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Business History and the History of Technology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Paul Uselding
Paul Uselding
Affiliation:
Professor of Economics, University of Illinois
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Abstract

Business enterprise in a market setting is the principal institutional artifact of capitalism, while capitalism itself is the creation of powerful evolutionary forces that were present in the culture of Europe. Those evolutionary forces continue their play into the present, working within the distinctive cultural context determined by an evolving capitalism. Every type and style of history dealing with European society and its offshoots must ultimately face and accommodate this central historical fact if it is to generalize its findings and acquire real intellectual weight and significance.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 54 , Issue 4: Business History and the History of Technology , Winter 1980 , pp. 443 - 452
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1980

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References

1 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Strategy and Structure: Chapters in the History of the Industrial Enterprise (Cambridge, Mass., 1962)Google Scholar and The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977). Landes, David, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe From 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, England, 1969).Google Scholar

2 Karl Marx and Frederich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 1848; and Marx, Karl, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, translated by Stone, N. I. (New York, 1904).Google Scholar

3 I am indebted to my colleague Fred Gottheil for this interpretation.

4 Veblen, Thorstein, The Theory of Business Enterprise (New York, 1904).Google Scholar

5 Schumpeter, Joseph, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York, 1950)Google Scholar and History of Economic Analysis (New York, 1954).

6 Bishop, J.Leander, A History of American Manufacturers from 1608 to 1860, 3 volumes (Philadelphia, 1868)Google Scholar; Clark, Victor S., History of Manufactures in the United States, 3 volumes (Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1929).Google Scholar Representative examples of the Harvard Studies are Gibb, George S., The Saco-Lowell Shops: Textile Machinery Building in New England (Cambridge, Mass., 1950)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Navin, Thomas R., The Whitin Machine Works Since 1831; A Textile Machinery Company in an Industrial Village (Cambridge, Mass., 1950).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 See, Cole, Arthur, Business Enterprise in Its Social Setting (Cambridge, Mass., 1959).Google Scholar