Abstract The burden of occupying the first established chair of business history at the. London School of Economics (and indeed the first in Britain) is happily lightened by the knowledge that the field is by no means as bereft of research and scholarship as this priority implies. The first two professors of economic history appointed at LSE fifty years ago, Eileen Power and R.H. Tawney, made distinguished contributions, to the study of medieval traders and to the impact of puritanism on the capitalist ethic. Their successors have maintained this interest in business history. T.S. Ashton's study of the business of Peter Stubs of Warrington was one of the building blocks from which his picture of the Industrial Revolution was built. Charlotte Erickson's study of British industrialists remains the classic account of their social and educational origins and career patterns between 1850 and 1950. Donald Coleman and Theo Barker, well before they joined with other scholars to found the Business History Unit, wr...