Trust (19th century)

A trust or corporate trust is an American English term for a large business with significant market power. It is often used in a historical sense to refer to monopolies or near-monopolies in the United States during the Second Industrial Revolution in the 19th century and early 20th century.

Originally, the corporate trust was a legal device used to consolidate power in large American corporate enterprises. In January 1882, Samuel C. T. Dodd, Standard Oil’s General Solicitor, conceived of the corporate trust to help John D. Rockefeller consolidate his control over the many acquisitions of Standard Oil, which was already the largest corporation in the world. The Standard Oil Trust was formed pursuant to a "trust agreement" in which the individual shareholders of many separate corporations agreed to convey their shares to the trust; it ended up entirely owning 14 corporations and also exercised majority control over 26 others. Nine individuals held trust certificates and acted as the trust's board of trustees. One of those trustees was Rockefeller himself, who held 41% of the trust certificates; the next most powerful trustee held only about 12%. This kind of arrangement became popular and soon had many imitators.

An 1888 article explained the difference between trusts in the traditional sense and the newfangled corporate trusts:

A trust is ... simply the case of one person holding the title of property, whether land or chattels, for the benefit of another, termed a beneficiary. Nothing can be more common or more useful. But the word is now loosely applied to a certain class, of commercial agreements and, by reason of a popular and unreasoning dread of their effect, the term itself has become contaminated. This is unfortunate, for it is difficult to find a substitute for it. There may, of course, be illegal trusts; but a trust in and by itself is not illegal: when resorted to for a proper purpose, it has been for centuries enforced by courts of justice, and is, in fact, the creature of a court of equity.

Although the "corporate trusts" were initially created to improve the organization of large businesses, they soon faced widespread accusations of abusing their market power to engage in anticompetitive business practices. This caused the term "trust" to become strongly associated with such practices among the American public and led to the enactment of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, the first federal competition statute.

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