ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the role of sociability and relationships in Elizabeth and John Shah's world, on how relationships worked to sustain them, individually and together, and any role those relationships may have played in their entrepreneurial career. John and Elizabeth's own family, they and their children, was content and mercifully untouched by tragedy, such as infant mortality, until the death of John junior in India in 1839. The wider networks of friendship and sociability showed similar levels of cohesion and persistence. Trade sustained rather than supplanted life. Family and friends were not there to be leveraged for advantage. The Shaw's world, shaped by ties of kinship, friendship and trade, was overwhelmingly oriented to the country north of their Wolverhampton home. New fledged entrepreneurs in particular, it is argued, were often highly reliant on familial and friendship sources of what we would now call venture capital.
