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Paradise of Knaves? Company Fraud in Britain, 1800-1880
Summary: This project examines the legal status of joint-stock company fraud in nineteenth-century Britain, focusing on the definition and punishment of fraud.
Key Facts
Funder: British Academy
Researcher: James Taylor
Dept/Research Group: History
Keywords: Business, Business history, Capitalism, Corporate law, Corporations, Fraud, History, Morality, Nineteenth century, Nineteenth-century culture, Nineteenth-century literature, Twentieth century British history, Twentieth-century culture, Twentieth century history, Economic history, Crime and society, Crime fiction
Project Description
The development of 'white-collar crime' in the twentieth century has attracted attention from sociologists and legal scholars since the 1940s, starting with Edwin Sutherland, and more recently, David Friedrichs, Stuart Green and others. However, both the broader historical dimension and the British context have been neglected: histories of crime in Britain are primarily 'blue-collar' in focus. During the nineteenth century the joint-stock company, hitherto a rarity, was adopted by increasing numbers of businessmen, and the divorce between ownership and control inherent in this form of enterprise created enormous scope for financial trickery. Yet George Robb's 1992 work remains the only monograph on the history of company fraud in Britain, and despite important contributions from Paul Johnson and Sarah Wilson, our understanding of the topic is limited. This project, funded by a British Academy Small Grant, seeks to fill this gap by exploring the legal status of fraud in Britain up to the 1880s. Was Britain, as Reynolds's Newspaper complained in 1856, a 'paradise of knaves, provided they are rich ones'?
Cartoon from 1869 on the Overend and Gurney Company failure: 'Ruined shareholder: Yes, they are committed for trial, but we, my child, to hard labour for life!'
Project Funder
British Academy
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