Wealth-Holding and Investment

This chapter explores how traders managed and invested their wealth by examining their wills. Businesses and real estate tended to constitute their most valuable possessions, which might suggest an aversion to risk among those in trade. However, this seems likely to have been the result of pragmatism, based on rates of return and the paucity of other forms of investment. As other possibilities became more accessible to the trading classes from the 1790s, they began to impact on their investing practices. In Liverpool, we also see evidence that traders invested in shipping. Individuals and families showed flexibility in the face of changing economic contexts, at the same time as they considered the best way to negotiate their own family resources and setbacks. Such practices reveal often quite sophisticated attitudes towards investment and risk, and also meant that specific directions made in wills were often ignored.

Business · Economics · Estate · Expected utility hypothesis · Face (sociological concept) · Financial economics · Flexibility (engineering) · Investment (military) · Management · Negotiation · Political science · Real estate · Risk aversion (psychology) · Risk–return spectrum · Social science · Sociology · Finance · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Law