Business records
-
Business
Archives - the journal of the Business Archives Council -
publishes annually an abstract of business archives deposited in
record offices.
- Cockerell, H.A.L. and Green,
E., The
British Insurance Business 1547-1970: an introduction and guide to
historical records in the United Kingdom (1976).
- Cox, N., and Dannehl, K., Dictionary
of Traded Goods and Commodities, 1550-1820
(2007).
A dictionary of terms used in documents relating to trade and
retail in early modern Britain.
- Goodall, F., Bibliography
of British Business Histories (1987).
- Green,
J., Ollerenshaw, P. and Wardley, P. (eds.), Business in
Avon and Somerset: a survey of archives (Bristol
Polytechnic 1991).
- Hawkings, D.T., Fire
Insurance Records for Family and Local Historians 1696 to 1920
(2003). Fire
insurance records can give details of the building. Those of the Sun
Fire Office's London branch 1811–1835, held at the Guildhall Library, are included in the online
catalogue A2A.
See Fabric for
firemarks.
- Hudson, P., The
West Riding Wool Textile Industry: a catalogue of business records from
the sixteenth to the twentieth century (Pasold Research
Fund Ltd, Edington Occasional Papers no.3, 1975).
- National
Archives leaflet: Sources
for Business History.
- Orbell,
J. and Turton, A., British Banking: a guide to historical
records (2001).
- Richmond, L., and
Stockford, B., Company Archives: the survey of the records
of 1000 of the first registered companies in England and Wales (1985).
- Richmond. L. and Turton, A., The Brewing
Industry: a guide to historical records (1990).
- West
lists gazetteers of commercial directories for towns 1763-1900, and
provincial newspapers 1690-1981 in England and Wales.
Primary sources
- The official newpapers of record - the London, Edinburgh,
and Belfast Gazettes
- carry notices of corporate insolvency, companies and financial
regulations, and business partnerships. The archive is online.
- Advertisements
in local directories or newspapers give information about a business
and may be illustrated. See Local
Studies Libraries
and Local History in
Print
for where to find them.
- The National
Archives of
Ireland has a survey of Irish business records, which can be
searched online.
- Trade
cards, letterheads, invoices
and brochures of businesses may have views of the building.
They may be found among collections deposited by the business itself,
or may have
been preserved by customers and found their way into local libraries
and archives as individual items. The huge
John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the Bodleian
Library includes trade ephemera. (There is an online catalogue.) The
Scottish Archive Network has a
small but interesting online
exhibition of trade cards. A large collection for Bristol has
been published in John Winstone, Bristol Trade Cards:
Remnants of prolific commerce (1993).
- The
British Library holds the Victorian Evanion
Collection of Ephemera and has put online
around 2,000 items from it, which include posters
and handbills for entertainments, trade cards,
catalogues, price lists and advertising materials mostly dating from
the 1860s to 1895.
