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Building the market: John Shaw ofWolverhampton and commercialtravelling in early nineteenth-centuryEnglandAndrew PoppPublished online: 11 May 2007.

To cite this article: Andrew Popp (2007) Building the market: John Shaw of Wolverhampton andcommercial travelling in early nineteenth-century England, Business History, 49:3, 321-347, DOI:10.1080/00076790701294998

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Building the Market: John Shaw ofWolverhampton and CommercialTravelling in Early Nineteenth-CenturyEnglandAndrew Popp

Presenting a detailed reconstruction of the commercial travels undertaken by English

hardware factor John Shaw in the period 1810–1815, this article reappraises thesomewhat neglected role of the commercial traveller in British business history. In

particular, it will be shown how, by the early nineteenth century, commercial travellingwas well established and displayed elements of ‘modernity’. The case allows insights into

the part played by factors and their commercial travellers in facilitating integration andspecialization across the economy.

Keywords: Commercial Travellers; Hardware; Black Country; Industrial Districts

Introduction

There is not a large literature on commercial travel in the British context and thecommercial traveller remains an oft neglected figure. More recent work has begun to

address this issue, though largely for the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Thus,French approached travellers in the period from the 1890 to the 1930s from theperspectives of class, culture and career.1 This work followed pioneering research by

Hosgood that addressed the social history of commercial travellers as an occupationalgroup.2 Work on earlier periods is certainly scarcer, with the notable exception of

Jones on the late eighteenth century, whose work provides an important context forthis research.3 These gaps have perhaps created the impression that the later

nineteenth century represented a significant discontinuity through which ‘modern’commercial travelling and travellers – distinct from peddling and peddlers – emerged.

This paper adopts a case study method, drawing on the archives of Wolverhampton

Andrew Popp is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Management, Royal Holloway, University of London.

Business History, Vol. 49, No. 3, May 2007, 321–347

ISSN 0007-6791 print/1743-7938 online

� 2007 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/00076790701294998

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hardware factor John Shaw, to begin to address these shortcomings in our knowledgeof commercial travelling in Britain during earlier periods. The paper aims, first, to

provide an empirically rich account of commercial travel in the early nineteenthcentury and, second, to place that account in the context of the growth and

development of the British business system.Without a substantial body of work on which to draw, the historian interested in

commercial travelling may be forced to search elsewhere for relevant frameworks.There is a large literature on the British mercantile system, exemplified by the work of

Chapman.4 However, this work is almost exclusively concerned with the activities ofBritish merchants in overseas markets. One relevant literature is that devoted to theemergence of what has been called ‘modern marketing’.5 Here the thrust has been

towards a revision of previously critical perspectives on the British record. Theprevailing analysis had held that the early development of a sophisticated commercial

sector in Britain had retarded the development of the British business system bylocking it into a pattern of fragmentation, whereby many manufacturing firms stayed

small and rarely integrated forward into marketing and distribution. This may bethought of as the skewed transaction cost thesis, and it has received both support and

revision.6 However, the recent literature on marketing, product development and thewider system has, at least for some sectors, found evidence of far greater dynamism

than was previously thought.7 This literature is relevant because it alerts us to therelationships between patterns of intermediation and wider industrial structures andstrategies, with commercial travel an important component of the way in which the

system was articulated. Reclaiming the role played by the commercial traveller maythen help shed further light on the wider shifts explored by Church and others.

The links between marketing, distribution and industrial organization are alsocentral to Allen’s still unsurpassed industrial history of the Birmingham and Black

Country industrial district. Here, Allen concentrates on the role of the factor, theclass of economic agent to which our case study belongs. Allen claims that it is ‘only

by an understanding of the ‘‘factor system’’’ that we can explain both howproduction was initiated, co-ordinated and distributed and why small firms andhigh-levels of specialization persisted for so long in so many of the trades

characteristic of this great district.8 Allen describes how the factor operating in thehome trade performed two ‘allied’ functions:

[H]e was responsible for initiating production, for distributing orders, andsometimes materials, among a multitude of outworkers or small masters, for co-ordinating their activities . . . and for financing manufacture . . . The factor’s secondfunction was to market the goods; and for this purpose he had to establishconnections with retailers and to employ travellers and agents to promote hissales.9

Allen devotes considerable attention to the subtle variations in the precise activitiesundertaken by factors from one trade to another, but these two basic functions were

almost always present. However, though Allen identifies changing demand

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conditions as a ‘powerful contributory cause of [the district’s] growth’, both in theeighteenth century and in the period 1830–1860, it is also true that he devotes far

more attention to the role of the factor in co-ordinating production rather than thatundertaken in marketing and distribution.10 The Shaw archive allows us to begin to

redress that balance.There is a more extensive literature on commercial travel in the North American

context, from Spears’ cultural and social history to Friedman’s more recentexploration of the Birth of a Salesman.11 Friedman’s work again fits with analyses

linking marketing, distribution and structure and is a challenge to the historianworking on Britain, in so far as he sees the development of modern selling as a uniqueproduct of late nineteenth-century America – as both a product of and handmaiden

to the emergence of the ‘Chandlerian’ corporation. In time, as part of a broaderreawakening of interest in commercial travel in Britain, this case may contribute to a

reassessment of that thesis.Broadly, then, this paper can be positioned as part of a critical re-evaluation of the

growth and development of the British business system during the early to mid-nineteenth century and of the role of intermediation within it.12 The work of the

commercial traveller exemplified those processes of intermediation. Here, weconcentrate on the economic function of the commercial traveller. Specifically, the

paper will reconstruct 17 journeys undertaken by Shaw’s firm in the period 1810–1815. A more positive emphasis on intermediation and its relationship to patterns ofindustrial structure, particularly specialization by region and firm, distinguishes this

work from the earlier and undoubtedly groundbreaking research of Jones.13 Joneswas primarily interested in factors and commercial travellers in so far as their

existence represented a failure on the part of manufacturers to integrate forward intomarketing and distribution. In essence, Jones’ work may be seen as contributing to

the skewed transaction cost thesis. The reinterpretation offered here is based not onlythe literature on marketing and distribution produced by Church and others and

discussed above but also on a burgeoning interest amongst British business historiansin dynamic districts of speciality, small-firm manufacturing sectors.14

A note is required about the usefulness of the case study in business history and the

degree to which this case can be taken as representative. Certainly, this work, inconjunction with that of Jones, extends the basis on which we may generalize about

the activities of factors and travellers during the late classic industrial revolution. Still,in the absence of further sources, the basis for any such generalization undoubtedly

remains relatively narrow. Nonetheless, the strength of the parallels between this caseand that explored by Jones permits some confidence in the representativeness of

both. Indeed, the particular interest of the paper perhaps lies not in any uniquenessthat may be claimed for the travels documented in this archive but in the relatively

complete way in which it reveals the well established, quotidian aspects ofcommercial travel at an earlier date – it is in this sense that the case study remainsuseful. As this also suggests, we will be arguing not only for the ubiquity of

commercial travel in Britain at this time, for the nation’s roads and inns were already

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teeming with commercial travellers, but also for its relative modernity, defined interms of functions, practices, structures and roles.15 Here it is most important to

distinguish between commercial travellers and peddlers. Peddlers, normally workingsolely on their own account, sold limited quantities and varieties of goods, normally

from saddlebags, to largely private customers for cash. Travellers, on the hand,working for merchants and factors, sold by sample and pattern book, employed

sophisticated instruments and systems of credit and over regular journeys developedsustained relationships with customers who were other businesses, normally

wholesalers and retailers but also some manufacturers.Similarly, the hardware sector served by Shaw is significant not because of a strong

individuality but because it was representative of a wide swathe of other

manufacturing sectors, typically concentrating on speciality consumer and producergoods and located in highly defined regional and urban agglomerations, or industrial

districts, that though existing in the shadow of the staple trades – cotton, coal, ironand steel – nonetheless formed an important but somewhat neglected part of British

industrialization.16

An initial section will explore the potential ways in which intermediation

contributes to economic growth and the development of business systems,particularly through the influence it exerts on emerging patterns in the division

and specialization of labour. We will then contextualize our study in terms of thecompany history of John Shaw & Sons, the archive on which this work is based, andthe industrial history of early nineteenth-century Wolverhampton. Subsequent

sections will introduce and detail the nature of the business conducted by thistraveller, in particular the products sold and the customers visited. This section will

explore further important aspects of these travels, concentrating on issues such aspayment and the use of credit. In essence, we will attempt to recreate both the

capabilities of the firm and the relationships that lay at the heart of the travels itundertook. We will conclude by relating our findings to relevant literatures on the

development of selling.

