By the mid nineteenth century, Britain had been the world's strongest economic power for nearly a century. It was the first industrialised nation and was hailed as the 'workshop of the world'.

        It is hardly surprising to see how contemporaries viewed Britain’s economic performance in contrasting ways.  Being closely involved with events did not allow any real sense of perspective.  There was no reliable statistical evidence as such in 1870-1914 as there was no gross domestic product (GDP) or national unemployment figures calculated at this time.

        It was primarily the work of the Harvard Business school in America who were responsible for the publication of the journal Explorations in Entrepreneurial History .  This provided further research and “developed the argument in the late 1940s and 1950s that stressed the linchpin of economic history is the entrepreneur”.  

        The 1960s sees the most sustained and convincing attack on the role of the entrepreneur as the major underlying cause of Britain’s industrial decline.  The principal argument came in the Aug. 1964 issue of the Economic History Review.  This article was written by Derek H. Aldcroft and was entitled ‘The Entrepreneur and the British Economy 1870-1914'.  Aldcroft argued that “Britain’s relatively poor economic performance could be attributed largely to the failure of British entrepreneurs to respond to the challenge of changed conditions”. 

        A brief summary of Aldcroft’s influential article, was that he believed that many British firms had failed to adopt the most efficient and best available techniques of production.  He uses the examples of ring spinning and automatic weaving in the cotton industry.  Britain’s failure to retain her position as the leading producer and exporter of iron and steel is explained by being attributed directly to the failure of those British iron and steel industrialists who were to slow in modernising their plant or adopting new processes.  He compares the production of German steel and their more extensive use of the ‘direct’ process of steelmaking, and states that 82% of Germany’s coke was produced in by-product recovery ovens, in 1909, whereas, only 18% was produced in the same manner in Britain.  Aldcroft also uses the example of the coal industry to illustrate the failure to adopt labour-saving machinery, particularly from the 1880s onwards.  The tin-plate industry is another example with regards to slowness of innovation, especially after 1891, which, leads Aldcroft to state that “generally speaking, by 1914, there was hardly a basic industry in which we held technical superiority”.

        Aldcroft’s second major point is that British industrialists, managers, and entrepreneurs all underestimated the increasing importance of science within industry.  He argued that very little was made by way of investment in laboratories and with technical personnel for research.  Aldcroft stressed that the economic supremacy that Britain had once enjoyed had been built up by a nation of ‘practical tinkerers’.  This was clearly no longer acceptable in the increasingly competitive international business arena.  He particularly condemns such science-based industries as iron and steel, electrical engineering and the chemical industry which, were becoming increasingly dependent upon scientific and technical expertise.  Britain is compared with Germany on the scale and provision of education, particularly technical and further education.  Germany had more than fifty-eight thousand full time students compared to the nine thousand in Britain, at the onset of the First World War.  

        Other convincing evidence that highlights Britain’s poor education was that for every one university graduate in some chemical works in Britain in 1901, Germany could boast four.  The Report on the Chemical Industry in Germany carried out in 1901, also stated that chemists in Germany were superior in terms of training and quality, than British chemists.  The article goes on to explain that the reason for Britain’s backwardness was the indifference given to scientific and technical education among British manufacturers. People were well aware that Britain was falling further and further behind Germany and America.  The attempt by the government and certain industries from the 1880s onwards to improve and rectify the situation are an indication of this awareness.  

        Berghoff and Moller have recently challenged this link between education and the ‘dynamic activities of entrepreneurs’.  Their evaluation of over a thousand biographies of German and British entrepreneurs found that by stereotyping British entrepreneurs as conservative and risk averting, whilst proclaiming German entrepreneurs to be innovative and risk taking is to base it not on fact but “on purely impressionistic foundations, or on generalisations from individual examples”.

