This book focuses on the role of the state in promoting a country's long-term technological progress and industrial leadership. Throughout history, a nation's rise to dominance has invariably been followed by its fall; the dominant powers of today are not the same ones that controlled the world three hundred years ago. In the same manner, economic dominance has usually been fleeting, as leading nations have routinely been caught up and surpassed by challengers. This study looks at Schumpeterian growth - currently the most important source of economic growth - which credits the ability to use technological progress for the benefit of industrial leadership as the key motor of national development and economic success. Contrasting the experiences of five great powers (Britain, France, Germany, the USA and Japan) during five periods of technological and industrial leadership, from the Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the twenty-first century, the book draws on historical and comparative methods to draw causal inferences about international progress and leadership. It explores various factors that promote or hinder technological advancement and how these can in turn effect national development. It concludes that where states have forged ahead and maintained a lead over their rivals, it is because consensus and cohesion prevented vested interests from growing powerful enough to block structural economic change. By applying economic theory to long-term historical models, this book offers a fascinating perspective on the causes and effects of national growth and industrial leadership. It will be invaluable reading for anyone with an interest in international relations and global economic trends, both modern and historical.
This book focuses on the role of the state in promoting a country's long-term technological progress and industrial leadership. Throughout history, a nation's rise to dominance has invariably been followed by its fall; the dominant powers of today are not the same ones that controlled the world three hundred years ago. In the same manner, economic dominance has usually been fleeting, as leading nations have routinely been caught up and surpassed by challengers. This study looks at Schumpeterian growth - currently the most important source of economic growth - which credits the ability to use technological progress for the benefit of industrial leadership as the key motor of national development and economic success. Contrasting the experiences of five great powers (Britain, France, Germany, the USA and Japan) during five periods of technological and industrial leadership, from the Industrial Revolution to the beginning of the twenty-first century, the book draws on historical and comparative methods to draw causal inferences about international progress and leadership. It explores various factors that promote or hinder technological advancement and how these can in turn effect national development. It concludes that where states have forged ahead and maintained a lead over their rivals, it is because consensus and cohesion prevented vested interests from growing powerful enough to block structural economic change. By applying economic theory to long-term historical models, this book offers a fascinating perspective on the causes and effects of national growth and industrial leadership. It will be invaluable reading for anyone with an interest in international relations and global economic trends, both modern and historical.
The American Reaper adopts a network approach to account for the international diffusion of harvesting technology from North America, from the invention of the reaper through to the formation of a dominant transnational corporation, International Harvester. Much previous historical research into industrial networks focuses on industrial districts within metropolitan centres, but by focusing on harvesting - a typically rural technology - this book is able to analyse the spread of technological knowledge through a series of local networks and across national boundaries. In doing so it argues that the industry developed through a relatively stable stage from the 1850s into the 1890s, during which time many firms shared knowledge within and outside the US through patent licensing, to spread the diffusion of the American style of machines to establishments located around the industrial world. This positive cooperation was further enhanced through sales networks that appear to be early expressions of managerial firms. The book also reinterprets the rise of giant corporations, especially International Harvester Corporation (IHC), arguing that mass production was achieved in Chicago in the 1880s, where unprecedented urban growth made possible a break with the constraints felt elsewhere in the dispersed production system. It unleashed an unchecked competitive market economy with destructive tendencies throughout the transnational 'American reaper' networks; a previously stable and expanding production system. This is significant because the rise of corporate capital in this industry is usually explained as an outworking of national natural advantage, as an ingenious harnessing of science and technology to solve production problems, and as a rational solution to the problems associated with the worst forms of unregulated competition that emerged as independent firms developed from small-scale, artisanal production to large-scale manufacturers, on their own and within the separate and isolated US economy. The first study dedicated to the development and diffusion of American harvesting machine technology, this book will appeal to scholars from a diverse range of fields, including economic history, business history, the history of knowledge transfer, historical geography and economic geography.
Elizabeth Gaskell might have been amused to learn that the Victorian 'elegant economy' she mocked so poignantly in Cranford reached a new apogee in the mid-twentieth century and endured the invasion of its precise antithesis, 'conspicuous consumption'. For Britons of all classes the years of austerity during and after the Second World War were years of disorientation and fears of resurgence of the worst of the interwar decades. They had never had more money in their pockets or less material things on which to spend it. Many took refuge in the 'elegant economy', its creator dubbed 'a sort of sour-grapeism, which made us very peaceful and satisfied'. Constrained by rationing, manufacturing and import controls personal finance could only be disbursed on non-material things - sometimes wisely, sometimes pragmatically and sometimes by throwing all caution to the wind. Here for the first time is the history of these diverse reactions explored through Britain's metamorphosis from austerity to affluence, with consumerism seen through fresh eyes. Today political commentators constantly warn of the encroachment of austerity. This book is a timely reminder of the years of real austerity in Britain: when regardless of financial status everyone suffered its tribulations: when a 'sub-prime' mortgage was unimaginable: when abuse of expense claims by public figures was unthinkable: and when no one dared utter a word critical of their bank or its manager.
