power geometries: social networks and the 1930s multinational corporate elite

Geoforum 37 (2006) 986–998www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Power geometries: Social networks and the 1930smultinational corporate elite

Mark Brayshay a,¤, Mark Cleary b, John Selwood c

a School of Geography, University of Plymouth, Drake Circus, Plymouth PL4 8AA, United Kingdomb OYce of the Vice-chancellor, University of Plymouth, Plymouth PL4 8AA, United Kingdom

c Department of Geography, University of Winnipeg, 515 Portage Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3B 2E9

Received 25 February 2005; received in revised form 27 January 2006

Abstract

This paper employs the concept of power geometries that has been applied in analyses of today’s corporate elite and the globalisationof the economy to explore the networks of an economic actor who ran British multinational companies in the early 1930s. By focusing onthe contacts engendered by the Bank of England director who was appointed in 1931 as the 30th governor of the Hudson’s Bay Companyin order to rescue this most emblematic of imperial trading companies, we examine not only the architecture of the web of connectionswithin which both the company and its governor were embedded, but also the ways in which channels of interaction and communicationwere actually used. We show that while structural analyses of multiple and interlocking directorships oVer a useful initial means of under-standing power geometries, more detailed, ‘thick description’ approaches, based on archival material, reveal that not all apparent linkswere active and, in the case of the early-20th century multinational elite, networks appear to have embraced a much broader array of con-tacts. These extended in both social and geographical space well beyond the corporate boardrooms of London.© 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Corporate elite; Multinationals; Globalisation; Multiple and interlocking directorships; Hudson’s Bay Company

1. Introduction linked with the notion of spaces of Xows: the actual or vir-

Considerable attention has been paid recently to thestructure and character of corporate networks at the heartof today’s transnational and globalising economy (Yeung,2000; Dicken et al., 2001; O’Hagan and Green, 2002a;Smith, 2003; Djelic, 2004; Hudson, 2004; Power and Lund-mark, 2004). The web of links between Wrms, and betweenindividual economic actors, has been described as a powergeometry driving forward and shaping the internationalisa-tion of business activity (Yeung, 2003). Such links are saidto provide channels for the sharing of economic informa-tion and for the establishment of knowledge clusters(Bathelt et al., 2004). The idea of knowledge clusters is

* Corresponding author.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (M. Brayshay),

[email protected] (M. Cleary), [email protected] (J.Selwood).

0016-7185/$ - see front matter © 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2006.02.003

tual contexts within which information is shared and inter-actions take place (Gertler, 1995; Malmberg and Maskell,2002). Clusters, and the Xows of knowledge within them,tend to be spatially anchored in key locations such as glo-bal cities, where Wrms and economic actors beneWt from the‘buzz’ of being there (Beaverstock et al., 2000; Yeung, 2000;Gertler, 2003; Smith, 2003).

Transnational corporate networks and power geome-tries are not, however, a novel phenomenon associatedexclusively with the current iteration of economic globalisa-tion. Recent research suggests that today’s ideas aboutpower geometries, knowledge clusters and spaces of Xowsmay be applied aptly to the corporate elite of the beginningof the 20th century (Gertler, 2003; Hess, 2004; Hudson,2004; Wolfe and Gertler, 2004; Zook, 2004). Thus, bythe early 1900s, although genuinely transnational enter-prises were rare, many companies that were based nation-ally nonetheless traded multinationally and there already

mailto: [email protected]






M. Brayshay et al. / Geoforum 37 (2006) 986–998 987

existed an interconnected corporate elite running largeenterprises with interests spread across the world (Jones,1996; Smith, 2003; Brayshay et al., 2005). The early decadesof the last century witnessed the Wrst modern manifestationof globalisation in the world’s economy (Jones, 2002; Rob-ertson, 2003). Though lacking the means for the sophisti-cated instantaneous communications available today, somestudies have indicated that directors of British multina-tional enterprises in the 1920s and 1930s were at the centreof a nascent transnational capitalist class (Standage, 1998;Barty-King, 1979; Corley, 1994; Wilkins, 1974, 1998; Jones,2002).

There is clear scope to draw further on contemporarysocial and economic theories on the operation and impor-tance of powerful elites in order to examine precisely howthe business community may have functioned in the past.For example, comparing later 20th century Britain and theUSA, Useem’s (1984) pioneering work used network anal-ysis to identify the powerful ‘inner circle’ within the capi-talist class that runs big business and Wercely protects itsinterests. Such ideas have been further developed byauthors such as DomhoV (1996) in order to deWne ‘classdominance theory’. Based on analyses of the membershipof business networks, money movements between peopleand institutions, and the measurable results that Xow fromsuch interactions, DomhoV’s model focuses on the agencyof highly interconnected boards of directors of major cor-porations, and the structure of the relationships that bindindividuals within interlocking networks of connections.Complex and enduring linkages through schools, universi-ties, clubs, leisure interests and intermarriage deWne a classwith shared values and aspirations, and reinforce its iden-tity and solidarity. By suggesting that the exercise of aniron control of economic resources accords a small inte-grated elite an overwhelmingly powerful role in contempo-rary society, class dominance theory challenges not onlythe pluralist polyarchy model, where several identiWablegroups compete with each other for power and inXuence,but also liberal democratic theory, which assumes thatelected politicians in practice make all the important deci-sions. Although relatively few contemporary social net-work theorists have examined evidence for the existence ofa transnational elite, the need to do so was brieXy acknowl-edged by Scott (1997) and the task was taken up by Sklair(1998, 2001), though in doing so the latter sought toemphasise its unprecedented character rather than its his-torical roots.

In general, studies by economic historians tend toeschew the terminology employed by social theorists butdirect parallels may nonetheless be identiWed within theliterature of both Welds. Most notably, in the context ofthis paper, key ingredients of class dominance theoryappear to underpin the concept of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’employed by Cain and Hopkins (1999, 2002) to describethe small group of inXuential, City-based actors in theWnance and service sectors who managed investment in,and the running of, Britain’s imperial economy and were,

they argue, the key drivers of British imperialism over aperiod of more than two and half centuries. Boundtogether by membership of the same sporting and socialclubs, often sharing a common school, university and mili-tary background, and frequently connected by marriagewith the landed aristocracy, gentlemanly capitalists shareda concern for sound public Wnance and the success and sta-bility of the Empire. As a radical revisionist theory ofimperialism, the gentlemanly capitalism thesis has provedcontroversial (Berg and Hudson, 1992; Daunton, 1989;Fieldhouse, 1994; Porter, 1995). Of the many criticisms,one relevant to our study is that Cain and Hopkins failedto identify the group of gentlemanly capitalists with suY-

cient precision and to provide a convincing Wt between thehypothesis and empirical evidence (Ingham, 1995). Theauthors countered by pointing not only to the dearth ofavailable empirical case studies, ‘especially on the periodafter 1914’, but also to the temporal Xuidity of the classwhereby ‘at any single moment’ there were ‘status andother diVerences between new recruits and full members’(Cain and Hopkins, 2002: 9).

