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INTRODUCTION: AN UNLIMITED PARTNERSHIP
‘Hearts in union mutually disclosed’1
Making a Life
Late in the afternoon of Sunday 22 April 1832 John Shaw, a hardware merchant, sat down at his home in Wolverhampton, in the English midlands, gathering his thoughts and feelings so as to write to his beloved wife Elizabeth, ‘My dear Liz,’ then visiting her family in Colne, some 113 miles to north in the heart of industrial Lancashire. The day found him in a reflective, perhaps even pensive mood; his fleeting emotions ranging back and forth across past, present and future:
I got your [letter] … at the top of which I find a calculation of the years we have been married which appears quite correct although I was not aware it was nineteen years past – how quickly has time flown and should we be spared for another such period I suppose it will not appear to have been much longer. I much fear neither of us [is] sufficiently grateful and thankful for the protection and success we have so abundantly enjoyed during so long a period and hope and trust we may be more so in the future.2
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The nineteenth-century businessman of popular culture and myth is a gritty, bluff, no-nonsense character. Resourceful rather than romantic. The entrepreneur of academic writing – and he is another decidedly gendered figure – is variously a decisive, risk-taking, and, increasingly, creative agent. We are rarely asked to imagine that either character has much of a personal life, let alone an interior life. In this study I will explore the historical experience of entrepreneurship and family business in the context of a central and basic human question: how do I make a life? The modern self, relatively unfettered and living in a world increasingly rich in resources and propensity, working with a previously unseen openness to innovation and change, has the luxury to ponder a series of questions: what is valuable and worthwhile to me; what would constitute a whole and satisfying life; what means and practices might produce such an end; how might the relationships
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I form sustain this vision of how to live.3 Adopting a focused micro-historical approach we will see how two people, John and Elizabeth Shaw, together, worked out their answers to those questions in the first half of the nineteenth-century. Of course, as well as working out how to make a life most of us also have to work out how to make a living. John and Elizabeth Shaw chose family entrepreneurship – family business foundation and ownership – in answer to this particular question. But in apparently privileging entrepreneurship and business by making it the focus of my enquiry I do not argue for the centrality of economic rationales and imperatives. Rather, perhaps counter-intuitively, the aim is to de-centre or, instead, re-humanize the economic by considering it in the context of those questions outlined above, from which it is so often divorced in our studies, and which, emphatically, I believe are foundational. For John and Elizabeth Shaw their entrepreneurship and family business existed in service to a greater set of priorities that ordered their decisions and choices as they followed the project of trying to make a life that they could consider good. Thus we reclaim entrepreneurship, especially when expressed in a family context, as an intensely human, perhaps even humane, art.4
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The Individual in the World
The choices available to John and Elizabeth as they made their lives were not unlimited. They operated within structures that were both deeply rooted and undergoing sometimes dramatic, unsettling and uncertain processes of change. They were situated in ways that were both more and less privileged in this respect than others amongst their fellow British citizens. Even as individuals, they did not each face exactly the same set of possibilities and barriers as the other. In theoretical language we would consider their agency as constrained; their priorities, desires and ideals had to be worked out through the means available, an availability structured by a wider set of social, economic and political institutions and forces. This means that the choices they made, though undoubtedly intensely personally felt, also reflected a much wider picture. This is part of the value of their story. Their solutions were theirs and theirs alone but they bore, indelibly, the imprint of a much wider world. And for that reason the hope is that their story will be one of wider resonance and significance. What did it mean, for example, to be born either a man or a woman in late eighteenth-century England? How was the economy structured so as to provide, or deny, resources and opportunities to those differently positioned (socially, geographically)? What societal norms prevailed and why and with what force? How was the polity and the public realm structured? At this time, for example, dissenters and non-conformists such as Elizabeth and John were barred from entry to politics and the professions, simultaneously restricting and focusing
