Three Bankruptcies: the Decline of Family Business in the Practices of Women Entrepreneurs in Moscow, 1830s to 1880s

Abstract

The article focuses on the issue of influence of the general economic situation and intra-family relations on the emergence of entrepreneurial risks that led to bankruptcy, and based on the reconstruction of three cases of the ruin of female entrepreneurs in the 1830s to 1880s from the proceedings of the Moscow Commercial Court. In a discourse in economics, bankruptcy represents one of the serious conflicts arising in the course of the development of Russia’s modern market economy and business culture. The presented cases of bankruptcy demonstrated that the causes were as follows: the lack of a distinctly defined distribution of responsibility and control between the partners in a family business; the insufficiency of the initial capital needed for establishing a factory and for its further development; the sharp decline in consumer demand for its products; and the crisis-imposed suspension of operations in the crediting system acting as an additional risk factor.