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The Sugar Revolution in New England: Barbados, Massachusetts Bay, and the Atlantic Sugar Economy, 1600–1700 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Marion Menzin
This article traces the patterns of sugar consumption in seventeenth-century New England, from port to countryside, and the way in which economic exchange between New England and Barbados shaped the development of both regions. It deepens understanding of the rise of slavery-based tropical commodity production and consumption in the Atlantic world and examines the ways in which the emergence of capitalism
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Unfreedom and Slavery Under Sail: Intercolonial Trade in the British Atlantic, 1698–1766 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Hannah Knox Tucker
Using evidence from 25,250 records of vessels entering and clearing the rivers of the Chesapeake Bay, this article demonstrates that intercolonial trading captains and crews significantly reduced the number of days their vessels spent in port in Virginia between 1698 and 1766. This contraction reflected a quantifying ethos in shipping that emerged during the early age of sail as the result of mutually
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Configuring Cultural Emerging Industries: A Comparison of the French and Italian Fashion Industries Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-03-21 Elisabetta Merlo, Valeria Pinchera
This paper builds on a body of multi-disciplinary literature to analyze and compare the emergence of the prêt-à-porter industry in France and the ready-to-wear industry in Italy from their founding to their growth stages in the mid-twentieth century. The comparison demonstrates the significant impact that the French Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, des Confectionneurs et des Tailleurs pour Dame, and
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Reflection: Firms, Rules, and Global Capitalism Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2024-01-03 Rawi Abdelal
Every organization of the world economy has been unstable. Each system is necessarily composed of trade-offs. Opportunities emerge, and disappointments abound. Nothing lasts; nothing is finished; and nothing is perfect.
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Governing Global Tax Dodgers: The “Group of Four” and the Taxation of Multinational Corporations, 1970s–1980s Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-11-23 Vanessa Ogle
During the 1970s, governments increasingly expressed concerns about the loss of revenue through the use of tax havens by both individuals and corporations. This article explores a covert international working group (the Group of Four) set up between France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1969 in response to such concerns. At regular meetings, officials exchanged information gathered
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A Mercantilist Brand: The British East India Company and Madeira Wine, 1756–1834 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Benedita Câmara, Teresa da Silva Lopes, Robert Fredona
This study analyzes the long-term power of mercantilist firms and brands in industries characterized by high uncertainty and asset specificity. It contrasts the reputation-building and protection strategies employed in two similar industries in Portugal in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; namely, those of Madeira and Port wine. The Portuguese crown created a collective brand for Port
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Development, Inc.? The EEC, Britain, Post-Colonial Overseas Development Aid, and Business Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Véronique Dimier, Sarah Stockwell
This article assesses the “business of development” in the post-colonial age, when bilateral and multilateral aid regimes offered businesses new opportunities. It uses the case study of Britain and the European Economic Community (EEC), from Britain's accession to the EEC in 1973 to the early 1980s, to demonstrate that the British government viewed multilateral aid instruments, in particular the European
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Revisiting Interwar Global Economic Governance: Technocrats, Sovereignty, and the Perennial Problem of Legitimacy in Global Governance Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-10-03 Laura Phillips-Sawyer
The international institutions that govern global capitalism—the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund (IMF)—wield considerable power over the flows of trade and finance, and thereby the nation-states that participate in it. (And opting out is nearly impossible.) Those institutions were created in July 1944, amidst World War II, with the laudable objectives to restore global trade
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Business and Global Capitalism: Continuities and Change Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Neil Rollings
It is common for historians to focus their attention on turning points in the past. The risk with this is that it overstates how dramatic change was and the extent of stasis and stability in between those turning points, at its most extreme form in notions of punctuated equilibriums. We need to remember the importance of continuities across those turning points and transitions in order to understand
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Competing Projects in Global Governance Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Quinn Slobodian
The twentieth century is a fascinating time to follow the relationship between global governance and firms because of the persistent tension between principles of mass democracy and private ownership and control. It is possible to narrate the entire century as a series of contestations between firms and international organizations. At times, firms have had the upper hand. At other times, the principle
