Event overview
A forgotten chapter of the history of entrepreneurship in the 18th century
It is often believed that the writings of early British economists have very little to offer when it comes to reflections on the functions and nature of entrepreneurship. As early as 1814, the Frenchman Jean Baptiste Say, known for his own discussions of the roles of the entrepreneur, pointed out what he considered the paradoxical fact that while England ‘owes its immense wealth […] to the remarkable talent of its entrepreneurs for useful applications [of inventions]’, at the same time ‘the English have no word to convey the industrial entrepreneur’. Ever since, commentators have mostly considered early thinking about entrepreneurship, as Schumpeter (1954, 555) suggested, as a ‘French tradition’.
This paper challenges this dominant view. By the mid-18th century there existed in Britain several dispersed writings that discussed the significance of individuals introducing ‘ingenuous’ new products and processes, or who risked their fortunes in uncertain business ventures. In fact, many of these contributions were brought together in a single publication, Malachy Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1751-1755). It is shown that this work contains two clusters of entries that each develop a separate conception of entrepreneurship. On the one hand, entries like ‘Cash’ and ‘Circulation’ present Richard Cantillon’s conception of the entrepreneur as a businessman who works for his own account and who, faced with expenses that are ‘fixed’ before he is able to sell at unknown prices, is portrayed as the main risktaker within the commercial system. Cantillon’s account is more profound than is often assumed, as will be shown, but it does pay scant attention to the entrepreneur as innovator. In other entries, however, drawing on different literatures Postlethwayt does present the entrepreneur as a crucial agent of change, a Baconian entrepreneur who is responsible for ‘the invention of new arts, new trades, and new manufactures, as well as the improvement of the old’.
After presenting both accounts of entrepreneurship, the paper concludes with suggestions why this rich literature on entrepreneurs, even when collated in a single and at the time famous publication, was subsequently ignored. The main suggestion will be that these contributions were associated with a kind of enlightened mercantilism that advocated the nurturing of the nation’s trades. This kind of effort fell foul of the free trade doctrines of the next generations.
Dr Richard van den Berg is Associate Professor at Kingston Business School, Kingston University.
(Illustration: William Hogarth. 1734. ©Sir John Soane's Museum)
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Mar 2023 | 5:00pm - 6:45pm |
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