Managing agency business groups, elite directors, and the rubber boom, 1897–1913

We identify a new organizational form, the Managing Agency Business Group (MABG), demonstrating how agency houses used interlocking directorships to build groups on the basis of commercial and plantation expertise to access finance on London stock markets and local capital markets in the pre-1914 rubber boom. MABG boards combined managerial and commercial expertise with access to financial resources. Such features, rather than membership of elite groups, effectively signalled new issue quality and explained the composition of board membership in the rubber industry, which represented a substantial proportion of initial public offerings in the decade before the First World War. The MABGs used a serial finance model, through which influential intermediaries embedded in commercial networks created managerial capacity in individual estates, which were then merged with other estates, floated on the stock market, consolidated into groups, and their returns securitized through the creation of investment trusts.