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Governing Global Capitalism: A Lawyer's Perspective Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Nicolás M. Perrone
In April 1959, editor-in-chief of Time magazine, Henry Luce, spoke vehemently to the World Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce, encouraging business leaders “to unite [their] energies on something which is really fundamental—fundamental to civilization and economic progress. That something is the advancement of the rule of law.” Together with lawyers, business leaders had “the responsibility
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Histories and Futures of Business in a Turbulent World Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-29 Patricia Clavin
When it comes to events that have marked turning points in the relationship between global governance and business history, I have focused on the role of international crises to understand the forces shaping relations between firms, states, and global governance frameworks. Such an approach stems from the fact that I am primarily an historian of international relations, and much of my research and
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Introduction Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-27
Scholarly and public interest in the nexus of capitalism and global governance has intensified in recent years. The persistence of economic inequality, the rise of populism, the backlash against globalization, the Covid-19 pandemic and supply chain fragility, the resurgence of open conflict in Europe, and the urgency of the climate change crisis have only drawn further attention to the relationships
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Slavery, Coercion, and Economic Development in Sub-Saharan Africa Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Leigh Gardner
Recent debates on the economic history of the United States and other regions have revisited the question of the extent to which slavery and other forms of labor coercion contributed to the development of economic and political institutions. This article aims to bring Africa into this global debate, examining the contributions of slavery and coercion to periods of economic growth during the nineteenth
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Captivity's Commerce: The Theory and Methodology of Slaving and Capitalism Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Mary E. Hicks
This article identifies new pathways for integrating African perspectives into debates about the historical relationship between slavery and capitalism. It focuses extensively on the work of African historian Joseph C. Miller (1939–2019), whose concept of “ethno political economics” combined ethnographic and quantitative data and offered a new perspective on Atlantic World history. Building on theorizations
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(Un)principled Agents: Monitoring Loyalty after the End of the Royal African Company Monopoly Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Anne Ruderman, Marlous van Waijenburg
The revocation of the Royal African Company's (RAC) monopoly in 1698 inaugurated a transformation of the transatlantic slave trade. While the RAC's exit from the slave trade has received scholarly attention, little is known about the company's response to the loss of its trading privileges. Not only did the end of the company's monopoly increase competition, but the unprecedented numbers of private
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Pharmaceutical Captivity, Epistemological Rupture, and the Business Archive of the British Slave Trade Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Carolyn Roberts
The archival record of the transatlantic slave trade poses a methodological challenge to researchers who wish to center the lives of enslaved people in their scholarship. In more recent years, such archival scrutiny has evolved into its own vibrant field of inquiry concerning the politics of the archive. This article contributes to this burgeoning field by studying the pharmaceutical dimensions of
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The British Gunpowder Industry and the Transatlantic Slave Trade Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Nicholas Radburn
How did Atlantic slavery stimulate British industry? This article answers that question through a study of five firms that supplied gunpowder to the slave trade. It first demonstrates that the Atlantic slavery trade certainly expanded Britain's explosives industry during the eighteenth century. British merchant capitalists established five plants in the proximity of Bristol and Liverpool to meet African
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Principles and Agents: The British Slave Trade and Its Abolition. By David Richardson. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2022. 384 pp. Illustrations. Hardcover, $50.00. ISBN: 978-0-300-25139-5 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Matthew David Mitchell
The care that David Richardson took, both in titling and in sub-titling his new book on Britain's transatlantic slave trade, is quite evident. This is not just a book on the abolition of Britain's slave trade, with a bit of material on Britain's previous conduct of its slave trade as a more or less unconnected prologue. This is a book about both things—“the British slave trade” and also “its abolition”—and
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“This Slavery Business Is a Horrible Thing”: The Economy of American Slavery in the Lives of the Enslaved Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Justene Hill Edwards
