Noblemen entrepreneurs

This special issue includes 10 articles and aims to highlight the role of noblemen in the economy, as entrepreneurs, and relate the history of noblemen entrepreneurs in Europe and Asia, thus offering up opportunities for comparison in an age of economic expansion and globalisation. In our editorial, we discuss the main features of noblemen’s business and their contribution to shaping the nineteenth-century economy, in a period which is still often identified, in spite of numerous revisionist studies, as the century of the rise of the bourgeoisie and the decline of the nobility. A specific section covers the Japanese nobility, established during the Meiji period and modelled on the Western aristocracy, which was a unique case in Asia. As a result of taking a more global view on the subject, in the conclusion we try to draw some similarities and differences between the European and Asian cases. Reconsidering the European nobility as influential economic players is one of the main objects of this special issue. As emerges from the articles on nineteenth-century European nobility, their interests ranged from land and urban estates to finance and the stock exchange. Their broad involvement in different kinds of businesses, and their constant presence as investors in several new initiatives, lead us to reflect on their persistent key contribution to the economy and to discuss the widespread idea of their inevitable decline throughout the century. As for the Asian nobility, noblemen were originally limited to the sovereign and their network of kin, in addition to vassals with whom they had a close relationship, which is quite similar to the initial stage of the composition of the European nobility. However, due to different historical paths, Asian noblemen did not experience a radical opening up of membership compared to the European examples, and important differences emerge in the scope and scale of Asian noblemen.