The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times

Published by EH.NET (May 2010)

David S. Landes, Joel Mokyr and William J. Baumol , editors, The Invention of Enterprise: Entrepreneurship from Ancient Mesopotamia to Modern Times. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010. xv + 566 pp. $49.50 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-691-14370-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Mansel G. Blackford, Department of History, Ohio State University.

?

The second volume published in the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation?s Series on Innovation and Entrepreneurship, this collection of eighteen essays explores entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development in parts of the world from ancient times to the present.? This work, states William J. Baumol, an economist at New York University and one of the study?s editors, was designed to test three basic hypotheses: 1) ?that the practical utilization of inventions? and accompanying economic growth would be lower without the work of entrepreneurs; 2) that ?entrepreneurial activities are not always productive?;? and 3) that ?the direction taken by entrepreneurial activity depends heavily, at any particular time and in any particular society, on the prevailing institutional arrangements? (p. ix).? David Landes, another editor and an economic historian at Harvard University, argues further that ?the countries and regions that have done best are precisely those that have taken advantage of the opportunities offered by active trade and entrepreneurial freedom.?? Those areas, Landes claims, have been mainly in the West, with ?China and the Arabic Middle East? offering ?pungent case studies? of ?resistance to innovation?(p. 2) — surely an outdated assertion.? The essays comprising this volume bear out Baumol?s hypotheses, but not the statements made by Landes.[1]

Six essays investigate preindustrial entrepreneurship and innovation.? Michael Hudson explores the development of entrepreneurship and business enterprises in ancient Mesopotamia (3500-1200 BC), where the association of businesses with public temples and palaces led to a commercial take off.? Many of the business practices first created in Mesopotamia — the use of money, uniform weights and measures, price systems, interest charges, and profit-sharing — Hudson shows, then spread to the Mediterranean world, only to collapse in Roman times.? In an essay on the Neo-Babylonian Empire (626-539 BC), Cornelia Welch looks at family entrepreneurship in agriculture and trade.? Particularly valuable is her case study of the Egibi family, which left an archive of 2,000 cuneiform tablets spanning five generations.? ?The Egibi family represents,? she concludes, ?an outstanding example of Schumpeter?s idea that the main entrepreneurial opportunities for profit or quasi-rent lie in creating new business opportunities.?? The Egibi family had ?far-flung operations? based on a ?marketing plan that integrated agricultural production, tax payments, and the shipment of crops to cities along Babylon?s canal system? (p. 53).? Timur Kuran claims that Islam first spurred entrepreneurship and economic development in the Middle East by creating ?institutions well suited to personal exchange,? but later ?became a source of retardation with the transition to impersonal exchange.?? Islamic institutions, Kuran finds, ?supported small-scale entrepreneurship,? but ?inhibited larger-scale entrepreneurship? (p. 63).? James Murray suggests that the European Middle Ages ?deserve a special place in the history of entrepreneurship,? for by 1500 merchants ?came to direct many of society?s ?productive forces?? (p. 88).? John Munro then examines the ideas of Max Weber and Richard Tawney, about economic development.? He finds that the alterations in mindsets and institutions that Tawney claimed were needed as precursors to industrialization in Great Britain occurred in 1640-1740, not, as Tawney posited, a century earlier.? Oscar Gelderblom defines entrepreneurs broadly as ?not just merchants involved in long-distance trade, but also shipmasters, fishermen, millwrights, farmers, artisans, and shopkeepers,? in arguing for the importance of entrepreneurial actions as the sources of economic development in the Dutch Republic between 1580 and 1650 (p. 156).

Eight essays probe entrepreneurship in Western Europe and the United States during industrial and post-industrial times.? Joel Mokyr, the third editor of this volume and a faculty member in history and economics at Northwestern University and Tel Aviv University, argues for the importance of institutions, especially informal ones such as codes of conduct, as stimuli for entrepreneurship in industrializing Great Britain.? In two jointly authored essays, Mark Casson and Andrew Godley debunk the idea that entrepreneurial failure retarded British economic development in the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries — a well-worn topic.? They find that entrepreneurs rationally shifted their attentions from manufacturing to infrastructural projects and other undertakings (such as finance) in Great Britain and abroad, in which they were very successful.? Ulrich Wengenroth surveys the ?tortured? history of entrepreneurship in Germany from the early 1800s to the present, emphasizing the roles institutions (including educational ones) played in creating opportunities for innovation.? Pulling no punches, he also looks at anti-Semitism and the unbalanced nature of Germany?s economy, which he concludes became over-industrialized and lacking in service businesses.? Turning to France, Michael Hau presents a picture of varying regional developments and changing roles taken by the national government, concluding that after declining in importance for several decades after World War II ?entrepreneurs have greatly gained in power? in the present day (p. 323).? Louis Cain examines entrepreneurship in the antebellum United States, first exploring innovations in law, finance, and transportation that allowed entrepreneurship to flourish and then describing the processes of industrialization and the diffusion of products to American markets.? Discussing the United States between 1865 and 1920, Naomi Lamoreaux stresses the importance of institutions, including federal and state governments, and big businesses, which encouraged entrepreneurship.? In a particularly wide-ranging essay, Margaret Graham offers a nuanced picture of American entrepreneurship after 1920, looking at the varied roles played by people in companies of all sizes and in many sectors of the economy.

