ABSTRACT
The changing language of profit-sharing speaks for the history of its fluctuating popularity in British society. In their early stages, profit-sharing and co-partnership were praised as the panacea to the problems that Britain had to confront both internally and externally. While profit-sharing emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, it did not attract much attention until the last decades of the century. The last quarter of the nineteenth century was a period in which Britain encountered the gravest economic difficulties in its modern history. Profit-sharing regarded the entire profits of industry as morally and economically the property of the capitalist, unlike a socialist claim which regarded it as the property of the manual workers. In the 1960s and 1970s it gained renewed interest: a number of major European countries, including France, West Germany, and Britain, passed legislation to promote profit-sharing and industrial partnership.
