ABSTRACT
Economic historians have often studied the prominent role played by the Crédit Mobilier in industrial financing in the nineteenth century. Gerschenkron elaborated a model of backwardness, in which first banks, then government, depending on how backward a country was, substituted themselves for the entrepreneurship that had been the driving force in the industrialisation of the United Kingdom, called ‘the first industrial nation’ by Peter Mathias. Cameron explained in detail how the Crédit Mobilier and its imitators were responsible for the economic development not only of France but of Continental Europe as a whole.
