Robert J Bennett

Biographic Data

ID366206
NAMERobert J Bennett
GIVEN NAMESRobert J
FAMILY NAMEBennett
SIGNATUREBENNETT R J
AFFILIATIONSUniversity of Cambridge
ORCID0000-0003-3940-1760
VERIFIEDYes
TOTAL WORKS97
TOTAL CITATIONS353
AUTHOR COUNT97
EDITOR COUNT0
FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR1974
LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR2026
H-INDEX9

  • Where have all the business women gone? Women and business in the 20th century

    Selin Dilli, Carry Van Lieshout et al.ARTICLEBusiness History2026References: 67

    This Special Issue (SI) explores the development of female entrepreneurship throughout the twentieth century. The articles employ a mixed-methods approach to showcase various forms of female entrepreneurship, from self-employment and co-working in family businesses to innovators across underrepresented sectors, economic conditions, and institutional contexts in both Western and non-Western settings. The SI illustrates how qualitative and quantita…

  • The sources of scale: Large employers in Britain in 1881

    Open AccessRobert J Bennett, Les HannahARTICLEBusiness History2026References: 37

    The article assesses the relative weight of different sources of workforce size, using both relative marginal effects and proportion of variance explained for the 545 largest British firms in 1881. Despite data uncertainties, integration is shown as the largest contributor to scale. Integration with mining had even larger effects, raising employment by 35%. Internal capital intensity reduced labour for the majority of firms by about 4 workers per…

  • Beyond the Elite: Corporate Directors and Their Networks in Britain, ca. 1880s–1910s

    Open AccessCarry Van Lieshout, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEEnterprise & Society2024References: 18

    This paper examines the population of corporate directors of Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the period 1881-1911 the corporate form became the most common mode of business organisation for large businesses. As their number increased, the population of directors expanded and reflected an increasingly diversified corporate landscape. Based on a large-scale dataset, this paper analyses the characteristics and networks of this wid…

  • The New Calling

    Robert J Bennett, Robert BennettARTICLEDialogue A Journal of Mormon…2022

    No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be,Am an attendant lord, one that will doTo swell a progress, start a scene or two,Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,Deferential, glad to be of use,Politic, cautious, and meticulous;Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—Almost, at times, the Fool.—T. S. Eliot, from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”I accepted the new calling, of course. Without reservati…

  • An Assortment of Meditations

    Robert J Bennett, Robert BennettARTICLEDialogue A Journal of Mormon…2022

    Samuel M. Brown's Where the Soul Hungers is something of a grab bag of sundry reflections on the gospel. As Brown himself explains, the book is intended to be part “pure devotions” and part “philosophical essays” mixed with scattered attempts to “repent” or “celebrate life and the senses” (10–11). Frequently, he simply offers remarkably fresh interpretations of what might otherwise be considered all too familiar scriptures. Ultimately, this menag…

  • British employer census returns in new digital records 1851–81; consistency, non-response, and truncation – what this means for analysis

    Robert J Bennett, Leslie HannahARTICLEHistorical Methods A Journal of…2022Cited by: 2References: 18

    Newly available digital resources from the British census identify employers and their workforce size. However, there was a non-response rate of about 2.3% for smaller firms, rising to over 10% for firms over about 300 employees, and higher for the largest manufacturing firms. Non-responses are largely random except for different forms of business organization: significantly higher for corporates, and lower for unincorporated enterprises, but wit…

  • Business Entry and Exit: Career Changes of Proprietors in England and Wales (1851–81) Using Record-Linkage

    Open AccessRobert J Bennett, Piero Montebruno et al.ARTICLESocial Science History2022References: 51

    The article links the digital records of individual proprietors in the manuscript censuses 1851–81 for the whole of England and Wales using the BBCE database to identify career changes of employers and own account proprietors. It investigates continuing proprietorship, entry to business from previous activity, and switching out of business. The article identifies the effects on switching of demography, gender, household relationships, sector mark…

  • Changes in Victorian entrepreneurship in England and Wales 1851-1911: Methodology and business population estimates

    Open AccessRobert J Bennett, Harry Smith et al.ARTICLEBusiness History2022Cited by: 6References: 42

