ABSTRACT
Britain was lacking in the production of office technology, a key factor contributing to the increased efficiency of large-scale managerial organizations in the Edwardian era. The organizational conservatism of British electrical engineering firms limited the extent of technical developments, which, in the long-term, meant that major advances in electrical technology continued to be made in Germany. Two researchers, Berghoff and Moller, have critically evaluated the stereotype of British entrepreneurs as risk averting and conservative, as risk taking and innovative. According to Chandler Bing, the pattern in electrical engineering was a common feature of the British machine-building sector as a whole. British capitalism was structurally dominated not by manufacture and Northern businessmen but by the City, by finance, by what Cain and Hopkins have identified as gentlemanly capitalism. To take a Perezian view, the mode of development in Edwardian Britain was shaped by the forces of finance over industry, by the interests of southern capitalism and rentiers over northern entrepreneurs.
