This book links the world of finance directly to the fate of the cotton
and textile industry, long a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain
as a manufacturing economy, for the first time.
The cotton and textile industry, at the centre of the industrial
revolution, has long been a metaphor for the rise and fall of Britain as
a manufacturing economy. This book links the world of finance directly
to the fate of the cotton and textile industry for the first time. Using
a unique underlying data-set drawn from financial business records of
over 100 cotton and textile-manufacturing firms based in Lancashire, and
ranging from the late eighteenth to the twenty-first century, Financing
Cotton analyses the dynamics of industrial capitalism by uncovering the
interaction between financial systems and technological development and
innovation. It offers new perspectives on business practices and their
evolution, as well as decisions taken by entrepreneurs, managers and
employees. The book broadly investigates five questions: how and why
were individual firms profitable and what happened to these profits; how
did the firms' financial structure and performance influence their
attitudes to employment regulation; what were the effects of financial
networks and institutions on the characteristics of the first and second
phase of industrialisation; how did the financial system enable or
stifle entrepreneurship and investment in new technology and, finally,
why did consolidation and industrial restructuring offer survival
options for some firms, but not for others?
