This paper considers the legal and financial context in which professional audit emerged in Britain during the nineteenth century. It concludes that an important contributing factor to the rise of the audit profession was its provision of advice on prudent accounting, which represented a distinctive competence. The capture of a jurisdiction over business advisory services from the legal profession involved, however, a relationship of complicity with management and large insider investors the interests of social capital- to the exclusion of small investors, who were stigmatized as 'speculators'.Auditing, Accounting Profession, Britain, Accounting Conventions, Prudence, Conservatism,

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This article explores the widening ownership of stocks and shares in Great Britain between 1870 and 1935. It demonstrates the extent of that growth and the increasing number of small investors. Women became more important in terms of the number of shareholders and value of holdings. Factors that encouraged this trend included the issue of less risky types of investments, and legal changes relating to married women's property. We examine the 'deepening' importance of stocks and shares for wealth holders, arguing that the growing significance of these kinds of financial assets was as important as the growth in the investor population.e hr_539 157..187 B y 1870, as Jenks noted, England had become a 'stock-and-bondholding aristocracy, measuring income in dividends and wealth in the quotations of the Stock Exchange'. 2 In the remaining decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, a striking change took place in the shareholding population. A growing number of individuals in Britain from a widening social spectrum, including the less affluent, began to own stocks and shares. Gentlemen, solicitors, and peers of the realm were joined by 'retailers, professional men, skilled workers and women'. 3 By the late nineteenth century, as Robb has remarked, 'middle and upper-class Britain truly had become a nation of shareholders'. 4 Buoyed by rising real wealth and enticed by the promise of higher returns and lower risk, individuals with relatively modest amounts of personal wealth began to invest in the stock market. In turn, the ability to tap into these swelling reservoirs of individual savings, eased by the development of the banking system and the spread of provincial stock exchanges, allowed British-registered firms, as well as the UK and foreign governments, to mobilize large amounts of capital from across the country. Indeed, the rise to prominence of these investors underpinned not just the expansion of industry at home but the march of British capital abroad.