Enterprise and Technology: The German and British Steel Industries, 1897-1914

by Ulrich Wengenroth

Overview

This is a detailed account of the British and German steel industries' performance during three decades that were marked by dramatic change. Relying on governmental and corporate archives as well as on the contemporary trade literature, Professor Wengenroth has drawn a meticulous picture of how managements in the two countries met the strategic problems raised by these changes. The author does not however merely trace technological developments; rather, he uses them as a backdrop for a contribution to the long-running debate on Britain's relative industrial decline in the late nineteenth century.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780521384254
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	10/21/1993
Pages:	308
Product dimensions:	5.98(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.83(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. The technology of late nineteenth-century steelmaking; 2. Expanding into the Slump: the railways as major customers of the new steel industry; 3. Surmounting the Slump: the individual strategies of firms; 4. Surmounting the Slump: collective strategies; 5. New processes and new markets; 6. Efficiency and capacity for innovation; Sources and bibliography; Index.

Editorial Reviews

"Tenison is to be congratulated on a felicitous translation." Journal of Interdisciplinary History

"...an outstanding analysis of technological change in the German and British steel industries." Charles K. Hyde, Journal of Economic History

"...Enterprise and Technology, by a Munich-based historian who has worked extensively in both German and British primary sources, breaks new ground in a variety of ways....it makes a real and important contribution to economic history and, in particular, to comparative national surveys of a detailed and searching kind." W.D. Rubinstein, Victorian Studies

"Ulrich Wengenroth has produced a fine history of the two main steelmaking industries of Europe in the late nineteenth century....Wengenroth's clear and deeply researched book will be important reading for anyone working on the economic history of Britain and Germany in the late nineteenth century." Steven Webb, Central European History

From the Publisher