While we have not sought to engage directly in either thewider fundamental debates about the gentlemanly capital-ism thesis as a whole, or the strengths and weaknesses ofclass dominance theory, our aims in this and previous workon the directors of British multinationals in the early 1900shave been to link the theories of contemporary economicgeography with those of economic history to show that apowerful corporate elite, enmeshed within complex sets ofrelations, existed not only in London and the UK, but alsospread across the Empire and other countries (Brayshayet al., 2005, 2006). We have shown elsewhere that multipledirectorships, whereby individuals were members simulta-neously of the boards of several diVerent companies, wereas common a phenomenon then as they are now; indeedthere is evidence to suggest that their incidence may havebeen even greater than it is at present (Brayshay et al., 2006;Davis, 1993; Scott, 1991, 2003). By the interwar years, thoserunning Britain’s multinational companies appear to haveheld unusually large numbers of directorships. Moreover,this multinational sub-group within the corporate class alsogenerated many indirect interlocks, or dyadic links,whereby pairs of directors from diVerent companies wereassociated through their mutual membership of the boardof a third company. The degree of complexity of dyadic(and triadic) connections, that created a potential indirectlink between two (or three) Wrms, and interlaced personalnetworks of contacts, appears to have been increasingsharply between the early 1900s and the 1930s (Brayshayet al., 2005, 2006). Multinational directors were thusbecoming more closely embedded within extremely power-ful overlapping and intersecting social, cultural, politicaland economic networks which were very like their counter-parts today. However, although an appreciation of thearchitecture of sets of linkages reveals that the possibilityfor contact between key individuals and Wrms existed, itprovides no guide to whether fruitful interactions actually

988 M. Brayshay et al. / Geoforum 37 (2006) 986–998

occurred. On their own, structural analyses of networksshed little light on the precise ways in which channels ofcommunication were employed and the kinds of informa-tion that Xowed between the principal nodes.

Studies within contemporary economic geography areable to employ so-called in situ, or participant observationapproaches as powerful research methodologies in orderto explore the uses made of networks and their signiWcancefor the shaping of business behaviours (Bellandi, 2001;Johannisson et al., 2002; Lall and Ghosh, 2002; Yeung,2003). While these methods are not available in an histori-cal context, the in-depth study of interactions within a net-work of individuals using documentary evidence canemulate the so-called ‘thick description’ approaches oftoday’s analysts (Murdoch, 1997; Black, 2004). Buildingon our previous work exploring the character of function-ing power geometries of members of the early 20th centurymultinational corporate elite (Brayshay et al., 2005, 2006),this paper focuses on the precise architecture of one partic-ular network that existed in the 1930s and, more impor-tantly, on how that network actually worked. The startingpoint in previous studies of corporate networks has beento select a large sample of companies and to reconstructthe interconnections of their boards of directors (Scott,1991; Wheeler, 1986; O’Hagan and Green, 2002b). Thismethodology has the advantage of enabling both theframework of linkages to be ascertained, and the characterand quantity of notional connections between enterprisesto be explored. However, a weakness of the approach isthat it inevitably risks privileging assumed links betweencompany directors while providing no insight into theeVectiveness of those links, and masking the possibleimportance of other elements within the networks of indi-vidual actors (Clark, 1998). A central aim of this paper istherefore to avoid the weaknesses of simple structuralanalyses by exploring one individual’s network of contactsin extenso and to assemble evidence of its actual employ-ment.

2. Patrick Ashley Cooper and the Hudson’s Bay Company

Drawing on the ideas of class dominance, gentlemanlycapitalism, and power geometries outlined above, we exam-ine the backgrounds and shared spaces of interaction ofjust one powerful member of Britain’s 1930s multinationalcorporate elite: Patrick Ashley Cooper. In 1931 Cooper wasappointed as governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company(HBC), one of the oldest and most emblematic of theEmpire’s multinational chartered companies (Newman,1991). While the interests of the HBC were focused primar-ily in Canada, it traded internationally, and was directedfrom London. Our choice of Patrick Ashley Cooper andthe HBC as the focus of analysis speciWcally in this periodwas guided by two further considerations. First, in the late1920s, partly as a result of the worldwide economic depres-sion, but also reluctance of the HBC to modernise, the com-pany was in danger of failing and the London board was

forced to resign (Newman, 1991).1 The Bank of England’sgovernor, Montagu Norman, was acutely conscious of theblow to the prestige of the British Empire that a collapse ofthe Hudson’s Bay would mean. He was also aware that thevacuum left by the demise of the Hudson’s Bay Companywould provide a competitive opportunity for the UnitedStates to extend its growing inXuence in Canada. Normanthus played a key role in the appointment of a new board ofdirectors and personally selected the Scottish-born accoun-tant, Patrick Ashley Cooper, as the company’s 30th gover-nor.2 Given the unusual circumstances prevailing in theearly 1930s, it is highly likely that the principal actorsinvolved in the HBC’s fortunes made considerable use oftheir networks and channels of communication, therebymaking our examination of the phenomenon at this partic-ular time especially worthwhile. The second reason for ourchoice of 1931–1932 is that, having previously been a juniordirector of the Bank of England, in April 1932 Patrick Ash-ley Cooper was appointed to a full Bank directorship, thusenhancing his status both within the City’s Wnancial com-munity and with counterparts in other parts of Britain’s‘formal’ and ‘informal’ Empire.3 Cooper thereafter built upan extraordinarily large number of international businesscontacts and connections that have enabled us to explorehis overseas personal network.

Evidence of Cooper’s wider network is drawn from hisdiaries, his correspondence and the remarkable Wlmrecords of his 1933 and 1934 Canadian tours that survivein the archives of the Husdon’s Bay Company in Winni-peg.4 Cooper’s diaries, grouped according to location, spanthe period 1931–1952, and record by name virtually everyperson within his orbit of contacts. The circumstances ofmeetings and the subjects of discussions are meticulouslynoted. We encountered the names of more than 900 indi-viduals mentioned as contacts by Cooper in London, Brazil,Uruguay, Argentina, Bolivia, the United States, SouthAfrica, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and, of course, Canada.

1 We have explored the multiple and interlocking directorships of theboard of the Hudson’s Bay Company in our earlier work. Evidence of theCompany’s predicament by 1930–1931 may be found in: Bank of EnglandArchives [BEA], G 14/227 Hudson’s Bay Company. Charles Nordon toMontagu Norman; Montagu Norman to Charles Nordon, June 1931. Seealso: Newman, P.C., Merchant Princes, pp. 281–283. During the 1920s, theCompany had unwisely invested in the costly up-grading and replacementof its stores in Canadian cities. Retail proWts were then disastrously hit bythe Depression. The wholesale fur trade was faltering and agriculturaltenants of the Company’s land in Canada were defaulting on their rent.Although vast tracts of land had been sold, the low prices secured andcrippling tax liabilities meant that a signiWcant proportion of the Com-pany’s real estate had been squandered for little return.

2 BEA, G 14/227 Hudson’s Bay Company. Montagu Norman to IsraelSieV, May 1935. BEA, ADM 34/18–20 Montagu Norman Diaries, 6 May1929, 3 January 1930, 22 January 1931, 3 February 1931.

3 Hudson’s Bay Company Archives [HBC], E. 125/5. Diaries of PatrickAshley Cooper, 7 April 1932; BEA, G2/5 Sir P. Ashley Cooper, April 1932.

4 HBC, E125/4–25. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 1931–1952; HBC,E125/26–29 Correspondence of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 1931–1935; HBC,F3 Scenes from Governor’s Canadian Tour, 1933; HBC, F16 Governor’sTrip to Eastern Canadian Arctic, 1934.


We entered names, dates, circumstances and, whereverrecorded, the issues that had been discussed, into a data-base. References to formal board meetings were alsoincluded in those cases where Cooper reported further pri-vate business discussions with another named director.Entries mentioning entirely private family occasions wereexcluded, but we noted major receptions and dinnerengagements as well as instances when Cooper entertainedassociates and discussed business issues. Inevitably, theidentities and aYliations of all those mentioned in the dia-ries were not always readily apparent. Reference to Coo-per’s letters, the Bank of England archives (especially thediaries and letters of the governor, Montagu Norman) andthe Wlm records made of Cooper’s tours in Canada, pro-vided additional information; we also employed the StockExchange Yearbook, the Directory of Directors, Who WasWho, the Dictionary of National Biography, the Dictionaryof Business Biography, and The Times obituaries.

