The incidence and persistence of partnerships in a British industrial city: Glasgow, 1861–81

Graeme Acheson; Eoin McLaughlin; Gill Newton; Linda Perriton

doi:10.1111/ehr.13356

The incidence and persistence of partnerships in a British industrial city: Glasgow, 1861–81

Graeme Acheson, Eoin McLaughlin, Gill Newton, Linda Perriton

Accounting And Finance

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2 Citations (Scopus)

34 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This paper examines the prevalence of business partnerships in a late-nineteenth-century British city, using individual-level data from post office directories and censuses. Focusing on Glasgow, we present a detailed picture of partnership number and type, demographic characteristics of the entrepreneurs who ran them, and how these businesses persisted over time. We show that partnerships were a key business grouping in the city and demonstrate that the partnership form was advantageous in manufacturing and that the majority of partnerships were formed between individuals without family ties. Furthermore, we offer new insight into business longevity, showing that partnership business survival broadly matched corporate survival rates in this period, with persistence data also suggesting that kinship partnerships were better able to deal with the perceived hold-up problems associated with the partnership form.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	849-876
Number of pages	28
Journal	Economic History Review
Volume	78
Issue number	3
Early online date	17 Jun 2024
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13356
Publication status	Published - 1 Aug 2025

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust (award no. RPG-2020-382). We are grateful to Catherine Shenk and two anonymous referees of this journal who gave us detailed and helpful feedback. We would also like to thank Michael Aldous, Jonathan Brown, Christopher Colvin, Naomi Lamoureux, John Turner, seminar participants at the University of Glasgow, University of Newcastle, University of Strathclyde, CAMPOP Brown Bag and Queen's University Centre for Economic History, and attendees at the Business History Conference ( Detroit), Association of Business Historians Conference (Newcastle Business School), and The Economic History Society Conference (Newcastle Business School) for their input on an earlier version of this paper. Proof of concept work was made possible due to a University of Stirling Spark Award. Thanks also to Olivier Bautheac, Hannaliis Jaadla, Shaun Wallace, Kevin Schürer and Eddy Higgs for their work on the I-CeM dataset and to UK Data Service for facilitating SN7856 Special Licence access, National Library of Scotland, and the archivists at the National Archive of Scotland for all of their assistance with the research underpinning this work.

Keywords

business partnerships
industry in Glasgow
manufacturing history

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10.1111/ehr.13356Licence: CC BY 4.0

Acheson-etal-EHR-2024-The-incidence-and-persistence-of-partnerships-in-a-British-industrial-cityFinal published version, 287 KBLicence: CC BY 4.0

Cite this

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The incidence and persistence of partnerships in a British industrial city: Glasgow, 1861–81

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