Makers of fortune : a colonial business community and its fall
So many businesses rose and fell in nineteenth-century Auckland that the city was called a 'graveyard of enterprise'. By far the most serious and general collapse came during the decade of depression and banking crisis which overtook the whole colony after 1885. Auckland's commercial elite, which had dominated the city's business for a generation and had launched some of New Zealand's most important financial institutions, was discredited. Some of its members were impoverished. In the 1890s this failure was explained in moralistic terms. It was seen as the just penalty for speculative rashness. This book suggests that although optimism was almost an Auckland trait and was incited by rapid city growth, other economic forces were also at work, There was, for one, the ease with which funds could be obtained from abroad. Many ambitious Auckland businessmen tried to make their way by the application of the Victorian ideal of self-help. Some succeeded: others failed after early success. Through contemporary newspapers and business and legal records Dr Stone has traced an engrossing story of the fates of individual industries, firms and entrepreneurs, which also illuminates the impulses of colonial business in general. The book was developed from a doctoral thesis, which Dr Asa Briggs, the noted historian and Vice-Chancellor of the University of Sussex, said was 'one of the best theses on urban dynamics that I have read'
Print Book, English, 1973
Auckland University Press, [Auckland, N.Z.], 1973
History
vii, 240 pages, 12 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations, maps ; 25 cm
9780196477138, 0196477131
903594
Rise of Auckland's business community 1841-1879
Setting of the 1880s
Boom and slump of the 1880s
Companies
Timber
Urban real estate
Merchant princes: Thomas Morrin and J.C. Firth
Dr John Logan Campbell
Thomas Russell and his associates
Conclusion