The York Research Database

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the amount of scholarship on the history of shareholding in Britain. One area that still remains relatively unexplored, however, is the problematic issue of how British investors actually went about the process of choosing their respective investments. The purpose of this article is to make a start at redressing this gap by using the sharepushing crime wave that swept across Britain between 1900 and 1939 as a prism through which to evaluate the behaviour of Britain’s shareholding population at this time. Ultimately, what it suggests is that, whilst the early-twentieth-century British investor may well have had far more potential sources of advice and information open to them then their nineteenth-century forebears, this did not necessarily mean that they were any better informed about the workings of the British securities market.