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Origins of Enterprise: Business Leadership in the Industrial Revolution. By Katrina Honeyman. (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press; New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983. ix + 204 pp. $20.00.)

Katrina Honeyman's solid if somewhat narrow monograph tests hypotheses about the social origins of early English industrialists through intensive examination of the lead-mining, cotton-spinning, and lace-making industries. The research is thorough, providing an unusually large number of cases through which mobility can be examined. The chronology of the inquiry extends from the mid-eighteenth century until about 1830, by which time capital requirements were demanding enough to deter most upwardly mobile newcomers automatically. Honeyman provides a wealth of information not only on the origins of entrepreneurs as statistically charted, but also on individual careers and on the dimensions of capital formation in the three industries. Her mobility statements derive from sensible, if necessarily somewhat gross, divisions of the eighteenth-century population into four large social categories. The study's conclusion is important and inescapable: early industry did not permit extensive upward mobility. Even geographic mobility was relatively rare among entrepreneurs, unless they were already wealthy. A number of small men tried to join the game, and without question a few succeeded; but most failed early on, by their own standards as well as ours. The early industrial revolution largely confirmed the mobility patterns of the preindustrial middle class, which had not precluded some vertical movement but which relied largely on preestablished wealth and position. The limitations of the book are twofold. First, the central thesis has already been well demonstrated, though not with this particular detail or industrial sector concentration. To take Samuel Smiles as an analytical antagonist, as the author does, seems undeniably dated. Second, Honeyman does not fully explain the impediments to entrepreneurial mobility; her effort is largely descriptive. She asserts that necessary capital accumulation was not the only factor involved, and briefly (p. 168) invokes a middle-class achievement ethic that would favor the established over new applicants. But we are not as close here to some of the intangibles of the entrepreneurial spirit as we are in other good histories, and the phenomena described go largely unaccounted for. Still, within her own guidelines Honeyman does a competent job. And if Samuel Smiles is long dead, it is true that some of his rags-to-riches claims linger in a mythic memory and probably deserve some additional empirical swift kicks.