ABSTRACT

This chapter provides the first large-scale, long-term and whole-population assessment of the history of entrepreneurship in Britain in detail from the nineteenth century to 1911, and in lesser detail up to the present. It develops and uses a remarkable new database of more than nine million persons identified as employers and self-employed over the period 1851–1911 that allows whole-population analysis of ‘all’ entrepreneurs, and then links them to modern trends. It also focuses on all individuals who ran all businesses, covering the full size range from the smallest to the largest. The challenges of definitions of the ‘entrepreneur’ and scale of available data have been well recognised in the literature. A useful debate has emerged in business history on the need to develop larger-scale analyses and to move beyond case studies and small samples: Wardley calls for greater ‘development of generally accessible machine-readable datasets’.