Growth, Entrepreneurship and Capital Formation in the United Kingdom's Cycle and Related Industries, 1870-1914.

The thesis delineates the growth, and the various social, economic, institutional and technological factors supporting the growth, of the United Kingdom's cycle and related industries over the period circa. 1870 - 1914. The emphasis-is upon tracing the short- and long-run movements in the industries' outputs up to 1900 (but without the ideal facility of quantitative data directly " relating to the aggregate volumes and values of final gross outputs); and upon assessing the links of the industry with the pre-existing industrial structures of the U. K. economy - in terms of the diversification of firms, the origins of the "founding fathers", and of the types and sources of initial capital requirements. The thesis also examines the various elements that pervaded the technological developments, with regard to both final products and the processes of their production, within the cycle industries in the broad. It is additionally concerned with the rise of foreign competition, and the typical or untypical reactions of the British entrepreneurial leaders of the cycle industry to this phenomenon. The thesis ends with a study of the relationships of the firms in the cycle and related industries with the facilities for formal, public, joint-stock company flotations in the United Kingdom, in order to cast some light upon the proposition that the available facilities tended to militate against the expansion of a "new" industry, such as the cycle industry, during the thirty-odd years prior to 1914