Intermediation, Specialization and the Division of Labour

Commercial travelling has never been a glamorous occupation, either now or in the

past. It has connotations of both drudgery and the ‘company man’ as drudge. InBritain, and no doubt elsewhere, the lonely ‘rep’ is a social and cultural stereotype.

However, this image belies the importance of both commercial travel and thecommercial traveller. In the context of this article we emphasize commercial

travellers and the factors for whom they worked as central to a growth inspecialization and an increasingly fine division of labour, both between firms and

between regions, by virtue of the processes of intermediation and integration thatthey helped effect.

These effects have various origins. However, it is important to note that they

will vary in magnitude according to context. First, the ease (or difficulty) of meeting

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face-to-face, central to travelling, are altered by changing technologies ofcommunication and transport. However, improved communications do not seem

to have reduced the salience of direct, interpersonal relations, for the number oftravellers on Britain’s roads increased steadily through the nineteenth century.

Certainly, in the early nineteenth century, both transport and communicationsystems were relatively rudimentary – though both were to be revolutionized during

the course of the century. But other factors will also shape the value placed onengaging in travelling and meeting. Socio-legal systems will, for example, determine a

trader’s confidence that any debts will be recoverable. These and other factorsconverge to affect levels of transaction costs, with a reduction in transaction costsencouraging an increase in economic activity. Conditions would suggest that in the

early nineteenth century, poor transport and communication systems and a relativelyweak or inefficient legal system would have imposed high transaction costs on the

business system, particularly where actors were geographically, and perhaps alsoculturally and socially, separated. Travel was one way to become plugged into

beneficial but spatially specific ‘cultures of credit’, to adapt John Smail’s term, andthus reduce transaction costs.17 This was particularly so when, as we shall see,

commercial travel led to the development of sustained long-distance relationships.Thus, it will be important to determine the extent to which the economy in which

Shaw participated was – as is sometimes claimed – a relatively informal, relationalone in which a quality such as trust was more important than contract.

However, factoring and travel had other economic impacts beyond those

associated with lowered transaction costs. First, as both the scale and geographicscope of economic activities increase, as during the expansion of markets,

manufacturers are faced with rising information costs relating to market conditionsin both a general sense and with regard to specific customers. Through all aspects of

their work, but particularly through the face-to-face contacts cemented throughtravel, factors and other traders both economize on the collection of market

information and reduce information asymmetries.18 This point is made by Allen,who noted how small manufacturers ‘must rely on [factors] for information as to thetype of commodity required’.19 Amongst other effects, this leads to a better matching

of supply with demand in terms of both levels and composition. Second, factorsperform a risk spreading function through the grouping of larger numbers of buyers

and sellers than would be available to the independent manufacturer. Third, there is askill function involved as salesmen develop an expertise. Fourth, there is a finance

function, with factors generally having better access to capital markets, includingthose located at some distance, such as those in London. The overall effect of these

functions, through the reduction of transaction and information costs and throughthe creation of enhanced capabilities, is to promote economic growth through

increased sales.20

However, perhaps most important of all were the effects on specialization and thedivision of labour, at the level of the region and the firm, achieved by the aggregation,

collation and distribution, by factors, of numerous, highly differentiated and,

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crucially, increasingly spatially distributed orders – that ‘parcelling out of demand’identified by Marshall as central to specialization and external economies.21 Under

the conditions found in Britain in the early nineteenth century, with many trades asyet unaffected by significant technological change in methods of production, and

personal capitalism predominating in the face of underdeveloped company law andcapital markets, this effect manifested itself in the form of an increasing specialization

and division of labour between rather than within firms, leading to self-reinforcingprocesses of clustering in order to reap the externalized economies scale associated

with expanding markets. Firms located in the nation’s burgeoning industrial districtsneeded Shaw and others like him in order to sell their expanding output and activelyto create demand. For Allen, conditions during the first industrial revolution ‘leading

to an extension of the market but not the size of the producing unit, had created agulf between the maker and the user, which it was the factor’s function to bridge’.22

Finally, it is worth noting that these effects may vary to some extent from sector tosector. In particular, those sectors in which branding is strong and developed early, as

Jones emphasizes was the case with pins, show a greater tendency for manufacturersto integrate forward into marketing and distribution quicker, earlier and more fully

in order to retain better control over the increasingly valuable assets represented bybrands.23 Thus, throughout, we will be seeking evidence of these effects in play and,

in particular, asking how they may relate to the practices employed by Shaw.

John Shaw & Sons and the Wolverhampton Industrial District

The very early history of the firm of John Shaw & Sons is obscure. Shaw was born in

1782. However, the trade journal The Hardwareman suggested in 1895 that ‘theearliest surviving records of the business are of the year 1795, though to be exact its

origin may have been a little earlier’.24 If this claim is accepted, then Shaw would nothave been more than 13 years old when he commenced in business. There is more

reliable archival evidence (a stock book) that the firm, acting as hardware factors inthe home trade, was in existence by 1805. John Shaw remained sole proprietor of thefirm until 1815, at which time he took a partner, Henry Crane. A directory of 1818

records the partnership as trading from premises on Worcester Street, Wolver-hampton.25 The partnership with Crane was dissolved in 1848, after which Crane

continued in business in Wolverhampton on his own account.As with the Worcester hardware factors John English and Sons studied by Jones,

the taking of a partner may have been to facilitate a greater division of manageriallabour in a growing and increasingly demanding business.26 Certainly, by 1810, when

our archive begins, Shaw may have been able to cease travelling himself, the mostobvious reason for doing so would be to enable him to concentrate on buying,

financial and warehousing functions – as again had happened at English’s.27

Important developments suggestive of considerable success and rapidly increasingcapabilities then flowed. In 1834 Shaw and Crane established in Calcutta the house of

T.E. Thomson and Co., managed by Thomas E. Thomson, who had travelled for

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Shaw in domestic markets. This move overseas was unusual, but not unknown,amongst provincial British home trade factors of this period.28 The Calcutta house

conducted an ‘indent business’, that is it took orders from native firms andtransmitted them to Britain for fulfilment. By 1848 goods to a total value of £127,000

had been shipped to India. Products shipped included: railway supplies, hardware,tools and, later, machine tools, pumps and agricultural equipment. Subsequently,

connections were also established in Canada, Australia and the East and West Indies.Clearly, the early years spent building an extensive home trade business, and an

overseas trade of unknown size and organization, had taught Shaw and Craneimportant lessons in how to organize trade across increasingly long distances.29

However, despite the vastly expanded scale and geographical scope of the

business there was initially relatively little organizational development. The firmremained for many years an example of personal capitalism. Shaw’s sons (John

Shaw junior, who died in 1839 whilst on business in India; Thomas WilkinsonShaw, 1818–1887; Edward Dethick Shaw, 1821–1886) were brought into the

business and became proprietors on the death of John Shaw senior, aged 76, in1858. As the firm’s administrative history notes, the deaths of the two remaining

sons in close succession in the mid-1880s created a ‘problem for the future of theCompany’.30 These problems were resolved in 1887 with the formation of two

limited liability firms, John Shaw & Sons, Wolverhampton, Ltd., to acquire theWolverhampton firm, and T.E. Thomson & Co. Ltd., to acquire the overseasbusinesses. However, these were strictly private firms, with all shares being taken by

the families of the late partners and descendants of John Shaw. Currently,insufficient is known about the management of the two new companies and, in

particular, whether or not they were run as well as owned by these family members.If so, then neither personal capitalism nor the difficulties of managing succession

seem to have impaired the vitality of the firm, which, from the mid-1890s,embarked on an campaign of acquisitions across the West Midlands manufacturing

districts that took it into manufacturing as well as services.31 John Shaw & SonsLtd. became a public company in 1919 and in 1970 was taken over by James NeillHoldings PLC.32

It is important to note briefly that Shaw was far from alone in exploiting therapidly expanding opportunities for intermediation presented by a period of

industrialization. Jones presents evidence from Birmingham trade directoriesindicating that the number of merchants and factors in the city increased from 66

in 1780 to 176 in 1821 (Hopkins gives figures of 85 in 1777 and 175 in 1815, thevariations being perfectly plausible in a sector that was easy to both enter and exit.)33

Similarly, merchants and factors ‘were also present in Walsall, Wolverhampton andother towns in the district and, although far fewer than in Birmingham, their

numbers also increased over the period’.34 A directory of 1818 lists 29 factors andmerchants, including Shaw and Crane, in Wolverhampton alone.35

Thus, the business commenced by John Shaw around the turn of the eighteenth

century traced a long and successful history that demonstrated, through growth and

