INTRODUCTION

The chapters in this book allude to a number of potential research directions that can help clarify the effect of culture on the rise of big business and the wealth of nations. Although culture can be maddeningly difficult to define, culture's consequences have shaped national economic policies and business strategies to a greater extent than has been generally acknowledged by present economic and business historiography. Alexander Gerschenkron's stance on ideology reflects the difficulty of integrating culture into a historical explanation. He posited a successively important role to national ideologies for late developers, but failed to develop the idea to any great extent. In his postscript, the impact of ideology fades out of the analysis. Culture, much like Gerschenkron's argument about ideology, has largely been ignored by economic historians, less “because it is irrelevant but because it is intractable.”

Culture does matter. The often protean quality of ideology or culture should not frighten off attempts to identify its specific impact on big business and the wealth of nations. The organizing principle of this book, in fact, orients itself around the development of big business in a national context. As “imagined communities,” nations and nationalism have significantly affected the global environment for business, yet they are cultural constructs of the first order, built around some notion of a people united by a common heritage. This apparently timeless heritage is an invented tradition of rather recent vintage, which helps to legitimize the existence of nation-states, one of the main organizing principles of our modern world. Culture may be intractable (and the problem of national identity has spawned a vast academic industry), but it cannot be made irrelevant.