The joint stock company, centred on Oldham, is a central narrative in Douglas Farnie's seminal book, the English Cotton Industry and the World Market. Farnie was the first to highlight the idiosyncratic nature of these limited companies, including their highly democratic system of governance....

This dissertation uses the large negative shock to the British cotton textile industry, caused by the U.S. Civil War, in order to test three long-running questions about innovation. Chapter one provides the first empirical test of the leading theory of directed technical change, introduced by...

This paper investigates the early development of English cotton spinning by analyzing about 700 bankruptcies and 1300 dissolutions of partnership reported in the London Gazette, 1770-1840. The data show two temporal cycles, peaking in the early to mid-1800s and in the later 1820s, near the ends...

The diffusion of technological knowledge is key to industry growth. But not all knowledge is created equal. I use a nanoeconomic approach to examine knowledge-diffusion based growth in the Meiji-era Japanese cotton spinning industry, which enjoyed remarkable success after a decade of initial...

We explore how firms grow by adding products. In contrast to most earlier work on the topic, our conceptual and empirical framework allows for separate treatment of product innovation (vertical differentiation) and diversification (horizontal differentiation). The market context is Japan's...