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diversification, remarkable evolution in both strategic and, latterly, organizationalterms. It is with the period in which the roots of that history were laid that we are

primarily concerned here. Nonetheless, that subsequent history is significant to ourconclusions in so far as it allows us to claim the early business of John Shaw as a vital

connection between the pre-modern and pre-industrial world of the peddler and amarketing and selling revolution that is normally dated, at the earliest, to the late

nineteenth century.36

The archive on which this article is based comprises 17 ‘journey books’, each book

detailing a single separate journey undertaken in the years 1810–1815. On theevidence of the extant archive, the firm’s travellers followed one of two routes: eitherthe ‘Kendal Journey’ or the ‘Salop [Shropshire] Journey’, each being undertaken

twice a year, the Kendal journey in late winter/early spring and late summer and theSalop Journey in early summer and early winter. However, during the period covered

by the archive a significant development took place, with the ‘Salop Journey’mutating to become the ‘Liverpool Journey’, this change in label being more than

mere semantics and representing the opening up of new markets. We will explore inmore detail the precise routes taken and places visited later but it is worth noting

that, although they overlapped considerably, in particular in their coverage of northCheshire and south-east Lancashire, the ‘Kendal Journey’ was by far the more

extensive of the two. Indeed, one of the most valuable destinations on the ‘KendalJourney’ was the steel and metalworking centre of Sheffield, located in SouthYorkshire, some way to the south and east of Kendal.

The books follow a clear template. Each begins with a summation of the total valueof current customer accounts, aggregated from smaller sums labelled Folio No. 1, etc.

The following pages, or Folios, then provide a full breakdown of those aggregateamounts. A strict system for recording transactions is adhered to throughout.

Beneath the name of each town visited is listed the names of all customers met withand against most names, in a second column, a monetary sum. Further columns

record the date, a second, invariably smaller monetary sum (for some but not allcustomers) and, finally, again for some customers only, brief comments on methodsof payment, credit, abatements and discounts, etc. The journey books have been

interpreted as statements of customers’ outstanding accounts, with total valuerecorded in the first column and monies received in the second. Scattered references

in the journey books to ‘order books’ suggest that new orders were recorded in othervolumes. In reality, given that many of these customers were visited repeatedly, many

on every single journey covered by the books, what we are witnessing are chains oftransactions, with each meeting between seller and buyer probably involving both the

settlement of old debts and the negotiation of new deals. Each book concludes with apage that sets out the various sums held by the traveller in cash, in bills and paid to a

range of accounts. This page also sets out the traveller’s expenses, both in total andper day. Finally, each book is noted as ‘checked and passed’ by John Shaw, who thenappends his signature. Thus, the data is rich enough to be analysed in several different

ways: the volume of business done with individual customers over repeated visits; the

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volume of business done in individual towns and cities; the way in which businesswas conducted with different types of customers, such as retailers versus wholesalers.

The orders won by Shaw’s traveller(s) were channelled back to the many hardwaremanufacturers found in Wolverhampton and throughout the wider Black Country.

Although it has not been explicitly studied as such by modern business and economichistorians, the Birmingham and Black Country region comprised a vast industrial

district, a mosaic of overlapping and interdependent trades, dependent for itsdelineations, in Allen’s words, on ‘characteristics . . . [that] are economic rather than

physical or administrative’.37 Having defined his area, Allen goes on to trace withgreat subtlety how various trades waxed and waned across the period from theeighteenth century to the first quarter of the twentieth, but always through the

elaboration of existing themes.This evolutionary development created a region of strong singularities. It was,

Samuel Timmins felt, one where:

social and personal freedom is extreme. The large numbers of small manufacturersare practically independent of the numerous factors and merchants they supply.The workmen, mostly untrammelled by trades’ unions, are paid according to theirmerits, and skilled labour of all sorts is nearly always in demand. The enormousvariety of the trades renders general bad trade almost impossible, for if one branchis ‘slack’, another is usually working ‘full’, or even ‘overtime’. In no town inEngland is comfort more common, or wealth more equally diffused.38

We note the interesting comment that the region’s manufacturers were largely free ofdependence on intermediaries, but emphasize for the moment the complementarities

of trades implied in Timmins’ description. Noting a ‘tendency to specialisation’,Shadwell, writing in the first years of the twentieth century, identified similar

characteristics, describing how ‘factories sprang up, chiefly started by workmen, whoin a short time became employers on a considerable scale . . . [a] repetition of the old

process of industrial development in England . . . [which] resulted in the formation ofa large number of small concerns’.39 Comparing the region to another classic Englishindustrial district, the North Staffordshire Potteries, Shadwell claims that ‘the effects

of the process are nowhere more clearly seen than in the Wolverhampton district’,consisting of a ‘string of towns, which are all occupied in making the same class of

things but are specialised amongst themselves within that class’.40

The wider region had a long pre-industrial history in a range of trades, including

metal-making and using, but significant industrial growth began from the 1780s. Thistake-off was driven by the application of coal to iron-making and, increasingly, by the

use of steam power in a range of manufacturing processes and the development ofcanal and road systems, all ‘allowing the district’s extraordinary range and depth of

minerals [coal, iron, lime and fireclay] to come into their own’.41 Overwhelminglydedicated to a range of metal-using industries, the Black Country nonethelessdisplayed considerable variety both within and between towns in terms of products,

firms and fortunes. As Trainor rightly notes, the various towns were ‘complementary

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rather than identical’.42 Thus, in West Bromwich the emphasis was on box-irons,stoves, grates, coffee-mills and bedsteads; in Dudley nails, fenders and fire irons and

brass foundries; in Bilston enamelled metal-wares predominated. Wolverhamptonhad many of the above, as well as a significant copper sector and, from an early date,

important ‘residential, social and trading facilities’.43

Though writing in the 1920s, Allen clearly demonstrates how the district shared

many characteristics with other speciality manufacturing districts emerging inEngland in this period, including firm size, finance, governance and management,

labour management, inter-firm connections and production strategies.44 Thesefeatures are further indicated by the range and numbers of firms detailed in tradedirectories. Thus in Wolverhampton alone a directory of 1818 records the following

trades: agricultural implement makers, bolt makers, box iron makers, brass founders,braziers and tinplate makers, brush makers, coffee and malt mill makers, cork screw

makers, door spring makers, file makers, fire iron makers, gimlet and bit makers,hammer makers, hinge makers, iron founders, japanners, key and lock makers, steel

rule makers, saddlers, scale beam makers, manufacturers of snuffers and spectacleframes, steel buckle and ‘toy’ makers, thumb-latch makers, and vice makers.45

Perhaps dominant in this list were lock manufacturers, tinplaters and japanners. Ofthe later two trades, Henry Loveridge claimed that they depended ‘on each other to a

very great extent for mutual support’.46 Thus specialization and interdependencewere clearly closely related, for, as later writers noted, many of these trades ‘to a greatextent . . . shared raw materials, processes and workers’.47 Specialization and

interdependence gave rise to a further important characteristic found in manyindustrial districts, the creation of spin-off firms and trades through a process of

cross-fertilization. For example, in edge tools, many of the district’s entrepreneurs‘were first employed by [William] Gilpin’ (d. 1834).48 In terms of cross-fertilization,

drop forging provides an excellent example, originally developed in the context ofedge tool manufacturing it readily found applications in the making of keys, small

arms and other products.49

As in other districts, fashion and creativity played an important role.50 Clearly, thevast majority of the output of these multifarious trades was destined for the

consumer market – as is evidenced by the predominance of small retailers amongstShaw’s customers – and was thus driven by that ‘great variety of novelties for

household purposes which have been introduced . . . So long as one man fancies hecan contrive an improvement in coffee pots . . . so long must it go on’.51 For

Wolverhampton in particular, in comparison to neighbouring towns, the centrality offashion was matched by a commitment to quality, design and skill in execution – a

factor in part responsible for the small-scale structure of most trades, where firmsconsisted ‘usually of a master craftsman and a handful of workers’.52 Naturally,

auxiliary trades, important in creating a district’s external economy of scale, alsoarose; for example, in the manufacture of paints, colours, varnishes and boxes.53

This great structure of manufacturing capacity was matched by a well-developed

commercial apparatus. Of central importance in this respect were merchants and

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factors, and we have already noted how a directory of 1818 records 29 inWolverhampton alone. These merchants were in turn supported by systems of

transport and communication. Thus, in 1818, no less than 104 post and other coachservices departed Wolverhampton on a weekly basis, giving access to every part of the

land. To give just one example, the ‘Perseverance’ day coach left the town everymorning at 8 am for Birmingham, Coventry and Leicester, returning at 7 pm the

same day. In the same year, the town could boast seven companies offeringconveyance of goods by water and 22 by land. Again, to give just one example, Heath,

Tyler and Danks were advertising ‘[f]ly boats daily to Birmingham, Dudley,Stourport, Manchester, Liverpool and the Potteries . . . from their Wharf, Horsleyfield’.54 The town naturally possessed a full complement of attorneys and banks.

