ABSTRACT
In the 19th century there was an economic boom in the British empire which created a hunger for investment capital. As a result, the trust device was used to raise capital from the public at a time when companies were still unlawful associations after the cataclysmic collapse of the South Sea Company in 1720. Trusts were used either in the form of joint stock arrangements whereby members (or, to use modern jargon, ‘shareholders’) became partners in the pursuit of commercial profit, or alternatively in the form of unit trusts (considered briefly in Chapter 11) as a mutual fund in which investors pooled their money in expectation of a financial return.