As well as his new role as governor of the HBC and as afull director of the Bank of England, by 1932 Cooper waseither the chairman or a director of another eight compa-nies. One was the Northern Assurance Company, a majorLondon and Aberdeen based multinational that conductedbusiness in all the overseas territories subsequently visitedby Cooper (in North and South America, and in southernAfrica). The others included the Beira Railway Company,operating between Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) and Africa’s eastcoast, and six South American businesses in the transportand the utilities sectors. The substantial scale of Britishinvestment, favourable economic concessions for BritishWrms, the existence of a signiWcant ex patriate English-speaking community, and the tradition of cordial politicalrelations, meant that South America (particularly Argen-tina) was regarded as part of Britain’s sphere of inXuenceand the region is often described as the ‘informal empire’(Ferns, 1992; Stockwell, 1996; Knight, 1999). Cooper wason the boards of the Compania Hispano-Americano deElectricidad (CHADE), and the Rio de Janeiro CityImprovements Company (CIC), and he was Chairman ofthe Argentine Transandine Railway Company, and thePrimitiva Gas, Primitiva Holdings, and the Waterworkscompanies of Buenos Aires.5 In total, the combined boardsof these 10 concerns comprised 90 directorships but,because seven men (including Cooper himself) served more

5 BEA, ADM 34/19 Montagu Norman Diaries, 12 December 1930.Determined to secure its position at a time of falling revenues and severecompetition, Cooper sought Montagu’s permission to take the chairman-ship of the Argentine Transandine and resolved to visit both Rio de Jani-ero and Buenos Aires. In fact, as a result of frustration with LordHunsdon, the elderly chairman of the Rio de Janeiro City ImprovementsCompany, Cooper resigned from the board before he left for his SouthAmerican tour. Once in Rio, therefore, he focused on meetings with themanagement of the Bank of London and South America (which acted asbankers for Northern Assurance in Brazil), with Brazil’s fur traders (pur-chaser of HBC furs) and various (British owned) railway companies. See:HBC, E125/6. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, London, 24 May 1932;E125/5. Rio de Janiero, June 1932.

than one of the companies, the group in fact numbered just73 individuals. As the common link between all these enter-prises, in 1931–1932 Cooper was thus associated with 72other directors. It is immediately clear, however, that hisnetwork of links was, in practice, considerably larger. Giventhe emphasis on interlocking directorships in previouswork on the networks of the corporate elite, a question thatwill be explored below is whether those within Cooper’spersonal cluster, and upon whom he depended most foradvice, were principally his boardroom colleagues.

Careful to take on no more than he felt he could man-age, Cooper was rarely, at any one time, a member of morethan a dozen diVerent company boards. Although he servedas governor of the HBC for over 20 years, his portfolio ofother directorships frequently changed. Indeed, during along career in business that began properly in 1919, Cooperwas a director, vice-chairman, chairman or governor ofmore than 40 diVerent companies. His notional network oflinkages with other members of the corporate elite wastherefore subject to periodic, sometimes quite radical,change. In this research, while we reconstruct Cooper’s cor-porate network of multiple and interlocking directorshipsand those of his directorial colleagues for a single year,namely 1931–1932, we acknowledge that in doing so wepresent a static glimpse of a dynamic phenomenon. How-ever, because many outcomes of actions and decisionstaken as a result of knowledge acquired by Cooper throughthe channels in his personal network were only evidentmuch later, it was deemed important to extend our studyperiod. We therefore established details of Cooper’s portfo-lio of directorships each year for his entire career and wefollowed selected trails in his diary entries over a 5-yearperiod between 1931 and 1935. For example, by 1934, whenthe position of the Hudson’s Bay Company had been stabi-lised, he began to accept additional directorships. Knowl-edge of Cooper’s involvement on behalf of the Bank ofEngland in the rescue of the British–Italian Banking Cor-poration in 1929 sheds light on his acceptance in 1934 ofthe chairmanship of the British–Italian Holdings Company.His track record of success in dealing with the past prob-lems of the failing joint British–Italian banking concern,and with the collapsing HBC, also made him the Bank ofEngland governor’s choice the same year to join the boardof the Central Mining and Investment Corporation, aSouth African gold mining enterprise.6 This was a time ofacute political and economic threat to British interests inthe South African and Rhodesian gold mining industriesand Montagu Norman was anxious to place a Bank ofEngland director on the board of the largest British goldproducer then operating in the region. In view of the factthat Cooper undertook a lengthy business trip to southernAfrica in 1935, and his diaries show the extensive use thathe made of his international network of banking, Wnancialand business contacts, constructed during the preceding

6 HBC, E125/7. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 16 March 1934.


years, we are able to examine some of the ways in whichknowledge was transferred and employed to inform hisactivities in the region.

Patrick Ashley Cooper was born in 1887 in Aberdeenand educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh, at Trinity HallCambridge, and at Aberdeen University, where he studiedlaw. The diaries make clear that Cooper valued his Scottishorigins and actively sought out, both at home and abroad,both old Fettesians and others with a British public schoolor Oxbridge background. His circle included manyOxbridge graduates and he is assiduous in noting new con-tacts who had also attended Trinity Hall, especially any fel-low rowers. After university, Cooper developed a career inaccountancy and had already become a company directorwhen the Great War began. He saw active service, was twicementioned in despatches, and rose to the rank of battalionmajor; but he was wounded and thereafter worked for theWar OYce as assistant controller of gun ammunition andassistant deputy director-general of trench warfare. Coopernumbered several war veterans amongst his most trustedgroup of business associates. These elements of his back-ground undoubtedly shaped Cooper’s attitudes and consti-tuted a stock of economic, cultural and social capital thattogether translated into an impressive reputation and con-siderable prestige within his circle. From 1919 onwards hiswork on Wnancial reorganisation strategies for various com-panies led to the oVer of further directorships. His career asa powerful member of the corporate elite was therebylaunched. Embedded in the City elite that ran multinationalWnance and service companies, Cooper’s background andattitudes closely Wt the model of gentlemanly capitalismsketched by Cain and Hopkins (2002). He believed in soundpublic Wnances, balanced budgets, and the intrinsic impor-tance of the Empire. Elected a member of London clubs andmixing frequently in riding, shooting, golWng and Wshing cir-cles, Cooper deliberately allied himself with the wealthy,powerful and prestigious groups that ran Britain’s multina-tional businesses and the imperial economy. He purchasedan estate in the English home counties.7 In 1926 he became agovernor of Guy’s Hospital. By 1932, as a director of theBank of England, he had automatically been made a lieu-tenant and freeman of the City of London, roles whichenhanced the part he played as a member of the Board ofTrade Advisory Committee and the National EconomicCommittee. Indeed his views, especially about banking, wereincreasingly sought by politicians and cabinet ministers. Inrecovering the identities of Cooper’s active contacts, itmight therefore be supposed that he chose to conWde in, andinteract most frequently with other members of the elitewho shared his social background. This notion will be fur-ther explored later in the paper. First, however, an analysisis made of the architecture of Cooper’s network of linkswith his boardroom and other colleagues.

7 First in Buckinghamshire (Little Pollards) and, from 1936, in Hertford-shire (Hexton Manor) where he served as the county’s High SheriV.

