British Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century

The quality of British entrepreneurship in the nineteenth century is continually being reassessed. Until the mid 1960s a major leitmotiv in accounts of British economic development from the heroic days of the Industrial Revolution to the eve of the First World War was the steady dissipation of a fund of entrepreneurship which, it has been implied, reached its greatest abundance during and immediately after the Napoleonic Wars. From being organisers of change who were ‘instrumental in delivering society from the fate predicted for it by Malthus’ [254: 129] by having the ‘wit and resource to devise new instruments of production and new methods of administering industry’ [172: 161], British entrepreneurs had, by the latter decades of the nineteenth century, come to be responsible for Britain’s failure to retain its role as workshop of the world. Britain’s international economic dominance, once so obvious, had been yielded to indefatigable and enterprising American manufacturers and their ‘drummers’ (commercial travellers), and to persevering, multi-lingual, scientifically-trained Germans.