        A third indictment of the British entrepreneur is that they overinvested in the old staple industries, such as the iron and steel industries, shipping and textiles.  Aldcroft sees this lethargic approach to embrace the second industrial revolution, as it has been called, those future industries such as electrical engineering, chemicals and the motor car industry.  Aldcroft points out that capital is not necessarily a prerequisite or even an essential factor in terms of growth.  However, he does criticise the way in which the capital is utilised.  He clearly believes that the Americans and the Germans made better use of their capital and other factors of production.  In particular, the article focuses on large-scale mass production, aimed primarily at  American industry.  He sees those industries discussed earlier, which were slow to adopt the more efficient and modern methods of production as the most apparently uneconomical utilisers of resources.

        A general condemnation of British salesmen is also found within this article, as yet another example of entrepreneurial decline in the late Victorian era.  These salesmen are also criticised by G.C. Allen for being even further behind the times than Britain’s outdated equipment, outmoded methods of production and antiquated techniques:  “In marketing as in manufacturing, England was clinging in a changing world, to methods and types of organisations which, had been formed in the days of her supremacy”.

        A year later saw the publishing of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe.  A major contributor to this book was made by David Landes, who arguably had constructed the most extensive, compelling and condemning view on the decline of the British economy and in particular on the role of the British entrepreneur.  Landes had also reached many of the same conclusions that Aldcroft had published a year earlier, albeit in a far more thorough and augmented manner.  

     

            Source: Pollard, Britain's Prime and Decline, Table 1.17, p.15

        As Table 1.4 shows, Britain experienced a declining share in the world market for manufactured goods in the late Victorian and Edwardian era.  A comparison between German, American and British industrial performance concluded that the reason why Germany and America performed much better than Britain was due to “the success of entrepreneurial and technological creativity on one side, failure on the other”.  Landes was absolutely certain that all the blame for Britain’s poor performance lay squarely with the managers and owners of British industries.  “The British manufacturer was notorious for his indifference to style, his conservatism in the face of new techniques, and his reluctance to abandon the individuality of tradition for the conformity implicit in mass production”.

        A.L. Levine published his book Industrial Retardation in Britain 1880-1914 in 1967, and again reached similar conclusions to that of Aldcroft and Landes, a couple of years before.  Levine examined the various possible explanations as to why British industry was lagging behind their German and American counterparts.  In the aforementioned factors of technology and business organisation, Levine’s inference echoing the judgement of Landes and Aldcroft was that the lag in British industry’s organisation and techniques was more than anything else a question of entrepreneurial responses.  Arguably, the work of these three economic historians represented the peak in the hypothesis of entrepreneurial failure.  However, from the late 1960s and early 1970s, this supposition of entrepreneurial failure has been attacked on several key issues.  

        One of the first ‘optimistic’ interpretations was forwarded by Charles Wilson, who in August 1965, contributed an essay to the Economic History Review and his findings on the state of the economy were vastly different to that of Landes and Aldcroft.  This was because Wilson focused on salesmanship, distribution and light industry, rather than the old staple industries.  “It was in large measure the economy men wanted, an economy that supplied their needs abundantly and on the whole efficiently”.  Wilson was openly critical of the fact that both Landes and Aldcroft had selected producer oriented industries like the chemical industry or iron and steel.  Instead Wilson concentrated upon consumer oriented industries, such as confectionery, manufacturers of soap and mass produced foodstuffs, and targeted the meteoric ten-fold increase in the number of Britain’s multiple stores from the 1880s to 1900, rather than judging the performance of the economy in terms of some selected trade’s output, or in the share of the international market for their selected industries.

        Lars G. Sandberg went even further in his defence of the entrepreneur.  In 1969, Sandberg published his article, ‘American Rings and English Mules: The Role of Economic Rationality’, in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.  Whereas, Wilson had used newer industries to counter the failure hypothesis, Sandberg went directly against the Aldcroft and Landes view using the cotton industry as an example of entrepreneurial efficiency.  In the slow adoption of the ring spindle over the much slower and less efficient spinning mules, Sandberg concluded that this was not indicative of ‘technological conservatism’, but was instead the ‘rational’ response of British industrialists to the various factor costs, and the availability of a skilled workforce making the innovation unnecessary at that time.  This was still the case in  the 1930s when almost seventy-five percent of Lancashire’s cotton yarn was still being produced on mules.  What was so unique about Sandberg’s theory, was not so much his results, but more the method he used to get them.  His undertaking of a formal cost-benefit analysis, was the start of a wave of quantitative assessments, the most famous of these being the work of Donald N. McCloskey.

