Description
Transport and mobility historians have eschewed detailed analysis of supply chains. This paper suggests, however, that business history approaches are useful for understanding the complex ways actors, regulation and institutions shape them, and where, why and how goods move.Using established business history research approaches, this paper considers pre-1865 British railway development from a supply-chain perspective. Where previous transport histories focussed on infrastructure development and profit-maximising strategies, early railways will be re-cast as links facilitating goods mobility, particularly cotton, from plantations using enslaved labour to British manufactories and consumers. Alongside, there will be an analysis of how supply chain participants interacted with these new transport organisations. Ultimately, focussing on goods mobility through supply chains enables the identification of the extent to which participants, despite being geographically distant from plantations, profited from enslavement.
Of central importance to the analysis is shifting governance within and of the supply chains, the paper therefore introducing Supply Chain Governance as an explanatory tool. This concept recently emerged to enable identification of where the control and governance of supply chains is situated, and the influences on them. It stemmed from firms’ explorations of how they could govern, instead of just managing, disaggregated global supply chains to guard against and then prevent environmental, social and economic abuses.
Readily adapted for use in historical research, SCG enables better understanding of the changing relationships between supply chain participants. Early railway promotion will firstly be reinterpreted as strategies by merchants to extend their governance over part of the supply chain to increase profits. Thereafter, expanding railway companies became governing institutions, leading users to seek external regulation of them.
The paper therefore importantly acknowledges the relationships between goods mobility, early British railways and slavery, whilst offering a new conceptual lens for transport and mobility historians seeking to explain such flows.
| Period | 22 Sept 2022 |
|---|---|
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Padova, ItalyShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |