If I remember anything from my high school social studies class, the reason was the ability to spread investment risk across multiple investors while also shielding the investors and employees from some personal legal liability. I think I even remember that companies/corporations predate stock exchanges.
> Remember that companies/corporations predate stock exchanges.
While not definitive, ChatGPT says that:
> The idea of organizing a group of people to work towards a common goal for profit or mutual benefit has evolved over centuries. The modern concept of a company, with legal structures and formalized business practices, has its roots in the emergence of capitalism during the Industrial Revolution in the 18th and 19th centuries.
Wikipedia doesn't have a history section on it's page for company, but it says this:
> By 1303, the word company referred to trade guilds. Usage of the term company to mean "business association" was first recorded in 1553, and the abbreviation "co." dates from 1769.
You can tweak your definition by the means you'd like, but I think an honest assessment would be at this point to say they were concurrent.
A company isn't the same as a corporation. A corporation is a legal privilege granted by the government to give a company legal personhood. Thus the word "corporation", from latin "corpus", signifying that the state considers this specific company to be a single, legal body.
Corporations aren't a free market concept, it's a way for the state to give special protections to certain companies that need it for some prosocial reason.
Basically, the original idea is, a corporate charter is granted to create a corporation, which acts on behalf of its shareholders (who the government trusts, have some worthy interest in mind).