Entertainment Industrialised: The emergence of the international film industry, 1890-1940

Also available in paperback, Cambridge University Press, 2011, ISBN: 9781107403499Entertainment Industrialised is the first study to compare the emergence and economic development of the film industry in Britain, France and the United States between 1890 and 1940. Gerben Bakker investigates the commercialisation and industrialisation of live entertainment in the nineteenth century and analyses the subsequent arrival of motion pictures, revealing that their emergence triggered a process of incessant creative destruction, development and productivity growth that continues in the entertainment industry today. He argues that cinema industrialised live entertainment by automating it, standardising it and making it tradeable, a process that was largely demand-led, and that a quality race between firms changed the structure of the international entertainment market. While a hundred years ago, European enterprises were supplying half of all films shown in the U.S., the quality race resulted in today's industry, in which a handful of American companies dominate the global entertainment business.-- List of figures viii -- List of tables xii -- Acknowledgements xv -- Prologue xix -- Introduction 1 (10) -- Part I The rise of entertainment 11 (142) -- The emergence of national entertainment markets 17 (55) -- The increase in demand for entertainment 72 (38) -- The structure of household entertainment expenditure 110 (43) -- Part II The rise of the international film industry 153 (162) -- The emergence of cinema 159 (26) -- The quality race 185 (44) -- Europe's failure to catch up 229 (43) -- How films become branded products 272 (43) -- Part III Entertainment Industrialised 315 (98) -- International market integration: firms versus trade 319 (22) -- Industrialising the discovery process 341 (30) -- At the origins of increased productivity growth in services 371 (33) -- Epilogue: after television 404 (9) -- Bibliography 413 (27) -- Index 440Published version of EUI PhD thesis, 200