Barriers to innovation in marketing in the mid-nineteenth century: merchant-manufacturer relationships.

Business History, April, 2002 by Popp, Andrew

Increasingly, attempts to understand the long-run development of British business are focusing on the decades leading up to and including the mid-nineteenth century. (1) It is in this period that we might find the accretion of conditions that were to lead to 'failure' in a changed competitive environment from the last quarter of the century onwards. To a considerable degree, this search remains heavily conditioned by the Chandlerian thesis that British competitiveness was undermined by a failure to make interdependent investments in production, marketing and management. (2)

The pattern of evolution traced by the mercantile system during the eighteenth and early nineteenth century is now relatively well understood. (3) However, in assessing the validity of...