The Trade: Products, Customers, Relations

Setting out on the morning of 12 February 1810 from the rapidly growing

metalworking town of Wolverhampton, in the English Midlands, the now unknowntraveller working for hardware factor John Shaw faced a daunting prospect. Ahead lay

34 days of hard travel on the often appalling roads of northern England, to beundertaken in the depths of winter and early spring.55 But, despite these adverse

conditions, the work-rate of this traveller was to prove prodigious. During thejourney that followed, visits would be made to 73 customers in 34 towns across sixcounties, dealing with accounts worth a total of £1,079 15s 8d to the many hardware

manufacturers of the Wolverhampton industrial district. Thus, this surely difficultwork fulfilled a vital function, integrating supply with demand across the burgeoning

regional and national markets of industrializing England, furthering specializationand the division of labour at spatial and organizational levels and promoting

economic growth. Such services were no mere adjunct to manufacturing; instead theyformed its absolutely necessary complement in the British business system of this

period.Thus, before examining in detail the travels undertaken by Shaw’s firm we wish to

give some broad indication of their scope. First, across the period covered by the

archive, visits were made to a total of 526 customers distributed across scores ofcities, towns and villages. Building and sustaining relationships with such a large

number of customers necessitated punishing schedules, as is clear from the twosample itineraries set out in Tables 1 and 2.

As we have seen, the Wolverhampton industrial district was a thriving seat ofspeciality metal-ware manufacture in the period under study and this is reflected in

the glimpses we have of the range of products that John Shaw’s business helped todistribute to retailers and consumers across the English midlands and northwards.

The journey books do not specify the goods being ordered or paid for but the noteson payment, errors, returns, abatements and discounts contained in the final columnof each page give us some sense of their range. Products mentioned include: a

‘machine’ (unspecified), sandpaper, files, traps, locks, nails, coffee mills, lamps,

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Table 1

Itinerary, Kendal Journey: January 1812

Date Place

January 22 Penkridge/Stafford23 Eccleshall/Stone2425 Stoke-upon-Trent/Newcastle2627 Stoke-upon-Trent/Hanley28 Sandbach29 Lane End/Fenton/Congleton30 Leek/Macclesfield31 Macclesfield

February 12 Rochdale34 Blackburn56 Kendal/Ulverston789

10 Lancaster1112 Preston13 Preston14 Wigan/Chorley1516 Bolton17 Manchester1819 Stockport/Manchester2021 Manchester22 Bury2324 Rochdale2526 Halifax/Leeds27 Bradford28 Doncaster

March 12 Rotherham/Sheffield3 Sheffield4 Sheffield5 Alperton/Derby/Burton6 Lichfield

Source: Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies, DB 24/A/158,Kendal Journey, January 1812.

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kettles, brushes, sugar scoops and cooking pans. In handling such a diverse if related

range of goods for the manufacturers of Wolverhampton, Shaw played a part inrealizing those economies of scale and scope so important to an industrial district

such as the Black Country.56 As Higgins and Tweedale note in their study of latenineteenth-century Sheffield steel and tool factor Fisher and Co., by aggregating

demand for diverse products, factors were able to ‘reconcile the conflicting demandsof production efficiency and marketing requirements’ and thus ‘helped to reinforcethe external economies that were present in the Sheffield steel and steel processing

industry’.57

Table 2

Itinerary, Liverpool Journey: November, 1814

Date Place

November 23 Bridgnorth/Wenlock24 Brosely/Coalbrookdale25 Shifnal/Wellington26 Salop (Shrewsbury)27 Salop28 Salop29 Welshpool30 Llanymynech

December 1 Oswestry23 Ellesmere4 Ruabon5 Wrexham6 Chester7 Warrington/Liverpool8 Liverpool9 Liverpool

10 Liverpool11 Liverpool/Prescott12 St Helens13 Bolton14 Bury/Rochdale15 Manchester16 Manchester17 Manchester18 Altrincham19 Northwich20 Middlewich21 Sandbach/Wheelock22 Nantwich/Whitchurch23 (Market) Drayton24 Newport/Gnosall

Source: Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies, DB 24/A/167,Liverpool Journey, November 1814.

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We are able to say much more about the firm’s customers and, in turn, the natureof the relationships between factor and customer. The first and most important

element to stress is the ongoing and sustained nature of many of these relationships.As Friedman notes of the commercial travellers, or ‘drummers’, for American

wholesale houses in the later nineteenth century, ‘skillful selling was not based ontrickery but on establishing trust with a customer – trust that had to be developed

over time’.58 The work undertaken by Shaw’s traveller exemplified this credo.Individual customers were visited time and again in the years covered by the

surviving journey books. The personal relationships that were developed throughrepeated visits (Shaw in 1813 married the daughter of a customer in Colne,Lancashire) were complemented and reinforced by the regular, almost seasonal, way

in which the travelling was planned and undertaken. We can envisage customers infar-flung Kendal in early January of each year beginning to anticipate the imminent

arrival of Shaw’s representative, bringing with him news, gossip and informationfrom both Wolverhampton and the many other towns and cities through which he

had already travelled. Indeed, a regular reliable schedule was probably essential ifcustomers were not to defect to Shaw’s many competitors. A few examples will begin

to give a sense of the persistence and regularity characterizing many of therelationships forged through travelling. In Manchester, Thomas Fildes (ironmonger

and grocer) was visited in January 1810 (‘value of account’ £5 1s 2d), December 1810(£7 5s 8d), January 1811 (£18 19s 2d), August 1811 (£5 17s 7d), February 1812 (£2 4s4d), June 1812 (£10 1s 10d), and August 1812 (£10 1s 10d).59 In one three-year

period alone (1810–1812) Manchester, and very probably Fildes, would also havebeen visited during further journeys in May and June 1810, May and December 1811

and December 1812 for which journey books are not extant.However, Fildes was the norm rather than the exception. Moreover, such regularity

was far from always associated with the relatively petty business given by Fildes. InLancaster, Heaton and Co. (ironmongers) ran an account to the following values; £23

8s 3d in January 1810, £66 11s 8d in February 1811, £66 11s 3d in August 1811, £69 2s1d in March 1812 and £103 13s 3d in August 1812, whilst in Macclesfield the value ofRoyston’s account ran from £11 to £97 4s 3d in February 1810, March 1811, August

1811, and January and August 1812.60 The earlier journey books, with their relativelyunchanging patterns and tempos, suggest then a patient cultivation of existing,

valued connections rather than the restless search for new ‘prospects’. It is possible tosee the regularity of the travels undertaken by Shaw as both reaching backward to the

pre-industrial world of seasonal fairs and forward to the carefully prepared selling‘campaigns’ that, Friedman argues, began to characterize American markets from the

mid-nineteenth century onwards.61

With the customary nature of these relationships, reinforced by and reflected in the

regularity of the travelling, came elements of obligation and reciprocity, reflected inturn in methods of payment. The two most common forms of payment were cashand the bill of exchange – but it was a relatively rare occasion on which the settling of

a debt did not involve some form of discount, allowance or abatement. Thus, Bennett

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(ironmonger) of Blackburn was on 5 March 1810 ‘allowed’ 3/- for cash payment onan order of £13 2s 0d, Thomas Jones of Wrexham (gunsmith) received a ‘discount’ of

5/- on business worth £9 13s 0d on 12 June 1810 for unspecified reasons, 2/- wasshaved off the £17 18s 0d owed by one Edwards of Salop in December 1810 in

recognition of errors in an order previously sent. Similarly, Greaves (ironmonger) ofMacclesfield was allowed 4/6d on return of casks (in which a prior order had been

delivered) in March 1811 and in Haslingden, Lancashire, Lands’ (whitesmith) debt of£10 14s 11d was reduced by a full £2 10s 0d for the return of sandpaper (that had

presumably proved sub-standard or had been sent in error).62 These are just a fewexamples from very many. Elsewhere, a number of customers in south Staffordshire,such as Eccles (grocer and chandler) in Penkridge, Hubbard (ironmonger) in Stafford

or Gibbs (ironmonger) in Eccleshall, were often ‘to send copper’ or ‘remit in copper’in at least part payment.63 More rarely, bookkeeping errors on the part of Shaw were

also acknowledged and compensated for, thus Wainhouse (ironmonger) of Halifaxreceived a rebate of 8/8d for an ‘error in bill’ in March 1810.64

