The Entrepreneur and the British Economy, 1870-1914

Abstract

In the last two or three decades much new work has appeared on the period 1870 to 1914 which has tended to confirm earlier suspicions that, while the British economy was growing fairly rapidly in absolute terms, its relative position vis-a-vis the world economy was deteriorating and that British industrial and commercial performance left much to be desired. British rates of growth of production, exports and productivity were slower in this period than in the early Victorian years, and compared unfavourably with growth rates abroad, especially with those of Germany and the United States.1 In their quantitative assessments of the British economy most economists have been more concerned with analysing the changes in growth rates and economic variables and accounting for such changes in terms of their interaction without examining fully the basic factors which motivate changes in the variables themselves. 2 But as Kuznets has recently pointed out it is difficult to explain the course of economic change purely in terms of economic variables given the wide variety of other conditioning factors which must be taken into account. 3 Undoubtedly there are many factors, both economic and non-economic, which affected the course of British economic history in this period, but one of these in particular, that of British enterprise, has so far received comparatively little attention.