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their opportunities and their ambitions. As clearly coming from the ‘middling sort’ in society what cultures and values did they bring to their enterprise?5 What scope was there for fashioning a satisfying private life that was, equally, emotional, intellectual and material in its forms? This study will then, of necessity be multidisciplinary, drawing in particular on recent researches in business, social, gender and cultural history. As already suggested, this couple made their life in a world in flux. Both were born and came to maturity and adulthood, to that point in life when those choices we have been talking about became both meaningful and pressing, during what is often thought of as the ‘classic industrial revolution’ period – the fifty or sixty years following 1770. Recent decades have seen historians seriously revise our understanding and our vision of the industrial revolution. Subtlety has entered the picture, the dramatics downgraded. We are told, convincingly, that growth was slower and patchier than we thought; change, whether organizational, institutional, or technological, piecemeal and incremental. Even if adjustments and accommodations were made society didn’t always experience change as radically dislocating. Continuity provided a counterweight to change. Indeed, as we shall see, John and Elizabeth themselves rarely commented on those elements those of us who followed have come to see as emblematic of their age; the factory system, radical new technologies, such as the railways, urbanization, social and political unrest, a widening of the franchise, war and empire – though all of these forces and events touched their lives. In this sense their life-world seems, from the evidence, if not hermetically sealed then relatively insulated. But there can be no doubt that the world they left, at every level from their own lives up, was very different from the one into which they had been born. John, the son of a Staffordshire farmer, died in 1858 a very prosperous man; the very model of the successful Victorian. He could rightfully claim this as a just reward for years of hard work – and that quintessential entrepreneurial quality; risk-taking – and, no doubt, this deeply religious and pious man would have asserted that his greatest debt was to Providence and God. But he was also clearly canny in taking advantage of the opportunities offered by a society that was at once wealthier, better connected (internally and externally), and increasingly oriented to and comfortable with the idea of consuming and having, making and accumulating Indeed, the Shaws did not simply react to or use to their own ends these wider shifts; instead they were actively part of the process, engaging in what Spinosa, Flores and Dreyfus have called ‘history-making,’6 by which is meant a kind of entrepreneurialism defined as the ‘disclosing of new worlds’ – a capacity for ‘regularly and as a matter of course seeing yourself and the world anew.’7 John and Elizabeth time and again demonstrated this capacity, whether in a
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bold move to extend the business to India or to re-imagine their respective roles within the domestic space Elizabeth and John were thus no mere pawns of a set of ungovernable and impersonal forces. They actively internalized, used, shaped and lived by a set of views and understandings they took from the world in which they found themselves. The changes we have briefly surveyed constantly opened up – and closed down – new and old ‘spaces’ for acting and being. These were two active, intelligent and engaged individuals. Our evidence allows us to eavesdrop as they mapped out and negotiated a path; puzzling out, as though through trial and error, solutions that would work, or that would at least do. What priorities ordered their understanding of what was both possible and proper?
An Unlimited Partnership
This is a story about relationships. It is a love-story even. John and Elizabeth’s world view was dominated by their relationship to God – a relationship that was experienced as real and immediate, not distant and abstract. They looked to theology as guide to help them to interpret and act in the world. So powerful and important to them was Christian theology, in all its detailed minutiae, that differences in belief that seem relatively insignificant to the modern observer nearly strangled their ‘connection’ at birth. They saw their lives as unfolding according to God’s will. References to Providence are legion. Salvation, to be reached only via a very strait gate, was the ultimate, indeed, the only end. As a frame of reference for making choices a non-conformist Protestant world view needs to be taken very seriously indeed; in particular it cannot be reasoned away as merely a ‘discourse’ amenable simply to textual analysis. But the most powerful earthly expression of God’s love was found in human love. The Shaw’s greatest life project – on this earth – was their marriage. It was first and foremost this which their entrepreneurship existed to service, sustain and nourish. And in turn it was love and marriage that made entrepreneurship – and worldly success and comfort – meaningful. Their entrepreneurship was but a means to an end. It was through this work that John and Elizabeth made for themselves a space in which to build and dwell. That is why I have chosen to think of this as a study of ‘an unlimited partnership.’ That concept is a way to get at the inextricable weaving together of forces we normally see as, at best, only distantly related: love and marriage, on the one hand and entrepreneurship, organization-building and economic decision-making on the other.8 Business history has devoted considerable effort to tracking the evolution of forms of business organization. Despite revisions this historical effort remains a largely Whiggish endeavour; from simple to complex, from constrained and limited to fertile and expansive. Significant in this shift is one from unlimited to
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limited liability. The limited liability form of corporate organization is one that by controlling for risk, depersonalizing ownership and allowing for the removal of fetters present in earlier, more ‘archaic’ forms of business organization (thus, for example, allowing access to much wider sets of resources, especially financial capital) seemingly cut or, at the very least, attenuated the link between the firm and the human actors it contains. The modern business firm became much more than sum of the people it was comprised of. But even today most entrepreneurial firms, just as John and Elizabeth’s was, are built on a foundation of personal ownership and management. Probably the majority of them are by any definition family firms. Recognition of this behoves us to reintroduce human drama to the story.9 The aim is not then simply another examination of how family structures, or religious beliefs, might have impacted business strategy and firm history, as though the latter concerns were prior to the former, but instead a much fuller reintegration of these spheres. And, as already suggested, for John and Elizabeth, this human drama was richest and most fully realized in the form of their romance and marriage. Here ‘unlimited partnership’ has a second, equally important set of resonances. This was a partnership in multiple senses and, most importantly, these dimensions were ‘unlimited;’ they overflowed into one another; the boundaries between them were ill-defined and permeable. Categories that historians are used to working with; economic/non-economic, public/private, efficient/affective, male/female, dissolve and crumble as we come to know this story.
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Ordinary Lives
Edward Berenson has written of micro-history as the reading (and writing) outwards, towards wider concerns, ‘through one exemplary event or person.’10 John and Elizabeth Shaw exemplified nothing but the ordinary. Their lives were almost wholly unexceptional and uneventful – at least in the sense that we would normally consider historically significant. Certainly together and with their partners and sons they built up a successful business that remained in independent existence for more than 160 years, though it is hardly to be found in the annals of British business history.11 They were not spared their measure of tragedy but for the most part their lives were ones of quiet contentment, sometimes even joy. Even their tragedies were the ordinary stuff of bereavement. Dull and provincial, far removed from metropolitan glamour in bustling, grimy Staffordshire, might sum them up. But in their very ordinariness they exemplify the lives of many more that lived as they did but for whom no historical record now exists, those condemned to silence by the archival gaps or the condescension of history and historians.12 The evidence we have for the Shaws allows entry into the rich warp and weft of their quotidian lives and thus it also allows that
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‘reading outwards’ suggested by Berenson to the dilemmas, challenges and possibilities thrown up by the mesh of interlocking economic, social and cultural change that characterized England in the first half of the nineteenth-century.13 Through the lens they provide we are better enabled to shift a series of important debates, from the relationship between family and business to the construction of gender within both public and domestic realms, from the abstract to the very concrete, to witness how wider forces were negotiated between two people as they lived their lives together.14 Crucially given the length of time covered by the sources, we are afforded an almost unique perspective on these issues across the best part of long, whole lives.
