Accounting & Finance Research Community Seminar – Professor David Higgins & Professor Steve Toms

Title: British Directors, and the Far-Eastern Rubber Boom c1890-1913

Date: 20 March 2024

Time: 15:00-16:00

Location: NUBS.2.05

If you would like to attend, please register using the following link:

British Directors, and the Far-Eastern Rubber Boom c 1890-1913

Speaker: Professor David Higgins, Newcastle University Business School & Professor Steve Toms, University of Leeds

Professor David Higgins is a Professor of Accounting & Finance at Newcastle University whose research includes exploring aspects of British business and economic history from the mid-nineteenth century. David will present his post-sabbatical seminar with his collaborator Professor Steve Toms. Steve Toms is Professor of Accounting at the University of Leeds. He is a former editor of the journal Business History. He uses accounting and finance methodologies to investigate historical issues and draw lessons for the present day. His main areas of focus are on the textile industry, financial fraud and company promotions.

Abstract:

We investigated the role of elite directors, and the importance of interlocking directorates during the Malayan rubber flotations in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. These flotations have been largely overlooked by historians; certainly, the composition of boards of directors of these companies is absent from business history. This oversight appears strange: these regions were among Britain’s oldest colonies. Malaya was formally a British colony from 1867, and The Federated Malay States was created by the British government in 1895. Singapore was a British colony from 1824. By the early twentieth century, these regions were global suppliers of rubber, tea, and tin, in which British interests were paramount. Data on the boards of directors was obtained from the Times Prospectuses of Public Companies between 1895 and 1913. A series of EXCEL spreadsheets were constructed which detail the number of directorates held by each director (both rubber and non-rubber); directorates of complementary institutions (banks, stockbrokers, agency houses, produce merchants); directorates of rubber trusts, and whether directors were ‘elite’ (ie aristocrats; commissioned officers, MPs, etc). Our statistical analysis (to date) questions the importance of ‘elites’. Many of the most ‘interlocked’ directors were not ‘elites’ but possessed long standing, complementary commercial expertise from managing tea plantations, and related. We find that stockbrokers reports placed a premium on directors with this experience.