This article examines the business of American slavery from the perspective of enslaved people. It draws from narratives of enslaved fugitivity and interviews with the formerly enslaved to interrogate how they understood the business imperatives of slavery in the antebellum American South. It argues that enslaved peoples’ economic knowledge was cultivated through the violence inherent in the business
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Liberal Environmentalism: The Public-Private Production of European Emissions Standards Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-06 Grace Ballor
In the late twentieth century, the European Union (EU) emerged as a global leader in setting environmental protections, including vehicle emissions standards. But member state consensus around environmental rules did not come easily, and the regional norms eventually set by the EU and its predecessor, the European Economic Community, had complex origins. This article argues that common emissions standards
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Profiting from Slavery and Emancipation: Compensation, Capital, and Collateral in Nineteenth-Century Senegal Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-06-01 Bronwen Everill, Khadidiatou Diedhiou
The relationship between capitalism and slavery has been contentious because, in the Atlantic economy, enslaved people functioned as commodities, as labor, and as assets. The transition away from the Atlantic slave-trading system across the nineteenth century affected the stakeholders in these economic functions differently. Compensated emancipation in Senegal provides an opportunity for thinking about
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Creating Value Out of Waste: The Transformation of the Swedish Waste and Recycling Sector, 1970s–2010s Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Magnus Lindmark, Nadezda Petrusenko
This article examines the growth of the waste and recycling sector in Sweden since the 1970s and seeks to identify the conditions for market growth and underlying business dynamics. The article identifies a slow growth pattern at aggregate level in the 1970s, while a major shift toward higher growth rates took place only in the mid-1990s. Resembling the findings of existing studies of German and US
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The Political Economy of American Businesses in British Central Africa, 1953–1963 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Victor M. Gwande
This article details how and why officials in the United States and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland developed policies and initiatives to promote US capital investments. It analyzes these policies in the context of decolonization, white minority rule, and the Cold War in Africa. It further shows how US business interests, especially in the mining industry, increased their investments and influenced
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A State of Supervision: The Political Economy of Banking Regulation in Germany, 1900s–1930s Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Robert Yee
This article examines debates over banking regulation in Germany that culminated in the 1934 Reich Banking Law. Existing accounts have traced its origins to the 1931 banking crisis or the 1933 Nazi seizure of power. Yet, rather than the outcome of a single financial or political crisis, banking regulation was the product of longer-term discussions on national security, legal rationale, and financial
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Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric. By Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020. 384 pp. Paperback, 28.00. ISBN: 978-1-982-17644-0. Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-05-10 Richard S. Tedlow
General Electric and Jack Welch are dead. Now they belong to the ages, which means they are the property of historians. What are we to make of them? Journalism has been called the first draft of history, and under review here are two books by journalists: Lights Out: Pride, Delusion, and the Fall of General Electric by Thomas Gryta and Ted Mann and The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted
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Beyond Planetary Limits! The International Chamber of Commerce, the United Nations, and the Invention of Sustainable Development Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-04-28 Ann-Kristin Bergquist, Thomas David
This article examines the role of business interests in shaping the structures of global environmental governance between the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992. It demonstrates how the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) managed to establish itself as a key partner for the UN while articulating
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Business Creation and Political Turmoil: Ireland versus Scotland before 1900 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Robin J. C. Adams, Gareth Campbell, Christopher Coyle, John D. Turner
What effect does political instability in the form of a potential secession from a political union have on business formation? Using newly collected data on business creation, we show that entrepreneurial activity in Ireland in the late nineteenth century was much lower than Scotland, and this divergence fluctuated over time. Several factors may have contributed to this, but we argue that political
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The Unsung Activists: UK Shareholder Investigation Committees, 1888–1940 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Janette Rutterford, Leslie Hannah
