British Engineering and the New Zealand Market, 1945-60
Britain's lack-lustre industrial performance after the Second World War is seen through the mirror of an important external market, New Zealand. The spotlight is on the failure of British exporters of diesel electric locomotives and heavy electrical plant to make the most of apparently excellent opportunities in New Zealand between 1945 and 1960. British firms occupied dominant positions in the relevant segments of the New Zealand market in the early post-war period, but frittered their advantage away. Development and production expertise was in limited supply, and was spread too thinly. Cartel pricing alienated public sector customers in New Zealand and encouraged them to give orders to other countries. While these are not novel charges to lay against British manufacturers, there is considerable value in having them confirmed by evidence from a peripheral market that has been relatively neglected by business historians.
Heavy Electrical Plant
In the 1950s, the UK industry — which included Metropolitan Vickers, British Thomson-Houston, English Electric, Brush, Parsons, Reyrolle, GEC, Ferranti, Crompton Parkinson, and Richardsons Westgarth — had a healthy flow of home orders and a large share of world trade in electrical generating plant and transmission equipment. The 1960s saw a large peak in home orders and a wave of takeovers that left GEC and Reyrolle Parsons as the only UK suppliers offering a full product range, including large steam-turbine generators, power transformers and switchgear. The 1970s have been a lean period for the UK industry, with few home orders and lingering uncertainty about the future. This chapter examines the industry’s recent performance and its prospects. First, we explain the technical and market framework in which it operates.
Italian Influence on the Development of Calvinist Scholasticism
THIS ARTICLE TRIES to show that the rise of Calvinist scholasticism, which was the most important development in Calvinist theology during the second half of the sixteenth century, stemmed largely from several converging Italian influences, particularly from the writings of Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi. Here Calvinist theology refers not only to the personal thought of John Calvin but also to the teachings of the founders of the Reformed or Calvinist tradition as it spread out from Geneva and Switzerland to France, Germany, England, Scotland, Poland, and the Low Countries. In this context Calvin emerges as the brightest star in a galaxy of Reformed theologians which includes Heinrich Bullinger, Pierre Viret, Theodore Beza and Wolfgang Musculus as well as Martyr, Zanchi and others. These theologians were often more influential than Calvin himself at a given place or time or on a given point of doctrine. Bullinger, Martyr, and Martin Bucer were all more important for spreading Calvinist ideas to Edwardian England than was John Calvin. Early Elizabethan Protestantism looked more to Zurich than to Geneva, as did early Polish Calvinism. German Calvinism owed more to Heidelberg than to Geneva.' These leaders developed their theologies sometimes in mutual dependence, sometimes with surprising independence. By no means was their relation to Calvin simply that of disciple to master, for each gave a personal nuance to his style of Calvinism. Thus the sixteenth century Jesuit Cornelius Schulting states on the opening page of his five volume polemic against Calvin and Peter Martyr that Martyr was clearer and far more learned than Calvin.2 Recently John Bray has pointed out that research in seventeenth century Calvinism leads "to the conclusion that the impact of Calvin upon the Calvinistic movement has been greatly over-rated. It may well be that some of