一九世紀末イギリス中小企業の証券発行と「プライベート・ルート」
-ホワイト&パイク社の事例-
2002 年 37 巻 2 号 p. 56-75
詳細
2002 年 37 巻 2 号 p. 56-75
A long-running and thus-far unsolved issue in British economic history, known as the Macmillan Gap, is the role played by the British capital market in the provision of finance to small- and medium-sized enterprises. There have been numerous allegations of failure in the literature, where it is alleged that the capital market was reluctant to finance such enterprises.
But recently a new view has appeared. A considerable proportion of small firms are said to have relied on private sources of finance through a circle of personally acquaintanted investors, and this form of financing worked satisfactorily in the pre-1914 era. However, there is little evidence of private financing, and therefore this picture is conjecture at present.
The aim of this paper is to provide evidence to support this new view. We focus on a case of raising finance by White & Pike, a small printing firm in the late nineteenth century, through empirical research, drawing on contemporary records held in Lloyds Bank Archive and the Public Record Office.
