Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture Britain 1780-1980 [Hardcover]

In this book F. M. L. Thompson makes an incisive contribution to the longstanding debate over gentrification and entrepreneurialism in Britain. He provides an expert analysis of the links between economic performance and the penetration of industrial wealth into landed society.

1. Posing the Problem
2. Aristocrats as Entrepreneurs
3. Entrepreneurs as Aristocrats
4. Entrepreneurial Culture and the Culture of Entrepreneurs
5. Consumption, Culture, and the 'Unenterprising' Businessman
6. Gentlemanly Values, Education, and the Industrial Spirit
7. Conclusion: The Rise and Fall of Cultural Explanations of Economic Performance

With the skill of a consummate historian, Thompson introduces, challenges, and demlishes established visions of who the gentry were and what gentrification entailed as he arrives at his own more open and elastic model. This makes Thompson's work important not only as a revisionist cultural history of gentrification and the enterprise culture but also as a critical evaluation of extant scholarship on the subject. --History

This admirable study...should be required reading for students of British economic history in the modern period. --Economic History