Rolf Engelsing

Bio: Rolf Engelsing is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 2, co-authored 2 publications receiving 15 citations.

Lebenshaltungen und Lebenshaltungskosten im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert in den Hansestadten Bremen und Hamburg

Abstract: Um den Lebensstandard der Bevolkerung in Deutschland vom Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts bis zur Mitte des 19. Jahrhunderts zu erforschen, kann man versuchen, ihn nach den Haushaltseinkommen zu quantifizieren, und prufen, wie er sich im Lauf der Zeit verbessert oder verschlechtert. Das ist oft erfolglos, weil die Quellen versagen. Dann kann man versuchen, die verschiedenen sozialen Stufen der Lebenshaltung zu qualifizieren, und darstellen, wie ihr Zuschnitt und ihr Verhaltnis untereinander sich im Lauf der Zeit auf den einzelnen Stufen verschiedenartig verandert.

Dienstbotenlektüre im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert in Deutschland

Abstract: Wir wollen es keinem Leser verargen, wenn er befurchtet, das ihn in diesem Aufsatz ein Kehraus der Kulturgeschichte erwartet. Hat die Disziplin nicht langst ihren Offenbarungseid geleistet und, was irgend an Werten greifbar war, an ihre Hauptglaubiger, z. B. an die Diszi-plinen Volkskunde und Geistesgeschichte abgetreten? Man wird es aber auch uns nicht verargen, wenn wir uns dagegen verwahren, das Thema einer Marotte halber gewahlt zu haben und bei einer Art der Geschichtsbetrachtung und Geschichtsschreibung stehen geblieben zu sein, von der es schon zur Zeit Wilhelm Giesebrechts sarkastisch hies, sie sei „eine Olla podrida von tausend Wunderlichkeiten”, und von der wir selbst behaupten, sie sei nicht erst durch eine wissenschaftliche Entwicklung uberholt worden, sondern ihrem Wesen nach von Anfang an uberholungsbedurftig gewesen. Obwohl wir diese Art Kulturgeschichte nicht im Sinn haben, wollen wir das Problem der Kulturgeschichte nicht ganz auf sich beruhen lassen. Denn da sie nun einmal schon zur Zeit Giesebrechts „ein so vieldeutiger und viel misdeuteter Name” war, kann man sich nicht einfach dadurch sicherstellen, das man darauf verweist, das in der Epoche des Imperialismus die Kulturgeschichte, die sich in der baurgerlichen Gesellschaft vieler Anhanger erfreute, die aber vom Staat allenfalls gleichgultig betrachtet wurde und kaum uber Lehrstuhle verfugte, von der Politischen Geschichte, die nach der Grundung des Deutschen Reiches von der burgerlichen Gesellschaft aufgewertet wurde, dem jungen nationalen Machtstaat vonnoten war und uber zahlreiche Lehrstuhle verfugte, in einem sehr ungleichen Kampf aus dem Felde geschlagen wurde. Genugte es, hierauf zu verweisen, so liese sich nach dem Spruch: nomen est omen auf das allgemeine Los der Besiegten kommen und behaupten, die Kritik an der Kulturgeschichte sei blose Kritik am Namen Kulturgeschichte, Kritik an einer ohnmachtigen und verdrangten Disziplin, Kritik, die Auswuchse statt der Sache selbst zur Zielscheibe nahm und falschlich „eine Olla podrida von tausend Wunderlichkeiten” dem Gespott von Zunft, Verwaltung und Offentlichkeit preisgab, wahrend beispielsweise einem Lamprecht doch nur etliche Schludrigkeiten und Irrtumer nachzusagen waren. Ist aber nicht Dietrich Schafer, der Herold der triumphierenden Politischen Geschichtsschreibung, in-zwischen mit seinem ganzen System, aller Stichhaltigkeit des Details ungeachtet, hinfallig und anruchig geworden?

Capital Formation in Great Britain

Abstract: Justification Conjecture: an opinion formed on slight or defective evidence or none. The above definition conveys very well the true character of many of the results which emerge from the exercise which follows: the estimation of capital accumulation over the period 1760–1860. As will soon be abundantly clear, the sources at present available for this period do not provide the evidence which would enable one to construct even moderately respectable estimates for certain key sectors – notably manufacturing – and hence for the whole economy. At crucial points we are able to proceed only by reliance on conjecture and speculation. The results are accordingly of limited pretension and humble status; the most that can be claimed for them is that they may indicate the broad orders of magnitude of the extent of the capital expenditures in each decade on both fixed assets and inventories, at home and abroad, and of the corresponding growth of the stock of capital; the approximate distribution, by sector, of domestic fixed capital; and the broad pattern and rate of change of capital over the hundred-year period in relation to the growth of population and of the national economy. What justification is there for attempting at this stage to construct new estimates for the economy as a whole, when so much still remains to be done on the individual sectors which can alone provide a proper foundation for aggregate estimates? Partly the answer is to be found in the great historical importance of this period of early industrialization in Britain, the uncertainty surrounding the existing estimates, and the desirability of bringing together the estimates for individual sectors which have resulted from investigations undertaken since the last synthesis was prepared.

