Dragons: 10 Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain

By Liam Byrne

These are the inspiring stories of 10 great British entrepreneurs from the Elizabethan age to the present, and how their genius made Britain great and shaped the global marketplace. Britain's rise to global dominance from the 16th century owed as much to the vision and creativity of traders, industrialists, and bankers as it did to wars of conquest fought by the military. This book tells the story of British business endeavor through the lives of 10 titans of commerce. Beginning with the Tudor merchants who transformed England's economy via trade with the New World, Liam Byrne traces an entrepreneurial golden line through men such as Thomas Pitt, savior of the East India Company; financier Nathan Rothschild, creator of the modern bond market; and William Lever, of the employee-owned John Lewis Partnership. At the start of the 21st century Britain remains a major economic power. This is both a rousing celebration of British business genius and a fascinating informative narrative of a neglected but essential strand of British history.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: May 5, 2016
• ISBN: 9781781857465

Liam Byrne

The Rt. Hon. Liam Byrne MP chairs the Global Parliamentary Network on the World Bank & International Monetary Fund and sits on the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee. He served in the Cabinet in 10 Downing Street and Her Majesty's Treasury. An Honorary Professor of Social Science at the University of Birmingham, Liam was a Fulbright scholar at the Harvard Business School and Gwilym Gibbon Research Fellow at Nuffield College, Oxford. He has represented Birmingham Hodge Hill, the most income-deprived community in Britain, for the last 19 years and is the author of a major history of British capitalism Dragons: Ten Entrepreneurs Who Built Britain.