ABSTRACT
In the late nineteenth century it was frequently claimed that challenging economic conditions and increasingly restrictive factory legislation drove British industrial capital abroad. 2 This might present a compelling rationale for a rising incidence of overseas portfolio investment, but foreign direct investment was undertaken exclusively by industrialists who, in spite of the alleged hardships, had achieved extraordinary wealth and success. Therefore it is necessary to look beyond the supposed negative push factors in the home trade to understand their true motivation. Global developments in communications that established commercial infrastructure on an international footing in the last quarter of the nineteenth century certainly broadened the horizons of many businesses in terms of export markets and resourcing. However, it was a diverse range of nation- and industry-specific advantages, the pull factors, which enticed venture capitalists to build factories abroad and ultimately determined the style and location for clusters of British foreign enterprise. This chapter will consider the broad-ranging factors which made foreign direct investment in the Russian empire a particularly tempting proposition for the Bradford partners.
