Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain, 1780-1980 (review)

In this book (originally the University of Oxford's Ford Lectures of 1994), Thompson brings under his unsparing critical lens two long-running controversies in British social history. The first of these, sparked by the publication of Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (Cambridge, 1981), concerns whether a putative "industrial spirit" was gravely weakened by a marked tendency for successful industrialists to abandon the pursuit of profit for the pursuit of the way of life of country gentlemen and noblemen. The other, provoked by Lawrence Stone and Jeanne C. Fawtier Stone, An Open Elite? England, 1540-1880 (Oxford, 1984), concerns whether the English elite was in fact as open to "new men" as historians once believed. The Stones contended on the basis of their empirical study of landownership in England that relatively few landowners came from a pool of "new men" outside the existing elite.

Thompson observes how difficult it is to reconcile Wiener's and the Stones' theses. If entry into the elite was exceedingly difficult, it could scarcely have been the motivating force behind the actions of aspiring entrepreneurs. Thompson is at pains to refute both theses separately. The "gullible" Stones, he holds, relied upon much-too-restricted a definition of the amount of land needed to confer gentry status during their period (49), and Wiener fell into the cultural historian's trap of relying selectively upon literary evidence that served his subjective interpretation.

Thompson suggests alternative hypotheses. For example, the second half of the eighteenth century was "the time when aristocratic involvement with the business of making money moved into a new gear" (27). Thus, no real conflict between the values of a supposedly leisured landed glass and an industrious entrepreneurial class really existed in the nineteenth century. On this score, Thompson appears to be echoing Perkin's perception in 1968 of "the complete acceptance by the ruling elite of the logic of industrialism before industrialism itself could be said to be a fact."¹ In any case, Thompson maintains that the notion of a single aristocratic culture dissolves upon close inspection of the variety of styles of life among the nineteenth-century aristocracy. Thompson's second hypothesis points to the way in which the railway and other faster means of communication made possible the possession of sizable estates in land, and therefore a landed way of life, with continued active involvement in business. This point, too, is reminiscent of Perkin's earlier noting of the rise of a plutocracy that fused landed, commercial, and industrial wealth at the end of century.²

Terminological problems have long dogged these controversies. Words such as entrepreneur, businessman, and industrialist do not admit of easy definition and distinction. How does one classify bankers? Wiener's thesis and, paradoxically, Rubinstein's that Britain never really had an "industrial spirit" at all, both benefit from excluding bankers from the category of entrepreneurs.³ Thompson is well aware of these terminological difficulties; after duly noting them, he is still inclined to be rather free and easy terminologically—entrepreneur and businessman being more or less interchangeable terms for him.

Thompson's observation of how recently the idea of an "enterprise culture" was constructed in "ideological and managerial ... right-wing factories" may well reveal the extent to which these lectures were grounded in the public debate of the Margaret Thatcher-John Major era (75). But "gentrification" is also a recent formulation, even though Thompson appears to think that it had a history of its own before it began to be applied to run-down neighborhoods undergoing re-development: "Gentrification is a concept ... which has been transferred from people to things" (45). If the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary is to be believed, the transference has been from things to people.⁴ Thus, the very title of this book recaptures that...