[1] .... Much of the attention directed towards family firms has focused upon their conservatism and alleged failure to adapt to new circumstances after 1850. In contrast, the work of Berg and Smail has brought a new understanding of the nature of 18th century industrialising communities. [J. Smail, The Origins of Middle Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire 1660-1780 (Cornell, 1994)] The intervening period witnessed the ascendancy of the family firm, which some have seen as an appropriate organisational response to a low trust culture. Nenadic, in her study of small businesses in Victorian Edinbrugh, suggests that family firms came to prominence as an antidote to a business environent 'characterised by low trust and morality', with the family 'the only istitution in common existence that operates according to rules that are non-market defined'. Rose has preferred to emphasize networks of trust which operated in business through the long 19th century, yet sees these as based upon extended kinship groups which, while including the likes of co-religionists who were not blood relatives, were essentially an extended family. [ M. B. Rose, 'The Family Firm in British Business, 1780-1914', in M.W. Kirby and M.B. Rose (eds.), Business Enterprise in Modern Britain: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century (London, 1994), p.67.] A view that family connections held a monopoly on trust - or that family was