Abstract
Hannah Barker’s earlier work on women’s enterprise in northern towns and cities in the eighteenth century made an important contribution to the gendering of business history and provided new ways to understand small firms. In this latest book, she builds on her extensive knowledge of this tier of business enterprise, to reach out to and influence other important topics. These include the size, structure, and internal cohesion of “the middling sort”; the quintessentially English class grouping that Barker argues has been overlooked by historians fixated on the economistic dualism between capital and labor; the ways in which the performance and longevity of small firms depended on the cohesion and talents of the families that managed and staffed them; the reciprocal ways in which the firms influenced the persistence and prosperity of the families and their members; the relationships between the men and women in the interlocked families and firms and how these contributed to evolving gender standards; and, finally, since small firms were the paradigmatic commercial units of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the contribution such firms made to Britain’s coincidental industrial revolution, a contribution that Barker again suggests has received insufficient attention. It is an extensive and ambitious agenda, family businesses used to provide fresh perspective on a number of different subjects, so it is hardly surprising that not all aims are equally realized. Barker does however have something of value to say on all the listed topics.
The book set off from familiar terrain in terms of research questions and historical sources. Chapter 1, written with the help of Mina Ishizu, asks how the wealth of the middling sort was managed drawing, as other historians have done, on the administration of equity law and the laws relating to probate, and on tradesmen’s wills to explore investment strategies. The analysis reveals that tradesmen managed their resources pragmatically and had a shrewd approach to investment. Reading back from the disposition of resources on death, the overwhelming imperative on display was to ensure the economic security of surviving family members, particularly widows and dependent children. But Barker provides an unexpected addendum to this not unexpected finding. By following up on what happened after death, she is able to demonstrate that, in case after case, instructions in wills were ignored, overridden by survivors because they had different objectives and assessments or because circumstances had changed. There is a brutal but perhaps life-affirming lesson here about the way in which mortality curbs authority!
Chapter 2 explores inheritance in more detail, focusing on the will-making practices of those in trade. The main aim of those writing wills, again not unexpectedly, was to retain wealth within the family and head off any usurpation by outsiders trying to inveigle their way into ownership or control or even just seeking to sponge off the business. Following the sources, Barker’s perspective is from the family of origin and will of the (expiring) paterfamilias and so perceives such potential interlopers as cuckoos in the nest, intruders seeking to benefit from and, in the worst-case scenario, fritter away wealth that had been prudently and often painfully accumulated. It is as well to remember that not all second husbands were designing or undeserving and that the women who were to be “protected” from such offenders had often themselves helped to build up the accumulated assets. Casaubon I am sure had commercial counterparts.
These different readings of interest and motivation are on display in Barker’s account of George Heywood’s romantic affair with Ann Owen, a widow and grocer who had inherited her business from her first husband. Heywood in his reflections on this episode confessed to entertaining enjoyable visions of a future as head of the family and firm. Alarm bells sounded among Ann’s relatives and friends, who responded with hostility to Heywood’s courtship even though he professed his good intentions. The property, he was warned, would be made over to the children, should they marry; and Ann’s brother declared himself much against the match. In Barker’s assessment, “Ann Owen did decide to conduct herself in a manner of which her family could approve” (p. 76) breaking up with Heywood who, perhaps revealing the materialistic foundations of his love interest, gave up and moved on. Eventually, Ann’s son assumed control of the business, while she appears to have remained an unmarried widow, according to Barker, pursuing a number of further romantic adventures and enjoying her relative independence. I can believe that Mrs. Owen was equitable about unloading George Heywood (who was undoubtedly becoming rather tiresome) and even that she enjoyed life thereafter but cannot overlook that she herself probably contributed to the success and survival of the business while also bearing and rearing the seven children who waited in the wings of inheritance. Perhaps this story ended well for all parties (even Heywood in the longer term) but for other widows constraints on their behavior might have involved loneliness and tears.
Chapter 3 closes in on family relations again using court records of different kinds. Not unexpectedly, it shows that family members fell out especially over property and the relative sizes of shares in inheritance. However, it has long been recognized that court records created a lopsided view of family relations selecting only cases where relationships had broken down and disputation become sufficiently acrimonious that external adjudication was sought. Barker, of course, recognizes the bias and is at pains to emphasize that the more general case would be one where the difficulties could be overcome, cooperation buttressed by duty and oiled by affection. More subtly, it might be that cooperation was ensured through what economist Gary Becker has called “the rotten kid syndrome” whereby the prospect of future gains from an ultimate share-out (inheritance) serves to check the disruptive actions of even the most selfish and self-centered offspring. Perhaps the survival of many eighteenth-century firms owned just as much to the rational postponement of egotistical action as to the palliating powers of duty and affection.
The extent to which the availability of sources, and in particular the dominance of court records, might have distorted historians’ perspectives is taken up again in chapter 4. Here, Barker supplements her sources by drawing on letters, diaries, and memoirs. These provide a lens on functional families at work managing and building their enterprises. Importantly, the difference in the methodological approach produces “a very different picture of family relations” (p. 14). Support and cooperation appear much more to the fore; the rotten kids too seem to retreat into the margins, underlining the ways in which the availability of sources and specifically the reliance on court records, might have misled historians’ assessments of the mix of harmony and discord within families and not just of families in trade. More generally, the inclusion of evidence from these more personal sources adds depth and nuance to the otherwise potentially misleading materials from disputations, enabling readers to see into episodes where resolution and reconciliation were achieved before relations deteriorated to the point where there was appeal to the law, or even where conflicts of interest were headed off before they became open fissures in the fabric of families, as in the case of George Heywood’s affair with Ann Owen described above.
Chapters 5 and 6, written with the help of Jane Hamlett, perhaps the most interesting and original in the study, take another methodological and source-led turn, moving into the physical environments where families lived and operated their businesses. Chapter 5 uses a range of local, urban, and architectural sources to describe the kind of houses used for small business and how space was organized. The cramped and confined interiors where people both worked and lived are brilliantly recreated. In these claustrophobic spaces, it becomes clear that combining domestic and commercial life under one roof created many difficulties. Chapter 6 explores these difficulties through the writings of employees. These tell how domestic space was defined and to some extent protected. While the separation of a domestic sphere enabled family members to distinguish themselves from employees and build solidarity and familial social capital, it simultaneously created feelings of exclusion and otherness among employees. The resentment created by the existence of an inner sanctum to which only blood ties gave access could be palliated by permitting employees occasional admission, a strategy that Barker reveals employers did pursue. Employees were entertained in the parlor or included in domestic sociability as a reward for performance or incentive to work, but this seems to have only made matters worse in the longer term when boundaries were again enforced. Glowering resentment around such issues is brilliantly illustrated from yet again George Heywood’s writings, when he provides an account of his employment and accommodation after leaving Ann Owen’s house. In his new post, his desired use of time and space constantly grated against his employer’s ideas of propriety and order, an irritation only resolved when Heywood moved into new premises with a partner to start business on his own account.
Barker’s excellent study of the middling sort in trade in the north of England does shine new light on how family life and commercial activities were successfully (and less successfully) intermingled. The chapters on the built environment of such firms and how owners sought to manage them to provide family time and space without eroding commonality with employees are particularly novel and engaging. Perhaps Barker’s account of the cramped and contested spaces of middling sort commercialism provides a good place to start thinking about the nineteenth-century quest for privacy. Where the book is less successful in its claim to connect with the historiography of the industrial revolution. Barker’s study of family firms provides a fresh and welcome lens on social, business, urban, gender, and family history, but the connection to the meta-narrative of industrialization remains rather vague. Hopefully, this will be Barker’s next project.