A long historiographical tradition has judged and condemned the British steel industry and its leaders for entrepreneurial failure, although they were rehabilitated in the 1970s by the then ‘new’ economic history to which their decisions appeared entirely rational. This debate cannot be reopened here. Whatever its performance, the iron and steel industry was an essential component of British big business in Edwardian England. Yet there is little doubt that it was less in the forefront than its Continental counterpart. There are two reasons for this. The first reason is that British iron and steel industrialists did not set up companies of the size reached by their German competitors. Why this should have been the case has aroused much discussion, though demand conditions seem to have been the major factor. Briefly stated, Britain was a mature, slowly expanding market, while the faster-growing markets of Germany and America were closed to her producers by protective tariffs. Free trade at home reinforced this situation, the more so as Britain tended to specialize in higher-quality open hearth steel, more suitable for shipbuilding, which absorbed as much as 30 per cent of British steel output by 1910-13. And in these conditions, the import of foreign steel for re-rolling was often more advantageous than investment into integrated plants. The second reason is that big business was already much more diversified in Britain than in Germany and France; heavy industry was one among a number of other important sectors.

It is widely assumed that the large firm emerged in capital goods in Germany, and in consumer goods in Britain. At first sight this seems obvious. One only has to glance at the list of the fifty largest industrial companies in Britain in 1905, ranked by capital, to be struck by the number of breweries. There were no less than fifteen, including Watney, Combe, Reid with a share capital of more than £6 million, Guinness with £4.5 million, Bass with £2.7 million, Whitbread with £2.3 million. Most of them—Guinness was the exception—had to raise vast amounts of capital in the ’scramble for property’ of the late 1880s and 1890s, when brewers paid increasingly inflated prices to purchase public houses. Property owners they might have been, but the top breweries were none the less large companies, though they were smaller if measured by workforce: even the largest among them did not employ more than 3,500 to 4,000 people. In the food component of the branded consumer goods industry, firms such as Cadbury, Fry, and Rowntree employed a similar number of people, but worked with a much smaller capital.