        Not only does McCloskey feel he has redeemed the performance of the British entrepreneur, but in his article ‘Did Victorian Britain Fail?’, published in 1970, McCloskey also arrived at a favourable conclusion of Britain’s economic performance in the 1870-1914 period.  Unlike the pessimistic image portrayed in the findings of Landes and Aldcroft, McCloskey views the late Victorian period as “a picture of an economy not stagnating but growing as rapidly as permitted by the growth of its resources and the effective exploitation of the available technology”. 

        McCloskey argued that there was no break in trend in British industrial production and real product growth, especially on a cyclical basis, till 1913.  He reached this conclusion by measuring the aggregate output of the economy as a whole, and then he gauged how efficiently Britain utilised the available techniques and resources.  He then used a measure of total factor productivity which was to be used as the statistical foundation for favourable reasonings of Britain’s economy from then on. Improvements and enhancements were made to McCloskey’s calculations by historians such as Feinstein and Roderick Floud.  They were recalculated to cover longer intervals, and produced a much rosier picture when used in comparing the economies of Germany and the USA

        In criticising Wilson for his ‘argument by example’ method, S.B. Saul is no less guilty for doing the same.  His main focus has been upon the mechanical engineering industries. Saul found after conducting an in depth analysis of the classic engineering industries that they continued to ”enjoy marked commercial and technological progress, moving into new fields such as the manufacture of ring frames, adopting new techniques of standardisation, but with their success being limited here and there by peculiar market problems”.  In terms of machine tools, Saul argued that the British industry was second to none, in terms of quality, production and specialisation.  An example of this was the firm Langs of Johnstone, who from the 1880s onwards specialised solely on lathes in true American fashion.  Saul also attacked the general condemnation of Britain’s salesmen, stressing that in different industries there were varying degrees of success, particularly in Europe and South America.

        Although agreeing that Britain had most certainly lost her industrial and economic supremacy, Roderick Floud concluded that the gap between Britain and her nearest rivals Germany and America was only small  and that it had been brought about not by “a failure of British enterprise”, but by “the increasing complexity of the international economy, and of the national economies within it”. 

        Sidney Pollard also reached the same conclusion as Floud, and stated that Britain had gone from being the single pre-eminent industrial economy, to becoming one of several.  But throughout this transition there had been no emerging “failure in entrepreneurship as a weakness in British Society” and that “in the years to 1913 the British economy was not only still the most productive in Europe, but also flexible and possessing hidden reserves at least the equal of any other.  More significant still in this context was its ability to install and operate successfully a whole range of industries hitherto hardly known in Britain or dependent on Germany, as soon as war-time made this imperative”.

        McCloskey agreed that Britain’s slower relative growth could have many causes and that this performance indicator lacked adequate proof to lay the blame at the feet of the late Victorian entrepreneur.   Britain’s ever decreasing resources , in particular coal and iron ore, have been put forward by historians as another alternative non-entrepreneurial factor for Britain’s industrial decline.  As more and more of the better and larger coal seams were being worked, it was steadily becoming less accessible to extract, which was clearly an advantage for those countries with greater resources, such as America.  This example also serves to reinforce the ‘rationality’ of the entrepreneur’s business decisions.  As coal was cheap at this time, it made sense to not adopt quickly any of the latest fuel-saving technology.

