'From Wolverhampton to Calcutta. The low origins of merchant enterprise' in R Lee (ed), Commerce and Culture. Nineteenth century business elites

Notes:

Explores 'how the essential link between trade and industrialisation could spring up from locations other than those great cities and ports that are so prominent in the literature and by entrepreneurs with origins quite different from those conventionally associated with the mercantile elite'. In a case study examines how Shaw & Cave, a small Wolverhampton hardware factoring business, was able to establish in Calcutta in 1834, and sustain, a directly owned merchant house, T W Thomson & Co. Focuses on such issues as 'what motivated this entrepreneurial decision, what factors explain the timing of the decision and the location of the new enterprise, and what capabilities and resources were the firm able to draw upon in order to put into effect such a strategy'