ABSTRACT
The pretence that the limited liability company functioned as a democracy was well and truly on the wane by the 1870s. In iron and steel, shipping and cotton significant numbers of businesses had ‘company limited’ appended to their name. Typical of such a conversion to limited liability form was the floating of the old Glasgow iron manufacturing firm of Mercy and Cunningham in 1872. Jeffreys also notes that amongst the iron and steel industries, in which the greatest opposition to the introduction of limited liability incorporation had originally occurred, there was a busy trade in converting enterprises into companies. The end of the idea of limited liability enterprises as ‘little republics’ came about in the late 1860s with the widespread adoption in company constitutions of provisions allowing for proxy voting.
