Patrons, gens d'affaires et banquiers: Hommages a Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenryk (review)

Professor Ginette Kurgan-van Hentenryk has been active in the renaissance of business history in the 1980s in Europe. She also has been the mentor of many scholars during her career, and definitively deserves these 481 pages of hommages, both as an academic and as an individual. Still, Festschrifts are not easy to edit or review because they tend to lack the coherence of "classically" edited collective works. This one is no exception. Serge Jaumain and Kenneth Bertrams have had the difficult task of organizing twenty-six very different contributions. The volume nevertheless possesses a backbone topic that reflects Kurgan-van Hentenryk's interests and legacy: businessmen and businesswomen as a social group.

The introductory chapter serves as a useful guide and includes a complete bibliography of Kurgan-van Hentenryk's work. It also gives a short but very informative tour of modern Belgian business historiography. Five sections, organized chronologically, follow. In the first one, the issue of entrepreneurship in the long run is tackled. Didier Viviers takes a look at classical Greek ceramists and the birth of a new class of "industrialists," while cautiously avoiding the anachronistic comparison with modern employers. Chloé Deligne, Claire Billen, and David Kusman offer a different perspective with Brussels butchers in the late Middle Ages. This guild story, in showing various profiles of artisans not limited to the strict definition of their trade, reveals a complex world. Butchers were diversified into fishmongers and landowners. They strengthened their social positions and fortunes over time using a privileged relationship with the nobility. Heinz-Gehrard Haupt broadens the research question in his chapter, as he aims to draw new perspectives on the history of corporations in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Two chapters are devoted to the important de Nettine family during the Austrian Netherlands period (1713–1799). Philippe Moureaux looks at the relationship between Baroness de Nettine and the Austrian authorities in the late eighteenth century, although with surprisingly little reflection on gender issues. Michèle Galand follows with a biography of Ange de Walckiers, de Nettine's son-in-law.

The second part of the book looks at the emergence of new institutions in the nineteenth century. Patrick Lefèvre writes on coal mining industry associations in the region of Mons between 1830 and 1870. Bertrams investigates the "manufactures of bosses" and the debates on higher education in the two decades before World War I. Valérie Piette contributes to a gender perspective with a piece on the Association belge des femmes chefs d'entreprise, a group formed in 1949. More innovative in scope are Pierre Van den Dungen and Véronique Pouillard, who explore new sectors. The former explains the switch in business models from subscription to advertising revenues for daily newspapers; the latter looks at the history of advertising industry in Belgium and the influence of the American model in the period 1900–1950.

The third section—"Performance, Strategies, and Business Administration"—includes the only international contributions, with a business history of Italian car manufacturer Lancia by Franco Amatori (in English) and a short discussion by Youssef Cassis on the issue of firms' performance. With Greta Devos's essay on the Naties, or longshoremen guilds in Antwerp, we look at the transformation of ancien régime institutions into corporations. The two remaining articles in that section have in common an interest in the taxonomy of leading Belgian financial groups. Guy Vanthemsche explores the economic Empire of the Société Générale (a dominant bank in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) and the networks of influence at work to manage its multiple interests in the Congo colony. Pierre Lanthier then takes over with a survey of the French executives of the Empain group of companies between 1913 and 1940.

This chapter gives a proper transition to the fourth section, on employers' paths (itinéraires patronaux). Using commercial courts records for...