Note (2018): Routledge is an active academic imprint of Taylor and Francis. See below for a more complete, though not comprehensive, history of the company.
Bookseller George Routledge began publishing in London in 1836. Soon realising that reprinting the works of other publishers was more profitable than developing his own, he published low-cost books in high volume, many of them in pirated editions. From 1848, when Routledge's brother-in-law William Warne became a partner, the firm was known as Routledge and Warne; it became Routledge and Company in 1851 when William's brother Frederick joined them, and Routledge, Warne and Routledge when George's son Robert joined in 1858. In 1848 the firm initiated the immensely successful Railway Library Series, which was followed by a number of similar series, made up of reprints of out-of-copyright British fiction and American titles, such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, of which the firm sold half a million copies. From the 1850s the firm published illustrated editions of popular and classic works, and developed as a children's publisher, having discovered the illustrators Randolph Caldecott and Kate Greenaway.
The business became George Routledge and Sons in 1865, when Frederick Warne left the partnership and another of George's sons, Edmund, came into the business. Following the founder's retirement and death in 1888 the fortunes of the firm declined and in 1899 it was declared bankrupt. A group of investors rescued the business from receivership early in the twentieth century and it underwent a period of growth, assisted by the acquisition in 1911 of Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner Limited, when it greatly expanded and diversified its publication list. The companies were run separately until 1947, when they merged as Routledge and Kegan Paul.
In April 1985 Routledge and Kegan Paul was taken over by Associate Book Publishers (ABP), a publishing conglomerate attempting to achieve economic efficiencies by merging various publishing houses and facilities. ABP sold Routledge to the Thompson Publishing Group in 1986. From 1998 Routledge was part of the Taylor & Francis Group, where it continued as a leading imprint for books and journals in the social sciences and humanities.