As companies became larger and shareholders more numerous in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, the conventional wisdom is that the free-rider problem inhibited active shareholder participation. Discontented shareholders could sell in the market, but it was long before the takeover bid mechanism facilitated the removal of underperforming incumbent boards. We show, using a sample of fifty
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Methodological Openness in Business History Research: Looking Afresh at the British Interwar Management Movement Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Mairi Maclean, Gareth Shaw, Charles Harvey, Gary Stringer
Much thought has been accorded to the evolving nature of business history. It is only relatively recently, however, that attempts have been made to articulate methodological issues in a more epistemologically explicit and reflexive fashion. This article contributes to this burgeoning agenda by examining the methodology underpinning an intensive archival study of the British interwar management movement
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Merchants Revisited: Long-Distance Traders and the World they Made Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Hannah Knox Tucker
When faced with Esther Sahle's, Edmond Smith's, and Dane A. Morrison's recent books on English and American merchants, their activities, and their communities, a reader with any level of exposure to the field of early modern and early republic business history might legitimately ask, do we really need more? Historians have so completely associated early modern economic activity with merchant activity
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Rahul Bajaj: An Extraordinary Life Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2023-02-08 Medha Kudaisya
Rahul Bajaj, long-time chairman of the more-than-120-year-old Bajaj empire—best known for Bajaj Auto, one of the most valuable motorcycle firms globally, and Bajaj Finserv, its financial services arm—was a larger-than-life figure in Indian industry and public life. Famed for his probity, Bajaj twice served as president of the Confederation of Indian Industry, was an elected member of the Rajya Sabha
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Related Investing: Family Networks, Gender, and Shareholding in Antebellum New England Corporations Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-11 B. Zorina Khan
Research into the organization of the firm typically contrasts family businesses with impersonal corporate structures, and kinship ties among corporate elites are often associated with inefficiency and corruption. This analysis of over 14,000 equity investors and executive officers finds that familial networks were embedded in early corporations, not just among directors but also among small shareholders
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Why Do Unsuccessful Companies Survive? U.S. Airlines, Aircraft Leasing, and GE, 2000–2008 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-11-11 Gishan Dissanaike, Ranadeva Jayasekera, Geoff Meeks
Warren Buffett famously commented that the U.S. airline industry had made zero profit in its first nine decades. Subsequently, between the millennium and the Great Financial Crisis the airlines in total lost almost $60 billion. Yet no major airline was liquidated or taken over in those nine years. Financial support was repeatedly provided by GE, the conglomerate supplier of leasing finance, engines
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The Rise and Fall of George Frederic Augustus II: The Central American, Caribbean, and Atlantic Life of a Miskitu King, 1805–1824 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-10-12 Damian Clavel
Retracing closely the events of the life of George Frederic, king of the Miskitu (in present-day Honduras and Nicaragua) between 1816 and 1824, this article describes how this Miskitu actor sought to set up, by hiring British agents, the concrete realization of a Central American commercial and political independence project—understood here as a utopia. Although his project ended in failure, the actions
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Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-09-20 Naomi R. Lamoreaux
When people ask me, as they often do, to recommend a single-volume overview of American economic history, I always feel stumped. Sometimes I suggest textbooks in the field, sadly all out of date at this writing, and sometimes monographs that cover specific periods or topics. Now, finally, I have a good answer. I can recommend Jonathan Levy's Ages of American Capitalism. A comprehensive narrative that
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Ownership Matters: French Governments and Automotive Industrialists Facing the Japanese Challenge, 1974–1986 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-09-13 Alice Milor
Between 1974 and 1986, the intervention of various French governments on both the right and the left—in addition to corporate maneuvering and increased focus on competitiveness and lean production—resulted in foreign direct investment, mergers, plant closures, and bankruptcies among struggling French automotive suppliers. This article will explore why these efforts were unsuccessful by revisiting the
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Recent Trends in the Business History of Russia: The Blurry Borders of the Discipline Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Valentina Fava, Volodymyr Kulikov
The article analyzes recent trends in the business history of Russia and its interrelations with mainstream business history. The authors explore the extent to which the business history of Russia can contribute to the development of the discipline. To do so, they use an “alternative business history” framework. They argue that Russian business history is a disciplinary hybrid. As such, it can reasonably
