ABSTRACT
The nature of entrepreneurship, the level of financial resources, and the means of raising capital are central issues in any analysis of early industrial Britain. Entrepreneurs came in various guises. The social origins of these industrial entrepreneurs have attracted attention from the days of Samuel Smiles' classic Victorian tract Self-Help, with its emphasis on individual thrift, hard work and self-reliance, virtues that enabled the industrialists of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain to rise from rags to riches. Case studies of businessmen have shown this to a rather simple notion, and indeed something unlikely to occur within a generation. Importance of capital accumulation for the early Industrial Revolution discussed by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, with its emphasis on parsimony and frugality in accruing savings. Mobilizing capital for most industrialists therefore meant either concentrating on fixed capital or on circulating capital either from personal and family resources or via the banking network.
