An Early Experiment in Industrial Organization

Book excerpt: First Published in 1968. This is an account of the Boulton-Watt partnership and adds another item to the now growing series of writings on the history of individual firms or individual pioneers of modern business. The choice of this particular firm is due to three facts : the great importance of the enterprise ; the concentration in Birmingham of the bulk of its records (the completeness and state of preservation of which is almost unique), and the lack, notwithstanding the existence of several books on the subject, of any exhaustive history from the economist's standpoint of what must be regarded as the foremost engineering firm of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.