In Chapter I some seeds of doubt were sown about the traditional ways in which historians have approached eighteenth-century enterprise. Although the crop is not yet fully ripe and ready to be harvested, some attempt might be made to judge its quality and yield. How does the history of bankruptcy that has been described help us understand the role of businessmen during the early stage of industrialisation?

Bankruptcy was an eighteenth-century growth industry. The sheer volume of bankruptcy demands some rethinking of the place of enterprise in growth. More especially, there was a profound discontinuity in trend levels of failure at about the middle of the century, just at the point at which the economy began visibly to impress contemporaries with its fecundity. But that fruitfulness was associated with higher rather than lower levels and rates of bankruptcy. Prosperity, far from banishing or subduing failure, coincided with the blossoming of business collapses. Clearly, the intensifying insecurity of the business environment during early industrialisation considerably damages uncritically optimistic and Whiggish visions of eighteenth-century businessmen and the business world. Explaining the stagnant or improving bankruptcy rates before 1760 and the worsening rates thereafter needs to be related to the interconnected issues of opportunities, market imperfections, competition, risk and uncertainty discussed in Chapter 1.

The geographical and occupational dynamics of eighteenth-century bankruptcy show a clear relationship between growth and failure. Stagnant areas of the economy, such as the Norfolk cloth industry, had steady or declining levels and rates of bankruptcy. But rapidly developing areas of the economy, such as the Lancashire cotton industry, overseas trade, or the West Riding woollen trades, all experienced increases in the level of bankruptcy.