ABSTRACT
The history of management consultancy in Britain has been a relatively long and complicated affair, situated in three centuries and through two world wars. During the course of that evolutionary process management consultancy has never stood still, factors outside of it and individuals within it have forced change on a massive scale over the 130 years or so of its history. This chapter breaks the tradition in terms of structure of the remainder of this historical account and provides a condensed history of management consultancy in Britain. Its purpose is to provide a pocket history of management consulting, bringing the various threads together through an approach that divides the whole period into a series of time frames. In the period of the mid to late-nineteenth century the financial aspects of businesses had taken on a greater prominence in an environment when British industry found itself competing with other industrial nations for its share of world and domestic markets.
