The product of a long-standing collaboration and recent collective research effort by members of the CGEUI network, The European Corporation makes an important contribution to the ongoing debate over convergence to the Anglo-Saxon model of corporate governance and persistence in corporate governance and law in Europe. This book fills the gap in the debate, and literature's lack of country-specific evidence on the evolution of ownership and control which has proven to be a serious impediment to both legal and economic analysis and evidence-based policymaking. It provides systematic and comparable accounts of ownership and control structure change (respectively persistence) in large firms across Europe over the decades following the 'global corporate governance revolution' in the 1990s. Focusing on countries in Europe's four main regions, this volume presents and discusses the net effects of the interplay between the 'global corporate governance revolution' and of its main countervailing forces in Europe.