    The full population of England and Wales employers and own-account business proprietors is estimated using population censuses 1851–1911. The main contribution of the article is a method of mixed single imputation to overcome the challenge of non-responses to the census 1851–1881. This method is compared with alternatives. Downloads of all data allow replication. The method is used to track trends in proprietor numbers and entrepreneurship rates …

  • Large-scale Victorian manufacturers: Reconstructing the lost 1881 UK employer census

    Open AccessLeslie Hannah, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEThe Economic History Review2022Cited by: 4References: 46

    This study presents the first available-and near-complete-list of large UK manufacturers in 1881, by complementing the employer data from that year's population census (recovered by the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs project) with employment and capital estimates from other sources. The 438 largest firms with 1 000 or more employees accounted for around one-sixth of manufacturing output. Examples can be found in most industries. Exploit…

  • Entrepreneurship in Scotland, 1851–1911

    Open AccessHarry Smith, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEJournal of Scottish Historical…2021Cited by: 1References: 6

    This article uses the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE) to examine the history of entrepreneurship in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Scotland. The BBCE identifies every business proprietor listed in the 1851–1901 Scottish censuses, correcting for non-response issues. The BBCE, therefore, allows the whole population of Scottish entrepreneurs to be examined for the first time. These data are combined with a reweighted version…

  • The British business census of entrepreneurs and firm-size, 1851–1881: New data for economic and business historians

    Open AccessCarry Van Lieshout, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEHistorical Methods A Journal of…2021Cited by: 4References: 31

    The British census asked employers to record their workforce numbers. The responses to this instruction provide a unique resource on firm size. While the responses were digitized and included in the Individual Census Microdata (I-CeM) deposit, their format limits their utility. A further data deposit, the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE), overcomes I-CeM’s deficiencies by infilling data gaps and parsing employer and workforce data …

  • Entrepreneurship in Birmingham and Manchester, 1851-1911: A Tale of Two Cities

    Harry Smith, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEMidland History2020

    It has long been argued that the economic structures of Birmingham and Manchester in the nineteenth century were fundamentally different, with Birmingham characterized by small workshops and high levels of social mobility and Manchester by factories and entrenched contrasts between workers and capitalists. This article uses new data to examine the reality of the economic structure of Birmingham and Manchester to see whether the assumptions of pre…

  • Households and entrepreneurship in England and Wales, 1851–1911

    Harry Smith, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEThe History of the Family2020Cited by: 5References: 12

    This article uses the British Business Census of Entrepreneurs (BBCE) to examine the relationship between the household and entrepreneurship in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The BBCE allows three kinds of entrepreneurial households to be identified: those where an entrepreneur employs co-resident family members in their business, those where two or more household members are partners in the same firm, and households with two or more en…

  • The Population of Non-corporate Business Proprietors in England and Wales 1891–1911

    Open AccessRobert J Bennett, Harry Smith et al.ARTICLEBusiness History2020Cited by: 5References: 24

    This article uses population censuses to provide the first consistent counts of the population of business proprietors for 1891–1911. After appropriate adjustments for imperfect Census design the article confirms the persistence of own account self-employed as the most common businesses throughout the period. However, it identifies a turning point around 1901 when the business numbers decisively shifted towards larger firms, where employers with …

  • Female entrepreneurship: Business, marriage and motherhood in England and Wales, 1851–1911

    Open AccessCarry Van Lieshout, Harry Smith et al.ARTICLESocial History2019Cited by: 9

    This article offers a new perspective on what it meant to be a business proprietor in Victorian Britain. Based on individual census records, it provides an overview of the full population of female business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. These census data show that around 30% of the total business population was female, a considerably higher estimate than the current literature suggests. Female entrepreneurship was not a …

  • Immigrant business proprietors in England and Wales (1851–1911)

    Harry Smith, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEContinuity and Change2019Cited by: 2

    This article examines the history of immigrant business proprietors in England and Wales between 1851 and 1911. The newly available electronic version of the Census (I-CeM) allows all business proprietors in each Census year to be identified, and provides birthplace information that allows entrepreneurs from different countries to be compared to each other and to business proprietors born in the United Kingdom. Immigrant populations had higher ra…

