Introduction

John Shaw's business was but one small cog in the machinery of growth and development that transformed England into an industrial and urban nation. He made no great innovation; but with skill, vision and diligence he inserted himself into the spaces for opportunity being opened up in a changing society. He was a classic market-maker; taking and turning to his own account and advantage the gaps and separations between markets of supply and demand that formed between the nation's scattered cities, towns and villages. Every day he made judgements and connections, shouldered risk, and, perhaps above all else, laboured hard to bring together buyers and sellers, claiming profits as a due reward for the work he did in making trade happen. Market intermediation has often been seen as an essentially parasitic activity, creaming off the fruits of others’ productive labour. Conservative radical William Cobbett certainly saw it that way, describing middlemen as ‘locusts’ who ‘create nothing, who add to the value of nothing, who improve nothing, but who live in idleness, and who live well, too out of the labour of the producer and the consumer’. So far as John Shaw was concerned, Cobbett was certainly wrong about the idleness of the middleman and modern theory would hold he was wrong also about the function and value of market intermediation. Factoring represented the vital and indispensable yeast that brought ferment and growth to the economic system.