 Between the firm and the market: An international comparison of the commercial structures of the cotton industry (1820-1939)Marc Prat Business History, 2009, vol. 51, issue 2, 181-201 Abstract: This article describes the ways in which cotton goods were commercialised during the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth. Several national cases are analysed: Britain as the Workshop of the World; France, Germany, Switzerland and the US as core economies; Italy and Spain as countries on the European periphery; and Japan as a successful export latecomer. The main question that we address is why some cotton industries vertically integrated their production and selling processes, but others did not. We present a model that combines industrial district size and product differentiation to explain why vertical integration was present in most cases and why there was vertical specialisation of production and selling in Lancashire, Lowell and Japan. Keywords: cotton industry; commercialisation; vertical integration; vertical specialisation; Industrial Revolution; transaction costs; Industrial Organisation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:bushst:v:51:y:2009:i:2:p:181-201 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from DOI: 10.1080/00076790902726533 Access Statistics for this article Business History is currently edited by Professor John Wilson and Professor Steven Toms More articles in Business History from Taylor & Francis Journals |
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