  • Towns in Victorian England and Wales: A new classification

    Open AccessHarry Smith, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEUrban History2018Cited by: 8References: 9

    This article describes the creation of a new urban classification based on the 1891 census of England and Wales. It is the first attempt to use the recently available electronic version of the census (I-CeM) to classify all large towns in late Victorian England and Wales on their economic structure. Where previous scholars were restricted by the form of occupation data contained in the published census reports, I-CeM allows manipulation of the da…

  • Portfolio entrepreneurship in farming: Empirical evidence from the 1881 census for England and Wales

    Open AccessDragana Radičić, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEJournal of Rural Studies2017Cited by: 3References: 16

    Whole population analysis based on census. • Farm size, population density and farmers' age are non-linear with probability of pluriactivity. • Low levels of regional variation. • Victorian married couple offered the most frequent means to share resources, and family members opened opportunities for additional business development. Urban market opportunities encouraged increased portfolio development as density increased in fringe urban areas

  • Interpreting business partnerships in late Victorian Britain

    Open AccessRobert J BennettARTICLEThe Economic History Review2016Cited by: 4References: 28

    This article gives the first large-scale assessment of business partnerships in England and Wales using business records within the population census for 1881. It seeks to understand the variety of ways that 'partnership' was used: explicit partnership, 'de facto' partnership, 'joint' activity, and asset ownership together. The article confirms that partnerships were chiefly between two people. Complexity and transaction costs largely precluded l…

  • Collective Action when Needed: The Kingston Chamber of Commerce in Jamaica, 1778–85

    Robert J BennettARTICLEThe Journal of Imperial &…2014References: 14

    A chamber of commerce in Kingston was a response to defects in local projections of the British imperial state. It met immediate needs to organise naval convoys and liaise with the local naval commander in the face of breakdown of effective government resulting from conflicts between Governor John Dalling and Jamaica's Assembly. The efforts of collective action were mitigated by being shared across a range of activities that the chamber either de…

  • Network interlocks: The connected emergence of chambers of commerce and provincial banks in the British Isles, 1767–1823

    Robert J BennettARTICLEBusiness History2013Cited by: 2References: 26

    Interlocking between the earliest 20 chambers of commerce in the British Isles and the partners of local provincial banks relied on similar needs for networks and trust. Two-thirds of banks and 40% of bank partners were members of their local chambers. Bank partners formed 8% of chamber memberships, and 39% held offices, indicating strong interlocking directorates. The interlocks provided a number of potential mutual benefits, influencing chamber…

  • Supporting trust: Credit assessment and debt recovery through Trade Protection Societies in Britain and Ireland, 1776–1992

    Open AccessRobert J BennettARTICLEJournal of Historical Geography2012Cited by: 2

  • Local Economic Development Initiatives and the Transition From Training and Enterprise Councils to New Institutional Structures in England: Partnership, discretion and local flexibility

    Mark Ramsden, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEPolicy Studies2007Cited by: 1References: 20

    Current British government economic development policy emphasises regional and sub-regional scale, multi-agent initiatives that form part of national frameworks to encourage a ‘bottom up’ approach to economic development. An emphasis on local multi-agent initiatives was also the mission of Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs). Using new survey evidence this article tracks the progress of a number of initiatives established under the TECs, usin…

  • Educating Social Workers to Establish Well-Formed Goals

    Rebecca Morrison Van Voorhis, Robert J Bennett et al.ARTICLEJournal of Teaching in Social Work2006References: 3

    Although effective goal-setting is universally accepted as good social work practice, students often struggle with establishing well-formed goals. Therefore, the authors have developed an educational approach to engage students in learning the skills of effective goal-setting. This manuscript presents a conceptual approach and instructional activities to prepare practitioners to establish well-formed goals, engage in goal-focused actions, and eva…

  • Local government and local economic development in Britain: An evaluation of developments under labour

    Open AccessRobert J Bennett, Chris Fuller et al.ARTICLEProgress in Planning2004