It is generally assumed today that business education at university level is an American invention. This belief finds reinforcement in the style and substance of management education as it diffused throughout Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. Modern management meant the introduction of American business methods; training in these methods meant the use of American curricular models and textbooks. But this propensity to turn to an American model was not unique to the postwar years; we can find traces of it at the beginning of this century. When, in 1902, W. J. Ashley presided over the creation of the first Faculty of Commerce at a British university, he appealed to the precedents set by recent American developments. Ashley, an Oxford history graduate, had been hired back from North America to lead the faculty: first Professor of Political Economy and Constitutional History at Toronto from 1888 to 1892, then the inaugural Professor of Economic History at Harvard University, his knowledge of developments in North American business education was considered of critical importance to the success of the Birmingham faculty.