3. The corporate network

While it is clear that Cooper was himself the connectionthat interlocked the 10 London boards of the companies ofwhich he was a director in 1931–1932, it is pertinent toexplore the full pattern of linkages supported by all 73 indi-viduals who occupied the seats on the boards. Multipledirectorships were common; the average number held was alittle over six. In all, 10 companies were interlocked throughmultiple directorships with 332 other separate Wrms. Ofthese, 137 (41.3%) were engaged in business outside theUnited Kingdom, most of them within Britain’s overseasEmpire, but 42 had interests spread across the republics ofSouth America.

As might be expected, a further intricate network ofindirect interlocks also existed whereby directors of two ormore of the 10 companies were connected as members ofthe same third company. Excluding Cooper’s set of connec-tions, we detected 27 further such dyadic links (Fig. 1).Associations with directors of the Bank of England standout. Indeed, with the exception of the pair of Primitivacompanies, there was at least one dyad between the Bankand directors of each of the other companies in the group,thereby reinforcing the Wndings of other research regardingthe growing international activities of the Bank of Englandafter 1918 and the importance generally of indirect bankcontrol over other corporations (Kotz, 1979; Chernow,1990; Roberts and Kynaston, 1995; Ackrill and Hannah,2001; Tomka, 2001).

A simple structural analysis of this kind obviously pro-vides circumstantial evidence for the existence of potentialchannels for interaction within a corporate network, but itdoes not indicate whether there was, in reality, any activeXow of information that might exert an inXuence on corpo-rate practice. In order to determine precisely which direc-tors were included within Patrick Ashley Cooper’s activenetwork, we cross-matched diary entries for 1931–1932where a speciWc discussion with a named director is noted,with the company listings published in the Directory ofDirectors for that year. This analysis indicated that, outsideformal board meetings, Cooper made signiWcant contactwith only 36 (50%) of the 72 members of this particulargroup. However, there was considerable variation in theproportion of each board with which there was evidence ofbilateral interaction. The scale of his contact does notappear simply to have been a reXection of the fact that somecompany boards were larger than others (Fig. 2). For exam-ple, Cooper rarely met with any fellow members of the Lon-don board of Northern Assurance, but he was by contrastin contact with nearly all the City directors of his Argentinebusinesses. Interestingly, however, during his trips in the1930s, Cooper met many of Northern Assurance’s overseasmanagers and agents and discussed business conditions anddetailed company policy. It is therefore clear that he wasfully engaged in Northern Assurance’s operations eventhough this is not manifested in interactions with othermembers of the company’s board. Clearly, a simple analysis


of networks of company directors would not have beencapable of revealing this fact. In general, the extent of inter-action with boardroom colleagues seemed to depend onCooper’s personal estimation of their worth and ability. Forexample, while the diaries indicate frequent meetings withseven (of the other eight) members of the London Board ofthe Hudson’s Bay Company, Cooper records just a singlemeeting apiece with only three of the seven directors of theRio de Janeiro City Improvements Company (CIC). Unsur-prisingly, given his involvement in their appointment, Coo-per makes clear that he held most members of the board ofthe HBC in very high regard but, by contrast, he describedLord Hunsdon (Chairman of the CIC) as an ‘extremely stu-pid man’. Another CIC director, Sir Henry Lowther, wassaid to know ‘nothing at all about business’, and FrederickBalfour was judged ‘intelligent’ but of the ‘itinerant type’.Cooper noted that the Managing Director of CIC (PercyGotto) came to the oYce for less than 5 h a day, took an

hour-and-a-half for his lunch, and did almost nothing butread The Times. The Assistant Company Secretary was, hewrote, a ‘spineless person without a chin’ to whom he‘would not pay 30 shillings a week’. Only Edward Greeneappears to have made a favourable impression.8

Cooper’s diaries indicate that meetings with other bank-ers, economists, accountants, industrialists, traders, over-seas and home politicians, government ministers, civilservants and oYcials, as well as leading members of society(including Royalty) feature just as prominently as thosewith fellow company directors. For example, through theMP Victor Cazalet and Reginald McKenna (former Chan-cellor of the Exchequer and then chairman of the MidlandBank), Cooper knew Leo Amery, Winston Churchill, and

8 HBC, E125/6. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 24 May and 31 May1932.

Fig. 1. Dyadic links generated by the interlocking directorships of Cooper’s 10 1931–1932 companies.


Harold Macmillan. He was on good terms with the chair-men of all the UK’s major clearing banks and, togetherwith Sir Edward Peacock, Cooper also discussed corporateWnancing policies with Charles Baring. He interacted withthe presidents of foreign banks, industries and railway com-panies and his contacts with political Wgures in Argentinaand Canada appear to have made an important diVerenceto the fortunes of his companies. However, the documen-tary evidence indicates that a relatively small group of keylinks existed within Cooper’s impressively large network. Afew trusted friends and colleagues emerge as those in hisorbit upon whose advice and experience he repeatedly drewand with whom he most frequently engaged. As alreadynoted, he exchanged information with only selected fellowdirectors and, amongst these, there was an even smallergroup of genuine intimates.

On the basis of frequency of contact noted in the diaries,and the kinds of discussions that took place, we identify 25key members of his inner circle of trust (Table 1). Only 14were fellow directors. Five others were key companyemployees, such as the chartered accountant, FrederickStacpole, who assisted in stabilising the Wnancial positionof the HBC, and Montes de Oca, who was chairman of theArgentina board of one of Cooper’s companies who he meton many occasions in London and in Buenos Aires. Therest comprised other bank directors, a director of the Pru-dential Assurance Company (who had formerly beendeputy governor of the HBC and proved a useful source ofhistorical insights into the company’s diYculties) and theCanadian High Commissioner. Three were Scots, 11 hadattended public school and eight were Oxbridge graduates.Perhaps inevitably, a number had shared the experience ofactive service in the Great War; several had been mentioned

in despatches or received gallantry medals. As club mem-bers, Cooper, Sir Edward Peacock and Reginald McKennafrequently dined together at Brooks’s, and many of theothers joined them as guests. An inspection of the kinds ofdiscussion that occurred reveals that Cooper regularly con-sulted his inner circle of conWdantes regarding key matterssuch as his own and others’ directorships, company policydecisions and a wide range of critical business issues.

4. Venues of interaction

London boardrooms, the Bank of England, the CityoYces of the HBC (Beaver House on Garlick Hill andHudson’s Bay House in Bishopsgate), and the premises ofseveral other multinational companies provided obviousspaces for meetings and for sharing knowledge, but therewere others. Cooper knew the chairmen of a number of themajor merchant and clearing banks and frequently lunchedat their head oYces. He met with directors and other con-tacts who were members of Parliament (Lords and Com-mons) in the Palace of Westminster. Private discussions arenoted in his diary on the occasion of formal receptions at theSavoy, in the Mansion House, in embassies, and in the pre-mises of the Law Society. Cooper met colleagues on the golfcourse and out riding. He was invited to dine with the Kingand Queen at Sandringham.9 However, prominent amongthe venues for private meetings were several London clubs inPall Mall and St. James’s (Lejeune, 1979; Cassis, 1985). Inaddition to Brooks’s, Cooper belonged to the Argentine, theCaledonian and the Canada clubs. He was occasionally a

9 HBC, E125/7. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 30–31 October 1934.

Fig. 2. Cooper’s interaction with members of the boards of his 10 1931–1932 companies.


guest at another four similar establishments (Table 2). Therecan be little doubt that he was deeply embedded in London’selite business and political community and beneWted fromthe ‘buzz’ of being there (Bathelt et al., 2004).

