British business history: a review of the periodical literature for 2001

Judging from the quality of the periodical literature, 2001 was a very productive year for scholars dealing with the history of business in Great Britain. Grappling with a broad range of issues, scholars ploughed fertile new ground and reworked well-established fields. Several trends stand out. Scholars dealt with topics well beyond the range of industrial developments, with many issues in agriculture, trade, and the service industries attracting attention. Then, too, they continued to question and modify paradigms put forward by the historian Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Finally, government-business relations came under increased scrutiny, with the state often pictured as an independent actor. My essay proceeds in chronological order to examine first how scholars portrayed economic and business developments in medieval and early modern Britain, and then goes on to look in more detail at how they viewed manufacturing and marketing developments during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It next investigates how scholars pictured the evolution of agriculture, transportation, and the service industries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and concludes by examining how they viewed recent business and economic developments.