Building Co-operation

John Wilson is Director of Newcastle University Business School, where he is also professor of strategy. He has published extensively in the field of international business history, knowledge transfer, and the history of management education, including a dozen monographs and over fifty articles and chapters. As executive editor of Business History and a former President of the Association of Business Historians, he has played a major role in developing the discipline.Anthony Webster is a graduate of the University of Birmingham UK, where he won the Ashley Prize for best PhD thesis in the Faculty of Commerce and Social Science in 1985. In his career he has been a tax inspector and has lectured at three universities in the North West of England. He is currently Head of History at Liverpool John Moores University. He has published extensively on business in the British empire and co-operatives, producing four major books and numerous articles in leading international journals (including Enterprise and Society, the article for which won the Newcomen Prize for best article in the journal in 2005).Rachael Vorberg-Rugh is a doctoral candidate in Modern History at the University of Oxford, where she is completing a thesis on the British co-operative movement between 1880 and 1920. She has published articles and book chapters on co-operative history and business. In addition to her academic work, she has engaged in numerous public history projects in the US and UK. She is currently a researcher with The Co-operative College, and previously served as project officer for the National Co-operative Archive and Rochdale Pioneers Museum.

...this handsomely-produced volume is an important contribution to the recent revival of academic interest in co-operation

• 1. Introduction ; 2. The Roots and Rise of British Co-operation, c.1780 to 1863 ; 3. The Rise of The Co-operative Wholesale Society - The Birth and Leadership of a Corporate Giant? 1863 to 1890 ; 4. The Age of Expansion, 1890 to 1914 ; 5. War and Peace,1914 to 1938 ; 6. Co-operation in Retreat: War and Decline, 1939 to 1973 ; 7. Adapting the Business Model, 1973 to 1990 ; 8. The Watershed Decade, 1990 to 2000 ; 9. 'Falling Towards The Centre': A Twenty-First Century 'Renaissance', 2000 to 2013 ; 10. Conclusion