On The “ Genesis of Modern Management ”

Abstract

recipient of the Newcomen Society Prize in 1967 for his Genesis of Modern Management (Cambridge, Mass., 1965), Sidney Pollard is without question deserving of the honor. His study represents a major contribution to the history of the British Industrial Revolution and therefore at the same time to industrial and economic history in general. It is a compendium of scholarly work that has been completed; it also draws heavily on unpublished materials. Hardly a name of prominence among the entrepreneurs of the English Industrial Revolution is omitted. As a summation of published work this book holds a position somewhat similar to the much shorter, excellent methodological essay of R. M. Hartwell, The Causes of the Industrial Revolution... (Economic History Review, 2d ser. 18 [1965], recently reprinted in a paperback, Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England [London, 1967]). To Pollard's and Hartwell's contribution should be added Phyllis Deane's First Industrial Revolution (Cambridge, 1965) as the necessary preliminary work that any student of industrial revolutions must undertake today. These studies all concentrate on the phenomenon as it existed in England and tend to ignore the Continental experience, leading to the possible and unjustified, oversimplified conclusion that industrial progress outside of England did not exist or at best was a derivative of the English. While it is not to be denied that nowhere in Continental Europe did there occur such a broad, revolutionary change as that which took place in England, nevertheless advanced industrial plants and technology were to be found there and may possibly have had some effect on Britain. Pollard categorically asserts that the Continental experience was irrelevant for British organizational development in industry. And well it may have been-but a simple assertion even when only a repetition of what numerous other authors have said is still not conclusive proof. Merely recalling the great interest with which the British engineer, John

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