Labour in Great Britain

Abstract: The Industrial Revolution: Economic Models of the Labour Market In Britain, the hundred years or so between c . 1750 and c . 1850 saw the competition of what is conventionally called the industrial revolution, and with it the corresponding transformation of the labour force from its traditional structure into a modern industrial working class. These changes constituted a stage in an irreversible social evolution, the creation of modern industrial capitalism. The new character given to society included the emergence of new classes and of new relationships between classes. The period as a whole has a certain unity and is marked off without much difficulty as the transitional link between relatively more stable economic relations that preceded it and a re-stabilized, but different, framework that followed. Economic theorists who lived through it, beginning with the ‘classics’ of Political Economy, as well as more recent writers on economic development, have been inclined to treat it as a particular and indeed unique phase with certain laws and characteristics of its own. As far as the market for labour in this period is concerned, there has been a remarkable and indeed striking unanimity among them and among all observers. The general axiom is that in this period as a whole the market operated against labour, and that wages tended therefore to be at or near subsistence levels. The mercantilist writers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had looked upon labour as merely a factor of production, which, in a competitive world in which most industry was highly labour-intensive, should be obtained at the lowest possible cost.

Capital Investment and Economic Growth in France, 1820–1930

Abstract: The General Argument Until quite recently, studies of capital formation in France were few in number and relatively cursory. This lacuna was of little importance: it seemed that the findings to be expected of such research were already well known. It was thought that the level of economic growth and of investment had remained below the level which technical advance made it possible to reach – or so it seemed from a comparison with the relevant figures for other countries or even with those for France during the earlier part of the nineteenth century. For of all the countries that underwent industrialization France was one of the few to experience an early and lasting break in development. Francois Perroux was the first to identify the problem. ‘About 1860’, he writes, ‘there appeared the first signs of a slowing-down of the economy; from 1880, this became a pronounced trend.’ The rate of growth fell, and this falling-off had long-lasting effects on the economy, for during its early stages – the period 1892–1914 – the second phase of industrialization was ‘much less vigorous than the first’. Various arguments have been put forward to explain this deceleration. Two of them, related to the state of the economy, have gained general acceptance in the past. Underinvestment, runs the argument, was connected, in the first place, to the shortness of the periods during which long-term planning was possible. At the very beginning of the nineteenth century, France already laboured under this disadvantage: the stagnation of agricultural productivity and the decline in international trade had paralysed industry throughout the thirty years of insecurity and of war which lasted until 1820.

Industrial Entrepreneurship and Management in Great Britain

Abstract: Introduction Since the Second World War the effort to understand the process of economic growth has been a major preoccupation of the social scientist. During this quarter-century those economic historians investigating this complex phenomenon have tended to follow the lead of the late T. S. Ashton by according a critical significance to the entrepreneur; and with their growing disenchantment with the strategic roles of natural resources and capital in economic development, economists too are increasingly promoting entrepreneurship and the supply of managerial ability to a position of greater and greater importance. More and more attention is being given to the economic and social circumstances favourable to increasing the supply of entrepreneurs, and the investigation of these circumstances is becoming ever more sophisticated. Economic historians and sociologists have identified a number of beliefs, attitudes, value systems, climates of opinion, and propensities which they have found to exert a favorable influence on the generation of enterprise and of developmental initiative. They have also stressed the role of minorities and of deviant behavior in the formation of entrepreneurial groups. [And] joining in the search,… psychologists have recently undertaken to establish the dependence of development and of entrepreneurial activity on the presence of achievement motivation. These interrelated explorations leave the student of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship both stimulated and not a little bewildered. The arguments advanced by both sociologists and psychologists are often fascinating, but the majority of them are as yet imprecise, chronologically ill-fitting, and empirically insubstantial.

Entrepreneurs and Managers in German Industrialization

Abstract: Concepts and Scope The definitions used in this Chapter have to meet two requirements. First, they must be applicable within the whole period under discussion. They must be flexible and broad enough to subsume the tremendous changes occurring within entrepreneurship and management from the late eighteenth century to the twentieth. However, they need not be so broad and abstract as to cover all types of entrepreneurs and managers in history. They should rather be framed with regard to characteristics of the German economy which remained constant through this whole period (without necessarily existing at other times and places) and which were, at the same time, of central importance for the development of entrepreneurship and management. Such a characteristic we find in the fact that this has been, and – for the larger part of Germany – still is, a period of industrialization structured according to capitalist principles. The general features of industrial capitalism which are most central for the study of entrepreneurship and management during the whole period are ( a ) a factory system which is characterized by power-generating and manufacturing machines, by large amounts of fixed capital, by maturing techniques on an increasingly scientific basis, by the separation between organizational and operative functions, and by contractual labour working under centralized managerial authority, not at home, according to elaborate patterns of labour division; and ( b ) largely independent and autonomous business enterprises on the basis of the private ownership and control of capital, which is used for the production of goods and services and their sale on the commercial market, according to the criteria of profitability; business enterprises relate to each other mainly through market mechanisms.