The Maona: How a Debt Became a Country

The arrangement Genoa made with its creditors was this.

The Republic acknowledged the debt and could not pay it. Therefore the shareholders of the expedition were granted, collectively, the right to hold and exploit Chios and Phocaea — to collect the revenues, run the mastic monopoly, administer the economy, and take the profits — until such time as the Republic redeemed the debt and bought them out. Sovereignty would remain with Genoa, which would appoint the governor and to which the island formally belonged. Economic exploitation belonged to the shareholders.

The shareholders organised themselves into a body called the Maona — from the Arabic ma'una, meaning aid or assistance, a word already in use in Genoese and Catalan commercial practice for a fund subscribed for a particular venture. This was the Maona di Chio e di Focea.

What exactly was it? Historians of the corporation have been arguing about the right label for well over a century, and the honest answer is that it was a transitional form which had some of the features of several later things and was not quite any of them. But the features are worth setting out, because they are startling for the 1340s.

Its capital was divided into transferable shares — called loca or carati — which could be bought, sold, inherited, subdivided, pledged as security, and held by people who had nothing to do with running the enterprise. A market in Chios shares existed in Genoa, and prices moved. It had, in practice if not in fully developed legal theory, a personality distinct from its members: the Maona contracted, litigated, held property, borrowed, and negotiated treaties as a body. It was governed by an elected board answerable to a general assembly of shareholders, under defined voting rules. It distributed profits in proportion to shareholding. It had a defined term and defined conditions of dissolution — namely, redemption of the underlying debt.

And it exercised sovereign functions. It taxed. It minted coin. It administered justice. It maintained fortifications and armed men. It conducted foreign relations, made treaties with the Turkish emirates, and paid tribute to the Ottoman Sultan.

That last cluster is what separates the Maona from a modern company and connects it to something else entirely. The Maona of Chios is a direct structural ancestor of the chartered company that governs territory — the Dutch and English East India Companies, the Hudson's Bay Company, the Royal African Company, the great shareholder-owned polities of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. It is a body of private investors, holding transferable shares, exercising governmental authority over a subject population, for profit, under a licence from a distant sovereign it does not much consult.

Historians of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie reach back to the Genoese maone for precedent as a matter of routine, and Chios is where the model was run longest and most successfully. The English East India Company governed Bengal for about a century before the Crown took it away. The Maona governed Chios for two hundred and twenty years, and only stopped because the Ottoman navy turned up.