ABSTRACT
Manufacturing, processing, and extractive industry accounted for 44% of all effective London company registrations between 1856 and 1883. The volume of effective registrations of this group displays the same general cyclical movement as other types of company but with possibly some leads and lags at upper and lower turning points. Industrial effective registrations peaked in 1865, 1874 and 1883 with corresponding troughs in 1863, 1868 and 1878, whereas other effective registrations peaked in 1864, 1873 and 1881 with troughs in 1858, 1867 and 1878. There is some dissimilarity during the late 1850s and early 1860s with a minor peak in industrial effective registrations in 1861/2 whereas other effective registrations rose smoothly from a trough in 1858 to a major cyclical peak in 1864. The highest cyclical peak in industrial effective registrations was 1874 with 450 registrations, 57.8% of all effective registrations in that year; the 1883 peak, though higher than the 1865 cyclical upper turning point, is lower than that of 1874 and this may be explained by some underlying secular fluctuation in the effective industrial company registrations. Other registrations do not have this secular pattern, each subsequent cyclical peak being higher, though the upswings of the mid-1860s and early 1870s have a similar amplitude while that of the early 1880s was very much greater.
