Mark Casson’s 1982 book The Entrepreneur is well-known for helping to launch the renaissance in entrepreneurial studies of the past thirty years. In this latest volume, he and co-author Catherine Casson take on a new and important project, namely, a survey of entrepreneurial history. Happily, they tend to deliver what they promise: a thoughtful and engaging history of entrepreneurship written in light of sound economic thinking.

This working paper seeks to integrate the role of entrepreneurship and firms into debates on why the Rest was slow to catch up with the West following the Industrial Revolution and the advent of modern economic growth. It was been suggested that poor human capital development and deficient institutions are important, but not sufficient, explanations. The emphasis on national-level institutions seems particularly unhelpful given strong regional variations in business activities between countries. The impact of institutions on the allocation of entrepreneurship between productive and redistributive activities takes the analysis to a deeper level, without entirely solving the problem, as the slow development of modern business in colonial India, and its skewed ownership, indicates. Entrepreneurs were also actors and not simply responders to institutions and resource endowments. They could train their own workers and they introduce investor protection into their own byelaws. It is evident that once the process of modern economic growth had started catch-up was surprisingly difficult in much of the Rest, if less so neighboring regions of the original North Sea industrializers. The societal and cultural embeddedness of new technologies posed significant entrepreneurial challenges in the Rest. The best equipped to overcome these challenges were often entrepreneurs based in minorities who held significant advantages in capital-raising and trust levels. They often also benefitted from a greater willingness to engage with Western firms and colonial governments. Generally, as the first global economy got underway, MNEs proved important facilitators of globalization, but they were a disappointing diffuser of organizational skills and information to the Rest, and had limited importance in relieving the institutional, human capital or other constraints faced by many local entrepreneurs. By the interwar years there is considerable evidence of productive modern entrepreneurship and business enterprise emerging across Asia, Latin America and even Africa. Japan was a spectacular case of a more general process. This generation of entrepreneurs were sometimes facilitated by nationalistic governments and sentiments, and in China and elsewhere they were quite effective combining local and Western practices to produce hybrid forms of business enterprise. However many governmental policies after 1945 designed to facilitate catchup ended up crippling emergent business enterprises without putting an effective alternatives in place. They were too inward looking, and too inclined to incentivize inefficiency and corruption rather than innovation. Many policy regimes ended up favouring redistributive rather than productive entrepreneurship, although it was noteworthy that they also provided some shelter for local firms to develop without being crippled by competition from the West. Individual businesses had the agency either to invest in managerial and technological competences in this era, or alternatively focus on rent-seeking, but the rules of the game often made the first path the easier one. The second global economy provided more opportunities for catch up from the Rest. Firms from emerging markets had the opportunity to access the global networks which, in part, replaced large integrated firms. There were new ways for firms in the Rest to access knowledge and capital, including returning diaspora, business schools and management consultancies. Smart state capitalism was a far greater source of international competitive advantage than the state intervention of the past, even if many government policies were not smart and continued to offer incentives for rent-seeking. The rapid international growth of MNEs based in emerging markets was a striking departure from the past. However global capitalism also remained a system which rewarded winners, and facilitated clustering in favoured locations. Innovation remained heavily clustered in the advanced countries, especially the United States. Western and Japanese firms have powerful incumbency advantages. Falling tariff and other barriers meant that a new generation of firms based in the Rest might even find it harder to reach scale than their predecessors who could grow in the much-derided era of import substitution.

Chartered companies provided one solution for the problems posed by long-distance trade in the early modern world. Accordingly, these organisations have been studied exhaustively. Yet the field is by no means depleted, as the books reviewed here attest. These six books cover questions ranging from whether the chartered companies acted as real business organisations or rather as appendages of state power, the relations between companies and states, the institutional development of the corporate form, and the nature of some of these companies as "company-states." In addition, two edited volumes deal with specific aspects of the chartered companies and with noncorporate forms of merchant organisation. The works raise new questions and engage in ongoing debates. The review also raises a number of issues which could be addressed in future research, including the dominance of the East India Companies in our understanding of the corporate form as a whole.

This paper identifies some traits that characterised the history of the porcelain manufacture of Doccia when it was a possession of the Ginori family, from the foundation to the fusion with the "Società Ceramica Richard” in 1896. The origin itself of the manufacture was unusual: not mercantile but mercantilist, not only entrepreneurial but also administrative. Such peculiarities descended and depended from the founder himself: Carlo Ginori, a passionate alchemist and an illuminist at core who united entrepreneurial vision and market knowledge with a great capacity to administer and govern territories and properties. From this origin, the manufactory derived four characteristics that persisted through its long life under the control of the Ginori family. Firstly, being a personal possession of the family and never a corporation with its own personality, the factory was managed by “ministers”. This occurrence confronted the property, ahead of its time, with all agency problems typical of modern corporations with separated ownership and control. Sometimes, as in the case of Johannon de Saint Laurent, Jacopo Fanciullacci and Paolo Lorenzini, the relationship run smoothly, in other cases it created fractures and strategic incapacity. Secondly, Doccia was immediately created as a centralized production facility and for all its life it made no concession to homeworking and decentralisation. In such a context, again ahead of times, to authoritarian excesses on the side of the property corresponded early collective claims from the workforce: an exercise for future industrial relations. A third point regards accounting methods. Accounting was a meticulous presence inside the manufacture, but did not correspond in any way to the usual merchant one. Considering unsold stocks as present values, the manufactory at times managed inventories with presumed values higher than that of the entire production facility, while active sale strategies were adopted only at the end of the eighteenth century. The family was appeased by a constant influx of income from its various activities and would not pursue growth per se. Accounting, in this sense, was more an instrument of control over administrators than the base for strategic reasoning. The modernization of bookkeeping was introduced just in the first half of the nineteenth century. Last characteristic that Doccia derived from its peculiar foundation was the inheritance problem. Fighting among heirs, heirs still not of age, trustees with little decision power were common traits of each generational transit. All these problems increased the decision power of administrators, exacerbating agency conflicts. With this complex heredity, the porcelain manufacture of Doccia crossed the centuries of industrialization, from the alchemical crucible to mass consumption, bearing witness of the social and cultural changes entailed in economic modernization. Often ahead of times, the Ginori manufacture experienced social conflicts, paternalism, the passage from entrepreneurship to a managed enterprise, bureaucratization and the relationship with the surrounding territory. It did so with a success that should not only be measured in terms of profits or generated income flows, but also from a social and cultural point of view. In time, as count Fossombroni wrote in his report on the manufacture, written in 1780, the manufactory came to represent an art gallery, for the beauty of its products, a social establishment for the employment it generated, a succesfull trade, given its sales and exports, and a stimulus for all landed proprietors to dedicate their capital and talent to industrial pursuits. A call for successful aristocratic entrepreneurship.

In the 19th century, the society of the Habsburg monarchy underwent a fundamental transformation. The changes associated with the year 1848 and the demise of the estate society also significantly affected the social position of businessmen. Their position before this date was not legally defined and prestige did not depend on their property, but on their place in the traditional ranking of the social hierarchy associated with the possession of burgher rights or the noble title. Their prestige began to grow after this date, mainly due to the ever closer cooperation with the state and growing political influence. In the new era, the noble title was not a prerequisite for belonging to the elite, but for many people it was still a symbol of prestige and many businessmen sought it. They saw in it a demonstration of their achievements and a fulcrum for the historical memory of their entire family.