Each of the many occasions on which credit was extended or a discount given wasthe outcome of a keen process of negotiation between traveller and customer, each

drawing on both personal knowledge and experience of the other, and moregeneralized, increasingly well-understood norms of commerce. Evidence of the

understandings and expectations held by both parties and of the decision rules withinwhich the traveller operated is fragmentary. The latter may have been shaped by boththe creditworthiness of individual customers – in turn assessed through reference to

factors such as payment history, length of relationship, value of account andcommercial intelligence gleaned from other local sources – and the state of both

Shaw’s business and the wider economy. These assumptions are reinforced by theevidence we do have. Mary Mayer (ironmonger), a longstanding customer in Hanley

in the Staffordshire Potteries, who ran an account of often considerable valuethroughout the period, was in December 1814 given a discount of 2.5 per cent on an

account of £6 1s 4d but, the traveller also noted, she had ‘expected’ 5 per cent for‘prompt payment’.65 In contrast, G. Fairclough (ironmonger) of St Helens, inDecember 1814 complained that he had ‘never had any discount allowed’, despite the

fact that he appears only to have become a customer in that same year. He wasoffered a discount of 5 per cent on an account valued at £49 1s 7d. More

straightforwardly, in the same month, Jackson (ironmonger) of Manchester wasallowed an unspecified discount for settling an account of £7 15s 1d in cash. It

appears the traveller could also impose penalties. Again in December 1814, Molineux(brazier) of Manchester, another new customer running an account valued at £17 2s

7d, was warned that the traveller ‘could not allow the 5 per cent next time’. Thiswarning may have been triggered by non-payment, for the account does not appear

to have been settled until summer 1815. Similarly, a more longstanding customer,Holgate (ironmonger) of Stoke-upon-Trent, objected to ‘paying the 2.5%’ imposedfor unspecified reasons.66 It is important to stress that the archive reinforces the

suggestion, advanced by Smail, that the highly localized ‘cultures of credit’ that

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typified the eighteenth century were, in the early nineteenth century, beingprogressively replaced by a more generalized national culture, powered by the

growing ubiquity of bills of exchange as instruments of credit and the spread of thecountry banking system, for there is no evidence of these practices varying from place

to place.67

Obligation and reciprocity were evident not simply in the forms payments took

but also in their timing. Many customers were repeatedly allowed to delay payment,often for very considerable periods. Moreover, this practice, which effectively

extended credit to the customer, could show considerable variation, suggesting thatthe traveller was empowered, and sufficiently trusted, to agree on the spot terms hethought appropriate.

Thus, in September 1811, Woods (ironmonger) of Bolton undertook to remit £242s 7d in three days, whereas G. Elliot of Doncaster (whitesmith) was allowed to remit

‘within six months’.68 Other time periods specified include: one week, a fortnight, 21days, ‘three or four weeks’ and six weeks. Alternatively, remittance was promised in a

specific, named month, on specific, named days or even ‘at midsummer’.69 Veryrarely, customers were allowed to promise only partial remittance, such as Prickett of

Manchester who, owing £142 10s 8d, was allowed in early September 1812 to promise£25 by 9 October in the same year.70

On many other occasions, however, no timeframe was specified, Darwin and Co.of Sheffield (iron founders and rollers), visited in March 1811 and owing £18 19s 0d,were, it was simply noted, ‘to remit’, while Booth of Congleton (ironmonger), visited

later in the same year, was ‘to remit soon’.71 Similarly, Shaw’s traveller, on making acall, could find that customers were themselves ‘out on [a] journey’.72 Notes on

payment also indicate that at times customers would visit Shaw in Wolverhampton;Ash (ironmonger), in the Derbyshire town of Burton-on-Trent was ‘to call and pay

soon’.73 However, such notes are found only a handful of times amongst hundreds ofentries.

Friedman notes that until the spread of an effective railroad network, and morespecifically in the decades after the US Civil War, American ‘regional storekeepersand merchants would themselves visit large north-eastern cities to select their

goods’.74 The evidence from the Shaw archives would suggest that English provincialretailers had been able to abandon this practice at a significantly earlier date and

before the advent of rail travel, a development no doubt facilitated to some degree bythe relatively compact geography of the nation but also by the sophistication and

robustness of systems and instruments of commercial credit and of transport andcommunication.75

The careful way in which total and daily expenses were recorded in the journeybooks also allows us to step back from the detailed interactions with individual

customers in order to consider the economic efficiency of this form of selling anddistribution. Details are presented in Table 3.

First, daily expenses were remarkably stable. Whether considering either Kendal,

Salop or Liverpool journeys and whether those journeys were undertaken in summer

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or winter, expenses per day were consistently in the region of 16s 10d, falling as low as

14s 8d for the ‘Salop Journey’ of June 1810 and rising as high as 17s 2d for the‘Kendal Journey’ of February 1810, perhaps reflecting the cost imposed by travelling

under winter conditions.76 The best available measure of the cost-efficiency of thesejourneys as a mechanism of selling and distribution is to calculate expenses as a

proportion of the ‘value of accounts’. Here we find more variation, reflecting thefluctuating level of the ‘value of accounts’ from trip to trip. Thus, for example, the‘Salop Journey’ of June 1810 involved accounts to the value of £488 but the ‘Kendal

Journey’ of August 1812 cost £4,277.77 The least efficient trip undertaken in theperiod under study was the aforementioned ‘Salop Journey’ of June 1810, during

which expenses represented approximately 3.3 per cent of the value of accounts, andthe most efficient was the ‘Kendal Journey’ of August 1814, during which expenses

represented approximately 0.73 per cent of the value of accounts.78 On average,expenses represented only a little over 1.0 per cent of the value of accounts.

Unfortunately, we have no data on any salary and/or commission paid to thetraveller – nor, indeed, on the number of travellers employed in total or at any one

time – or on the costs of office and warehousing functions or the profit marginsrealized by Shaw, meaning that our measure is inevitably incomplete. It seems clear,however, that the expenses incurred through travelling represented an extremely low

proportion of the value of the accounts involved. It is surely unlikely that the

Table 3

Travelling Expenses, 1810–1812

Journey Value of accounts (£) Expenses (£)Expenses as %

Value of accounts

Kendal, 2/1810 1,079 29-5-4 2.7Salop, 6/1810 488 16-2-7 3.27Salop, 12/1810 1,412 17-5-4 1.22Kendal, 2/1811 3,736 33-5-3 0.88Kendal, 8/1811 3,406 33-6-11 0.97Kendal, 1/1812 3,549 37-13-7 1.06Salop, 5/1812 2,182 27-18-0 1.27Kendal, 8/1812 4,277 39-15-0 0.92Liverpool, 11/1812 2,982 27-4-0 0.91Kendal, 2/1813 5,458 49-12-4 0.9Salop, 5/1813 2,955 26-7-0 0.89Kendal, 8/1813 5,748 42-8-0 0.73Kendal, 2/1814 6,401 – –Liverpool, 6/1814 3,855 42-7-3 1.09Kendal, 8/1814 6,342 – –Liverpool, 11/1814 4,297 46-10-10 1.01Kendal, 7/1815 6,794 – –

Average 3,244* 33* 1.03*

Notes: *All averages exclude: Kendal, 2/1814; Kendal, 8/1814 and Kendal, 7/1815, for which journeystotal expenses are unavailable.

