Family Capitalism

This internationally comparative volume contains the results of important new research on family-owned businesses over three centuries and on three continents. Family firms have often been regarded as forces for conservatism and backwardness. Recent research has questioned this interpretation, pointing rather to the advantages of family ownership in certain contexts. The essays in this collection provide considerable support to this revisionist literature. They include studies of family firms in eighteenth-century India, of Quaker firms during the British industrial revolution, and of small firms in Victorian Edinburgh. Leading American historian of family firms, Philip Scranton, provides an important new study of family firms in Philadelphia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. There are essays by prominent Dutch and French business historians which survey the structure and performance of family firms in twentieth-century France and the Netherlands. Much of their information has never been published previously in English. Finally, Roy Church contributes a wide-ranging comparative study of the family firm in the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan over the last century. The overall conclusion of this book is that the behaviour and performance of family firms is explained by their environment rather than by their ownership structures. Family firms can provide the most effective corporate form in one culture, region, industry and time period - and they can be a competitive liability in other contexts. On the way to reaching this conclusion, the contributors to this volume paint a rich and colourful portrait of the diversity and complexity of the family firm experience over the last three hundred years.