History Of Entrepreneurship Research Articles

“Old” Economic History in the United States: 1939–1954

This paper investigates the actions of a small, yet influential group of American economists who sought to claim economic history for themselves and use it as a springboard to launch a wider transformation of economics. Their actions constitute an episode of dissent in the history of twentieth century economics, albeit an unusual one. These dissenters were not a socially or intellectually marginalized group, but rather a set of privileged scholars who were able to leverage their contacts within the profession and amongst its patrons to further their vision. Their actions could almost be described in Kuhnian terms: they consciously sought to trigger a “paradigm shift” to bring about a social science better suited, in their views, to a world in political and economic turmoil (Kuhn 1962). In spite of the Kuhnian allusion to “scientific revolution,” this paper is not about the 1960s “cliometric revolution,” but about the 1940s and '50s and the little known events that led to the creation of the Economic History Association, the Journal of Economic History, and Explorations in Entrepreneurial History (subsequently Explorations in Economic History).

Notes for a Panel on Entrepreneurship in Business History

I want to begin with a question. Why did the historical study of entrepreneurship take such a decidedly “organizational turn” during the 1950s? One might have thought that a Research Center in Entrepreneurial History would have stimulated work on the individual entrepreneur; that it might have encouraged a focus on such questions as exactly why and how individual entrepreneurs created and sustained new businesses.

Hugh G. J. Aitken (1922–1994)

Memorial HUGH G. J. AITKEN (1922-1994) SUSAN J. DOUGLAS Like many members of SHOT, I was in Atlanta on April 14, 1994, attending the annual meeting of the Organization of American Histo­ rians. It was spring in Atlanta, which may seem a trite (and obvious) thing to report. But for those of us from up north, having been clobbered by one of the most relendess winters on record, the azaleas and magnolias of Adanta were the first convincing sign that we were going to make it, that the snow was going to melt, that new beginnings were possible. So it was especially surreal and unbelievable when the phone message came from back home. Hugh Aitken was dead, the message went. Just like that—final, flat, matter-of-fact. How could this be? He had just finished an article for Technology and Culture, as well as an essay for Antenna that outlined an entire book proposal. He was planning other essays on the history of radio and on the spectrum. He hadjust finished making a fresh batch of beer. He was looking ahead. The news just didn’t seem real. It still doesn’t. To those of us who were his friends—and he had so many friends in the field—Hugh’s death is a terrible personal loss. We have also lost one of our major intellectual leaders and a gifted writer. Hugh Aitken was awarded the Dexter Prize twice, first in 1976 for Syntony and Spark: The Origins ofRadio, and then in 1988 for The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932. (He probably also would have won it for Scientific Management in Action: Taylorism at Watertown Arsenal, 1908-1915 if there had been a Dexter Prize in 1960.) In 1986, he received the highest honor our society awards, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. He was elected vice-president and president-elect of SHOT in 1991 but stepped down because of concerns about his wife’s health and about his own stamina. He donated the prize money from his second Dexter Prize back to the society to establish a travel fund for graduate students and Dr. Douglas is the author of Inventing American Broadcasting 1899-1922 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press) and Where the GirlsAre: Growing Up Female with Mass Media (New York: Times Books). She teaches at Hampshire College. Permission to reprint a memorial may be obtained only from the author. 906 Hugh G. J. Aitken (1922-1994) 907 junior scholars who might not be able to afford to attend the annual meetings without some assistance. He was, in sum, a major figure in the field, intellectually and financially generous to us individually and to SHOT as an organization. Hugh Aitken was born in Deal, England, and raised in Aberdeen, Scodand. He attended the University ofSt. Andrews, but his studies were interrupted by World War II when he served as an airplane mechanic, and he then began cultivating a lifelong interest in mechanical and then electronic tinkering. (The word “tinkering” hardly seems to do justice to a man who could assemble his own ham radio station or build his own color television set and computer.) In 1947 St. Andrews awarded Hugh an M.A. with First Class Honours in economics and philosophy, and the next year he went to study economic history at the University of Toronto, where he worked with Harold Innés. He then moved to Cambridge and received his Ph.D. in economics from Harvard in 1951. Two critically important things happened in Cambridge: he met his wife,Janice Hunter, and he became centrally involved with the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard, which played a key role in revitalizing economic history in the United States. Hugh became a key figure in the center, where Arthur Cole, Joseph Schumpeter, Tom Cochran, Alfred Chandler, Leland Jenks, Harold Passer, and others began moving the study of entrepreneurship away from the deductive theories of neoclassical economics and into more empirically based work that drew from sociology, history, and social psychology. In 1965, Hugh edited Explorations in Enterprise, a classic collection which summa­ rized the pathbreaking work of the center. In 1955, Hugh joined the economics...

