The Blacketts: A northern dynasty's rise, crisis and redemption By GregFinch, Newcastle upon Tyne: Tyne Bridge Publishing. 2021. pp. viii + 367. 28 plates. ISBN Hbk. 9781838280956 Pbk. 9781838280994 Hbk. £20 Pbk. £14.99
本书研究了布莱克特家族三代人的兴衰，聚焦其商业网络、政治影响及在17-18世纪英格兰北部的社会地位，适合对家族企业史和早期现代英国社会感兴趣的读者。
Blackett Street in today's Newcastle is a busy bus route through the heart of the shopping district.In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it would have traced the northern wall of the town and bordered a spectacular mansion in extensive grounds known as the 'Newe' house.Home of the Blacketts from 1675, the house announced the family's wealth and political status to all travellers on the Great North Road, but within a century it had changed hands, only to be demolished in favour of the Grainger Town redevelopments of the 1830s.At the heart of this book is a family history of three generations of Blacketts, all of them merchants, parliamentarians, knights, and Williams (neatly differentiated by the author as I, II, and III), as well as a comprehensively researched and resourced analysis of the family's business fortunes, and the people and external forces that shaped them.The rise of William I (1621-80) from a murky, though not poor, yeoman upbringing in County Durham to a high-status Newcastle apprenticeship and a profitable business dominates the early chapters.William skilfully (and a little serendipitously) wove himself a web of connections through apprenticeship, friendship, and marriage.He navigated the terrible plague of 1636 and then the English Civil War and the trade disruption that quickly followed, and in so doing built a fortune made of trade and lead, and ultimately land.William's political ambitions always served his commercial interests, giving him an effective platform to lobby for the family firm.Along with his wife Elizabeth, he was a vocal member of Newcastle's Puritan oligopoly in the interregnum period, but that did not stop him funding a celebratory fountain of wine to celebrate the restoration of Charles II in 1660.Meanwhile, he introduced a sophisticated management structure to handle the family business through trusted agents, giving him the space to work on political influence and ultimately to overcome some of the shortcomings of his descendants.Neither William II or III could match the scale of William I's ambition or business agility, although the Blackett industries continued under the able management of agents John Wilkinson and, later, Joseph Richmond.William II (William I's third son, 1657-1705), more in his father's mould, expanded the Weardale lead business further, and consolidated the family's portion of the Newcastle coal monopoly.But he died suddenly in 1705, leaving a young William III (1690-1728) in charge, whose university rather than practical education, and love of high living, led to management and cashflow problems in the 1710s and 1720s before he, in turn, died in 1728, and the business moved to a nephew, Walter.Finch describes The Blacketts as 'a case study of one family [from which] . . .general conclusions cannot be drawn', but this is modest (p.302).Readers of the Review might be less invested in the