George Bunn & Co: A study in British venture capital and company formation in early-colonial Australia

Abstract

Chartered companies such as the East India and Hudson Bay Companies had long been vehicles for transferring British capital to the New World. Such companies offered guarantees of protection against competition, while providing limited liability for their shareholders. Australia was no exception. Alan Atkinson has described the Australian Agricultural Company (AAC), as a 'powerful combination of free and state enterprise'. However, increasingly during the nineteenth century smaller agency houses provided venture capital for shipping, banking and commercial development in Australia. Like chartered companies, they enjoyed close links with government decision-making, both individually and through lobby groups. John Dunmore Lang complained that NSW business enterprise was under the control of British acceptance houses, representing the interests of their British principals rather than the interests of the colony. Lang failed to account for the business risks associated with commercial transactions in an undeveloped country. Referring to nineteenth century China, Michael Greenberg suggested that agency houses were the 'outcome of geographic distance between the origin of capital and its actual sphere of operations, and of the technical difference between two levels of economy'. Given his premise is equally applicable to early NSW, this paper examines the antecedents, development and structure of one early Sydney firm, George Bunn & Co.