For many years, jurists have struggled to rationalise the common law rules which describe the circumstances in which it is justifiable to eschew the principle of separate legal personality which posits that a company is distinct from its members and managers. This is not particularly surprising....

This paper presents a reading of British literary representations of commercial travelers between 1800 and 1939. Three forms of representation are used: nonfiction representations by others, travelers' self-representations, and fictional representations. We find remarkable continuity in...

Using a hand-collected dataset, we examine share trading activity over the period 1882 to 1920 for the North British and Mercantile Insurance Company, one of the largest UK companies of the time. Our main finding is that the steady flow of rentiers into the shareholding constituency of this...

This article uses a prosopographical methodology and a new dataset of 1,558 CEOs from Britain's largest public companies between 1900 and 2009 to analyse how the role, social background, and career pathways of corporate leaders changed. We have four main findings: First, the designation of CEO...

The previously successful British merchant houses on the west coast of South America faced significant problems between the two world wars. Earlier historians have referred to difficulties such as the volatility of commodity prices, the organisation and structure of the firms, and changes in...

This teaching case study tells of the foundation and growth of the Virgin Group over the forty years to 2010. The creation of over 300 business interests in parts as far afield as the UK, South Africa, Australia and the USA resulted from a unique management style. Branson and the Virgin brand...

British overseas investment was a powerful force behind rapid global integration before World War I. Close to half of the total was in the form of foreign direct investment. Weetman Pearson was among the most successful of Britain's overseas-based entrepreneurs of the period. By 1919, the...

There has been considerable and ongoing debate about the performance of the British economy since 1945. Empirical studies have concentrated on aggregate or industry level indicators. Few have examined individual firms' financial performance. This study takes a sample of c.3000 firms in 19...

The massification of retail finance in the 1980s relied on the successful deployment of automated teller machines (ATM) and on-line real-time (OLRT) computing during the 1960s and 1970s. We document how the deployment of ATM networks interweaved with the adoption of OLRT computing in Sweden and...

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...