The long-running debate on Britain's apparent economic decline in the last 120 years (not exactly noticeable in the living standards of ordinary people, which have risen enormously in that time) has generated a large economic and statistical literature and a great deal of heat in rival social and cultural explanations. The 'decline' has been confidently attributed to the permeation of the business elite by the anti-industrial and anti-commercial attitudes communicated by public schools and the old universities through their propagation of aristocratic and gentry values; and the readiness of the buiness elite to be thus permeated has been ascribed to the persistent tendency of new men of wealth to transform themselves into landed gentlemen. There have been equally confident claims to have overturned this traditional view that wealthy merchants and industrialists sought to acquire landed estates and country houses, and to have established that 'gentlemanly values' were in fact economically advantageous to Britain because she never was a primarily industrial economy. In this book, Professor Thompson subjects these interpretations to the test of the actual evidence, and firmly re-establishes the conventional wisdom on the characteristic desire of new money to acquire land and a place in the country, an aspiration which continues to be manifest today. At the same time, he shows that aristocratic and gentry cultures have not by any means been consistently anti-industrial or anti-business, and that many of the businessmen-turned-landowners have in fact not turned their backs on industry, but have founded business dynasties. Gentrification has indeed occurred ona large scale over the last two hundred years, but has had no discernible effects one way or the other on Britain' economic performance.
Reviews
Michael Thompson brings to his task his usual attributes of a sharp, liberal intelligence, an elegant style and much wit ... easy and enjoyable to read. * Labour History Review *
This book is a thoughtful probe of the normative assumptions of the last two hundred years. It is a wonderful work, and sparkles with the wisdom and wit first seen in Thompson's classic English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century. Not only is it rich and profound, it is remarkably brief, and always a pleasure to read. The book is a gift which no one else could confer, another high peak for a master scholar. * English Historical Review *
Michael Thompson's 1994 Ford Lectures, now published as Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture, will delight business historians. It is a measured distillation of half a century's distinguised research and writing on British landed society and social history. No historian better understands the world and workings of the landed classes in the last 200 years. * Business History *
The book concludes with an excellent chapter surveying the literature of cultural explanations of entrepreneurial failure, a good starting point for students and teachers alike on the subject. * Business History *
This is a book which can be read with considerable intellectual profit: it is elegantly written, well structured in terms of analytical progression, and offers a paradigmatic example of the historian's craft in summarizing and commenting upon a controversial literature. * The Economic History Review *
This admirable study should be required reading for students of British economic history in the modern period ... Thompson's evidence is the product of his unrivalled knowledge of the social and economic history of landownership in Britain during this period. * The Economic History Review *
The publication of Thompson's lectures under the title of Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture will be seen as perhaps the standard discussion on the subject ... The result is among the most intelligent and sensible series of historical essays to have been published in recent years, devoid of verbiage but animated by Thompson's wit and dry humour ... These outstanding essays represent a life-time's reflection on some of the key questions of twentieth-century British social history by one of it's great exponents, a man who has had a wholly beneficial influence on the discipline, both in an academic and personal sense. Britain's upper classes may well have changed so markedly that no gentleman therein remains, but one notes with satisfaction that at least one may still be found in British academic life. * William D. Rubinstein, Times Literary Supplement *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199243303
Author Prof F. M. L. Thompson
Format Hardback
Page Count 210
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 460g
Dimensions(mm) 242mm * 164mm * 17mm