| The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship From Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times |
| David S Landes, Joel Mokyr and William J Baumol (eds), Princeton University Press, 2010, 566 pages, £34.95. |
| At the end of his life, Joseph Schumpeter, wrote: “If, starting my work in economics afresh, I were told that I could study only one of history, statistics or theory, but could have my choice, it would be economic history that I should choose.” (Quoted in Thomas K McCraw, ‘Schumpeter’s Business Cycles as Business History’, Business History Review, Vol 80 No. 2 (Summer 2006), pp 231-262.) The three editors of this volume – two economic historians (Landes and Mokyr) and an economist (Baumol) – have taken this comment to heart and produced a book that aims to get insight into the nature of entrepreneurship through historical study. |
| The book is broad in scope. It is structured chronologically and covers a period starting several millennia BC up to about ten years ago, and a geographical area that includes many corners of Eurasia and North America. Each of the chapters focusing on a region and a time period and is written by an academic expert on the topic. |
| An introductory chapter by Landes is followed by a broad essay by Michael Hudson on entrepreneurship in Antiquity, followed in its turn by Cornelia Wunsch’s detailed case study of a Neo-Babylonian entre-preneurial family. Timur Kuran discusses the allegedly inhibitive role of Islamic institutions on entrepreneurship in the Middle-East, James Murray examines entrepreneurship in medieval Europe, and John Munro the role of Protestantism on entrepreneurship in early modern England and Scotland (the ‘Weber-Tawney thesis’). Oscar Gelderblom studies the golden age of the Dutch Republic, Mokyr the British industrial revolution, Mark Casson and Andrew Godley entrepreneurship in Britain from 1830 to 2000, Ulrich Wengeroth the history of entrepreneurship in Germany after 1815, Michel Hau entrepreneurship in France. Louis Cain, Naomi Lamoreaux and Margaret Graham examine respectively the antebellum US, the US between 1865 and 1920, and the US since 1920. Susan Wolcott studies the financing of entrepreneurship in colonial India, Wellington Chan Chinese entrepreneurship in the late Imperial period, and Seiichiro Yonekura and Hiroshi Shimizu the role of Zaibatsu in pre-war Japan. A broad essay by Baumol and Robert Strom concludes the volume. |
| The book is an open-ended investigation into the nature of entrepreneurship, and several themes run through the chapters. Factors that can affect entrepreneurship, such as culture, religion and institutions receive abundant attention. Temples, for example, were institutions that could both significantly enable and limit entrepreneurship in the ancient world. Baumol emphasizes the distinction between productive, value-creating entrepreneurship and unproductive entrepreneurship such as crime, extortion or striving for government monopolies, and between replicative and innovative entrepreneurs. The best outcome, he argues, is the productive-innovative entrepreneur, and countries that achieved this outcome often did so partly by historical accident – which raises the question whether it was the accidents that mattered or how societies reacted to them. |
| The book is an important complement to the existing business and economic history literature, which typically discusses individual firms or entrepreneurial themes within one country. As with any edited history, one can always quibble about the coverage. Essays on Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Australia are conspicuously absent, though one is aware of the enormity of trying to include every region, country and period. Nevertheless, the wide coverage, together with the excellent index, makes the book especially useful as a reference work for business economists interested in history. |
| In all, this fascinating volume is a major contribution to the history and economics of entrepreneurship. It is highly recommended to those interested in entrepreneurship from a broad comparative and historical perspective. |
| Gerben Bakker |
| Lecturer in Economic History and Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and author of ‘Entertainment Industrialised: The Emergence of the International Film Industry 1890-1940’, (Cambridge University Press, 2008) |
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