Banians acted as intermediaries for European merchants in Bengal. They were highly influential in the eighteenth century but their importance waned thereafter. This article reexamines their role in the nineteenth century and argues that their importance persisted but evolved in response to changes in the Bengal economy and issues of contracting and governance. It shows that the banians remained a nexus between the local and global economies, facilitating a bidirectional transfer of knowledge. They enabled the development of innovative Indian business forms and contributed to the emergence of a diverse ecology of organizational forms and ownership in Bengal at the end of the nineteenth century.

The success of Balfour, Guthrie and Company in mobilizing British and American capital for productive investment contributed importantly to the economic development of the Pacific-coast region of the United States. The changing economic patterns of that region emerge through Professor Rothstein's analysis of the firm and its managers' actions and responses, from which a broader understanding of the problems and direction of foreign investment in the American West is possible.

Economic and geographic centralization are typically seen as critical components of the industrialization of food during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the fresh- and processed-tomato industries during this period offers an important counterexample to this dominant narrative. Between the late nineteenth century and World War II, the most salient characteristic of both fresh- and processed-tomato production was economic and geographic decentralization. This article argues that the emergence of sites of tomato production and processing in virtually every region of the country played a vital role in fulfilling the long-standing quest for year-round access to both fresh and processed tomatoes.

In the manner of the Creole tradesmen of Louisiana, whose lagniappe to their patrons is legendary, the Editors offer a similar bonus to readers of the Review. Instead of trifling presents added to a purchase, however, our lagniappe will be documents illustrative of the evolution of business enterprise. It is hoped thus to provide a wider availability of the raw materials of business history to teachers and researchers.

The United Planters' Association of South India (UPASI), formed in 1893 at the zenith of British colonial rule in India, was an organization dedicated to the interests of British planters, mainly tea planters, of South India. In the first half century of its history, UPASI enjoyed an unusual degree of effectiveness and control. Its authority and reach owed to the fact that, unlike many other planters' organizations of the time, such as the Ceylon Planters' Association and the Planters' Association of Malay, UPASI was an “association of associations,” a cartel of cartels, its members being district associations. But its power also derived from the homogeneous ethnic composition of the firms that constituted and managed this body, making it an exclusive association of Europeans in an Indian world. In this article, I show how this combination of ethnicity and cooperation, dynamics that manifested across the entire range of modern businesses started in colonial India, proved to be both a source of strength and a point of weakness.

IBM Finland, a small national subsidiary, was at once a Finnish business and an interface to much larger networks of technological innovation and knowledge sharing. We contextualize its development within a nested set of institutions and identities: IBM's Nordic operations, its European business, and its World Trade Corporation. Its development was profoundly shaped by Finland's unique geopolitical position during the Cold War. IBM's internal structures anticipated and paralleled those of the European Union, with mechanisms for international cooperation, for the creation of transnational identities, and for the resolution and regulation of disputes between national subsidiaries.

This article traces the economic factors in the decline of the railroad commuter business and examines the recent public-policy issues. The author is extremely skeptical of the rebirth of railroad commutation under any institutional arrangements and predicts further decline and possibly eventual extinction.

Recent studies of the progressive era by Gabriel Kolko and Robert Wiebe have proven that much reform legislation was supported by many of the interests against which the bills were ostensibly written. Professor Caine shows that, in at least one important state, railroads fought reform bitterly, accepting the principle of regulation only when conservative administration of the Railroad Regulation Act of 1905 offered them unexpected protection from progressive reformers.

“All books are dead in twenty-five years,” Mr. Justice Holmes wrote to Sir Frederick Pollock. An example of Holmes’ mastery of the art of over-statement, the dictum has its notable exceptions, as even a relatively young discipline such as economic and business history reveals. Professors Scheiber and Salsbury make the case for the permanent impact of one such exception. At the Editor's discretion, communications like the following may be published in the future about other milestones.

By building retail and wholesale market halls in the 1880s, the city of Berlin rationalized the distribution of food while maintaining public control of commerce. In designing the market hall system, technological improvement and public orderliness emerged as top priorities, while the interests of consumers and small retail dealers who had relied on the traditional outdoor public markets remained secondary. The emphasis on order reflected the interests of the city's economic and cultural elite, the Bürgertum, who sought to make Berlin fit their image of a world-class city.

At the close of the Napoleonic era, the banking business of France except in one respect had not advanced much over what it had been in 1789. At that time it had been dominated by Protestant Swiss, the best known of whom was Necker. Some of them like the Mallets, Delesserts, and Thélussons, descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Geneva and other places and in a later generation returned to France as Swiss. The business of these bankers consisted in lending their own funds and those entrusted to their care to worthy applicants for loans, probably merchants as well as noblemen. They administered fortunes for their owners, which is especially true of the court bankers who were charged with the financial affairs of the king and his family. In addition, like all eighteenth-century bankers they had a flourishing business in bills of exchange, including the accepting of drafts of bankers and merchants in other cities and countries. Necker is said to have organized these bankers and their foreign correspondents so as to provide by a system of short-term drafts the funds for French participation in our Revolutionary War.

This article examines how the film industry influenced prevailing gender and skin color stereotypes in India during the first four decades after Independence in 1947. It shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India, shared Hollywood's privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and its preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency. The influence of film content was especially significant in India as audiences often lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information. It was left to parallel, and often regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media. As conventional archival sources for this history are lacking, the article employs new evidence from oral histories of producers and actors.

Though often controversial, British investment has long played an important role in American economic development. But one sector where British capital has found a home is agriculture, where such investment has taken many forms in many places. In this essay Professor McFarlane looks at various land investments that Britons made in the North Central states, particularly Nebraska, during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, a time when there was a general agricultural boom in the cornhusker state, albeit one sandwiched around various business contractions. In his remarks McFarlane not only examines British strategies of investment but also quantifies its extent and its longterm return. To a degree his conclusions dispel some of the concerns and controversies that attended the flow of British capital into western lands.

The movement for nation-wide association among businessmen was echoed at the local level as well. This study of why and how a “grass roots” association developed suggests that the causative forces included not only material benefits but also a desire for status.

Concluding his sophisticated analysis of the Pennsylvania Railroad's organizational structure (cf. BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW, Summer, 1961), the anonymous reporter for the RAILROAD GAZETTE described in a supplementary article, reproduced here following Professor Jenks' interpretative comments, the decentralized management of the Pennsylvania's western divisions.