Hannah Barker's Family and Business during the Industrial Revolution recounts the lives of the lower middling sorts populating the towns of the north of England, highlighting the ordinary stories of tradesmen and women that are as important to our understanding of the early Industrial Revolution as the stories of more exceptional, larger, and wealthier firms. These small businesses were a central part of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century economic and urban development in England, helping to drive industrial change and urban development, and this monograph uncovers the experiences of the families at their core. The traces left behind in sources like wills and testaments, letters, and memoirs of the traders of Manchester, Liverpool, and other northwest towns in England are pieced together here to create a compelling picture of everyday business strategies and family negotiation. Barker's findings build on the work of those such as Andrew Popp and Joanne Bailey, fusing business and family history research to enhance our understandings of both.

The death of the head of the household was often the juncture at which a family firm passed from one set of hands to another. This could be a tense time, and a moment at which family members’ distinct interests in the family estate and business produced conflict that could result in legal action. Litigation over the division of family and business assets forms the basis for a rich discussion of family strategy here. Barker outlines the contemporary belief that families should work toward a shared prosperity and stresses the sense of duty, trust, and love that was deemed the proper foundation of family relations in business as well as in life. These ideals were appealed to in court cases that dealt with disputes over inheritance, where the basis of the action was usually a claim that family resources had been distributed unfairly or that the probate instructions had been ignored or neglected. One particularly instructive case, concerning the estate of William Duxbury, a dyer in Manchester, demonstrates the connections that Barker draws between love, duty, and individual interests that shaped family relationships in business families. Duxbury's brother and longstanding business partner, Robert, along with Duxbury's son John were accused of having drawn up a fraudulent will that left his wife and daughter with smaller portions than intended and securing the bulk of the estate and the family business for his son. The case focused on whether the will had been correctly made, but also placed great significance on witness testimony about Duxbury's relationships with his children—the affection shown to each and their conduct toward him. It clearly underlines Barker's argument that family strategies were not necessarily unified, that competing claims over family and business resources could create strained and fraught relations, but that affection and duty were looked to as the ideal basis for family partnerships.

Letters, diaries, and memoirs provide the basis for a closer discussion of familial love and the bonds between parents and children, husbands and wives, and other family members. The autobiography of Joseph Livesey, for example, who ran a cheesemonger's shop with his wife, Jane Williams, in Preston, depicted their relationship as fundamental in providing both the joint labor required to make a success of their fledgling business and mutual emotional support and comfort throughout their lives at difficult moments as well as celebratory ones. Other examples also make clear the variety of ways that younger family members were supported in business ventures, with parents, siblings, or other relatives providing capital, opportunities for training, and mentorship. Barker unravels the ways that these supportive and cooperative relationships were shaped by shared economic interests and a sense of religious duty and faith, as well as strong emotional bonds.

In the final two chapters, Barker explores the control of space within trading families’ houses, arguing that gender and generational hierarchies were important factors in controlling access to, and use of, domestic space. These chapters address the issues around who counted as a family member and the dynamics of having apprentices, servants, and journeymen living-in in small trading households. She argues that there may have been multiple understandings of the family among residents of a household. There is clear evidence for the continued adherence to the household family model, where all residents, including servants and apprentices, were included. Yet there were also distinct gradations of status between members based on their relationship to the head of the household by blood or marriage (rather than employment) more akin to the concept of the nuclear household. In some trading families, employees and children enjoyed the same access to space in the household, while in others, children were awarded more privileges. Tensions arose over specific uses of space at certain times of day, such as the appropriate time for male and female householders to access the kitchen to wash and who was invited to eat with the head of the household. Relations between those who shared a living space could have a direct bearing on the functioning of the business, as Barker demonstrates in the case of a check-weaving family in Manchester where the business partnership between three brothers was dissolved because one of the brothers, and his wife, could not live peaceably with the other two in the same household.

Narratives like these serve to emphasize the important connections Barker draws between household, family, and business in this rich and detailed work. This is important research for both business and family history, unpacking the complex dynamics of lower-middling trading relationships and the functioning of business families at a critical period of social and economic development.