Corporations were small unless granted a patent by the king.
(Note that "patent" has also changed its meaning a bit.)
Without something like the kind of corporation we have in the US you have two sizes of business: the first is small, perhaps family run; the second is large and state-sponsored.
The US despised the second kind. They tend to serve the interests of the state--or the state blatantly serves the interest of their business, the corporations. You wind up with all kinds of subsidies. If the state provides lots of services to the population, then the business is milked (hedge-fund style) for money; if the state's actors just benefit from the money from the business, then the business is run for the benefit of the state at the expense of the population. 1970s Britain, the USSR for most of its existence, even the PRC serve as examples of these.
The first kind of business, small and family-run, can't be a GM or a Microsoft, or even a medium-sized start-up for very long. Such businesses can exist, but they are almost always owned by a family or a small number of partners and then have to pass the wealth down, pretty much strictly in the family. And if estate taxes are large enough, they're simply liquidated or spread so thin as to be ungovernable. By the time your business is up and running on a large and efficient scale, it's time to pack it in and start over, trying to sort out who'll get the patents and equipment and try to replicate what you did. If you're very lucky, you can set up a kind of family dynasty, but the US didn't like that and most liberals consider this to be the worst kind of corporation possible.
The US corporation is a kludge. It's a way of having medium- and large-size businesses that can survive more than the last decade or two of an owner's lifespan.
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