Measures were introduced in the New World to prevent corporate tyranny. Corporations received their charters from individual states and these were for a limited period, say 20 or 30 years, not in perpetuity. They were only allowed to deal in one commodity, they could not hold stock in other corporations, their property holdings were limited to what was necessary for their business, their headquarters had to be located in the state of their principle business, monopolies had their charges regulated by the state, and all corporate documents were open to the legislature. Any direct or indirect political contribution was treated as a criminal offense. Corporations had their charters removed if the state considered their activities harmed its people.
Railroad companies had traditionally been referred to as 'artificial persons' and when the Fourteenth Amendment gave all 'persons' equality before the law they desperately tried to claim that equal rights applied not just to slaves but to them as well. For eighteen years the Supreme Court consistently ruled that corporations did not have the rights of human persons. Then the Santa Clara County vs. Southern Pacific Railroad legal case reversed this. Corporate tyranny in the US and throughout the world can be traced to this one case.
Textbooks only quote the headnote of this case, not the detail. It was Thom Hartmann who eventually unearthed the original records in Vermont only to find that the judge had specifically stated that the case did not relate to corporate personhood. The headnote had been written a year after the hearing by the Recorder, a person whose life had been with the railroads. By then the judge was too ill to check the headnote. American corporate law is therefore based on a fraud.
