Do gentry values and the acceptable face of capitalism explain Britain's economic decline? Drawing on an extraordinary wealth of resources - from Mill, Dickens and Ruskin to newspaper reports and brewers' advertisements - Martin J. Wiener chronicles the peculiarly English ambivalence towards industry in the last 130 years or so, and demonstrates how crippling this distaste for the capitalist ethos has been to our economic development.
A scrupulous historian, Wiener argues his case with vigour and eloquence. His cultural analysis of recent economic history is masterful, and the implications far-reaching. As an explanation of the economic decline of Britain, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit is consistently readable and entertaining, insistently pertinent and provocative.