How did people in the eighteenth century understand bankruptcy and what sort of advice did they offer to businessmen to help them avoid it? Such opinions have already been examined in the context of the legal mechanisms for dealing with failure and of the significance of financial crises as causes of failure. What becomes clear from the following, more concerted analysis, is that historians' preoccupation with the heroes of the Industrial Revolution has helped them to ignore or forget the considerable worries and reservations that were expressed at the time about the balance between success and failure, about the way businesses were conducted and about the achievements of the business world.

EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PERCEPTIONS OF SUCCESS AND FAILURE

Perceptions of business enterprise in the eighteenth century, and of the route towards success and away from failure, have to be reconstructed from a variety of sources. Opinions about the job, role and aims of businessmen were rarely expressed methodically and have more usually survived as a series of piecemeal and disjointed reflections. Nowhere were the causes of success and failure clearly detailed, but business letters, the law of bankruptcy, economic pamphlets and the so-called ‘advice books’ can all be used to piece together a picture of opinions at the time.

Over the course of this book many causes of bankruptcy have been discussed.