Abstract

"Reinventing UK and US Manufacturing for a Larger Scale and More High-Tech Future; What Do Their 1880/81 Censuses Show about Their Relative Progress Up to Then?"

Leslie Hannah, London School of Economics (l.hannah@lse.ac.uk)

It is commonly supposed that by the later 19h century successful businesses were becoming larger scale and more research-intensive and that some countries managed this process of reinvention more successfully than others. Hannah and Bennett (2022) identify 438 UK manufacturing firms employing 1,000 or more and /or with £1m (ca $5m) or more paid-up capital. The manuscript returns of the 1880 US census of manufactures enable us to compare US establishments, nominally by the same criteria. There were fewer large manufacturers in the US (even by the capital criterion and aggregating US establishments into firms). But were US firms more efficient, more capital-intensive, more vertically-integrated, and more professionally managed, as implied by Alfred Chandler in Scale and Scope (1990) and related articles. The statistical evidence on these further questions is less clear-cut, but British (like German and French) manufacturers were then less likely to be incorporated, but more likely to be listed on a major stock exchange, than American rivals. Some British manufacturers identified by Chandler as amateurish laggards relative to the “visible hands” of American professional businessmen in capital-intensive industries, in fact achieved higher levels of labour productivity in 1880/81. However, the US led in labour productivity in many industries (eg timber sawmills, grist mills, leather, sailing ships, paddle steamboats) still generally characterised by small producers.
Hannah, L. and Bennett, R., ‘Large-scale Victorian manufacturers: Reconstructing the lost 1881 UK employer census’, Economic History Review, (November 2021), pp. 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/ehr.13118.
Chandler A D, Scale and Scope (MIT Press 1990)
I m grateful to Jeremy Atack for generously sharing his database of manuscript returns to the 1880 US census of manufactures, but responsibility for any errors of interpretation is mine alone.
The author acknowledges financial support from a Leverhulme Trust emeritus fellowship grant