ABSTRACT
Economic expansion with its attendant changes in employment, investment, trade, technology and management was bound to affect the proportions of the economy and the composition of society, or what in academic language is usually described as ‘economic and social structure’. The importance of individual branches of the economy – their respective contributions to the national product – was bound to alter during the period. The share of agriculture greatly declined; nor did the relative weights of other sectors of the economy remain the same. In addition, in some industries their constituent units, firms or single commercial and industrial establishments, changed in size and organization. The period also witnessed some further mutations in the ownership of industrial and commercial capital and in the make-up of the higher executive ranks of firms. There were also changes in the labour force. Slowly and almost imperceptibly the economy and society of Western Europe, while growing, were also acquiring a new shape unlike the shape they possessed in the nineteenth century.
