Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Piscatorial politics in the early Parliaments of Elizabeth I
- 2 Marriage as business: opinions on the rise in aristocratic bridal portions in early modern England
- 3 Age and accumulation in the London business community, 1665–1720
- 4 The use and abuse of credit in eighteenth-century England
- 5 Convicts, commerce and sovereignty: the forces behind the early settlement of Australia
- 6 ‘Gentleman and Players’ revisited: the gentlemanly ideal, the business ideal and the professional ideal in English literary culture
- 7 The City, entrepreneurship and insurance: two pioneers in invisible exports – the Phoenix Fire Office and the Royal of Liverpool, 1800–90
- 8 ‘At the head of all the new professions’: the engineer in Victorian society
- 9 Bernard Shaw, Bertold Brecht and the businessman in literature
- 10 Lost opportunities: British business and businessmen during the First World War
- 11 Ideology or pragmatism? The nationalization of coal, 1916–46
- Bibliography of D. C. Coleman's published works
- Index
10 - Lost opportunities: British business and businessmen during the First World War
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- List of contributors
- 1 Piscatorial politics in the early Parliaments of Elizabeth I
- 2 Marriage as business: opinions on the rise in aristocratic bridal portions in early modern England
- 3 Age and accumulation in the London business community, 1665–1720
- 4 The use and abuse of credit in eighteenth-century England
- 5 Convicts, commerce and sovereignty: the forces behind the early settlement of Australia
- 6 ‘Gentleman and Players’ revisited: the gentlemanly ideal, the business ideal and the professional ideal in English literary culture
- 7 The City, entrepreneurship and insurance: two pioneers in invisible exports – the Phoenix Fire Office and the Royal of Liverpool, 1800–90
- 8 ‘At the head of all the new professions’: the engineer in Victorian society
- 9 Bernard Shaw, Bertold Brecht and the businessman in literature
- 10 Lost opportunities: British business and businessmen during the First World War
- 11 Ideology or pragmatism? The nationalization of coal, 1916–46
- Bibliography of D. C. Coleman's published works
- Index
Summary
Donald Coleman has provided us with a characteristically succinct account of Courtaulds' war:
Despite the involvement of this country in four years' grim and expensive warfare, Courtaulds were able, during this time, to sell all the artificial silk they could make: and sell it, moreover, at prices which rose more than did the general level of prices.… Such weakening as there was in the support which the monopoly derived from its patents was amply balanced by the circumstances of war. What the second international consortium failed to do when it collapsed, the war achieved by narrowing, in some places completely shutting off, the channels of trade.
Such a description appears somewhat heretical when compared with more general accounts of the impact of the First World War on the British economy; though it is important to note that most attention has been given to the immediate postwar period while discussions of the war years themselves have tended to concentrate on the ways in which extraordinary financial, production and manpower needs were met. As to the economic effects of the war, two main lines of argument emerge from the literature. One concludes that it had powerfully damaging consequences which continued well into the 1920s and even beyond.The other seeks to show that the war exacerbated longer-term problems affecting the British economy through the scale, nature and speed of its demands, and through thedistortions it caused in international trade and finance; altogether, it is alleged,this made it much more difficult to achieve necessary structural changes, in particular in the industrial sector.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Business Life and Public PolicyEssays in Honour of D. C. Coleman, pp. 205 - 227Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1986
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