In the extensive literature of British economic and social history, much less attention has been given to merchants and trading companies than to manufacturing and banking enterprises, particularly in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is because the British Industrial Revolution was long thought to have been about production rather than trade or finance. The present generation of researchers has sought to redress the balance, but has often been handicapped by a paucity of records, and by an unwillingness on the part of the handful of surviving firms to release information. Geoffrey Jones has succeeded in assembling a large volume of evidence from diverse sources, but high-quality archival evidence is only available for a small number of long-lived and probably untypical enterprises.