Nobility and Business in History: Investments, Innovation, Management and Networks

This book reconsiders the role of nobility as influential economic players and provides new insights into the business activities of noblemen in Europe and Asia during the nineteenth century thus offering up opportunities for comparison in an age of economic expansion and globalisation.

What was the contribution of the nobility to the economy? Can we consider noblemen to have been endowed with an entrepreneurial spirit? Research shows that far from being passive, throughout the century the European nobility were widely involved in business, carried on innovations, refined management strategies, and diversified their investments from agriculture to transport, industry and finance. Both in Europe and Asia businesses were embedded in social networks and personal relationships. In modern Japan after the Meiji Restoration - the unique case in Asia where a Western-style nobility was created - business, trust, personal connections and aristocratic marriages were intertwined and Japanese noblemen, especially the richer ones, acted as promoters of industrialisation, even though their role was certainly limited in time and space. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers in the fields of economics, management, political science, sociology, public management and history. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Business History.

Silvia A. Conca Messina is Associate Professor of Economic History in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Milan, Italy. She recently edited Leading the Economic Risorgimento. Lombardy in the 19th Century, Routledge, 2022.

Takeshi Abe is Professor Emeritus of Osaka University, Japan, and is former President of the Business History Society of Japan (BHSJ). He is one of the editors of Region and Strategy in Britain and Japan: Business in Lancashire and Kansai 1890-1990, Routledge, 2000.