        Another possible explanation as to why Britain’s industrial performance experienced a relative decline is that Britain invested too heavily abroad.  On average , between 1870-1914, 5.2 percent of Britain’s GDP was being invested overseas, not just within the British Empire, but also in Latin and North America.  By 1914, 4000 million pounds was invested abroad.  Between 1911-13 almost twice as much money had been invested abroad than at home.  It has been suggested that this export of capital was actually hindering domestic industrial performance, whilst at the same time hastening the industrialisation of Britain’s rivals.   An example of this was seen in Britain’s attempt to build up the textile industry in the Far East, which, had damaging effects upon the long-term interests of Lancashire.  The alternative view of this theory is that by helping other countries through capital investment, it was actually beneficial to British industry, as a large percentage  of the loans made to other nations, was actually spent on equipment such as textile machinery and railway stock, all made in Britain.  Peter Mathias has suggested that there is nothing more than a tenuous link between adopting innovations or re-equipping industrial plants with the flow of capital abroad.  Mathias argues that there was not a shortage of capital at home for industries who needed it.  “More particularly, the problems of innovation and lack of investment in certain British industries were very much more deep-seated and institutional than a mere one or two per cent gap in the annual cost of capital”.

        Historians such as Martin Wiener have even gone so far as to explain Britain’s industrial decline in terms of the development of an anti-enterprise culture.  Wiener believed that Britain never really came to terms with industrialisation, and stated that the relative decline was the product of ‘ingrained cultural forms’.  He argues that by the late nineteenth century any advance in productivity and technological change were seriously hindered by the upper classes’ hostile response to the growing political power of the newly emerging manufacturing classes.  Wiener’s thesis is not that far removed from the entrepreneurial failure argument.  Indeed, Wiener believes that there wasn’t the same industrial spirit in 1900 as there had been in 1850.  His line of reasoning was, that not only were there no great industrial pioneers, such as Brunel, but that the image of industrialisation had been steadily degraded and seen as spoiling the landscape of the once green and pleasant Britain. 

        However, Wiener’s thesis of cultural atrophy is certainly not without its critics.  Principally amongst these criticisms is the way in which Wiener uses phrases such as ‘industrial spirit’, yet fails to supply what exactly this term actually represents.  He also failed to take into account the unevenness of business performance, which seriously undermines the view that a decline in the economy must draw, a parallel with a decline in cultural values.

        Corelli Barnett argued that there was an anti-technological ethos in the intelligentsia and governing elite of Britain.  Barnett believes that education had its emphasis on the classics and religion because of the intellectual snobberies of the Victorian public school.  Another of Barnett’s arguments which he attributes to British economic decline was that between 1870-1914, there was a widespread distaste amongst industrial employers to recruit those with formal technical qualifications.  They preferred those people who were trained on the job, as they themselves had been.  What emerges here is a double bind.  Although Germany and America were turning out far more technically trained personnel in proportion to Britain, the British industry still had more than they wanted. 

        There is also the ‘third generation’ theory which argues that subsequent generations of businessmen are less and less inclined to be creative, innovative or willing to reinvest its profits, preferring to live lives of luxury and recreation.  This is linked with Barnett’s point on education, as these descendants are not receiving the education to help them effectively manage a family business.  However, historians tend to reject this theory of ‘conspicuous degeneracy’ as very few firms survived into the third generation. For those that did,  every example of ruined family businesses (Marshall’s, Napier), could be countered by a successful one (Pilkingtons, J&J Colman etc).  Third generation mismanagement would be minimised anyhow by the entry of new firms and the hiring of competent managers, by those who had no interest or knew their limitations.

E.J. Hobsbawm suggests that because Britain was at the top ‘politically and economically’, that British businesses fell into complacency and fell back on their earlier achievements, whilst regarding other nations with ‘a little contempt’.  There was not the same desire within British businesses to catch up, that is so readily clear in German industries.  The Germans even admitted as much, and is evident in the systematic way that German industry ploughed more and more capital into scientific research.  The same is true of the “typically American desire to have the latest and most up-to-date piece of mechanical equipment”, even when it was “quite economically irrational in origin”.

