ABSTRACT
Though a handful of US firms had established sales agencies and banking houses in this country during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries1 not until 1852 was there any direct American participation in British manufacturing industry. At that date, Samuel Colt, an American gun manufacturer, decided to set up a branch plant in Pimlico, London ‘to protect himself from the destructive effects which would follow the introduction of…spurious arms into use in England, where he had no patent’.2 According to his biographers, Colt would have preferred to license the right to produce pistols to a British manufacturer, but at the time ‘no machinery made in England was exact enough for the work necessary to turn out the revolvers’.3 However, the venture was not a financial success, and in 1857 Colt sold his UK interests to a group of Englishmen.