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Entrepreneurship in Emerging Markets: Female Entrepreneurs in Colombia since 1990 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Carlos Dávila, Andrea Lluch
This article analyzes changes in the composition of Colombia's entrepreneurial class since the 1990s. We identify an increasing heterogeneity among the country's entrepreneurs, marked by greater diversity in gender, social class, and educational level. We also note more diverse regional origins, career trajectories, and political orientations among this group. The increasing number of women entrepreneurs
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Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-07-29 Robert Fredona
“At the expense of anything?” rejoined Lady Carbury with energy. “One cannot measure such men by the ordinary rule.”—Anthony Trollope, The Way We Live Now (1875) Facile criticisms of Adam Tooze's new book, Shutdown: How Covid Shook the World's Economy, present themselves at once. It suffers by comparison to Tooze's masterpiece, The Wages of Destruction (2006)—easily one of the best historical works
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Globalization, Cities, and Firms in Twentieth-Century India Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-06-20 Chinmay Tumbe
This article explores the linkages between globalization, cities, and firms in twentieth-century India. Since the interwar period in the early twentieth century, India withdrew from the global economy, reintegrating only in the 1990s. This reshaped the metropolitan hierarchy in India in specific ways, whether through international migration and creation of new supply chains before 1991 or by foreign
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From Defensive to Transformative Business Diplomacy: The British South Africa Company and the End of Chartered Company Rule in Rhodesia, 1910–1925 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-06-09 Klas Rönnbäck, Oskar Broberg
Chartered companies were important tools of European colonialism, but also institutions with a political agenda of their own. In this study, we focus upon one key chartered company, the British South Africa Company, in particular the ending of its charter in 1923/24, in order to study the business diplomacy strategies employed by the company. We show how the company during the period under study moved
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Growth Regimes Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-06-02 Peter A. Hall
Although it has a durable institutional shape, the operation of capitalism takes different forms across space and time with varying distributive effects. This article contributes to a growing literature considering the successive forms taken by capitalism in the developed democracies since World War II. It develops a distinctive conception of these forms as “growth regimes” that are mutually constituted
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Mexico's Business and Entrepreneurship in the Era of Nationalism Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-06-02 Aurora Gómez Galvarriato, Gabriela Recio Cavazos
This article studies the evolution of business in Mexico from the Revolution (1910–1920) to the early 1980s, a period when the state played a major role in the economy and undertook nationalistic policies. It explores the development of distinctive features that characterize business in Latin America: the importance of family-owned diversified business groups and immigrants, the prominence of illegal
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Intellectual Property and National Economies Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-04-22 Lee Vinsel
While a few nations had intellectual property (IP) laws before 1800, many more created them in the nineteenth century, and even more than that waited until well into the twentieth century. When scholars examine different national and international IP regimes, they find not only controversy and apparently intractable debate about the laws’ merits but also seemingly irreducible variety. Two recent books—the
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The Business of Internetworking: Standards, Start-Ups, and Network Effects Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Andrew L. Russell, James L. Pelkey, Loring Robbins
Historical accounts of the Internet's origins tend to emphasize U.S. government investment and university-based researchers. In contrast, this article introduces actors who have been overlooked: the entrepreneurs and private firms that developed standards, evaluated competing standards, educated consumers about the value of new products, and built products to sell. Start-up companies such as 3Com and
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CE Marking, Business, and European Market Integration Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Grace Ballor
Many products—from consumer electronics to children's toys—bear the CE mark, the symbol of conformity to the “essential requirements” of European standards. This article traces the development of CE marking from its origins in the European Community's (EC) efforts to relaunch the Single European Market in the mid-1980s to its full implementation in the mid-1990s across the European Economic Area (EEA)
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Inching toward Modernity: Industrial Standards and the Fate of the Metric System in the United States Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-03-21 Stephen Mihm
That the United States stands almost alone among nations in its failure to adopt the metric system has long been blamed on conservative, reactionary forces. This paper argues against this interpretation, which passes for conventional wisdom in both academic and popular circles. It instead contends that attacks on the metric system in the late nineteenth and twentieth century originated with progressive
