Risky Business: investing in innovation and Britain's economic development, 1600-1750

追求创新是我们世界的一个决定性特征。在过去的四个世纪里，创新一直被誉为投资机会，有助于经济增长和改善人们的日常生活。在17世纪和18世纪的经济繁荣时期，投资者蜂拥而至，寻找贸易、制造业、采掘业和农业的机会，希望发财致富，并参与英国的经济成功。通过改进或发明的成功创新，在当时和今天一样，取决于个人是否愿意承担克服不确定性和冒险的风险。宏观经济指标并不能告诉我们具体的项目、创新和改进如何克服投资者的风险抑制，也不能告诉我们个人投资者如何在更广泛的投资网络中发挥作用。然而，尽管个人投资者参与了生产和金融创新，但在现有的资本主义史学中，个人投资者决定在何处、何时和如何投资的方式一直被搁置一边。“风险业务：投资创新和英国的经济发展，1600年至1750年”将通过调查这些行为者如何看待金融投资，感知风险，并自觉地参与“改进”，“创新”和经济增长来解决这些差距。在这样做的过程中，它将重塑对17世纪和18世纪初投资的文化和社会层面的研究--在这一时期，金融革命加速了第一批现代经济体的发展。通过这种分析，它将超越以国家为中心或机构账户和有效市场对经济发展本质的解释，而是评估“投资实践”，并研究投资选择在日常生活中经历，理解和处理的各种手段-从投资者的教育到他们的商业组织，失败的经验，以及他们如何作为“投资大众”的一部分发挥作用。因此，这项工作将作出关键的方法学贡献，目前的研究，通过建模的效用转移到'自下而上'的投资历史的注意。对创新投资背后的社会和文化实践进行更多更好的研究，将改变我们对经济变革形态和方向的理解。因此，本项目为经济发展研究提供了一个新的研究框架，该框架认识到个人和社区如何应对和参与风险、不确定性，有时是由与利润原则无关的考虑因素驱动的企业。本项目将利用广泛的主要来源，并采用创新的方法框架来呈现和解释它们。通过开发一个独特的数据集，它将审查投资于创新的行为体的经济活动、网络和行为，并评估他们如何识别机会、理解不确定性和减轻风险的文化基础。通过这种解释，该项目将超越以投资组合分析为重点的投资选择解释，以更全面地了解投资者如何参与创新市场及其对英国经济增长的影响。它还将使历史学家和社会科学家能够探究个人、企业和社会交往之间看似不重要或违反直觉的关系如何对更广泛的网络产生巨大而动态的影响。总之，通过这种分析，该项目将提出对经济增长的解释，超越对经济“何处”扩张的评估，并开始质疑投资者“为什么”和“如何”选择将经济推向这些方向。

The pursuit of innovation in a defining feature of our world. Over the past four centuries, innovation has been lauded as an investment opportunity, contributing to economic growth and the improvement of people's daily lives. During the economic boom of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, investors flocked to opportunities in trade, manufacturing, extractive industry, and agriculture in the hope of making their fortunes and take part in Britain's economic success. Successful innovation, through improvement or invention, depended just as much then as it does today on the willingness of individuals to undertake the risky business of overcoming uncertainty and putting their money on the line. Macroeconomic indicators do not tell us how specific projects, innovations and improvements overcome the risk-reticence of investors, nor how individual investors function within wider investment networks. Yet, despite their essential participation in productive and financial innovation, the ways in which individual investors made decisions about where, when, and how to invest have been side-lined in the existing historiography of capitalism."Risky Business: investing in innovation and Britain's economic development, 1600-1750" will address these gaps by investigating how these actors came to view financial investment, perceive risk, and self-consciously participate in 'improvement', 'innovation' and economic growth. In doing so, it will reshape inquiry into the cultural and social dimensions of investment during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries - a period in which financial revolution accelerated the development of the first modern economies. Through this analysis, it will expand beyond both state-focused or institutional accounts and efficient market explanations of the nature of economic development to instead assess 'investment practices' and examine the diverse means by which investment choice was experienced, understood and tackled in everyday life - from an investor's education to their business organisation, experience of failure, and how they functioned as part of an 'investing public'. Thus, this work will make key methodological contributions to current research by modelling the utility of a shift in attention to 'bottom-up' history of investment. More and better examination of the social and cultural practices underlying investment in innovation will transform our understanding of the shape and direction of economic change. This project therefore presents a new research framework for the study of economic development that recognises how individuals and communities responded to, and took part in, ventures that were risky, uncertain, and sometimes driven by considerations that had nothing to do with the profit principle.The project will draw on an extensive body of primary sources and will employ an innovative methodological framework to present and interpret them. Through the development of a unique dataset, it will examine the economic activities, networks and behaviours of actors who invested in innovation and assess the cultural foundations of how they identified opportunity, understood uncertainty and mitigated against risk. Through this interpretation, this project will move beyond 'portfolio analysis'-focused interpretations of investment choice to present a more holistic understanding of how investors engaged in the innovation market and its impact on Britain's economic growth. It will also allow historians and social scientists to interrogate how seemingly unimportant or counter-intuitive relationships between individuals, business, and social engagements had considerable and dynamic influence on wider networks. In conclusion, through this analysis the project will present an interpretation of economic growth that moves beyond assessments of 'where' the economy expanded and start to question precisely 'why' and 'how' investors chose to drive the economy in those directions.