While the childhood and early adult years of many ofthose occupying the high command positions in the global-ising economy of the interwar years were shaped by atti-tudes of superiority of late-Victorian high imperialism, bythe 1920s there was a growing recognition that Britain’shitherto unassailable economic supremacy, in both her for-mal and her informal empire, would need to be nurtured bya much closer personal engagement by company directorswith the territories in which their multinational companiesdid business. London of course retained its role as the para-mount global city and there was still a large group of com-pany directors content to spend their entire time at the hubof empire: they saw little need for business travel of the

Table 1Patrick Ashley Cooper’s ‘inner circle’, 1931–1935

Sources: HBC, E125/4–7. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 1931–1935.

Name AYliation

Sir Edward Peacock Director: Bank of England andHudson’s Bay Company

Sir Alexander Murray Director: Hudson’s Bay Company(Deputy Governor from 1932)

Philip Chester General Manager for Canada:Hudson’s Bay Company

Frederick Stacpole London Manager: Hudson’s BayCompany

Mark Denne Director: Province of Buenos AiresWaterworks Company

Sir Evelyn Wallers Director: Hudson’s Bay CompanySir Montagu Norman Governor of the Bank of EnglandMajor Basil Binyon Director: Province of Buenos Aires

Waterworks CompanyMaurice Bock Director: Primitiva Gas of ArgentinaCaptain Victor Cazalet, MP Director Hudson’s Bay CompanyHoward Ferguson High Commissioner for CanadaRobert Grant Director: Primitiva Gas of Argentina

and Primitiva HoldingsSir George May Director: Prudential Assurance

Company (ex-Deputy Governorof Hudson’s Bay company)

Dr Manuel Montes de Oca Chairman in Buenos Aires PrimitivaGas

George Parker Jervis BI HoldingsSir Charles Gordon President: Bank of MontrealWilfred Howard-Williams Director: Argentine Transandine

RailwayJohn Martin Manager in South Africa: Central

Mining and Investment CorporationPatrick O’Farrell Manager in Buenos Aires: Primitiva

Gas of ArgentinaSir Alexander Roger Director: Midland BankDudley Docker Director: CHADE and Trustee of

Midland BankLt-Col. John Karslake Director: Hudson’s Bay CompanyBrig. Gen. Frederick

HammondDirector: Beira Railway Company

James Goudge Director: Argentine TransandineRailway

Reginald MacKenna Chairman: Midland Bank

kind that today would be deemed essential.10 Paradoxically,such anachronistic ideas were bolstered temporarily as thetelegraph and international telephone services improvedthe speed of communications, creating an impression thatthe need for physical proximity had diminished rather thanincreased, but a new group within the corporate commu-nity was already forming and its members embracedentirely new attitudes.11 Patrick Ashley Cooper belonged tothe new group and, at various points in his diaries, herecords that his views and advice were sought about Brit-ain’s postwar recovery, the desirability of balanced budgets,the impacts of policies on the gold standard, the implica-tions of the sterling area, the growing economic challengeof the United States, protectionist trade tariVs, and the con-sequences of the Depression. He argued that to retain andadvance their position in the world economy, Britain’s mul-tinational enterprises required more active and more ambi-tious direction. Through his business travels Cooper soughtadvantages for his companies by establishing ever larger,overlapping networks of contacts with overseas businesscommunities. In doing so, he became a conduit for thetransfer of information and ideas in a manner very similarto those described in the context of today’s globalisingeconomy (Smith, 2003; Bathelt et al., 2004; Wolfe andGertler, 2004). There are numerous examples but three arevery brieXy cited here to provide an illustration.

10 The National Archives (TNA): Public Record OYce (PRO) FO 371/12737 Sir Malcom Robertson to Sir Austen Chamberlain 24 March 1928;TNA: PRO FO 371/12737 Department of Overseas Trade, copy of speechby E.T. Campbell; Evening Standard 11 December 1928. See also: TheTimes Cooper’s speeches: 28 May 1930, Primitiva Holdings 1st OGM; 4October 1933, Primitiva Holdings 4th OGM; 28 May 1936, Province ofBuenos Aires Waterworks Company; 6 August 1932, Anglo-ArgentineTramways; 31 May 1932, Hudson’s Bay Company.11 Direct telephone connections between London and Winnipeg wereWrst established on 8 March 1928 (see TNA: PRO A1/1 The Hudson’s BayCompany A92/173/1). Calls cost £10-4s for the Wrst three minutes and £3-8s for each additional minute. Earlier that year, the GPO agreed to operatea telegraph oYce in Beaver House three times each year for the durationof the HBC fur sales (see TNA: PRO A1/1 The Hudson’s Bay CompanyA92/173/3).

Table 2Private clubs where Patrick Ashley Cooper met colleagues and discussedbusiness, 1931–1935

Sources: HBC, E125/4–7. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 1931–1935.

City Club name

Buenos Aires Jockey Club, City ClubQuebec Seigniory ClubMontreal Mount Royal Club, Stream County ClubToronto Toronto ClubWinnipeg Motor Country ClubVancouver Union ClubNew York Bankers’ Club, Chicago Club, Metropolitan ClubCape Town Rand ClubLondon Brooks’s Club, Argentine Club, City

[of London] Club, Caledonian Club,Canada Club, Carlton Club, Bath Club,Air Services Club


In July 1932, whilst in Buenos Aires dealing with theaVairs of CHADE, the Primitiva Gas and Holdings compa-nies, and addressing the diYculties of the TransandineRailway (which was making substantial losses), Coopersought new business amongst Argentine fur dealers for theailing HBC trade. He also gathered information on retail-ing policies in Buenos Aires. Above all, he engaged withministers in the new Argentine government regarding arenewal of the concession for the British-owned Province ofBuenos Aires Waterworks company, of which he was chair-man. Basil Binyon and Mark Denne, co-directors on theLondon board, had accompanied Cooper to Argentina forthis purpose. The fact that their presence was suYcient toobtain agreement for the waterworks company concession,which had hitherto been stalled for many months, is a clearmanifestation of the practical operation of symbolic capitaland a power geometry. Thereafter, Cooper met variousministers and oYcials. A signiWcant encounter occurredwith the minister of Wnance, Señor Alberto Hueyo, onArgentina’s banking crisis. Cooper advised that Hueyoshould Wnd ‘a banking expert from Europe to come andhelp him’ and suggested Otto Niemeyer, a former BritishTreasury oYcial who had worked on Europe’s postwarWnancial reconstruction, but was subsequently employed bythe Bank of England as an advisor. Niemeyer had under-taken advisory missions to New York, Sydney, Wellingtonand Rio de Janeiro. As a Bank of England director, Cooperknew Niemeyer personally and respected his experienceand expertise. In Buenos Aires, Cooper’s recommendationwas readily accepted and an invitation was later issued toNiemeyer. In December 1932, Cooper and Niemeyer mettwice in London and the latter’s mission began early thefollowing year.12

A second example of a transnational transfer of knowl-edge focuses on the severe crisis in the HBC’s chain ofstores and trading posts in Canada. Following his Wrst visitto Canada as HBC governor in 1931, Cooper consultedwidely with contacts in London regarding the best meansto rescue the company’s retailing operations. Early in 1932,a co-director and major HBC shareholder, the MP VictorCazalet, introduced Cooper to Israel SieV, then Vice-Chair-man of Marks and Spencer. The two subsequently dis-cussed in detail all aspects of retailing. Following his SouthAmerican tour later that year, Cooper travelled onwards toCanada via the United States. He gathered further ideas onstore management in both Buenos Aires and New York,but it is clear that Marks and Spencer approaches toeYcient stock control and staYng levels were prominent inshaping the HBC stores and trading posts reorganisationand rationalisation strategy developed in Canada in con-sultation with the company’s British-born general man-ager, Philip Chester.13 SieV was consulted again whenCooper returned to London and the two occasionally met

12 HBC, E125/5. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 15–16 July 1932.13 HBC, E125/6. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 9 May, 8 November

1932; E125/5 22–23 September 1932.

thereafter to share ideas about retail management. Eventu-ally, in 1935, underlining his admiration and gratitude forthe advice he had received, Cooper asked Montagu Nor-man to invite SieV to join the Court of the HBC.14

Although SieV declined, because Marks and Spencer policyprecluded its directors from joining other boards, it is clearthat the sharing of expertise between the two companiesremained important. Streamlined stock management prac-tices and new personnel strategies, transferred to Cooperby SieV and others in three diVerent continents, played adecisive role in the rescue strategy adopted at that time forone of the world’s most venerable imperial trading compa-nies.

