David S. Landes

French Entrepreneurship and Industrial Growth in the Nineteenth Century

The study of French enterprise and entrepreneurship is rewarding for two major reasons. In the first place, anything that will help explain the present weakness of French industry and commerce throws light in turn on one of the most important political phenomena of the last 150 years: the fall of France from hegemony under Napoleon to the position she holds today. Secondly, the history of French business and businessmen is significant precisely because of Frances relatively minor place in the economic world. If we are to weigh the validity of the recent emphasis of theorists on the role of the entrepreneur qua se in the over-all process of economic change—on the contribution of the personal element to the impersonal operation of the system—we must consider not only the more “modern†nations but those less industrialized as well. It will not suffice to study the progress of American or German business and deduce therefrom impressive theories on the importance of the businessman. The converse must also be examined: To what extent are certain attitudes and values inimical to the development of enterprise ? Or concretely in the case of France, to what extent have the character and mentality of the French financier, industrialist, or merchant been responsible for the relatively retarded status of the countrys economy ?

The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times

Whether hailed as heroes or cast as threats to social order, entrepreneurs--and their innovations--have had an enormous influence on the growth and prosperity of nations. The Invention of Enterprise gathers together, for the first time, leading economic historians to explore the entrepreneurs role in society from antiquity to the present. Addressing social and institutional influences from a historical context, each chapter examines entrepreneurship during a particular period and in an important geographic location. The book chronicles the sweeping history of enterprise in Mesopotamia and Neo-Babylon; carries the reader through the Islamic Middle East; offers insights into the entrepreneurial history of China, Japan, and Colonial India; and describes the crucial role of the entrepreneur in innovative activity in Europe and the United States, from the medieval period to today. In considering the critical contributions of entrepreneurship, the authors discuss why entrepreneurial activities are not always productive and may even sabotage prosperity. They examine the institutions and restrictions that have enabled or impeded innovation, and the incentives for the adoption and dissemination of inventions. They also describe the wide variations in global entrepreneurial activity during different historical periods and the similarities in development, as well as entrepreneurships role in economic growth. The book is filled with past examples and events that provide lessons for promoting and successfully pursuing contemporary entrepreneurship as a means of contributing to the welfare of society. The Invention of Enterprise lays out a definitive picture for all who seek an understanding of innovations central place in our world.

The making of technological man : the social origins of French engineering education

In this book, Weiss traces the rise of the professional class of ingenieurs civils - in France, engineers of whatever specialty who did not work for the state but were employed by industrial firms or operated on their own elsewhere in the private sector. In particular, his book is a study of the primary source of such engineers - the Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures - from its founding in 1829 to that watershed year in French history, 1848.One of the books conclusions is that the schools formal curriculum and social ambience did not prepare its graduates to deal explicitly with political, economic, philosophical, or cultural matters, producing engineers with little understanding of the social implications of technological change. Its findings parallel evaluations of technical institutions - including MIT - that were founded later and in other countries and that were based on the original Parisian school.John Hubbel Weiss is Assistant Professor of History at Cornell.

Watchmaking: A Case Study in Enterprise and Change

From its beginnings in sixteenth century southern Germany, Professor Landes traces the development of the personal timepiece industry to France, where the design of watches as items of personal adornment reached its peak; to England, where precision in timekeeping and rationalization of manufacture were developed to new heights; to Switzerland, where manufacture on a mass scale for a highly diverse market was attained; and, finally, to America, where the technique of assembling mechanical devices from precision-machined interchangeable parts was applied to watchmaking with the same success it had achieved in less demanding applications. He discusses the sociological factors that produced the Swiss industry in a region of seemingly little promise, and demonstrates how these factors made the Swiss more successful than the Germans, French, or English.

The Statistical Study of French Crises

Two major themes have been developed by Ernest Labrousse in his well-known works on prices and income. One, a reinterpretation of the origins of the French Revolution, does not concern us here. The other, a theory of an agriculturally determined business cycle, has recently been confirmed for the early nineteenth century by a young historian and student of Labrousse, M. A. Chabert, and forms the subject of this paper. Chaberts first work offered time series of French prices from 1798 to 1820, a hitherto neglected interval falling between the monetary anarchy of the assignats and the period covered by the tables of the Bureau de la Statistique GA©nA©rale. He has followed this with a more ambitious effort, a general study of the social and economic development of France during the same years, as reflected in the price series already presented and other data assembled since.

Wirtschafts- und sozialgeschichtliche Probleme der frühen Industrialisierung

Den Kern der vorliegenden Arbeit bilden Vortrage die im Laufe der Jahre 1964 bis 1966 an der Freien Universitat gehalten wurden.

The ‘Great Drain’ and Industrialisation: Commodity Flows from Periphery to Centre in Historical Perspective

The economic development of the industrial nations of Europe may be envisaged and analysed from many points of view. One of these, which will form the subject of this paper, is the commercial: European industrialisation as the outcome of a millennial Smithian process of division of labour between Europe as manufacturing Centre, workshop to the world, and the other countries as agrarian and mining Periphery, purveyor of raw materials in exchange for Europe’s manufactures.