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....

There has been a substantial debate about the benefits rationalisation might have conferred on British manufacturing during the interwar years. One industry which has featured prominently is the Lancashire cotton-textile industry. This article assesses the validity of John Maynard Keynes' claim...

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 paper analyses the relationship between entrepreneurial philanthropy and the competitive process. In doing so, it constructs a typology of entrepreneurial philanthropic behaviour. Such behaviour is conditioned by a combination of ideology and business strategy variables. Ideological...