A third example of a transnational conduit throughwhich knowledge Xowed concerns Cooper’s meeting withSouth Africa’s prime minister in February 1935.15 As aresult of his links both with UK banks and, in New York,with the directors of the Chase National Bank and theFederal Reserve Bank, Cooper possessed crucial insightsregarding United States and British policy on the demandfor gold and its link with the major world currencies. Heclearly traded his own knowledge for information from theprime minister about South Africa’s transport policies, atti-tudes to British-owned mining and railway companies, andthe state’s provision for native mineworkers. In discussionswith South Africa’s minister for education, Cooperdetected an attitude towards the Black population wherebythey were to be held in ‘their present position’. He notedthat this paralleled policies pursued in the Indian Depart-ment in Ottawa and recalled ‘the disaster of the Indians’that had resulted.16 Gaining Wrst-hand impressions of localcircumstances was important to Cooper in judging futuretrading prospects for companies such as Central Mining,Northern Assurance and the Beira Railway, the principalfocus of his visit.

Although we gathered further full details from the dia-ries of more than 600 of Cooper’s interactions with individ-uals within his personal network in the period 1931–1935, itis possible here to present only a summary of the mainissues. Table 3 therefore ranks our sample of 647 of Coo-per’s meetings according to a very general classiWcation ofthe principal subject of each discussion. Interestingly, weencountered more than 40 private conversations betweenCooper and his closest colleagues about the appointment ofdirectors to various boards and another 29 about his owndirectorships and invitations he received to join other com-panies (O’Higgins, 2002). However, the key point is thatwhile many meetings were highly focused on company pol-icy and day-to-day business problems, Cooper frequentlyshared information with his contacts about much wider

14 BEA, G 14/227 Hudson’s Bay Company. Montagu Norman to IsraelSieV, May 1935.15 HBC, E125/10. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper South Africa, 7 Feb-

ruary 1935.16 HBC, E125/10. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper South Africa, 7 Feb-

ruary, 10 March 1935.


and more general social, political, Wscal, Wnancial and trad-ing issues. There is, for example, some intriguing evidenceof instances where Cooper might have exerted politicalinXuence. Thus it is possible that his views on the need inCanada for a central bank were sought by both the PrimeMinister, Richard Bennett, and the Canadian High Com-missioner, Howard Ferguson. Although the precise natureof their conversation is not clear, Cooper’s diaries showthat he Wrst met Bennett, along with two directors of theRoyal Bank of Canada, in Ottawa in September 1931. At adinner with the prime minister and the high commissionerin London on 20 December 1932, banking problems wereapparently further discussed. Another opportunity to shareideas on ‘currency stability’ and ‘exchange rate issues’ withBennett occurred at a reception hosted by Ferguson atCanada House in London on 3 July 1933, and the twoseemingly continued their conversation privately a weeklater. Cooper discussed similar matters at various times thatyear in New York and Toronto with directors of the USFederal Reserve, Morgans, the City National Bank, and the

Table 3Matters discussed by Cooper with contacts in his network, 1931–1935

Notes: Only cases where the precise matter discussed was clear in the diaryentries have been included.Sources: HBC, E125/4–7. Diaries of Patrick Ashley Cooper, 1931–1935;BEA, ADM 34/18–19 Montagu Norman Diaries, 1929–1930; Directory ofDirectors, 1929–1935.

a Companies of which Cooper became a director by 1935.b Having been involved in the rescue of the British–Italian Banking Cor-

poration in 1929–1930, Cooper returned in 1934 (as Chairman) to theholding company that he had established 4 years earlier. He served as BIHoldings chairman for 5 years.

Number %

138 21.3 Hudson’s Bay Company90 13.9 General Wnance and banking51 7.9 General political issues (overseas)42 6.5 Discussions about appointments of

company directors39 6.0 General trading and dealing36 5.6 Central banking and Bank of England issues31 4.8 Buenos Aires Waterworks Company31 4.8 General industrial issues29 4.5 Invitations to join boards26 4.0 General transportation issues22 3.4 Primitiva Companies of Argentina14 2.2 Northern Assurance12 1.9 Central Mining and Investment Corporationa

12 1.9 General political issues (home)10 1.5 General UK oYcial issues (regulations, tariVs, etc.)10 1.5 Media and publicity9 1.4 BI Holdingsb

9 1.4 Aron Meter Companya

8 1.2 Compania Hispano-Americano de Eletricidad7 1.1 Argentine Transandine Railway7 1.1 Beira Railway Company6 0.9 General overseas oYcial issues

(regulations, tarrifs, etc)4 0.6 Rio de Janeiro City Improvements Company4 0.6 London Transport Authoritya

647 100.0

Continental Illinois National Bank. Whether or not hisadvice played any role in encouraging Richard Bennett toseek the 1933 Royal Commission that led a year later to thecreation of the Bank of Canada is not clear, but he doesseem to have been included in some of the preceding dis-creet soundings taken by the Canadian premier (Cain,1996; Redish, 1999).

In order to examine Cooper’s embeddedness in locationsoutside London, we employed archival evidence to recon-struct all the major lengthy business trips that he undertookeach year between 1931 and 1935. The extensive 5-monthitinerary followed in 1932 is depicted in Fig. 3. As notedearlier, the documents make clear that Cooper often trav-elled with other London-based directors and companyemployees. Their essential purpose was to engage with col-leagues abroad, to visit premises, to gauge local circum-stances, to seek out new business, to negotiate contractsand concessions with oYcials and government ministers,and to signal by their presence an unequivocal commitmentto a locality and its economic success. These journeys vastlyextended Cooper’s personal web of contacts and createdcomplex links between key nodes in London’s businesscommunity and (otherwise separated) clusters overseas.The physical spaces in which Cooper met and interactedwith members of his personal network in overseas localitieswere strikingly similar to those in which he operated inBritain. As in London, the diaries show that meetings wereheld in company premises, the dining rooms of banks andhotels, embassies, government oYces and the oYcial resi-dences of ministers and other political Wgures. Moreover,just as in London (Table 2), Cooper was made a member,or he was admitted as a guest, to gentlemen’s clubs in themajor cities that he visited in Argentina, the United States,Canada and South Africa.

Records in the HBC archives that preserve, for example,details of transatlantic travel arrangements by ship for thegovernor and his staV, railway (and, latterly, aircraft) travelwithin North America, accommodation bookings, and eventhe striking of commemorative medals to be awarded tostaV in Canada, oVer an important glimpse of the meansemployed to enable a powerful Wgure at the apex of theimperial economy to achieve an unprecedented degree ofoverseas engagement. Further studies of a similar kind thatexamine geographies of imperial engagement in the 1920sand 1930s are now needed in order to extend and developthe enquiries that we report here.

