Abstract EN:

A detailed study of british banking and business archives show that, contrary to common beliefs, the decline of the iron industry in the midlands and south wales between 1815 and 1880 was strictly limited to the production of pig iron, and did not extend to the manufacture of semi-finished or finished goods. Small and medium size iron firms successfully moved out of primary iron production into the secondary metal trades. Their flexibility, combined, at least for some of them, with commercial and financial skills, helped them to overcome the disadvantages of technological backwardness and tracitional family ownership, and enabled them to survive the deeply rooted changes of the period 1815-1880, in particular the advent of cheap steel. Reports of the bank of england and material from over forty country banks illustrate the dangers of generalizing from a few case studies of well-known giant firms, and suggests a partial rehabilitation of late victorian entrepreneurship. They also point to the existence of multiple solidarity networks and personal links in the business community between industrialists, merchants and bankers. Finally, they suggest that the chandlerian model of company growth from small firm to multidivisional business a only one of several successful patterns in the victorian iron industuy.