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hardware manufacturers of Wolverhampton could, by selling directly andindividually, have matched the levels of efficiency achieved by Shaw, whose

traveller(s) visited many dozens of customers to sell a product range far wider thanthat made by any single manufacturer. Again we must conclude that the commercial

travelling undertaken by factors such as Shaw formed an indispensable element of thewider system through which the Wolverhampton industrial district realized

externalized economies of both scale and scope. Moreover, in this period, theadvantages derived from the services of factors by speciality manufacturers in

industrial districts meshed with more generalized conditions in which, due to‘imperfectly connected markets’, all manufacturers faced high transaction andopportunity costs reflecting ‘the character of transport, communication and other

environmental factors’.79

Expansion, Change and Challenge

Many aspects of the trade outlined above – the regular tempo of travelling, sustainedrelationships, extensive use of credit – persisted throughout the period covered by the

archive. However, in the second half of that period we also see significant changesand developments that shed light on other aspects that have so far remained more

obscure: who undertook the travelling and how they were monitored; how the firmattempted to expand the scope of the markets it served; how solidly based in trust andreciprocity relationships were with customers, and to what risks a factor such as Shaw

was exposed, particularly during periods of growth. The two major developments,occurring in close succession, were a renewed attention to previously under- or

unexploited target markets, particularly the great port city of Liverpool, and theemployment of a new traveller.80

From mid-to-late 1812, Shaw steadily added both new destinations and newcustomers in existing destinations to the journeys. The upturn was marked enough to

be thought of as signalling a strategy of growth and lead to a clear expansion incustomer numbers and, most importantly, the value of accounts. The value ofaccounts was running at an average of £3,247 per journey in 1812 and £5,223 in 1814,

an increase of some 60 per cent.Expansion was achieved by an intensification of the work undertaken by travellers,

with journeys both lasting longer and involving more customer visits. Thus, whereasjourneys undertaken in 1810–1812 lasted on average 34.7 days those occurring in

1813–1814 averaged 47 days. Similarly, the number of individual visits increased,particularly in the largest cities – Manchester, Sheffield and, most strikingly,

Liverpool – that were the main targets in this expansionist phase. Thus in February1810, five customers were visited over a two-day period spent in Manchester but by

September 1814 some 22 customers were being visited in just three days spent in thecity. Going largely unrecorded must have been many other visits to prospectivecustomers, who may have required diligent courting in the face of competition from

other factors selling a similar range of goods. This can be seen in the case of

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Liverpool, which first appears in the journey books in the summer of 1812, when 12customers were visited (just five of them actually running accounts, the rest as yet

unconverted prospects presumably).81 By November 1814, however, Shaw had 22active customers in the city.

At the same time, Shaw also seems to have started using a new traveller, probablyat some point during 1814. In that year, a new hand appears in the journey books,

which also become more heavily annotated in a way that suggests a less experiencedtraveller providing himself with a detailed aide memoire. More concretely, the record

of one conversation with a customer (negotiation of a discount with Fairclough ofSt Helens, discussed above) references prior discussions between the customer andone William Shaw. This is clearly suggestive of a change of personnel and would seem

to indicate that John Shaw had previously relied on a member of his own family toundertake the difficult but highly responsible task of travelling. As Jones showed in

the case of English, the relationship between factor and traveller in the field involvedconsiderable principal–agent problems.82 Unmonitored by their employees, un-

scrupulous or incompetent travellers might extend credit unwisely, cheat on expensesand, notoriously, drink excessively. As in small, personally managed firms in many

sectors, one solution was to employ a trusted family member.The annotations made by the new traveller shed light on several further aspects of

this work. First, they indicate that these journeys really did involve selling. Severaltimes, the new traveller records that he ‘cannot get an order’. Of Taylor and Co. inChester, for example, he notes that he ‘could not do anything with them’. More and

more customers, like Moore, also of Chester, now ‘promise[d] an order next trip’.Clearly, the traveller could not simply collect debts and record orders, instead he was

required actively to sell, particularly where, as in this phase, many new customerswere being approached. The notes also reveal often uneasy relationships with some

customers, again particularly those new to the firm’s books. For the first time in thearchive, notes appear to the effect that a customer (such as Kinder, ironmonger,

Warrington) ‘would not pay’ or (Pickering, tinsmith, Liverpool) ‘could not pay’.Clearly, the push for growth had brought with it some less reliable customers,including Smith of Manchester, who, promising to ‘pay something next journey’, was

‘but just released out of prison’. Equally alarming, in Liverpool, Thomas Carr ‘couldnot be found’ and Clay and Son, with whom Carr appeared to share an account,

‘know nothing about it’.83 Other customers also saw the employment of a newtraveller as an opportunity to renegotiate terms, perhaps hoping to take advantage of

a presumed naivety or of lack authority. We have already seen how in December 1814Fairclough of St Helens complained that he had never been allowed a discount.

However, the traveller’s record of the conversation continues: ‘I told him 5% of thewhole [he] says William Shaw told him 15%’. The decision is not recorded, though

such a rate of discount would have been unprecedented. The reciprocity that is oftenpresumed to have underpinned many business relationships in this period neededcareful nurturing, perhaps through such hard-nosed bartering, and cannot be

assumed to have existed in all cases.84

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As Chapman has noted, the ‘pivotal position of the merchant . . . was ultimatelybased on close financial control’.85 For Shaw, the period 1812–1814 well illustrated

this maxim. A strategy of growth, in conjunction with the employment of a newtraveller, left his firm more exposed to financial risk than it had been in the years

immediately preceding and showed just how difficult could be the task of winning thetrust and goodwill of new customers.

Forging Connections: Conclusions

The extent to which it is possible to generalize on the basis of a single case studyis obviously limited, though we would argue that the strength of the parallels

between this case and that presented by Jones provide a justification for ascribinga degree of representativeness to Shaw (and English). Nonetheless, despite this

caveat, the story of the travelling undertaken by John Shaw’s firm in the earlynineteenth century can be related to several important themes in business history;

particularly changing patterns and practices in marketing and distribution and, inturn, to the structure and functioning of the British business system in the

nineteenth century.Some conclusions: routes and itineraries were carefully planned; the progress of

journeys and the outcomes of transactions were carefully and systematically recorded;the traveller was empowered to take important decisions in the field, such as thegranting of credit, and yet was subject to a careful systems of monitoring and

oversight, with John Shaw, as principal of the firm, subjecting all journey books toexamination and scrutiny before he would sign them off as ‘passed’. The firm and its

travellers were also clearly capable of planning and executing a significant expansionof markets, in terms of both territories and volumes. It is our belief that this case,

though dealing only with a single firm, is suggestive of greater continuities in thepractices and impacts of factors and commercial travellers than has hitherto been

suggested. To reiterate a point made earlier, the commercial travellers working forShaw must not be mistaken for peddlers.

Unfortunately, detailed though it is, this archive does not reveal enough of the

relationship between Shaw and his traveller(s), and certainly Jones shows that JohnEnglish experienced considerable principal–agent problems with travellers in the

field. The elevation of former traveller T.E. Thompson to the management of theCalcutta house suggests Shaw was capable of forging good working relationships with

employees and may also have relied on the employment of a relative for a time, butwe know little of how Shaw either controlled or incentivized his travellers.86

Travelling was also, as we have shown, undeniably cost-efficient.Moreover, by situating an analysis of the journeys undertaken in the period 1810–

1815 within the context of the firm’s wider history, which encompassed a strategy ofexpansion into overseas market led by an employee who had previously worked as atraveller in the home trade and, at a later stage, backward integration into

manufacturing, it is possible to argue that these features permitted and encouraged

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the development of vital capabilities at both the individual and the organizationallevel.87

Claims that developments in British selling were relatively retarded are, in turn,nested inside a wider set of criticisms with regard to the British business system as a

whole and marketing in particular. The persistence of intermediation is seen as bothof a part with and, to some extent, a factor in the persistence of an atomistic

industrial structure, particularly in manufacturing, coupled with small-scale andpersonal forms of capitalism; for Allen, as we have seen, identifying the central role of

the factor is crucial for a full understanding of industrial structure in Birminghamand the Black Country.88 As Church notes, ‘[a]n interpretation is gaining groundwhich presents the business system of early and mid-Victorian Britain as one in

which, because of favourable market conditions and an industrial structure andorganisation in which family firms were central, a partial ossification occurred’.89

This ‘ossification’, foreshadowing the later failures at the turn of the nineteenthcentury identified by Chandler, is frequently associated with, in Wilson’s words, a

failure to establish ‘dedicated and extensive marketing and sales networks’, the earlyemergence of sophisticated mercantile systems in both the home and export trades

ensuring that ‘transaction costs were heavily skewed in favour of external dealings’.90

As already noted, Jones’ reading of English’s activities, situated in the dominant

historiography of the 1980s, is a search for explanations of a perceived failure.91

However, subsequent developments in the literature, stressing both greaterinnovation in marketing and distribution and the positive externalities generated in

small-firm districts, allow us to position factors and travellers as delivering not simplylow transaction costs via the effects outlined above but also enhanced value in terms

of market access and information. In the British context, studies of intermediation inthe pottery and cotton textile industries have sought to recast intermediation as an

important positive externality.92 Where manufacturing firms serve niches in productranges that are highly diverse, a strategy typical of firms producing speciality goods in

the context of industrial districts, the economics, as Jones himself notes, point tospecialization in distribution by firm. This effect will be magnified in a sector such ashardware where branding is relatively weak. Further, as we have attempted to argue

here, it is vital that we remain sensitive to period. As Church argues, it is more helpfulto ‘describe [firms and their strategies] in relation to contemporary economic and

industrial structure and the existence of a well-established merchanting sector’.93 Andit is in the temporal context of the early nineteenth century and the sectoral context

of a diverse speciality production that Shaw and other factors were able, through theeffects outlined above of reduced transaction and information costs, risk reduction,

matching of supply and demand, enhanced access to finance and deepeningcapabilities in selling, to achieve a powerful integrative effect across an emerging

national economy, to play their part in facilitating increased specialization anddivision of labour in a vibrant industrial district, promoting economic growth.

