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Avoiding Negligence and Profusion: The Failure of the Joint-Stock Form in the Anglo-Indian Tea Trade, 1840–1870

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 May 2015

MICHAEL ALDOUS
MICHAEL ALDOUS*
Affiliation:
Michael Aldous is a Ph.D. candidate at the London School of Economic and Political Science. Contact information: Department of Economic History, London School of Economic and Political Science, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK. E-mail: [email protected].
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Abstract

In the nineteenth century, firms operating in the Anglo-Indian tea trade were organized using a variety of ownership forms, including partnership, joint-stock, and a combination of the two, known as the managing agency. Faced with both an increasing need for fixed capital and high agency costs caused by the distance between owners and managers, the firms adapted and increasingly adopted the hybrid managing agency model to overcome these problems. Using new data from Calcutta and Bengal Commercial Registers and detailed case studies of the Assam Company and Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., this article demonstrates that British entrepreneurs did not see the choice of ownership as a dichotomy or firm boundaries as fixed, but instead drew innovatively on the strengths of different forms of ownership to compete and grow successfully.

Type
Articles
Information
Enterprise & Society , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , September 2015 , pp. 648 - 685
Copyright
Copyright © The Author 2015. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. 

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