Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880–1914: Enterprise and Culture. By Andrew Godley. Basingstoke, England, and New York: Palgrave, 2001. Pp. xii, 187. $60.00.

Extract

In this imaginative and readable book, Andrew Godley argues that culture matters in economics, and that some cultural traits encourage entrepreneurship, and therefore material prosperity, more than others. More specifically, he joins debates among British historians over the causes for Britain's relative economic decline around the turn of the twentieth century. He argues that British culture was in fact anti-entrepreneurial and concludes that this was likely to have had a negative impact on the country's economic fortunes. This is, therefore, really a book about Britain and its economic culture. Though it certainly has interesting insights into Jewish history as well; the author uses the Jews primarily as a “control group” in his historical “experiment.”