Event Details

This paper explores the role played by familial and community relationships in the everyday operation of a small-scale mining enterprise during the late eighteenth century. This is a hybrid event on campus and online via MS Teams.

The source for this analysis is a rare diary kept by a Derbyshire lead miner for 1095 consecutive days between 1789 and 1792. The case reveals how relationships of age, gender, trust, reciprocity and reputation, framed by family and community structures, were essential to running entrepreneurial endeavours during this period. Such interpersonal and local bonds are shown to have governed, among other things: the division labour at home and the mine, the availability of locally sourced labour and capital, access to local services and the ubiquity of credit in facilitating everyday transactions and business dealings.

The case highlights the indivisibility of home and enterprise for the eighteenth-century Derbyshire lead miner and suggests that any account of industrialisation and economic change during this period must consider the web of relationships that enmeshed families and local communities. We will also explore its potential relevance to today’s family enterprises.