The Past Speaks

The December 2010 issue of the business history journal Enterprise & Society contains a number of interesting articles, one of which is  by Albert Schrauwers of York University, “Regenten” (Gentlemanly) Capitalism: Saint-Simonian Technocracy and the Emergence of the “Industrialist Great Club”

This is from the abstract:

This article traces the transformation of [Dutch] aristocratic financiers into Saint-Simonian-inspired industrialists under the leadership of their Merchant King over the course of the nineteenth century, as they replaced this network of canals with an equally dense national network of railways… Legitimated by a technocratic ideology they co-opted the corporate form utilized by the Crown to rule while avoiding parliamentary oversight, and thereby shifted the Dutch state from autocracy to oligarchy.

I recently reviewed Schrauwers’s important book ‘Union Is Strength’: W. L. MacKenzie, The Children Of Peace, And The Emergence Of Joint Stock Democracy In Upper Canada. The review appeared in Labour/Le Travail, vol. 65.

Schrauwers is clearly a prolific and wide-ranging scholar.