Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Abbreviations used in the footnotes
- Introduction: approaches and concepts
- Part I The setting
- Part II New Streams Of Enterprise
- Chapter 3 Merchants in the Atlantic trade
- Chapter 4 The agency houses: trade to India and the Far East
- Chapter 5 The international houses: the foreign contribution to British mercantile enterprise
- Chapter 6 The home trade houses
- Part III Response to instant communication
- Part IV Conclusions
- Manuscript sources
- Index of firms and people
- Index of places
- Index of subjects
Chapter 6 - The home trade houses
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 March 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Preface
- Abbreviations used in the footnotes
- Introduction: approaches and concepts
- Part I The setting
- Part II New Streams Of Enterprise
- Chapter 3 Merchants in the Atlantic trade
- Chapter 4 The agency houses: trade to India and the Far East
- Chapter 5 The international houses: the foreign contribution to British mercantile enterprise
- Chapter 6 The home trade houses
- Part III Response to instant communication
- Part IV Conclusions
- Manuscript sources
- Index of firms and people
- Index of places
- Index of subjects
Summary
One of the apparent anomalies of economic history is the continued development of London as a major centre of the textile trade through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Textile manufacturing largely deserted the metropolis during the Industrial Revolution period, slipping away to a variety of regional settings. The northern regions soon raised their own trading centres – Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow, Nottingham and others, but London was never entirely eclipsed. Of course, the sheer size of London's population and the concentration of wealth, fashion and conspicuous consumption in the capital inevitably sustained an entrepot trade, but there was more to London's role than this. The textile sector of the City of London, the narrow streets between Wood Street and St Paul's churchyard, evidently retained a momentum of its own, both in its particular forms of enterprise and its relations with the provinces. Strangely enough, no one has ever attempted to piece together the story of this enterprise, at any rate not beyond the period of Defoe's classic account. Perhaps this is mainly for want of material, for most of the evidence was lost in the blitz, but it is possible to discern some of the salient features of change in the textile market in the two centuries after Defoe.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Merchant Enterprise in BritainFrom the Industrial Revolution to World War I, pp. 167 - 190Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1992