Gentrification and the enterprise culture

"The long-running debate of Britain's apparent economic decline in the last 120 years has generated a large economic and statistical literature and a great deal of heat in rival social and cultural explanations. The 'decline' has been confidently attributed to the permeation of the business elite by the anti-industrial and anti-commercial attitudes communicated by public schools and the old universities through their propagation of aristocratic and gentry values; and the readiness of the business elite to be thus permeated has been ascribed to the persistent tendency of new men of wealth to transform themselves into landed gentlemen. There have been equally confident claims to have overturned this traditional view that wealthy merchants and industrialists sought to acquire landed estates and country houses, and to have established that 'gentlemanly values' were in fact economically advantageous to Britain because she never was a primarily industrial economy." "In this book, Professor Thompson subjects these interpretations to the test of the actual evidence, and firmly re-establishes the conventional wisdom on the characteristic desire of new money to acquire land and a place in th