Tired pioneers and dynamic newcomers? A comparative essay on English and German entrepreneurial history, 1870-1914

Tired pioneers and dynamic newcomers? A comparative essay on English and German entrepreneurial history, 1870-1914

Tired Pioneers and Dynamic Newcomers? A Comparative Essay on English and German Entrepreneurial History, 1870-1914

Tired Pioneers and Dynamic Newcomers? A Comparative Essay on English and German Entrepreneurial History, 1870-1914

The Wealth Creators: An Entrepreneurial History of the United States. ByGerald Gunderson · New York: Truman Talley Books, E. P. Dutton, 1989. vii + 278 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $18.95.

The Wealth Creators: An Entrepreneurial History of the United States. ByGerald Gunderson · New York: Truman Talley Books, E. P. Dutton, 1989. vii + 278 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $18.95. - Volume 65 Issue 3

The Wealth Creators: An Entrepreneurial History of the United States. By Gerald Gunderson. New York: E. P. Dutton/Truman Talley Books, 1989. Pp. viii, 278. $18.95.

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John Bell Rae (1911–1988)

Memorial JOHN BELL RAE (1911-1988) JAMES J. FLINK John Bell Rae succumbed on October 24, 1988, to complications fol­ lowing heart surgery. He was a founder and past president (1973-74) of the Society for the History of Technology and the recipient in 1980 of the society’s highest award, the Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Rae was born in Glasgow, Scotland, on March 21, 1911. The Rae family emigrated to Providence, Rhode Island, when John was twelve. There he attended Classical High School and Brown University, from which he received his B.A. in history in 1932. After a year’s study at Yale, he returned to Brown to do graduate work in economic history under the supervision ofJames B. Hedges. In 1935—36 he was a Social Science Research Council Pre-Doctoral Field Fellow. He was awarded his M.A. degree in 1934 and his Ph.D. degree in 1936. A childhood fascination with trains culminated in a doctoral dissertation on railroad land grants. The continuing scholarly merit of that disserta­ tion is evident in its publication some 43 years later (1979) as Development of Railway Land Subsidy in the United States, in the Ayer Company Development of Public Lands Law in the United States Series, edited by Stuart Bruchey. After serving as a research assistant at the Brookings Institution (1936—37), and then as an administrative assistant to the president at Brown (1937—39), Rae began his teaching career as instructor in history at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He taught English composition as well as general history, and then, during the war years, taught military and naval history for army and navy programs. He still considered himself an economic historian with a primary interest in railroads, but he had “not yet found a definite focus” and had little time for research. He was promoted to assistant professor in 1943 and to associate professor in 1947. Curriculum planning for the postwar period bore fruit in a textbook coauthored with Thomas D. H. Dr. Funk is a professor in the Program in Comparative Culture at the University of California at Irvine. Permission to reprint a memorial in this section may be obtained only from the author. 718 John Bell Rae (1911-1988) 719 John B. Rae Mahoney, The United States in World History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1949, 1955, and 1964). Writing the text and compiling a collection of readings with Lynwood Bryant on the industrial history of Lowell, Massachusetts, made Rae “more aware of the impact of technology on the growth of our modern civilization” and took him “still closer to the history of technology.” Rae also came to associate with engineers at MIT and “absorbed information and ideas about what they did and how they thought.” 720 James J. Flink In 1953 Rae was invited to the Research Center for Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University to do research on the engineer as entrepreneur. To Rae, this was a “landmark” experience that he recalled as “one of the most intellectually stimulating of my life.” He exchanged ideas with Leland Jenks and Fritz Redlich; came to know Harvard Business School historians Ralph and Muriel Hidy and Henrietta Larson; worked closely with Hugh Aitken, then executive secretary of the center and editor of its pioneering journal, Explora­ tions in Entrepreneurial History; and “above all, came under the inspir­ ing and stimulating influence of Arthur H. Cole,” the center’s director. Two articles resulted that are classics for serious students of automotive history: “The Engineer-Entrepreneur in the American Automobile Industry,” Explorations in Entrepreneurial History 8 (Octo­ ber 1955): 1-11; and “The Electric Vehicle Company,” Business History Review 29 (December 1955): 298—311. “As I got more deeply into the study of the engineer,” Rae explained in 1981, “I became convinced that the best way to proceed was to select a single industry for intensive investigation, one that had a reasonably rapid pace of technological change and could be pre­ sumed to have engineers well represented in its management. . . . The automobile industry met my specifications, and I discovered that, at that time, a surprisingly limited amount of scholarly work had been done on it.” Indeed, at the time Rae began...

