Rewriting the history of the NZ entrepreneur

Rewriting the history of the New Zealand entrepreneur

A new book by Ian Hunter of The University of Auckland Business School provides the first comprehensive tribute to New Zealand's founding entrepreneurs, while rewriting a crucial period in our economic history often dubbed the "long depression".

Age of Enterprise: Rediscovering the New Zealand Entrepreneur, 1880-1910, published by Auckland University Press, looks at the second industrial revolution and questions its portrayal as a time of economic depression.

Hunter credits the entrepreneurs of this time with producing one of the world's most dynamic economies, with the highest living standards anywhere, whose enterprises later became the backbone of the economy.

"The entrepreneur was a leader in many of New Zealand's new fields of enterprise, integral to the growth of printing, brewing, sawmilling, and gold extraction; the mercantile trade, textile manufacturing, the frozen-meat and dairy industries and many others," he says.

Hunter examined more than 130 detailed case studies of early entrepreneurs held by The University of Auckland. He found that New Zealand's early entrepreneurs were resolutely innovative in the face of failure. They did not have access to large sums of start-up money, and traded in trust as much as capital. They were internationally connected via ties to their homelands in Europe, and invested heavily in their new society through donations to cultural boards, orphanages and galleries.

"Entrepreneurs saved up cultural, social, and financial capital, as well as the knowledge gained by experience in an industry, giving them an ideal platform to launch and then gradually expand firms," Hunter says.

The result was an economy not dominated by big business but by the entrepreneur, with small-scale firms built on individual drive, personal capitalism and family ownership.

"There are important lessons to be learned from our early entrepreneurs. The sorts of tensions, pressures and opportunities that the nineteenth century entrepreneurs faced remain true of the entrepreneurial life today, making this essential reading for today's young entrepreneurs," Hunter says.

Ian Hunter is a senior lecturer at The University of Auckland Business School where he teaches and researches in entrepreneurship, business history, marketing, and management. His previous books include Robert Laidlaw: Man for our Time, David Levene: A Man and his Business, and When People Matter Most (with Colin Prentice), and he was a co-editor of City of Enterprise (AUP, 2006)

ENDS

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