Inheritance and continuity in small family businesses during the early industrial revolution

Abstract

Explanations for the rapid turnover rates of small businesses during the early years of British industrialisation are usually framed in terms of mismanagement or misfortune. More recently, the short lifespans of family businesses have been presented in the context of family ambitions and priorities. Whilst these explanations are persuasive, such studies tend to describe a reluctance to continue the family firm after the death of the head of household. By utilising evidence of both formal and informal methods of post-mortem estate disposal in Liverpool and Manchester we argue that the petite bourgeoisie of the early Industrial Revolution were more likely than has been thought to continue family businesses and to treat them as valuable going concerns. Moreover, we identify a degree of freedom on the part of those who inherited that allowed them to use their own judgements about the best interests of surviving family members.

Keywords:

• small businesses
• family businesses
• Liverpool
• Manchester
• inheritance

Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council as part of the project ‘Family and Business in North-West England, 1760–1820’, RES-062–23–0593. We are grateful to participants at the Economic History Conference, Warwick, 2009 for their comments and to David Green, Sheryllynne Haggerty, Paolo di Martino, Bob Morris, Colin Phillips, AnnaWatson and our anonymous Business History reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Notes

 1. Gattrell, ‘Labour, Power and the Size of Firms’; Roger, ‘Concentration and Fragmentation’; Nenadic, Morris, Smyth, and Rainger, ‘Record Linkage and the Small Family Firm’.

 2. Crossick, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society; Nenadic, ‘The Small Family Firm’.

 3. Lloyd-Jones and Le Roux, ‘Marshall and the Birth and Death of Firms’.

 4. Young, ‘The Economic Characteristics of Businesses’.

 5. Crossick, ‘Meanings of Property,’ 52.

 6. Kent, ‘Small Businessmen and their Credit Transactions’; Hoppit, Risk and Failure.

 7. Payne, ‘Family Business in Britain’; Hunt, The Middling Sort; Owens, ‘Inheritance and the Life-Cycle’; Jones and Rose, ‘Family Capitalism’.

 8. Nicholas, ‘Clogs to Clogs in Three Generations?’; Daunton, ‘Inheritance and Succession’; Rose, ‘Beyond Buddenbrooks’; Nenadic, ‘The Small Family Firm’.

 9. Nenadic, Morris, Smyth, and Rainger, ‘Record Linkage and the Small Family Firm’, 183.

10. Mathias, The Transformation of England; Rose, ‘The Family Firm in British Business’, 72; Casson, ‘The Economics of the Family Firm’; Dupree, ‘Firm, Family and Community’.

11. Owens, ‘Inheritance and the Life-Cycle’, 43.

12. Owens, ‘Inheritance and the Life-Cycle’, 24–5.

13. Owens, ‘Inheritance and the Life-Cycle’, 32.

14. Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 123.

15. Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 129–31, 228–9.

16. Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 149.

17. Courtis, ‘Business Goodwill’; Cooper, ‘Debating Accounting Principles’; Owens, ‘Inheritance and the Life-Cycle’, 23.

18. For a discussion of contemporary definitions, see Haggerty, The British–Atlantic Trading Community, 35–61. See also Life and Ledger of John Coleman, c. 1797, p. 58, Liverpool Record Office, 920/COL 1–2 on the difference between a ‘merchant’ and a ‘tradesman’. On historians’ definitions, see for eg. Crossick, The Lower Middle Class in Britain; Mayer, ‘The Lower Middle Class as a Historical Problem’; Corfield, ‘Class by Name and Number’; Bailey, ‘White Collars, Gray Lives?’

19. Wills and testaments were strictly speaking separate documents which dealt with different types of property – real estate and personal property – but as they were generally written as one document they are considered together here and described, for the sake of brevity, as ‘wills’. Liverpool and Manchester were both situated within the archdeaconry of Chester. Wills produced in the two towns by those who did not own goods in another archdeaconry were proved at the archdeacon’s court in Chester and those that survive are now held by the Lancashire Record Office (LRO). We have excluded deliberately those wills of Liverpool and Manchester inhabitants proved in other, higher ecclesiastical courts on the assumption that these were likely to have been produced by wealthier individuals who we wished to exclude from our survey.

20. Although executors were supposed to provide a valuation of estates for the purposes of assessing stamp and death duty (the former payable from 1694, the latter from 1796), these valuations only appeared in extant records for Liverpool and Manchester wills from around 1790 so estimates were made based on internal contents in earlier cases.

21. Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 84. Morris's analysis of average sworn probate values from Leeds, 1830–34 (for which valuation figures are more complete than in the case of our sample) showed those individuals in ‘distribution’ with a mean of £985 and a median of £200; those in ‘craft’ with a mean of £460 and a median of £100; and those in manufacturing with a mean of £1443, and a median of £100.

22. Arkell, ‘The Probate Process’, 7, 12; Green and Owens, ‘Metropolitan Estate of the Middle Class’, 295.

23. Owens, Green, Bailey, and Kay, ‘A Measure of Worth’.

24. The Prospect Before Her, 239. See also Anderson, ‘Money and the Structure of Credit in the Eighteenth Century’, 96–8.

25. Barker, Business of Women, 56.

26. Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 79. Morris found a similar proportion of Leeds deaths resulted in probate in the 1830s.

27. The number was particularly high in our sample for 1800 when an exceptionally large number of mariners' wills were proved, almost certainly because of the war with France.

28. Will of William Oliver (1820), WCW, LRO.

29. These figures are notably lower than in Owens' examination of early nineteenth-century Stockport wills (Owens, ‘Inheritance and the Life-Cycle’, 30), though Morris noted a similar lack of reference to business continuity in the wills of the Leeds middle classes in the early 1830s (Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 119).

30. Will of Adam Grundy (1760), WCW, LRO.

31. Will of Richard Potter (1800), WCW, LRO.

32. Manchester and Salford Directory, 1797; Manchester Mercury, 13 May 1800.

33. Climie v. Lang, 1815, E112/1543/660; National Archives.

34. Will of Robert Lang (1808), WCW, LRO.

35. Manchester and Salford Directory, 1804, 1809, 1811.

36. Barker, Business of Women, 42–54. Trade directories are an imperfect source, for not all businesses and traders appeared amongst their pages and the information they contained could sometimes be out-of-date or inaccurate. Moreover, the first Liverpool directory didnot appear until 1766, and that of Manchester, four years later in 1772. Despite the need for these caveats about their use as a census of the trading classes in urban societies, they provide the best means of tracking the fate of businesses over time, especially in northern English towns.

37. Manchester and Salford Directory, 1809.

38. It seems unlikely that William junior's children, if indeed he had any, would have been old enough to join their father in the business so soon after their grandfather's death and more probable that William and his brothers ran it as a partnership under their father's name. On the value of certain family business names see Nenadic, ‘The Small Family Firm’, 86, and on the importance of ‘credit' and reputation in eighteenth-century society, D'Cruze, ‘The Middling Sort in Eighteenth-Century Colchester’; Muldrew, TheEconomy of Obligation.

39. 67% Manchester, 70% Liverpool.

40. Will of George Bloor (1820), WCW, LRO.

41. Barker, Business of Women, 114–17.

42. Will of Thomas Heywood (1820), WCW, LRO.

43. Will of Thomas Galley (1770), WCW, LRO.

44. Liverpool Directory, 1772.

45. Will of John Adams/Haddams (1780), WCW, LRO.

46. Will of James Chambers (1770), WCW, LRO. Raffald, 1772 lists the business still under the control of Edward Chambers.

47. Ashton, ‘The Bill of Exchange and Private Banks in Lancashire’, 41–4, 46; Mitchell and Deane, Abstract of British Historical Statistics, 455–6; Weiller and Mirowski, ‘Rates of Interest in Eighteenth-Century England’, 6–7; Pressnell, Country Banking in the Industrial Revolution; Clark, ‘Debts, Deficits and Crowding Out’, 411; Green and Owens, ‘Gentlewomanly Capitalism?’, 522, 527.

48. Clark, ‘Debts, Deficits and Crowding Out’, 406, 416–17.

49. Will of Thomas Morgan (1810), WCW, LRO.

50. Liverpool Directory, 1820,

51. Will of Jonathan Johnson (1790), WCW, LRO.

52. Will of Thomas Whitlow (1820), WCW, LRO.

53. Will of Thomas Stelfox (1800), WCW, LRO.

54. Will of Ralph Rhodes (1800), WCW, LRO.

55. Will of John Gratrix (1820), WCW, LRO.

56. Commercial Directory of Manchester, 1825.

57. Will of James Dixon (1820), WCW, LRO.

58. Liverpool Directory, 1800, 1802, 1803.

59. Staves, ‘Resentment or Resignation?’, 199; Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 98; Green, ‘To Do the Right Thing’, 135.

60. Stebbings, The Private Trustee in Victorian England, 10–15.

61. Phillips, Women in Business, 68; Barker, Business of Women, 138; Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England, 22–4; Erickson, ‘Coverture and Capitalism’, 13.