Читать книгу From Empire to Europe: The Decline and Revival of British Industry Since the Second World War - Geoffrey Owen - Страница 7

There is a widely held view that British industrial decline began in the closing decades of the nineteenth century and has continued remorselessly ever since. According to this account, British entrepreneurs, having led the world in the first industrial revolution, failed to adapt to competition from the two late-industrialising countries, Germany and the US. British industry was locked into a set of institutions and management practices which had become obsolete. The financial system was not well organised to supply risk capital for the new industries of the second industrial revolution; the education system did not produce enough scientists and engineers; and the labour relations system slowed down the introduction of new manufacturing methods.

It is certainly true that Britain was caught up by the US and Germany between 1870 and 1914. It is also true that the institutions and capabilities which the two late-comers developed were different from those on which the British industrial revolution had been based. One well-known example is the emergence in Germany of the big universal banks, led by Deutsche Bank, which made long-term loans to their industrial clients and organised stock market flotations for them, while British banks concentrated almost entirely on short-term lending. Another is the creation in the US towards the end of the nineteenth century of large, professionally managed corporations, while British businessmen still clung to what Alfred Chandler, the American business historian, has called personal capitalism – a structure of small, family-controlled firms, lacking the economies of scale enjoyed by their US counterparts.¹

A much-debated issue is whether Britain’s inability to match these and other innovations constitutes an entrepreneurial failure, and, if so, whether the failure was sufficiently serious and long-lasting to be relevant to what happened after 1945. Was it a disadvantage to have come first?