Nationalism and Industrial Development in Finland

p0343-p0353.pdf (application/pdf Object)


A quick scan of the historiography of business and economic history reveals that both bodies of scholarship have focused on large Western European countries and the United States. This comes as no surprise. Modern business institutions, entrepreneurs and ideologies were born, raised and cultivated in Western Europe and the United States. The emphasis on development in Germany, France, Great Britain and the United States, has overshadowed the evolution of modern business life in small and less advanced countries. As Sidney Pollard points out, scholars have often viewed peripheral Europe as a passive recipient of new industrial products from the center and a more or less underdeveloped supplier of raw materials, surplus laborand food to advanced regions. Recent studies of smaller European countries illustrate, however, that this broadly accepted view is somewhat, if not completely, misleading. For instance, countries such as Sweden, Norway, Czechoslovakia, Poland and the Netherlands had already developed large scale industries and advanced business institutions in the 19th century which were. . .





Karl-Erik Michelsen
Markku Kuisma

University of Helsinki