The Growth of Entrepreneurship in India c. 1850–1950 with Some Latin American Comparisons

Among Third World countries, India stands out as having one of the most developed ‘big business sectors’, with a recent tendency by some firms to go multinational. This notwithstanding the fact that the public sector plays a major role in the Indian economy. Although the origins of some of India's business groups go back to pre-colonial times, most of them trace their beginnings to the 1850–1950 period, the ‘second colonial century’, during which India underwent a limited process of industrial growth as well as became a major exporter of some agricultural commodities to the world market (tea, jute, cotton, oilseeds, and, prior to 1910, opium and indigo). There are obvious parallels there with the developments in some Latin American countries, particularly Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Mexico and Colombia, which also emerged as major suppliers of raw materials (coffee, sugar, wheat, nonferrous metals) while they built up manufacturing sectors of various magnitudes (with Brazil in the lead). However, the private business sector in these countries presents a picture which differs in many ways from the Indian case. It seems worth attempting a comparison between those two very different underdeveloped regions of the world, the Indian subcontinent and Latin America, in the hope of being able to put the Indian case in a broader perspective. Given the broad similarity in the constraints under which capitalist enterprise laboured in those two areas, a study of the differences in entrepreneurial responses might bring to light certain specificities in Indian entrepreneurial history which often go unnoticed.

Entrepreneurial Historians and History: Leadership and Rationality in American Economic Historiography, 1940–1960.BySteven A. Sass · New York: Garland Publishing, 1986. vi + 301 pp. Notes and sources. $45.00.

Entrepreneurial Historians and History: Leadership and Rationality in American Economic Historiography, 1940–1960.<i>By</i>Steven A. Sass · New York: Garland Publishing, 1986. vi + 301 pp. Notes and sources. $45.00.

French Economic Growth: A Radical Revision

History is full of reactions and revolutions from which even the scholarly world is not immune. The revision in French economic history during the last two decades affords an example of one of the most complete turnabouts in recent scholarship. In the 1940s and 1950s a number of scholars, mainly American, believed that the problem to be explained was French economic retardation in the nineteenth century. Much was written about the unenterprising character of French entrepreneurs, anticapitalist social attitudes, the persistence of the family firm and the small farm, and other sociocultural characteristics that were deemed inimical to economic growth. The Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard (1948-1958) provided inspiration for analysing French entrepreneurial failure in terms of Parsonian sociology, and the classic retardationist view of French industrial development remains enshrined in David S. Landes’sThe Unbound Prometheus(1969), originally written during the 1950s for theCambridge Economic History of Europe.

Examining the Federal Reserve

Abstract. Vritz Redlich (1892–1978) played a leading role in the development of the analytic approach in history and in establishing the new institutional history that combines entrepreneurial and business historv and sociology. A member, in economics, of the German historical school, he spent 16 years in the chemical industry before the triumph of Nazism forced him to emigrate from Germany in 1936. After teaching at various colleges until 1942, he spent the rest of his life doing research in the libraries of Harvard University, producing several notable works in economic history, including a classical study of American banking, and pioneering in entrepreneurial history.

Fritz Redlich, 1892‐1978: The Man and the Scholar

Abstract. Fritz Redlich (1892‐1978) played a leading role in the development of the analytic approach in history and in establishing the new institutional history that combines entrepreneurial and business history and sociology. A member, in economics, of the German historical school, he spent 16 years in the chemical industry before the triumph of Nazism forced him to emigrate from Germany in 1936. After teaching at various colleges until 1942, he spent the rest of his life doing research in the libraries of Harvard University, producing several notable works in economic history, including a classical study of American banking, and pioneering in entrepreneurial history.