This book is specifically aimed at addressing a gap in the study of the evolution of corporate governance in Britain. In particular its key theme, the relationship between corporate governance and personal capitalism in British manufacturing in the first half of the twentieth century, provides the means for a systematic and critical examination of the dominant Chandlerian paradigm that the long-running persistence of personal capitalism shaped the governance of British manufacturing firms well into the twentieth century and acted to erode their competitive performance. The book helps to identify those aspects of corporate governance that have undergone change, with some critical observations on the magnitude of change and those aspects which have displayed characteristics of continuity. The empirical spine of this book is set out in a series of case studies which provide the basis for the examination of corporate governance in Britain during the period c. 1900 to 1950. By focusing particularly on the responses of a range of businesses to the turbulent environment of the inter-war years, this volume offers an insight into a much neglected, yet vital, area of business and economic history.
This monograph makes a fresh contribution to a longstanding but far from exhausted debate concerning the transition to capitalism in Europe. The work investigates key aspects of this transformation: the changes on the land, the origins of the industrial revolution, the modern rise of population and the growth of markets. It does so from a new perspective, however, by focusing on an area of southern Europe, Catalonia. Catalonia's interest as an area for study lies in its precocity within a southern European context, as one of the few regions on the European periphery to industrialise in comparable ways and at the same time as areas of northern Europe. Population growth was similarly rapid. The study engages critically with several important debates in economic and social history, such as the transition to agrarian capitalism, whether or not sharecropping should be viewed as a backwards form of agricultural production, theories of proto-industrialisation and theories of population change. It also questions claims that the nuclear family of north-western Europe was a superior model for industralisation than the more extended family structures prevalent in southern Europe. Not only could the extended family be as dynamic as the nuclear family when required but, more importantly, attention needs to be paid to other institutions and factors that may have conditioned family forms and decision-making processes. The approach taken by this work is a micro-study of one community, Igualada, an important proto-industrial centre but also situated within the viticultural region. It grew rapidly over the eighteenth century from around 1,700 inhabitants in 1717 to 4,900 in 1787 and around 7,700 by 1830. Only at the micro-level is it feasible for an individual study to reconstruct networks of relationships and patterns of decision-making at the household level. At the core of the book, therefore, is a family reconstitution of 8,700 families, supplemented by a wide body of additional sources, such as landholding contracts, tax records, manorial surveys, inventories, marriage contracts and letters.
Drawing upon an impressive range of international sources, this book explores the late-nineteenth century partnership between Bradford worsted manufacturers the Briggs brothers and the German merchant Ernst Posselt, and their investment in a factory and workers’ community at Marki, near Warsaw in Poland. Against a backdrop of political instability and social upheaval, which dramatically impacted on business after 1905 and particularly during the interwar period of Poland’s Second Republic, Sarah Dietz examines the fortunes of an extraordinary enterprise which has been little researched in Poland and is largely unknown to British scholars.
For most of the twentieth century, the Conservative Party engaged in an ongoing struggle to curb the power of the trade unions, culminating in the radical legislation of the Thatcher governments. Yet, as this book shows, for a brief period between the end of the Second World War and the election of Harold Wilson's Labour government in 1964, the Conservative Party adopted a remarkably constructive and conciliatory approach to the trade unions, dubbed 'voluntarism'. During this time the party leadership made strenuous efforts to avoid, as far as was politically possible, confrontation with, or legislation against, the trade unions, even when this incurred the wrath of some Conservative backbenchers and the Party's mass membership. In explaining why the Conservative leadership sought to avoid conflict with the trade unions, this study considers the economic circumstances of the period in question, the political environment, electoral considerations, the perspective adopted by the Conservative leadership in comprehending industrial relations and explaining conflict in the workplace, and the personalities of both the Conservative leadership and the key figures in the trade unions. Making extensive use of primary and archival sources it explains why the 1945-64 period was unique in the Conservative Party's approach to Britain's trade unions. By 1964, though, even hitherto Conservative defenders of voluntarism were acknowledging that some form of official inquiry into the conduct and operation of trade British unionism, as a prelude to legislation, was necessary, thereby signifying that the heyday of 'voluntarism' and cordial relations between senior Conservatives and the trade unions was coming to an end.
The birth of a mass consumer society in western Europe has been the subject of much scholarly debate in recent years. In order to come to a further understanding of the issue, this book adopts an analytical approach, paying special attention to the socio-cultural and economic transfers which occur when different commodities are introduced to territories with diverse values and identities. In particular, it examines the role of merchants and their important influence on consumer decisions, describing how they created demand for new necessities in local, national and international markets of the western Mediterranean area. Through a systematic analysis of probate inventories from southern Spain, the study reveals shifts in the patterns of consumption of new goods in urban and rural families, underlining a growing interest in new, exotic and foreign goods. By connecting these local desires, aspirations and choices to a global movement in which human and material capital circulated trans-continentally, broader patterns of consumption are revealed. By observing a southern European society, such as Spain, where the industrialization process was slower than that in Anglo-Saxon territories, the book contributes to the on-going debates about 'industrious revolution' and 'trickle-down' theories and whether both occurred simultaneously or separately. The book also helps identify the socio-economic forces and agents that prompted the stimulus for new consumer aspirations, as well as the cultural consequences that the new modern consumerism brought about.
During the nineteenth century the British government and the Admiralty provided large subsidies to commercial companies to run international mail services. Concentrating on the service between Britain and South America, this book explores the economic, maritime and political aspects of the Royal Mail Lines company, which held contracts between 1851 and 1965, and reveals the impacts that a long-distance mail service had upon travel, trade, commerce and the changing patterns of global information exchange.
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