Output details

Shareholder Democracies? : Corporate Governance in Britain and Ireland before 1850

The research (ESRC-funded) was conducted 2003–6 in dozens of archives in England and Wales to extract a multifaceted and innovative database with 90 variables for 512 companies. Revisions ended in 2010. All this was employed to present the company not simply as an economic unit but as a complex entity shaped by local and national political cultures (e.g. parish vestries, municipal corporations, virtual representation), as well as social and cultural norms (e.g. regarding participation by women and the working classes). This challenged the neat but misleading conceptual boundaries dividing the ‘economic’ and the ‘political, the ‘public and the ‘private’.