Three essays and a short conclusion complete the volume.? Susan Wolcott examines supplies of financial credit, especially ?informal? types, available to entrepreneurs in Colonial India.? She addresses issues about economic growth in India from the 1700s to the present, emphasizing the importance of family and ethnic networks defined, in part, by caste distinctions.? Wolcott concludes that, while such networks and the informal credit they commanded initially aided economic development, they ultimately limited business development — a finding similar to Kuran?s conclusions about the Islamic Middle East.? Wellington Chan looks at entrepreneurship and innovation in China from the late 1800s, emphasizing continuities in stressing the roles personal relationships and networks have played for business people throughout Chinese history.? ?Chinese entrepreneurship,? Chan concludes, ?has always been an inherent part of Chinese history and tradition? (p. 495).? Seiichiro Yonekura and Hiroshi Shimazu find entrepreneurship at the core of the development of zaibatsu in Japan before World War II and present accounts of the development of Mitsui and Mitsubishi, unfortunately ignoring the significant roles small and medium size business played in Japan?s economic development.? Finally, Baumol and Robert Strom (a director of the Kauffman Foundation) offer short concluding remarks underlining the importance of cultural developments and institutions for the evolution of entrepreneurship and innovation over time.

Anyone interested in entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic development will find much to ponder in this work, and extensive multilingual notes and bibliographies at the end of each essay will lead readers to additional sources.? However, even such an extensive volume as this one has limitations.? The focus is clearly on Western Europe and the United States.? Only a few essays examine developments in Asia and the Middle East, and none look at entrepreneurship in Latin America or Africa.? Then too, most of the essays approach entrepreneurship and innovation from the vantage points of economics and economic history.? The substantial contributions of business historians — Harold Livesay, Thomas McCraw, and William Lazonick, among many others, come to mind — are largely ignored.[2]? Moreover, the authors of the essays follow no commonly agreed-upon definition of entrepreneurship, making cross-national comparisons difficult.? Most of the authors bow in the direction of Joseph Schumpeter, but essentially fail to adopt a common approach.? I was disappointed that little effort was expended by the editors or authors to reach comparisons across boundaries of time or space.? For the most part, this study consists of fairly traditional national studies. ?Ironically for a book about innovation, this volume contains little in the way of conceptual breakthroughs.? The authors might well have explored more fully innovative business networks and industrial districts that often spread across national lines, especially in modern times.[3].? Even with these caveats, however, I think these essays deserve close consideration, as much for the questions they raise as for the answers they give about innovation and entrepreneurship.

Notes:

1. On innovation in China, see for example, William T. Rowe, China?s Last Empire: The Great Qing (Cambridge, 2009); and Peter Zarrow, China in War and Revolution, 1895-1949 (London, 2005).? Landes? main source on Islamic developments is Bernard Lewis, _What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East_ (Oxford, 2002), a one-sided study.

2. Harold Livesay, American Made: Shapers of the American Economy (New York, 2007); William Lazonick, ?Business History and Economic Development,? in Geoffrey Jones and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Business History (Oxford, 2007), 67-95; and Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Cambridge, MA, 2007).

3. See, for example, Louis Galambos and Jane Eliot Sewell, Networks of Innovation: Vaccine Development at Merck, Sharpe & Dohme, and Mulford, 1895-1995 (Cambridge, 1995); and Charles Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin, eds., World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge, 1995).

?

Mansel G. Blackford is a business historian at Ohio State University and, most recently, is the author of The Rise of Modern Business: Great Britain, the United States, Germany, Japan, and China Chapel Hill, 2008 (third edition).