Business and the world of labour

Business was, rather surprisingly, covered only patchily in the old DNB. I say 'surprisingly' because the first two editors, Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, were active at a time when Britain's commercial and industrial supremacy had not yet been seriously challenged. Furthermore, their employer George Smith (the publisher) was after all himself an entrepreneur, and much pride was taken in the fact that the DNB was published without any resort to state aid; it was itself a monument to the potential harmony between profit-making and the public interest.

Nor were the late-Victorian public indifferent to business history, for Samuel Smiles's biographical volumes and the weighty two-volume Fortunes made in Business (1884) were already in print. Welcoming Smiles's works in a letter to John Bright in 1863, the radical politician Richard Cobden -- that Karl Marx of the middle classes -- thought the early industrialists destined for growing fame, and crowed over the fact that 'The Captains of Industry are invading the domain that was formerly held sacred to the warrior or statesman'. Perhaps this is why the old DNB included most major pioneers in transport, textiles, engineering, chemicals and mining together with the more prominent London bankers; but they neglected 'trade' -- especially retailers and wholesalers, craftsmen and artisans, brewers, accountants and key figures in stockbroking, insurance and building societies.

The twentieth-century supplements did not respond quickly to the rapid growth in economic history, despite the fact that the first of J. H. Clapham's three-volume Economic History of Modern Britain was published in 1926. Reviewing an inter-war supplement in 1938, the distinguished historian R. C. K. Ensor wondered whether the dictionary's 'criteria of what constitutes national importance' had been 'sufficiently modernised' so as to give due attention to the entrepreneur. 'Are not the politicians, by comparison, over-valued?' he asked: 'here are some figures. George Cadbury and Weetman Pearson get approximately a page of the Dictionary apiece. Leverhulme gets two pages and a half. Per contra, Milner gets round about fifteen pages. Now, Milner's career was an important one... But was it really fifteen times as important as Cadbury's or Weetman Pearson's?'

Two specialist biographical dictionaries published in the 1980s began to fill the gap: The Dictionary of Business Biography (1984-6) and The Dictionary of Scottish Business Biography (1986-90). 'Business history' and 'industrial archaeology' had by then become thriving sub-disciplines, and to this situation Dr Christine Nicholls (editor or co-editor of the four latest supplements) responded fully in the volume she edited entitled Missing Persons (1993). It was at this time that Colin Matthew, the New DNB's founding editor, was planning the new venture. He doubled the number of subjects whose primary reason for being in the dictionary was their contribution to economic life. The consultant editor for the business area was Professor Martin Daunton, with Robert Brown as research editor. The creators of reference works recruit widely among one another, and our dictionary owes much to recruits from Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the History of the University of Oxford, and in Robert Brown's case to the three-volume project for a history of BP, for which he worked after taking his degree in modern history from Cambridge. On the business area he was assisted by a research-editor colleague, Dr Anita McConnell, about whom I'll be saying more in my next message on the 'science' area. Commissioning of the new articles began in 1993 and was completed in 1997. Because all this happened well before I became editor in January 2000, I rely for guidance on what I say even more heavily than usual on the research editors involved, and this message owes much to Robert Brown.

A biographical dictionary inevitably focuses on the life of the individual, but business dynasties are important, and the business area boasts over fifty 'family articles' -- a type of article which it did much to pioneer within the dictionary as a whole; we now have more than 400 family and group articles, and hope after 2004 to have more. For example, we will be illuminating the contribution made by a network of Quaker families to manufacturing and banking in Norfolk and the North East. Through this route we were able to boost our coverage of women, given their central role -- as wives, mothers and widows -- in creating and holding together family firms. Most of our business subjects are treated as individuals, however, and we aim at the rounded portrait which will give due attention to their non-business interests, just as with old DNB subjects we insert the business interests that were often passed over.

One might have thought, from the old DNB 's coverage of business, that it began only with the industrial revolution, whereas now we give due attention to such pre-industrial groups as East-Anglian woollen merchants, blanket makers and Cornish tin-mining entrepreneurs. And while the old DNB gave special emphasis to the inventors, we are now at least as interested in collaborative commercial activity, taking a less 'heroic' approach to the process of commercial innovation. The old DNB highlighted the big nineteenth-century figures in shipping and railways, but our coverage of transport subjects probes more deeply into canals and road transport, including turnpike promoters, mail-coach proprietors and horse-drawn road hauliers. We do fuller justice to the major early-twentieth-century personalities associated with the advent of the bus, the tram and the underground railway. Manufacturers of cars and planes received their due in the supplements: less so the builders, civil engineers and contractors who dealt with the consequences. Even for the nineteenth century we have felt able to include 45 new subjects in the contractor and speculative builder category, and I cite here the inclusion of the McAlpine family in a group article to represent the huge consortia that grew up in this area in the twentieth century.

Regionally, too, the business area provides opportunities. We have used it to extend our non-metropolitan coverage, though our increased emphasis on consumer products and light industry has been a countervailing influence, given that so much in these areas took place in the Midlands and further south. Nor is our treatment of medicine confined to 'official' medicine: patent medicines now receive their due. We also give more scope to British businessmen with a major impact overseas: to iron manufacturers and merchants in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Sweden and Russia (many of whom came from Scotland), to nineteenth-century South American railway pioneers, and to bankers in early-twentieth-century Australasia, South America, Africa and the Far East.

I would not like to end complacently. Given our distance from the events under discussion, we can readily identify the blindnesses of our predecessors. But our successors will detect blindness in us also, for as Gordon Brown pointed out in his budget speech last April, 'the small firms of today are the big firms of the future'. Their proprietors do not themselves yet know how big they are going to become, and we in the dictionary have no crystal ball to offer them.

Brian Harrison