African American Entrepreneurship: The View from the 1910 Census

Despite limited study in recent years, entrepreneurship plays a crucial role in economic growth, both in society at large and within specific ommunities. 2 In a capitalist market economy, firms initiate and coordinate a wide range of ongoing economic activity, and have increasingly been the site of innovation. The formation and nurturing of firms, of organizations which can create and sustain economic activity, is the most basic of entrepreneurial activities. Understanding who forms businesses, and why they succeed or fail, should be of great importance to economists. Understanding how those processes have changed over time should also be an important area of study for economic historians. Successful entrepreneurs often rely on networks for the provision of information and resources which give them a competitive advantage privileged access to information about product markets, sources of labor or capital, production technology, and management organization. Sometimes these networks are based on family and extended kinship. Other networks are based on common racial, ethnic, or religious identification. Historians and sociologists have focused on these "non-economic" networks to explain ethnic and racial differences in patterns of entrepreneurship [1,3]. Less formal, and less visible when not associated with a distinct "minority" group, are networks based on common membership in professional, craft, educational. social, or cultural institutions. More generally, overlapping business and personal associations can be thought of as highways for the flow of resources and information. Firms, industries, communities, and nations succeed when they are at a major intersection, where mutually sustaining networks intersect. While sociologists and historians have focused on personal, familial, and