        The 1980s saw an increasing amount of support for the ‘institutionalist’ approach when explaining entrepreneurial failure.  This account went against the aforementioned neo-classical explanations of McCloskey, Floud and others.  The leading advocates of this rigid institution theory are Bernard Elbaum and William Lazonick.  It is their belief that rigid institutional structures  were developed during the nineteenth century, and it was the policies of the government, rather than ‘inherited cultural endowment’, that explain the main reason for Britain being less successful than other industrialising economies, particularly the USA and Germany.  “Entrenched institutional structures – in industrial relations, enterprise and market organisation, education, finance, international trade, and state-enterprise relations – constrained the transformation of Britain’s productive system”.

        Britain was also severely at a disadvantage with her rivals with regards to her trading policies.  The British economy had grown very strong during the era of free trade.  It had seen the cheap importation of foodstuffs and raw materials, which, in turn stimulated the demand for British goods.  Although Free Trade brought benefits to the economy, its effect upon British industry and manufacture was more ambiguous.  The growth of foreign industrialisation from 1870 onwards saw increased competition in Britain’s overseas markets.  More importantly, they were also able to challenge Britain in her domestic market.  This was made possible by those industrialising nations such as Germany and America because they imposed  protective tariffs on incoming foreign goods.  This meant British goods increased in cost, giving the advantage back to local industries.  Britain was the only leading trading nation to retain its Free Trade policy.  Joseph Chamberlain brought Free Trade to the fore as a major political and party political issue when he raised the agenda in May 1903, when he resigned from his position as Colonial Secretary.  

        Concern over Free Trade saw the formation of the National Fair Trade League in 1881, and by the 1890s, there were many Fair Trade Societies in Britain all advocating tariff protection for British industry, or it would mean the restriction in the growth of exports, investment and employment opportunities.  British business had little incentive to innovate or invest in new technologies if their industries were not protected.  This view was also echoed in the national and local press of the time.  In comparing British and American manufacture, the Sheffield Daily Telegraph in 1904, gave the main reason for the United States being more successful as “they put down expensive machinery without fear that production will be checked by hostile tariffs whereas our manufacturers hesitate to invest large sums in industries which may be exposed to ruin by tariffs”.

        It was not just through inaction that the government has been criticised.  Certain policies have also been seen as being detrimental to Britain’s economic growth.  Inadequate education provision, particularly in science and technology has come under attack.  Lack of funding in research and development was an obvious handicap for British industry.  Reforms in factory and working legislation and other protectionist policies also hindered development.  Certain specific legislation such as the ‘Red Flag Act’ of 1865 limited car speeds to four miles per hour and all vehicles had to be preceded by a man carrying a red flag. This severely restricted British car manufacturing until 1896.  Although this had a negative impact on the British motor car industry, by 1907 it still formed a sizeable part of the engineering industry, suggesting good entrepreneurial performance in a less than advantageous climate.  The Electric Lighting Act of 1882 enabled local authorities to take over private companies, thereby reducing the attraction of the electricity industry to private investors.  On the rare occasions the government did intervene, it was generally an unmitigated disaster for British industry.

        A final explanation and one that is perhaps the most commonly used and possibly the best justification of Britain’s industrial decline is what has come to be called the ‘early start’ thesis.  This rationalisation of British industry’s loss of dynamism is only the result that you would expect “ultimately of the early and long-sustained start as an industrial power”.  To be a pioneer of industrialisation is only possible with a special set of circumstances, which are never going to be maintained.  It is asking far too much for a nation to remain the most advanced and efficient in constantly changing economic, social and political conditions.  This was the case with Britain in the nineteenth century.  For nearly a century, British industry was at the forefront of nearly every technological breakthrough, yet it was only a matter of time till Britain was caught up.  Countries who started the industrial race after Britain had the advantage of being able to invest in the most modern and efficient equipment, while many British firms had to make do with out-dated industrial plant.  As newer technology invariably meant greater expense, it was not easy or perhaps ‘rational’ for a company to invest in newer machinery.  It was also very difficult to accomplish as it would involve large-scale co-operation between a lot of individual firms, where distrust and jealousy between industries were clearly prevalent. 

