Introduction

What does a favourable culture contribute to entrepreneurship, compared with other influences, such as appropriate institutions? Entrepreneurial business often provided outlets for the energies and enterprise of national and religious minorities who were blocked from rising through the state apparatus. Max Weber instanced Poles in Russia and eastern Prussia, Huguenots in France under Louis XIV, Nonconformists and Quakers in England, and Jews for two thousand years. For Weber it was the (institutional) barrier, not the culture, that explained the entrepreneurial precocity of these minorities. His most famous supposed positive cultural influence on business and economic development, the Protestant Ethic, was something extra, he maintained.

Virtually the converse of the Protestant Ethic, the ‘cultural critique’ of British capitalism looks instead at how culture constrained entrepreneurship. For the later nineteenth century Martin Wiener proposed that British culture encouraged ‘gentrification', exactly what Protestants, or at least Puritans, would never accept, for it entailed enjoying their wealth. A pervasive anti-industrial and anti-business culture especially transmitted through middle-class education was supposedly responsible for Britain's ‘industrial decline’ in these years.

There is more evidence for David Landes's assertion that culture makes all the difference to economic development. He focuses on expatriate entrepreneurial performance; Jews and Calvinists throughout much of Europe, Chinese in East and South-East Asia, and Indians in East Africa, when thwarted by ‘bad government’ at home or, more generally, by poor institutions.