For generations, the uneasy relationship between Britain and France has captured the popular and scholarly imagination. Comparative studies between the two countries abound, from political systems to eating habits: so far they have not extended to business history.
There is now growing interest in comparative business systems, practices, and performance. In these areas comparison with America, Germany, or Japan have taken precedence. This volume, with contributions from leading British and French experts, explores comparative developments and trends in the two countries which for so long...

Francois Crouzet is one of the most distinguished economic historians in the world whose life's work has been largely devoted to the study of European industrialization. In Britain Ascendant, a collection of essays spanning his career, he examines the rise of Britain to the position of dominance in the world economy in the nineteenth century and the concomitant decline of France. Special attention is paid to the problems of capital formation, foreign trade and the Empire. In later chapters, Crouzet examines the Anglo-French relationship up to the present day, attacking conventional wisdom and...

The 'first industrialists' were the pioneers and leaders of the British Industrial Revolution, the men who founded factories and other large establishments, which were typical of the new economic system. They had a number of precursors since the sixteenth century, but, on the whole, they were a new breed, which emerged in the late eighteenth century. They were markedly different from the leaders of traditional industry. This book is focused on the social and occupational origins of those founders of modem British industry: what kind of families did they come from? What was their occupation...

Britain's role in the mid-nineteenth century as the world's greatest economic power was an extraordinary phenomenon, foreshadowed in the Industrial Revolution of the century before and originating from a unique combination of global and indigenous factors. In this study Francois Crouzet analyses the growth and - in late Victorian Britain - decline of the nation's economy, drawing on an immense amount of quantitative data to examine and explain its development. The book begins with a macroeconomic survey of the period, reviewing broad fluctuations in economic growth and the question of the...