ABSTRACT
With perhaps a similar attention to historical detail as that for which the poet Phillip Larkin is renowned,1 it has been claimed that private equity finance began in 1901. That was the year when J.P. Morgan bought the Carnegie Steel Company from Andrew Carnegie and Henry Phipps for half a billion dollars. Phipps set up the Bessemer Trust with $50 million to invest in private businesses – and his family’s future. That fund still exists, worth a thousand times more than the original stake. Carnegie’s bequest lives on too, in both concrete and philosophical terms: his foundation endowed over 2,500 libraries in his lifetime, starting in Scotland in 1883. When he died in 1919, half of all the libraries in the USA had been funded by him. The man who argued (in The Gospel of Wealth, 1889) that businesses are the trustees of societal property that should be managed for the public good could be said to be the father of modern corporate social responsibility.
