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This chapter looks at the role of the business community and charts both the business and civic activity of members of the Belfast business elite. It gives overview of the economic and business culture in which the middle-classes lived and worked. Rather than an economic history of the city, it offers a people-centric view of the city and its economic environment. The focus is on three lesser-known business families of Belfast – the Workmans, Corrys and McCances. Particular attention is paid to the Workman and Corry businesses which together highlight the close-knit nature of the local economy, the interrelatedness of family businesses and the strong connections between industrialists in Belfast and their counterparts in Scotland. Like many of Belfast’s industrial elite, the Presbyterian Workman and Corry families moved to the up-and-coming town at the very beginning of the century to take advantage of the opportunities it had to offer. The first part of the chapter outlines these family businesses and the ways in which they were representative of the city’s business elite. The second part of the chapter discusses the civic activism in which these and other middle-class families engaged.

This short chapter argues that we now need a different definition of a military-industrial complex, for the evidence in this book shows a different side to the alleged abuses of armament manufacturers and industrial elites. While plenty of illegal dealings occurred, they did not occur in the way some theorists have anticipated, nor by the actors judged most likely to hold influence in such a complex. The actions of ‘outsiders’ and ‘insiders’ during rearmament and WW2 paints a very different picture of industry, and shows why political, business, and military history can never be effectively separated when studying questions like these.

This chapter establishes the concept that Bombay was built and controlled jointly by the colonial rulers and the Indian and European mercantile and industrial elite to serve the interests of these classes and the commerce of the city. Arguing against the popular notion that a colonial city is the product of the singular vision of the colonial regime, it builds on recent literature that shows how a variety of colonial cities resulted as much from contributions of local populations as from contributions of the colonial regime or settlers. The objective is to demonstrate the operation of the joint enterprise and to introduce readers to Bombay by discussing the urbanization of the city and important phases of its growth.