Private and Public Enterprise in Europe: Energy, Telecommunications and Transport, 1830–1990 (Cambridge Studies in Economic History - Second Series)
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 6/16/2005
EAN 9780521835244, ISBN10: 0521835240
Hardcover, 372 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 2.5 cm
Language: English
This 2005 book is a comparative history of the economic organisation of energy, telecommunications and transport in Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It examines the role that private and public enterprise have played in the construction and operation of the railways, electricity, gas and water supply, tramways, coal, oil and natural gas industries, telegraph, telephone, computer networks and other modern telecommunications. The book begins with the arrival of the railways in the 1830s, charts the development of arms' length regulation, municipalisation and nationalisation, and ends on the eve of privatisation in the 1980s. Robert Millward argues that the role of ideology, especially in the form of debates about socialism and capitalism, has been exaggerated. Instead the driving forces in changes in economic organisation were economic and technological factors and the book traces their influence in shaping the pattern of regulation and ownership of these key sectors of modern economies.
Part I. Introduction
1. Ideology, technology and economic policy
Part II. The Construction of the New European Infrastructure c. 1830–1914
2. Infrastructure development and rights of way in the early nineteenth century
3. Local supply networks, private concessions and municipalisation
4. Railways and telegraph
economic growth and national unification
5. Electricity supply, tramways and new regulatory regimes c. 1870–1914
Part III. Nations and Networks 1914–45
6. Infrastructure development from the nineteenth to the twentieth century
an overall perspective
7. The development of telecommunications
8. Network integration in electricity supply
successes and failures
9. Railway finances and road-rail competition
Part IV. State Enterprise 1945–90
10. The new state, economic organisation and planning
11. Coal, oil and security
12. Airline regulation and the transport revolution
13. Telecommunications
from calm to storm
14. Economic policy, financial accountability and productivity growth
Part V. Conclusions
15. The road to privatisation and de-regulation?
Review of the hardback: 'This is a riveting, wide-ranging analysis of the development of these technologically driven industries which is absolutely vital reading for historians of this period. It is interdisciplinary, internationally comparative and also easy to read. In many ways it makes an excellent companion volume to Millward's much earlier economics text Public Expenditure Economics (1971) and could, along with other texts such as Oz Shy's The Economics of Network Industries, provide the basis for a chronologically long, internationally wide-ranging and economically stimulating course on the international development of network industries.' Economic History Review