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Making Food Standard: The U.S. Food and Drug Administration's Food Standards of Identity, 1930s–1960s Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-03-09 Xaq Frohlich
This article looks at the implementation of food standards of identity by the U.S Food and Drug Administration from the 1930s to the 1960s, a period in the FDA’s history wedged between the “era of adulteration” of the early twentieth century and the agency’s turn to “informational regulation” starting in the 1970s. The article describes the origin of food standards in the early twentieth century and
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Plan Calcul: France's National Information Technology Ambition and Instrument of National Independence Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Laureen Kuo
The history of Plan Calcul―France's first information technology program, launched by de Gaulle's government in 1966―has been well described in the literature; however, few studies investigate the arsenal system of the program in depth. Drawing from Plan Calcul's archives, this article is the first to demonstrate that, in the context of de Gaulle's Cold War foreign policy, the French government, initially
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Trademarks as “Global Merchants of Skill”: The Dynamics of the Japanese Match Industry, 1860s–1930s Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-02-18 Teresa da Silva Lopes, Shin Tomita
The Japanese match industry is an early case of an industry that changed global market dynamics by building international competitiveness through combining low-cost and low-price strategies with product differentiation. This differentiation was achieved through the registration of trademarks for all matches exported, total quality control, and strong investments in graphic design to adapt brands and
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Men of Science and Standards: Introducing the Metric System in Nineteenth-Century Brazil Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Anne G. Hanley
This article addresses the question of how standards were determined and disseminated in an era before the formation of agreed upon standards or the existence of governing bodies, by examining the case of nineteenth-century Brazil. It argues that the experience in Brazil was similar to that of other nations: individuals engaged in mathematical, scientific, engineering, and statistical organizations
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“All the Other Devils this Side of Hades”: Black Banks and the Mississippi Banking Law of 1914 Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-01-12 Shennette Garrett-Scott
The realms of banking and finance reveal a far more complex approach to early twentieth-century African American activism than the conventional protest vs. accommodation paradigm. Whites’ anxieties about Black economic and political autonomy melded into a peculiar alchemy of progressive zeal and white supremacy that professed the idealistic goal of protecting citizens from exploitative business practices
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Enron and the California Energy Crisis: The Role of Networks in Enabling Organizational Corruption Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-01-12 Adam Nix, Stephanie Decker, Carola Wolf
We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization
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History and Turning the Antitrust Page Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2021-12-23 Brian R. Cheffins
Present-day advocates of antitrust reform referred to as “New Brandeisians” have invoked history in pressing the case for change. The New Brandeisians bemoan the upending of a mid-twentieth-century “golden age” of antitrust by an intellectual movement known as the Chicago School. In fact, mid-twentieth-century enforcement of antitrust was uneven and large corporations exercised substantial market power
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How to Boost the Payoff from Innovation While Shrinking its Destructive Side Effects Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-01-12 Robert J. Gordon
Gather a group of economists together and ask what most concerns them, and a wide variety of topics would soon emerge: slowing economic growth in the rich nations, the inability of many poor nations to converge toward the rich, rising income and wealth inequality, the increasing dominance of superstar firms, growing profit margins and the decline in labor's income share, globalization and the human
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The Corsairs of Saint-Malo: Network Organization of a Merchant Elite under the Ancien Régime. By Henning Hillmann. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. xii + 322 pp. Figures, tables, notes, bibliography, index. Hardcover: $140.00. ISBN: 9780231180382. Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Oliver Cussen
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The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business. By Karolina Hutková. Woodbridge, U.K.: Boydell Press, 2019. xii + 257 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendixes, bibliography. Hardcover, $120.00. ISBN: 978-1-783-27394-2. Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 Jagjeet Lally
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Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. By Marcia Chatelain. New York: Liveright, 2020. 336 pp. Hardcover, $28.95. ISBN: 978-1-63149-394-2. Business History Review (IF 1.5) Pub Date : 2022-01-01 LaShawn Harris