Nor is it clear that the prior existence of a system of external dealing presented a

necessary block to integration under changed conditions in subsequent periods.

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Church has shown that British firms in a range of consumer goods industries led thefield in developing strategies of branding and marketing and these developments were

matched by innovations in selling and distribution, including the direct employmentof travellers.94 Where branding gave manufacturers both vital proprietorial control

and delivered the promise of a mass market (as well as incentivizing them to ensurethe protection of the valuable assets embodied in brands), then British manufacturers

proved themselves perfectly capable of circumventing the system of external dealing,however well-established and efficient.95 Allen himself, having indicated the centrality

of the factor to the early industrial development of the Birmingham district, showsequally carefully how changing conditions in the late nineteenth century –particularly a growth in the average size of firms in both manufacturing and

retailing – had led to near extinction of the factor in many trades by 1914 asproducers employed branding, advertising and their own travellers ‘to get behind the

intermediary to the customer’.96 Further, at many levels, the commercial traveller forthe factor, merchant or wholesaler was a direct precursor of the commercial traveller

directly employed by the manufacturer; it was the men working for factors such asShaw who developed the routes and routines later followed by the travellers working

directly for later manufacturers, for whom the infrastructure of ‘commercial inns’and other facilities were developed, and who embedded the place and image of the

‘commercial rep’ into British society and culture.97 Thus, for many reasons, thecommercial traveller deserves rescue from the neglect of history.

References

Allen, G.C. The Industrial Development of Birmingham and the Black Country, 1860–1927. London:Frank Cass, 1966.

Bridgen’s Directory of the Borough of Wolverhampton. Wolverhampton, 1833.Broadberry, Steven, and Andrew Marrison. ‘‘External Economies of Scale in the Lancashire Cotton

Industry, 1900–1950.’’ Economic History Review 55, No.1 (2002): 51–77.Carnevali, Francesca. ‘‘Golden Opportunities: Jewelry Making in Birmingham between Mass

Production and Specialty.’’ Enterprise and Society 4, No.2 (2003): 272–298.Chapman, Sidney D. Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War

Two. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.Church, Roy. ‘‘New Perspectives on the History of Products, Firms, Markets and the Competitive

Process in the British Business System of the Nineteenth Century.’’ Economic History Review52, No.3 (1999): 405–435.

———. ‘‘Ossified or Dynamic? Structure, Markets and the Competitive Process in the BritishBusiness System of the Nineteenth Century.’’ Business History 42, No.1 (2000): 1–20.

———. ‘‘The Rise and Changing Role of Commercial Travellers in Britain between 1870 and1914.’’ Paper presented to the Annual Conference of the European Business HistoryAssociation, Barcelona, 2004.

Church, Roy, and Christine Clark. ‘‘The Origins of Competitive Advantage in the Marketing ofBranded Packaged Consumer Goods: Colman’s and Reckitt’s in the Early Victorian Period.’’Journal of Industrial History 3, No.2 (2000): 98–119.

Church, Roy, and Andrew Godley, eds. The Emergence of Modern Marketing. London: Frank Cass,2003.

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French, Michael. ‘‘Commercials, Careers, and Culture: Travelling Salesmen in Britain, 1890s–1930s.’’ Economic History Review 58, No.2 (2005): 352–377.

Friedman, Walter. Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2004.

Higgins, David, and Geoffrey Tweedale. ‘‘The Voracious Kingfisher: Harry Fisher & Co. and theSheffield Factoring and Hire-Work Trade, 1890–1909.’’ Transactions of the HunterArchaeology Society 18 (1995): 47–59.

Homeshaw, E.J. ‘‘Edge-tools.’’ In A History of the County of Stafford, Volume II, edited by M.W.Greenslade and J.G. Jenkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Hosgood, Christopher, ‘‘The ‘Knights of the Road’: Commercial Travellers and the Culture of theCommercial Room in Late-Victorian and Edwardian England.’’ Victorian Studies 37, No.4(1994): 519–548.

Hopkins, Eric. Birmingham: The First Manufacturing Town in the World, 1760–1840. London:Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1989.

Jenkins, J.G. ‘‘Engineering.’’ In A History of the County of Stafford, Volume II, edited by M.W.Greenslade and J.G. Jenkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Jones, S.R.H. ‘‘The Country Trade and the Marketing and Distribution of Birmingham Hardware,1750–1810.’’ Business History 26, No.1 (1984): 24–42.

Johnson, B.L.C. ‘‘Iron to 1750.’’ In A History of the County of Stafford: Volume II, edited by M.W.Greenslade and J.G. Jenkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Lloyd-Jones, Roger, and M.J. Lewis, Raleigh and the British Bicycle Industry: An Economic andBusiness History, 1870–1960. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000.

Marshall, Alfred. Industry and Trade. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1919.Minchinton, W.E. ‘‘Tinplate and Allied Products.’’ In A History of the County of Stafford, Volume II,

edited by M.W. Greenslade and J.G. Jenkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967.Parson, W., and T. Bradshaw. Staffordshire General and Commercial Directory for 1818. Manchester,

1819.Popp, Andrew. Business Structure, Business Culture and the Industrial District: The Potteries, 1850–

1914. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.———. ‘‘Barriers to Innovation in Marketing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century: Merchant-

Manufacturer Relationships.’’ Business History 44, No.2 (2002): 19–39.Scranton, Philip. Endless Novelty: Specialty Production and American Industrialization, 1865–1925.

Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997.Smail, John. ‘‘The Culture of Credit in Eighteenth-Century Commerce: The English Textile

Industry.’’ Enterprise and Society 4, No.2 (2003): 299–325.Spears, Timothy. One Hundred Years on the Road: The Travelling Salesman in American Culture.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995.Stobart, Jon. The First Industrial Region: North-west England, c.1700–60. Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2004.Timmins, Samuel, ed. The Industrial History of Birmingham and the Midland Hardware District.

London: Robert Hardwicke, 1866.Trainor, R.H. Black Country Elites: The Exercise of Authority in an Industrialized Area, 1830–1900.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.Wilson, John. British Business History, 1720–1994. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995.Wilson, John, and Andrew Popp, eds. Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks in England,

1750–1970. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Notes

Pre-decimal UK currency: £1¼ 20s (shillings); 1s¼ 12d (old pence)¼ £0.05p (new pence).1 French, ‘‘Commercials, Careers, and Culture.’’

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2 Hosgood, ‘‘Knights of the Road.’’3 Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade.’’4 Chapman, Merchant Enterprise.5 Church, ‘‘New Perspectives’’; Church and Clark, ‘‘The Origins of Competitive Advantage.’’6 Wilson, British Business History; Popp, ‘‘Barriers to Innovation’’; Broadberry and Marrison,

‘‘External Economies of Scale.’’7 Church, ‘‘Ossified or Dynamic?’’; Church, ‘‘New Perspectives.’’8 Allen, Industrial Development of Birmingham, 152.9 Ibid., 344.

10 Ibid., 29.11 Friedman, Birth of a Salesman.12 Church, ‘‘Ossified or Dynamic?’’; Popp, ‘‘Barriers to Innovation.’’13 Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade.’’14 Popp, Business Structure, Business Culture and the Industrial District; Wilson and Popp,

Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks.15 In 1808 a customer in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, told a traveller working for John English that

he had seen 400 travellers pass through the town that year alone. Personal communication fromS. R. H. Jones. One of the journey books in the Shaw archive is annotated with the names of theaccommodation used by the traveller, which consisted entirely of inns, taverns, and hotels.

