The death blow to unlimited liability in Victorian Britain: The City of Glasgow failure

Graeme G. Acheson and John D. Turner

Explorations in Economic History, 2008, vol. 45, issue 3, pages 235-253

Abstract: In 1878, one of Britain's largest banks, the City of Glasgow Bank, collapsed, leaving a huge deficit between its assets and liabilities. As this bank, similar to many other contemporary British banks, had unlimited liability, its failure was accompanied by the bankruptcy of the vast majority of its stockholders. It is generally believed that the collapse of this depository institution revealed the extent to which ownership in large joint-stock banks had been diffused to investors of very modest means. It is also believed that the failure resulted in bank shareholders dumping their shares unto the market. Our evidence, garnered from ownership records, trading data, and stock prices, offers no support for these widely held beliefs.

Date: 2008

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6WFJ ... 79866f5c07771e233fbe
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:exehis:v:45:y:2008:i:3:p:235-253

Access Statistics for this article

Explorations in Economic History is edited by R. A. Margo

More articles in Explorations in Economic History from Elsevier
Series data maintained by Heidi Boesdal ().