Economy, Society, and Government in Medieval Italy

Hugh Myddleton, goldsmith and financier, investor in silver and lead mining, and projector of ambitious New River scheme for improving London's water supply. Biographical information of this kind is laborious to compile, and it is useful that an expert of Mr. Gough's rank has put so much of it together in this book. choice of individuals to include in this gallery of entrepreneurs was to some extent arbitrary, being governed by availability of information (7), and Mr. Gough very fairly points out that The men whose careers have been sketched . . are indeed only a selection of those whose names might have been included, and whose achievements might, with more research, have been (286). His principles of selection have sometimes worked in an unfortunate way. For example, Sir Arthur Ingram is admitted because, besides being a financier, he was interested in alum industry; whereas Sir Lionel Cranfield is excluded because he is rated a financier, not an entrepreneur. A definition that excludes Cranfield from a book about entrepreneurship in this period must be open to criticism, especially as there is no lack of information about Cranfield's career. Moreover, little attempt is made by Mr. Gough to generalize from his individual case-studies, or to suggest on basis of this evidence what characterized and differentiated entrepreneurs as a class. Professor Lawrence Stone, in a not dissimilar context, has described the futility of quoting individual examples to demonstrate a sociological proposition (Social Change and Revolution in England 1540-1640, p. xvi). phenomenon of rise of entrepreneur cannot be adequately explained by collecting examples of entrepreneurs at work in latesixteenth and early-seventeenth century England

Economic history · Economics · Economy · Government (linguistics) · Political economy · Political science · Historical Economic and Social Studies · Philosophy

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