5. Discussion and conclusion

This paper has examined both the structure and theoperation of a network of contacts and the kinds of knowl-edge and information that Xowed through its channels. Ourfocus on the business relationships and connections of oneindividual aimed to explore theoretical claims in the eco-nomic geography literature about the centrality of net-works to knowledge transfer and the importance of eliteactors and gatekeepers. Several speciWc conclusions may


also be drawn. First, we argue that a full reconstruction ofan economic actor’s array of contacts requires researchbeyond the stylized mapping of corporate networks. Thus,while the governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company was amember of the board of another nine companies in 1931–

1932, providing access to 72 other directors, he was in factembedded in a much larger and more complex web oflinkages that extended far outside the London boardrooms.Indeed, our analysis shows that in 1931–1932 Coopergenerally networked actively with only 36 of his fellow

Fig. 3. Cooper’s travels and overseas spaces of territorial embeddedness: 1932 itinerary in South America and Canada.

GUYANA

SURINAM

E

FRENCHGUIA

NA

U. S. A.

C A N A D A

M E

X I C

O

B R A Z I L

BOLIVIA

PE

RU

A L A S K A( U . S . A . )

G R E E N L A N D

PARAG

.

AR

GE

NT

INA

ECU.

COLOMB.

VENEZ.

URUGUAY

C H

I LEMollendo

30 Jul 1932

Edmonton13 Sep 1932

Sao Paulo21 Jun 1932

Winnipeg1 Sep 19321 Oct 1932

Quebec18 Aug 1932

Toronto28 Aug 1932

New York15 Aug 193214 Oct 1932

London24 Oct 1932

Montevideo23 Jun 1932

Rio deJaneiro

19 Jun 1932

Santos20 Jun 1932

Calgary26 Sep 1932

Vancouver18 Sep 1932

Buenos Aires24 Jun 1932

Ottawa12 Oct 1932

Montreal25 Aug 1932

Departs South America forNew York on MV Reina delPacifico (from Mollendo)11 Aug 1932

Saskatoon11 Sep 1932

La Paz22 Jul 1932

4000miles0

0 6000kilometres

~


directors, yet he discussed business and shared knowledgeswith several hundred other individuals. His personal web oflinks was extraordinarily diverse and was spread across sev-eral countries. In any case, as Cooper resigned from someboards, and joined others, his relatively narrow array ofboardroom-derived linkages, as revealed year-by-year inthe pages of the Directory of Directors and the StockExchange Yearbook, was rarely static. Assumptions basedon a structural analysis of interlocking directorships thatexisted at a particular point in time need therefore to beinterpreted with considerable caution.

Notwithstanding the impressive scale of Cooper’s fullweb of linkages, within it, our systematic analysis revealsthe existence of a core group of special conWdantes. Thiscore group comprised people upon whose professionaladvice and counsel Cooper regularly drew. While somewere indeed co-members of the same company boards,many others were not. We found, moreover, that Cooper’sbackground and his growing reputation profoundlyembedded him in particular political, economic and socialcircles. Within these circles he found many of his closestand trusted business conWdantes.

Our second conclusion is that models of knowledgetransfer and notions of a transnational corporate class,developed in the context of today’s globalising economy,provide a useful means for understanding the interrelated-ness of the world’s multinational business elite in the earlydecades of the 20th century. Thus, although communica-tions technologies were still relatively unsophisticated, bythe 1930s, some (though not all) directors of Britain’s mul-tinationals behaved in a manner similar to those runningtoday’s transnational corporations (Castells, 1996, 2001;Graham and Marvin, 1996, 2001; Robertson, 2003; Skair,2001). Territorially embedded in the elite circles of a globalcity (London), and beneWting from the ‘buzz’ of beingthere, leading directors like Sir Patrick Ashley Cooper alsotravelled extensively and engaged personally with the polit-ical, economic and social circumstances prevailing in over-seas territories. This genre of company directors therebybuilt a global network which established internationalbridges between suppliers and markets, facilitating theintercontinental transference of business ideas and meth-ods, and promoting the sharing of expertise, privilegedknowledge and information.

A third general Wnding is that, as now, the kinds ofknowledge and information shared within a networkallowed ideas and methods developed in one locality to betransferred and applied in another (Arias and Guillén,1998; Amin and Cohendet, 2004). Cooper clearly used hisnetwork for a remarkably wide range of business and pol-icy-related purposes. Information on Wnancial and tradingprospects, the impacts of protectionism, banking systems,eVective management approaches, and the development ofnew markets was traded freely amongst trusted colleagues.By examining these kinds of interdependencies, our studyhas pointed to ways in which a particular network of con-tacts was actually employed.

Acknowledgements

We thank Simon Francis and Wes Toews for archivalresearch assistance in the UK and Canada, Pauline Fra-mingham for help with data analysis, and Brian Rogers forthe artwork. We are grateful to anonymous referees forvaluable comments on the paper. The research was partlyfunded by the Economic and Social Research Council(Grant no: RES-000-22-0208).

References

Ackrill, M., Hannah, L., 2001. Barclays: The Business of Banking 1690–1996. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Amin, A., Cohendet, P., 2004. Architectures of Knowledge: Firms, Capa-bilities, and Communities. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Arias, M., Guillén, M., 1998. The transfer of organizational techniquesacross borders: combining neo-institutional and comparative per-spectives. In: Alvarez, J.L. (Ed.), The DiVusion and Consumption ofBusiness Knowledge. MacMillan Press, Basingstoke, pp. 110–137.

Barty-King, H., 1979. Girdle Round the Earth: The Story of Cable andWireless and its Predecessors. Heinemann, London.

Bathelt, H., Malmberg, A., Maskell, P., 2004. Clusters and knowledge:local buzz, global pipelines and the process of knowledge creation. Pro-gress in Human Geography 28 (1), 31–56.

Beaverstock, J., Smith, R., Taylor, P., 2000. World city network: a newmetageography? Annals of the Association of American Geographers90 (1), 123–134.

Bellandi, M., 2001. Local development and embedded large Wrms. Entre-preneurship and Regional Development 13 (3), 189–201.

Berg, M., Hudson, P., 1992. Rehabilitating the industrial revolution. Eco-nomic History Review 45 (1), 24–50.

Black, A., 2004. Hidden worlds of the early knowledge economy: librariesin British companies before the middle of the 20th century. Journal ofInformation Science 30 (5), 418–435.

Brayshay, M., Cleary, M., Selwood, J., 2005. Interlocking directorships andtransnational linkages within the British empire 1900–1930. Area 37(2), 209–222.

Brayshay, M., Cleary, M., Selwood, J., 2006. Social networks and the trans-national reach of the corporate class in the early twentieth century.Journal of Historical Geography, in press.

Cain, P.J., 1996. Gentlemanly imperialists at work: the Bank of England,Canada, and the Sterling Area, 1932–1936. Economic History Review49 (2), 336–357.

Cain, P.J., Hopkins, A.G., 1999. The theory and practice of British imperial-ism. In: Dumett, R.E. (Ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Imperi-alism: The New Debate on Empire. Longman, Harlow, pp. 196–220.

Cain, P.J., Hopkins, A.G., 2002. British Imperialism, 1688–2000, second ed.Longman, London.

Cassis, Y., 1985. Bankers in English society in the late nineteenth century.Economic History Review 38 (2), 210–229.

Castells, M., 1996. The Rise of the Network Society. Blackwell, Oxford.Castells, M., 2001. The Internet Galaxy: ReXections on the Internet Busi-

ness and Society. Oxford University Press, Oxford.Chernow, R., 1990. The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty

and the Rise of Modern Finance. Atlantic Monthly Press, New York.Clark, G.L., 1998. Stylized facts and close dialogue: methodology in eco-

nomic geography. Annals of the Association of American Geographers88 (1), 73–87.

