A concise 1995 review of the strengths and weaknesses of the British motor industry during the one hundred years since its foundation.

Kit Kat, Turkish Delight, Creme Egg, Rolo and All Gold: they are all as much a part of British life as were the companies that made them and which led the chocolate revolution in the nineteenth century: Rowntree's, Fry's, Cadbury's, Mackintosh and Terry's. This book charts the history of chocolate manufacture, marketing and consumption in Britain from its origins in the eighteenth century. It then describes the golden age from 1900 to the 1970s and the subsequent US and Swiss invasions, spearheaded by brands such as Mars, Toblerone and Nestlé's Milky Bar, including the takeovers by Nestle and Kraft.

This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.

The first comprehensive, research-based attempt to determine what has, in fact, been achieved by the measures and policies adopted, and to forecast their continuing effects.

How has British industry financed itself in the past? With the current debate on industry's financial strategy, this study of the past sixty years is a particularly timely contribution to the discussions on the future financing of industry. This book gives, for the inter-war years, a detailed examination of the main sources of funds, covering long-term and short-term funding. It also traces the transition in the new issue market and explores the course of firms' own internal funds, and ends his coverage of the pre-war years with a chapter on the Macmillan Gap. Dr Thomas puts particular emphasis on the influence of government policy on the financing of industry in post-war Britain. He also explains the effects the new sources of finance have had on industry and the major public corporations. His last chapter surveys the later developments in the main sources and uses of funds and the factors responsible for them, and includes an illuminating comparison of financial practices in some of the major overseas industrial countries. Dr. Thomas has written a clear and objective account describing the trends in finance since the First World War. His notably well-documented book is an essential reference work.