Structure
This is not a biography, thus its organization is largely thematic rather than chronological or narrative-based. Moreover the sources, though very extensive, are too incomplete too allow for the construction of a satisfying biography. Chapter 1 will deal with the most important aspects of those sources and the opportunities and challenges they present us with. A wide range of archival sources, including conventional business history sources, will be used throughout this study but at its heart lie more than 200 intimate letters between various members of the Shaw and Wilkinson families. More than one hundred of those letters are between John and Elizabeth and they cover the years 1811 to 1839; that is from courtship to middle age.15 We will examine the nature of letters as a source, their silences and their elisions as well as their strengths and virtues. We will see the role that letters and letter-writing played in John and Elizabeth’s lives, the constitutive force of writing, their attitudes to it (including as men and women). We will also examine how other historians have used letters as a source in their own writing. I believe that letters have a particular ontological quality somewhat different from that of diaries and, especially, memoirs and that those qualities demand we take the subjective experience of our subjects seriously. Letters are of course relational, they must flow between at least two people; that quality crystallizes this study’s focus on the unlimited partnership between Elizabeth and John. At the same time letters also have a particular relationship to time; they allow us privileged glimpses of the unfolding of life, of the unknowableness of the future, of the slipping away of the past. They have a richness and an immediacy that provokes a desire to set Elizabeth and John in their time and place and to follow them as they live and grow. I am unashamedly engaged and captivated by their story and present much of it in their words. Chapter 2 will present a brief history of the firm founded by John Shaw around 1800. I think of this study as one essentially rooted in the discipline of business history. It is thus important we understand the firm, what it did,
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and how it grew. This was a classic family firm emerging out of a, for the time, entirely typical partnership. As a factor John Shaw did vital economic work as an intermediary between buyers and sellers, integrating markets, manufacturers and consumers. This chapter will also locate the firm in the context of a brief economic, social and cultural history of the first half of the nineteenth-century. Chapter 3 is in many ways the still centre around which the book hangs together. It explores in depth the Shaws’ marriage, particularly how it came to be through a prolonged and sometimes difficult courtship, much of it conducted by letter.16 John and Elizabeth’s struggles over the three years of courtship are the historian’s gain, for it led to them very carefully debating, explaining and refining their values, priorities and choices; their understanding of what it meant to be in love and to be together; what it was that they wished for together and individually. Thus with care we can come to a much clearer understanding of how and why they ordered their world as they did. This chapter is central because, we assert, it was marriage, love and family, as they understood and experienced those concepts, which provided the foundation for everything else they did – business especially. Business was entered into as allowing the expression of virtue of industriousness but pursued as a duty and means to provide for loved one. In 1834 the partnership of Shaw and Crane, as the firm was operated between 1815 and 1848, took the almost unprecedented and unpredicted step of opening an entirely new operation in Calcutta. This adventure, as the partners themselves thought of it, will form the subject of Chapter 4. This is essentially a story of the dynamic interactions between firm and family, of waning energies and ambitions renewed, reawakened and given a fresh expression. It is also an exploration of how the firm was part of a wider world, of empire and international trade most obviously, but also the web of connections and institutions that made it possible for a small Black Country firm to take this barely credible step. And, ultimately, it is at the end a tale that plays out as tragedy, urging us to bring back real emotions to the very centre of our studies of family business.17 We should beware the temptation to romanticize John and Elizabeth, their lives and their marriage. Entrepreneurship placed great demands upon them – particularly prolonged and painful separation as John undertook long selling journeys around northern England (though it was of course that separation that generated the correspondence on which the historian now depends). Chapter 5 will examine how they coped, what roles they took, how the work was divided. It will bring gender to the fore, alongside notions such as the public, the private and the domestic and will thus engage with debates current in gender, women’s and social history. What is revealed will, I hope, sometimes confound or complicate our expectations – but also delight us with a touching portrait of family life. Family was a far from nuclear concept in this period. In Chapter 6 we will see how John and Elizabeth interacted with the others through circles of family,
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friendship and sociability, the ways in which these relationships sustained them, and how they grew and changed. This was a largely warm, convivial and nurturing environment. It is often contended across a range of literatures that such circles and networks overlapped to a great degree with more instrumental or economically oriented connections and networks, whether in the form of business finance from other family members, trusting relationships with customers and suppliers, or cooperative endeavours with other entrepreneurs in the local and wider economy. These dimensions of their networks will also be the subject of this chapter. Finally, in Chapter 7, we will turn to the material world John and Elizabeth inhabited, the homes in which they lived, the things they surrounded themselves with and how they thought about them. Doing so also forces us to think about values and aspirations. The picture that emerges is a complex one. Elizabeth and John began life with a religiously inspired ambiguity towards material possessions and, in particular, the temptations of fashion and display. A modest appearance and way of living denoted for them a properly humble Christian disposition. Over their lifetimes, however, they became decidedly wealthy through business success. Thus the chapter will explore how they came to terms with that transition in their fortunes and, in particular, how John disposed of his wealth at death. Chapter 8 will present a conclusion that will relate this very specific, focused and detailed story to wider concepts and theories in the literature. In particular we will explore the intersection between family, marriage, business, gender and class. A short Epilogue will briefly sketch the subsequent – and long and distinguished – history of the firm of John Shaw and Sons.