16 Wilson and Popp, Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks.17 Smail, ‘‘The Culture of Credit.’’18 The journey books are peppered with notes reminding the traveller to ‘enquire’ of particular

customers amongst his or her neighbouring trades-people.19 Allen, Industrial Development of Birmingham, 153.20 I am deeply indebted to S. R. H. Jones for enabling me to develop more clearly many of the

arguments advanced in the preceding paragraphs.21 Marshall, Industry and Trade, 601.22 Allen, Industrial Development of Birmingham, 349.23 Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade,’’ 28.24 Wolverhampton Archives and Local Studies (hereafter WALS), Administrative History.25 Parson and Bradshaw, Staffordshire General and Commercial Director. By 1833 the partners had

moved to Church Lane, Wolverhampton. Bridgen’s Directory of the Borough of Wolverhampton.26 Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade.’’27 Ibid. When Shaw was able to stop travelling is unclear. All the journey books have appended a

note to the effect that they have been ‘checked and passed’ by John Shaw – suggesting he hadnot compiled them himself. However, the archive also contains a letter from Henry Crane inWolverhampton, dated 12 March 1810 and addressed to Shaw at the Post Office, Lancaster.Moreover, the journey books do show that Lancaster was visited in March of that year (thoughon 1 rather than 12 March). The letter, seemingly written in some panic, warns Shaw thatGibbons and Co., bankers, had that morning stopped payments. WALS, DB 24/A46. Letter fromH. Crane to J. Shaw, 12 March 1810.

28 Thus, for example, John English established an import business in Philadelphia in 1840 inpartnership with E. C. Pratt. The company, E. C. Pratt and Co., sold needles, pins, fish-hooks,Gillotts pen and other similar items on their own account. Personal communication with S. R. H.Jones.

29 WALS, Administrative history. There were of course important differences between home andoverseas trade, the latter offering far greater challenges. In particular, in overseas trade, knowledgeand understanding of shipping, of foreign exchange markets, of general information concerningforeign markets. I am again indebted S. R. H. Jones for reinforcing these points.

30 Ibid.

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31 Thus, for example, in 1896 the firm took over J. and W. Hawkes of Birmingham, incorporatedW. and H. Bate and Owen and Fendlow in 1899 and in 1906 Onions and Co., also ofBirmingham. WALS, Administrative History.

32 Ibid.33 Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade,’’ 24; Hopkins, Birmingham, 68.34 Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade,’’ 24.35 Staffordshire General and Commercial Directory.36 Friedman, Birth of a Salesman.37 Allen, Industrial Development of Birmingham, 3.38 Timmins, The Industrial History of Birmingham, 223.39 Ibid., 140, 142.40 Ibid., 142–143; Popp, Business Structure, Business Culture and the Industrial District.41 Trainor, Black Country Elites, 25.42 Ibid., 1.43 Ibid., 4.44 Allen, Industrial Development of Birmingham; Popp, Business Structure, Business Culture and the

Industrial District; Wilson and Popp, Industrial Clusters and Regional Business Networks.45 Staffordshire General and Commercial Directory.46 Timmins, Industrial History of Birmingham, 117.47 Minchinton, ‘‘Tinplate and Allied Products,’’ 177.48 Homeshaw, ‘‘Edge-tools,’’ 260. At the end of the nineteenth century, a further series of spin-offs

and complementarities led to the creation of cycle and automobile sector. Jenkins,‘‘Engineering,’’ 151.

49 Homeshaw, ‘‘Edge-tools,’’ 261.50 Scranton, Endless Novelty.51 Johnson, ‘‘Iron to 1750,’’ 118; Minchinton, ‘‘Tinplate,’’ 177.52 Minchinton, ‘‘Tinplate,’’ 179.53 Ibid., 182.54 Staffordshire General and Commercial Directory, 397.55 The hard life experienced by travellers in this period is attested to by the high rate of staff

turnover at Midlands needle and hardware factor John English and Sons. Jones, ‘‘The CountryTrade.’’

56 Broadberry and Marrison, ‘‘External Economies of Scale.’’57 Higgins and Tweedale, ‘‘The Voracious Kingfisher,’’ 48.58 Friedman, Birth of a Salesman, 61.59 WALS, DB/24/A/153, Kendal Journey, February 1810; DB/24/A/154, Salop Journey, June 1810;

DB/24/A/156, Kendal Journey, February 1811; DB/24/A/157, Kendal Journey, August 1811; DB/24/A/158, Kendal Journey, January 1812; DB/24/A/161, Salop Journey, May 1812; DB/24/A/159,Kendal Journey, August 1812. In the majority of cases, customer occupations have beenidentified from the various trade directories listed in the references.

60 WALS, DB/24/A/ 153; DB/24/A/156; DB/24/A/157; DB/24/A/158; DB/24/A/159.61 Friedman, Birth of a Salesman, 36.62 WALS, DA/24/A/153; DA/24/A/154; DA/24/A/155, Salop Journey, December 1810; DA/24/A/156.63 See, for example, note on Eccles of Penkridge for 5 February 1811 in relation to a debt of £24 2s

9d. DB/24/A/156.64 WALS, DB/24/A/153.65 WALS, DB 24/A/168, Liverpool Journey, November 1814.66 Ibid.67 Smail, ‘‘The Culture of Credit.’’68 WALS, DB/24/A/157.

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69 On 15 April 1811, W. Royston of Macclesfield promised to remit £76 14s 3d on 1 April. WALS,DB/24/A/156; DB/24/A/161.

70 WALS, DB/24/A/159.71 WALS, DB/24/A/156; DB/24/A/157.72 Examples include Berry of Kendal, visited on 26 February 1810, and Braithwaite (ironmonger),

also of Kendal, visited on 17 August 1811. WALS, DB/24/A/153; DB/24/A/157.73 WALS, DB/24/A/153.74 Friedman, Birth of a Salesman, 57.75 Smail, ‘‘The Culture of Credit.’’ As Stobart notes, whilst it was transport infrastructure that

‘provided the potential for interaction, it was the services which carried the goods, people andinformation that were the essence of spatial integration’. Stobart, The First Industrial Region,185.

76 WALS, DB/24/A/154; DB/24/A/153. By way of contrast, Thomas Webb, taken on byWorcestershire hardware factor John English in 1788, was given a travel allowance of 8s.6d.per day. Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade,’’ 26.

77 WALS, DB/24/A/154; DB/24/A/159. Shaw’s trade was thus much larger than English’s, whosetravellers in 1802 took more than 500 orders from over 350 customers for sales totalling almost£1,500. Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade,’’ 30.

78 WALS, DB/24/A/154; DB/24/A/156.79 Church, ‘‘Ossified or Dynamic?,’’ 3.80 Liverpool first appears in the journey books in May 1812. Other destinations targeted for the

first time include, in the period 1813–1814; Colne, Pontefract, Chesterfield, Warrington,Cartmel, Garstang, Keighley, Skipton, Cheadle, Wilmslow, Altrincham, Shifnal, Paddiam and,in 1815, Leigh and Todmorden.

81 WALS, DB 24/A/161.82 Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade.’’83 WALS, DB 24/A/168. See also, Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade,’’ 37–38.84 WALS, DB 24/A/168.85 Chapman, Merchant Enterprise, 4.86 Jones hazards that English’s problems with employees may partly have been of his own making.87 As Friedman notes, ‘commercial travelling [could serve] as a school of business for young

merchants’. Friedman, Birth of a Salesman, 60. We again also find later parallels in the Britishcontext. Thus, Higgins and Tweedale, noting how Fisher began his commercial career as atraveller for a Sheffield manufacturer in the 1870s, argue that ‘as a traveller, [Fisher] had theopportunity to acquire considerable wealth and status – in other words, the job was more thansimply a latter-day business ‘‘rep’’. In the nineteenth-century steel trade, a traveller could be akey figure for a firm. Fortunes could be made by the successful; and for some it was the classicroute to business partnership and greater things’. Higgins and Tweedale, ‘‘The VoraciousKingfisher,’’ 49.

88 Allen, Industrial Development of Birmingham.89 Church, ‘‘Ossified or Dynamic?,’’ 1.90 Wilson, British Business History, 22, 91.91 Jones, ‘‘The Country Trade,’’ 40.92 Popp, ‘‘Barriers to Innovation in Marketing’’; Broadberry and Marrison, ‘‘External Economies

of Scale.’’93 Church, ‘‘Ossified or Dynamic?,’’ 3.94 Church, ‘‘New Perspectives’’; Church and Clark, ‘‘The Origins of Competitive Advantage.’’95 It is true, however, that there are significant counter-examples. Higgins and Tweedale found

that in the Sheffield steel trade it was ‘a very common practice . . . for factors and otherintermediaries to obtain from manufacturers goods which bore their trade mark rather than

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that of the actual manufacturer. By such means, factors were able to keep secret the identity ofthe actual maker and thereby prevent buyers from going direct to the manufacturer. Effectivelythis practice had the effect of transferring customer loyalty to the manufacturer’. Higgins andTweedale, ‘‘The Voracious Kingfisher,’’ 53. Allen argues that this practice was much lesscommon in Birmingham and the Black Country by the late nineteenth century.

96 Allen, Industrial Development of Birmingham, 346.97 Hosgood, ‘‘Knights of the Road’’; Spears, One Hundred Years on the Road.

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