        In terms of innovation, there were indeed many technological advances in Britain in this period, but there were indeed some significant industries where the adoption of new methods either did not occur, or did so at a negligible rate.  This is particularly the case in the staple industries and particularly the coal industry.  The output from British pits constantly increased during 1870-1914 (see Table 1.1), but although production rose, productivity (the output per worker) actually fell, and this was due to the huge increase in the number of workers.  So, it was not through advanced coal mining methods that output increased.  Various mechanised methods of coal extraction were being pioneered and used in Germany and the USA at the same time when Britain’s coal was still being extracted by old-fashioned methods.  However, it was not just in the staple industries that complaints of inefficiency and failure can be found, but also in the newer industries.  The development of electrical supply and engineering industries has also been attacked.  Despite being invented in England the “UK industry lagged behind American practice; many businessmen were dubious about its future and unwilling to risk introducing electrical plant”.

        It was not all doom and gloom as some historians would like us to believe, there were some notable areas of entrepreneurial endeavour.  The British bicycle industry was more than equal to the task of competing with the challenge of American competition, and was thriving by the start of the twentieth century, exporting 150,000 cycles by 1913, over fifty per cent more than Germany.  This was due to successful entrepreneurial activity in standardising, mass producing and selling low-cost bicycles to a wider market.  Specialist steels (especially from the Sheffield area), cigarettes, manmade fibres, armaments and the motor car industry were also very successfully manufactured and were able to match the performances of other leading export nations.

        Through the course of the debate on the performance of the entrepreneur, it is quite clear that the argument for entrepreneurial weakness as advocated vehemently by Landes, Aldcroft and others is based on a somewhat limited set of facts.  This is also the central problem with making a qualitative assessment of British industry, where for every case study there can be seen to be an example of entrepreneurial weakness, such as Burn’s and Burnham and Hoskins’ study on iron and steel, there are alternative views showing entrepreneurial innovation and creativity, as in Wilson’s study of Unilever soap.  This ‘arguing by example’ is clearly of limited use.  In 1969, Eric Sigsworth asked “....can we still continue to generalise with such certainty about the characteristics of the ‘British entrepreneur’ between 1870 and 1914?  It is not simply that as between industries, British entrepreneurial performance was ‘patchy’ and that a patchiness existed in ‘old’ industries as well as ‘new’, but that within industries, there existed marked differences in performance between different sections and, within sections, between different firms....can we continue to accept generalised explanations about characteristics which, in so far as they amounted to ‘short-comings’ or even ‘failure’, were so variously distributed?”.

        The work of Landes and Aldcroft, stressed the fall in entrepreneurial performance, offering examples, showing what they believe implicitly to be illustrative of poor industrial leadership and management.  The main focus of their theories, being the poor response of British businessmen in adopting the latest techniques and machinery.  However, by using the same statistical indicators, historians such as Charles Wilson, S.B. Saul were quick to dispute the claims of Landes and Aldcroft, by showing examples of industries that were more productive and profitable than their American and German counterparts.  The quantitative assessments of McCloskey, Sandberg and Floud have opened the debate up to further controversial discussion.  Although there work is of equal and perhaps greater merit than the early hypothesis of entrepreneurial failure, it is by no way fully conclusive.

        Ultimately any judgement made on the performance of British entrepreneurs or on the decline of British industrial performance is dependent upon the historian’s choice of performance indicators.  Entrepreneurial activity as this essay has shown, is not a factor in itself to explain the relative decline of the economy or the comparatively poor performance of British industrial production.  It is difficult to ascertain whether an entrepreneur’s aims and goals are going to be those that prove to be the best thing for the national economy.  There clearly was not a typical Victorian entrepreneur, some were disappointing, particularly in the older staple industries, but they were not characteristic of the period as a whole.  Successes could also be found in the newer industries and within the service industry, but again, this is not characteristic either.  There are also regional disparities where cases of entrepreneurial endeavour and failure can be seen.  At this moment in time there is simply not enough statistical evidence or enough detailed case studies to either be able to condemn the late Victorian and Edwardian entrepreneur, or redeem him.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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