You're right about the colonial megafirms, they were really the forerunners of today's corporate world...quarterly stock price pressure and all. But, they're pretty absent from most examples of that time. Maybe it's because they didn't operate in Europe much.

Modern free marketers can easily disown them on crown issued monopoly grounds. Smith considered them the same as guilds... Even Marxists didn't really pay as much attention to them as they should have, considering hindsight.