Inheritance and the Life-Cycle of Family Firms in the Early Industrial Revolution

Abstract

This article examines the impact of businessmen and businesswomen's inheritance strategies on the life-cycle of family firms in the early industrial revolution. Focusing on three key occupational groups - cotton manufacturers, tailors and drapers and publicans and brewers - in the industrialising town of Stockport over the first half of the nineteenth century, it demonstrates that inheritance was an important reason why many firms were 'closed'. Businesses were terminated to fund family provision strategies and to provide offspring with alienable legacies. It is suggested that such strategies led to both the recycling and eventual widening of business capital. More broadly, the article calls for business historians to assess and evaluate the strategies of small firms within the context of family ambitions and priorities, rather than against more abstract, economistic and potentially anachronistic notions of business performance.

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