What explains the national economic success of the United States, Britain, Germany, and Japan? What can be learned
from the long-term championship performances of leading business firms in each country? How important were specific
innovations by individual entrepreneurs? And in the end, what is the true nature of capitalist development?
The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Thomas K. McCraw and his coauthors present penetrating answers to these questions.
Creating Modern Capitalism is the first book to explain for a broad audience the interconnections among technological
innovation, management science, the power of entrepreneurship, and national economic growth. The authors approach
each question from a comparative framework and with a unique triple focus on national economic systems, particular
companies, and individual business leaders.
Above all, the book focuses on how specific entrepreneurs influenced the economic success of their countries: Josiah
Wedgwood and Henry Royce in Britain; August Thyssen and Georg von Siemens in Germany; Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan,
and the two Thomas J. Watsons in the United States; Sakichi Toyoda, Masatoshi Ito, and Toshifumi Suzuki in Japan.
The product of a three-year collaborative effort at the Harvard Business School, the book combines cutting-edge
scholarship with a finely tuned sense of the art of management. It will engage general readers as well as those
with a special interest in entrepreneurship and the evolution of national business systems.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Thomas K. McCraw
Josiah Wedgwood and the First Industrial Revolution
Nancy F. Koehn
British Capitalism and the Three Industrial Revolutions
Peter Botticelli
Rolls-Royce and the Rise of High-Technology Industry
Peter Botticelli
German Capitalism
Jeffrey Fear
August Thyssen and German Steel
Jeffrey Fear
The Deutsche Bank
David A. Moss
Henry Ford, Alfred Sloan, and the Three Phases of Marketing
