The relative efficiency of producer cooperatives is investigated through an examination of the financial performance of a group of cotton spinning firms that emerged from the spread of cooperative ideals after the mid nineteenth century. Reflecting such influences these firms adopted two...

This article investigates the contribution made by the cotton industry to the British war effort between 1914 and 1918. Its main conclusion is that the government failed to make the best use of the resources available to it in Lancashire, and permitted the cotton industry to hoard labour and to...

This article seeks to answer three basic questions about the nineteenth-century cotton textile industry in Bengal that still remain unresolved in the literature; namely, when did the industry begin to decay, what was the extent of its decay during the early nineteenth century, and what were the...

I study the slow adoption of ring spinning in Great Britain's cotton industry at the end of the 19th century, which has been used as evidence of British entrepreneurs' declining efficiency and conservatism (Musson, 1959; Aldcroft, 1964; Lazonick, 1981, 1981b). To this purpose I use firm-level data from...

The paper examines an early case of creative accounting, and how, during British industrialization, accounting was enlisted by the manufacturers’ interest to resist demands, led by the ‘Ten hours’ movement, for limiting the working day. In contrast to much of the prior literature, which...

This paper tests the hypothesis that capital market imperfections constrained the growth of British firms during the Industrial Revolution. Using data on the cost structure of a representative British cotton manufacturer during the 1798 to 1827 period, this paper shows that the scale of...

This article provides three types of evidence for external economies of scale in the Lancashire cotton industry. Anglo-American productivity differences are used to demon-strate external economies at the industry level. Econometric evidence of dynamic (Marshall-Arrow-Romer) external economies of...