Entrepreneurial Typologies in the History of Industrial Italy (1880–1960)

Those who in the past twenty years have examined the historiography of industrial Italy cannot help but recognize its “backwardness” when compared to similar studies in other countries, particularly those of American entrepreneurial history. Various reasons have been given to justify this “backwardness,” such as the excessive humanistic tradition of Italian historical studies, the relatively scarce statistical data available on Italian industry, and the poor condition of industrial archives. But, above all, it has been observed that “enterprise,” “entrepreneurs,” and “entrepreneurship” are concepts not especially sympathetic to Italian historiographical culture. First, there is an ideological suspicion, which suggests that to investigate these topics impliesper sea favorable attitude. Second, there is a diffuse conviction according to which it is necessary to utilize explanations other than free initiative, and, particularly to stress the role of the State, in order to understand Italian economic development.

Jiichi Kitamura, Studies in German Entrepreneurial History

Jiichi Kitamura, Studies in German Entrepreneurial History

A Note on Japan Business History Review and Recent Books

Professor Yamamura offers a critical evaluation of the recently established Journal of Japanese business history and of five important new books on Japanese business, entrepreneurial, and economic history.

Entrepreneurial Theory and American Business History: A Survey

Entrepreneurial Theory and American Business History: A Survey

The Work of the Hamburg Research Center in Entrepreneurial History

Although Germans have made major contributions to the study of historical economics and the discipline of economic history, the pioneer work on the enterprise, that lies beneath them all, has been done by Americans. Such continental newcomers to the field as the journals Histoire des Entreprises or Tradition, and the Hamburg Research Center in Entrepreneurial History (Wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Forschungsstelle e. V.) are only now catching up with an important set of data which have been ignorantly neglected. Their approach to economic history, mainly through entrepreneurial history, has the great strengdi of forcing a reconciliation between actual entrepreneurial behavior and the implications of rigorous historical analysis. But it also has evident limitations. The problem of social and economic placement of entrepreneurs, seeking to determine the general effect of their policies, hinges upon quantitative generalization that cannot be derived from particular histories of enterprises remaining within the framework of the firm. One of the major aims of this paper is to show the Hamburg Research Center's recognition that an increasing part of the interest in the history of the enterprise should focus on broader questions that transcend the limits of monographs on firms, questions diat relate business development to economic change.

Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt. By &lt;italic&gt;David S. Landes&lt;/italic&gt;. [Studies in Entrepreneurial History.] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1958. Pp. xvi, 354. $6.00.)

Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt. By David S. Landes. [Studies in Entrepreneurial History.] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1958. Pp. xvi, 354. $6.00.) Get access Bankers and Pashas: International Finance and Economic Imperialism in Egypt. By Landes David S.. [Studies in Entrepreneurial History.] (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 1958. Pp. xvi, 354. $6.00.) Rondo E. Cameron Rondo E. Cameron University of Wisconsin Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The American Historical Review, Volume 64, Issue 4, July 1959, Pages 906–907, https://doi.org/10.1086/ahr/64.4.906 Published: 01 July 1959

Business History, Entrepreneurial History, and Business Administration

The Economic History Association is an interdisciplinary organization of widely varying interests. The Association has several times considered the relationships between Economic Theory and Economic History, but it has paid little attention to that between the applied field of Business Administration and Economic History. It is appropriate to do so now because significant special interests have arisen within and around Economic History in recent years which have been of particular interest to students of Business Administration. I refer to the studies in Business History, Entrepreneurial History, Economic Development, and Innovation. Like Economic History, Business Administration is interdisciplinary, at least in part, and relies considerably, though at the applied level, on the same fundamental social sciences that interest economic historians. Also we have seen an outpouring of histories of individual enterprises, as American business, once more proud of its accomplishments and increasingly conscious of the value of public relations, has sat for its portrait. At the same time, in the field of Business Administration there has been a growing recognition of the importance of the long-range view in appraising administration, and of the use of the social sciences to improve its quality. It therefore is time to attempt some integration of these strands of thought.