Corley, T.A.B., 1994. Britain’s overseas investments in 1914 revisited. Busi-ness History 36, 71–88.

Daunton, M., 1989. Gentlemanly capitalism and British industry 1820–1914. Past and Present 130, 19–58.

Davis, G.F., 1993. Who gets ahead in the market for corporate directors:the political economy of multiple board memberships. In: Academy ofManagement Best Papers, Proceedings, pp. 202–206.


Dicken, P., Kelly, P.F., Olds, K., Yueng Wai-Chung, H., 2001. Chains andnetworks, territories and scales: towards a relational framework foranalysing the global economy. Global Networks 1 (2), 89–112.

Djelic, M.-L., 2004. Social networks and country-to-country transfer:dense and weak ties in the diVusion of knowledge. Socio-EconomicReview 2, 341–370.

DomhoV, W.G., 1996. State Autonomy or Class Dominance? Case Studieson Policy Making in America Aldine de Gruyter, New York.

Ferns, H.S., 1992. Argentina: part of an informal empire. In: Hennessey,A., King, J. (Eds.), The Land that England Lost: Argentina and Britain,a Special Relationship. Academic Press, London, pp. 49–62.

Fieldhouse, D.K., 1994. Gentlemen, capitalists and the British Empire.Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (3), 531–541.

Gertler, M.S., 1995. Being there: proximity, organization and culture in thedevelopment of advanced manufacturing technologies. EconomicGeography 71 (1), 1–26.

Gertler, M.S., 2003. Tacit knowledge and the economic geography of con-text or, the undeWnable tacitness of being (there). Journal of EconomicGeography 3 (1), 75–99.

Graham, S., Marvin, S., 1996. Telecommunications and the City: Elec-tronic Spaces, Urban Places. Routledge, London.

Graham, S., Marvin, S., 2001. Splintering Urbanism: Networked Infra-structures, Technological Mobilities and the Urban Condition. Routl-edge, London.

Hess, M., 2004. Spatial relationships? Towards a reconceptualization ofembeddedness. Progress in Human Geography 28 (2), 165–186.

Hudson, R., 2004. Conceptualizing economies and their geographies: spaces,Xows and circuits. Progress in Human Geography 28 (4), 447–471.

Ingham, G., 1995. British capitalism: empire, merchants and decline. SocialHistory 20 (3), 339–354.

Johannisson, B., Ramírez-Pasillas, M., Karlsson, G., 2002. The institutionalembeddedness of local inter-Wrm networks: a leverage for business crea-tion. Entrepreneurship and Regional Development 14 (2), 297–315.

Jones, G., 1996. The Evolution of International Business. Routledge,London.

Jones, G., 2002. Business Enterprises and Global Worlds. Enterprise andSociety 3 (December), 581–605.

Knight, A., 1999. Latin America. In: Brown, J.M., Roger Louis, W. (Eds.),The Oxford History of the British Empire, The Twentieth Century.Oxford University Press, Oxford, pp. 623–642.

Kotz, D., 1979. The signiWcance of bank control over large corporations.Journal of Economic Issues 13 (2), 407–426.

Lall, S.V., Ghosh, S., 2002. Learning by dining: informal networks andproductivity in Mexican industry. The World Bank DevelopmentResearch Group: Infrastructure and Environment, Policy ResearchWorking Papers 2789.

Lejeune, A., 1979. The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London. Macdonald andJane’s, London.

Malmberg, A., Maskell, P., 2002. The elusive concept of localizationeconomies: towards the knowledge-based theory of spatial clustering.Environment and Planning: A 34 (3), 429–449.

Murdoch, J., 1997. Towards a geography of heterogeneous associations.Progress in Human Geography 21 (3), 321–337.

Newman, P.C., 1991. Merchant Princes: Company of Adventurers (vol.III). Viking-Penguin, Toronto.

O’Hagan, S., Green, M.B., 2002a. Tacit knowledge transfer via interlock-ing directorates: a comparison of Canada and the United States.GeograWska Annaler 84 (B), 49–63.

O’Hagan, S., Green, M.B., 2002b. Interlocking directorates: an example oftacit knowledge transfer. Urban Geography 23 (2), 154–179.

O’Higgins, E., 2002. Non-executive directors on boards in Ireland: co-option,characteristics and contributions. Corporate Governance 10 (1), 19–28.

Porter, A., 1995. Birmingham, Westminster and the City of London:visions of empire compared. Journal of Historical Geography 21 (1),83–87.

Power, D., Lundmark, M., 2004. Working through knowledge pools:labour market dynamics, the transference of knowledge and ideas, andindustrial clusters. Urban Studies 41 (5–6), 1025–1044.

Redish, A., 1999. British Wnancial imperialism after the First WorldWar. In: Dumett, R.E. (Ed.), Gentlemanly Capitalism and BritishImperialism: The New Debate on Empire. Longman, Harlow,pp. 127–140.

Roberts, R., Kynaston, D. (Eds.), 1995. The Bank of England: Money,Power and InXuence, 1694–1994. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

Robertson, R., 2003. Three Waves of Globalization: A History of a Devel-oping Global Consciousness. Zed Books, London.

Scott, J., 1991. Networks of corporate power: a comparative assessment.Annual Review of Sociology 17, 181–203.

Scott, J., 1997. Corporate Business and Capitalist Classes. Oxford Univer-sity Press, Oxford.

Scott, J., 2003. Transformation in the British economic elite. ComparativeSociology 2 (1), 155–174.

Skair, L., 2001. The Transnational Capitalist Class. Blackwell, Oxford.Sklair, L., 1998. The transnational capitalist class and global capitalism:

the case of the tobacco industry. Political Power and Social Theory 12,3–43.

Smith, R., 2003. World city actor-networks. Progress in Human Geogra-phy 27 (1), 25–44.

Standage, T., 1998. The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of theTelegraph and the Nineteenth Century On-line Pioneers. Wiedenfeldand Nicolson, London.

Stockwell, A.J., 1996. Power, authority, and freedom. In: Marshall, P.(Ed.), The British Empire. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp.147–184.

Tomka, B., 2001. Interlocking directorships between banks and industrialcompanies in Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century. Busi-ness History 43 (1), 25–43.

Useem, M., 1984. The Inner Circle. Oxford University Press, New York.Wheeler, J., 1986. Corporate spatial links with Wnancial institu-

tions. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 76 (2),262–274.

Wilkins, M., 1974. The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: AmericanBusiness Abroad from 1914 to 1970. Cambridge, MA.

Wilkins, M., 1998. Multinational enterprises and economic change. Aus-tralian Economic History Review 38 (2), 103–134.

Wolfe, D.A., Gertler, M.S., 2004. Clusters from the inside and out: localdynamics and global linkages. Urban Studies 41 (5/6), 1071–1093.

Yeung, H. Wai-chung, 2000. Embedding foreign aYliates in transnationalbusiness networks: the case of Hong Kong Wrms in Southeast Asia.Environment and Planning: A 32 (2), 201–222.

Yeung, H. Wai-chung, 2003. Practicing new economic geographies: amethodological examination. Annals of the Association of AmericanGeographers 93 (2), 442–462.

Zook, M., 2004. The knowledge brokers: venture capitalists, tacit knowl-edge and regional development. International Journal of Urban andRegional Research 28 (3), 621–641.

power geometries: social networks and the 1930s multinational corporate elite

Documents