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 demand, provincializing the gunpowder industry for the first time. The slave trade also inflated the gunpowder industry's volume, with twelve percent of all powder going to Africa before abolition. This article next reveals that supplying the slave trade was likely a lucrative pursuit for British manufacturers, with investors in the five mills earning profits that exceeded those of slaving. The boost given to the explosives industry faded considerably as abolition neared, however, and so this article concludes that Atlantic slavery's stimulus was likely of limited importance for driving the later Industrial Revolution.

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 of slavery, from their ideas about banking to their understanding of entrepreneurialism. Building on the current literature on capitalism and slavery, this article shows that slavery's brutality shaped enslaved peoples’ knowledge of commerce in nineteenth-century America.

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 a neoliberal vision that emphasized the market mechanism and business self-regulation as sources of environmental governance. The article provides empirical evidence that the ICC institutionalized business self-regulation in environmental governance and contributed to the very definition of the concept of sustainable development as we know it today.

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 policy. Drawing from Zimbabwean archives, it argues that these competing priorities produced inconsistent results that tended to support US imperialism and hinder nationalist movements in British Central Africa.

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 globalization. Prior to World War I, officials expressed concerns over Germany's dependence on foreign capital, while later efforts to improve liquidity in the banking sector continued in the 1920s. The construction of a regulatory policy thus arose from a series of investigations into how to protect the German economy from foreign crises, thereby reflecting the interdependence of politics and finance.

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 industry counterparts, Swedish recycling companies grew larger in the 1970s and more knowledge-intensive from the 1980s. Our study concludes that the growth of the Swedish recycling industry has been driven not only by government policies addressing household waste but even more so by large manufacturing firms that have increasingly demanded more complex recycling services over time.

This article analyzes the accounting treatment of sales and purchasing at the Fengshengtai Company (丰盛泰号), a salt trader from Shanxi Province. We find evidence of “dualled entry” bookkeeping in that all transactions were recorded twice. Crucially, each set of dualled entries was recorded in two distinct accounts. For example, cash transactions were recorded in a “cash flowing account” as well as a specialized flowing account. We thus argue that, in light of clues from other records, a system of indigenous Chinese double-entry bookkeeping may well have been developed at Fengshengtai and other Shanxi merchants. Our study is based on Fengshengtai's surviving account books, a collection of primary sources spanning 1854 to 1881, that have recently become available to scholars.

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 uncertainty about the prospect of a devolved government in Ireland played a role. The effects were most acute in the North of Ireland, the region that was most concerned by potential changes.

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 (1918–1939), a major force in British management education between the wars. We explicate the methodology employed and question what this material tells us about the interwar management movement, in terms of its determination to modernize management, encourage openness between firms, and extend a new spirit of partnership. We show that the interwar management movement was characterized by organized cooperation and methodological openness. Our main contribution is to demonstrate that interpretations themselves can become entrenched and prone to inertia, inviting us to revisit these periodically and, if appropriate, recast them.

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 of this little-known Miskitu king had repercussions in the Caribbean and beyond, even in the heart of the City of London. Concentrating on a marginal actor seldom considered by historians reveals how particular American Indigenous peoples sought to actively position themselves in the important commercial and political transformations affecting the Atlantic World in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

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 in the firm. Related investing was especially prominent among women and other relatively disadvantaged groups. Personal ties in newer, riskier enterprises encouraged capital mobilization in emerging ventures and persistence in shareholding, and related investing was significantly associated with lower risk of corporate bank failures. The results support a more positive view of family networks in business organizations and in overall economic development.

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, and servicing. The article offers a historical perspective on the factors behind this relationship between GE and airlines. It outlines the benefits or costs to GE, airline shareholders, and passengers; the relevance of the model for other industries; and implications for different notions of efficiency.

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 runs from the colonial period through the recent financial crisis, the book is broader than the accounts most economic historians would offer in that it pays considerable attention to Americans’ cultural responses to economic change. At the same, time, however, it provides up-to-date coverage of the relevant economics literature, making it accessible to readers not able to follow the econometrics. Undoubtedly, specialists will find things to quibble about. I did. But that goes with the territory. The bottom line is that Ages of American Capitalism is an impressive work of synthesis that everyone interested in American history should read.

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 from a reactive and defensive diplomacy strategy concerning its charter, to a proactive and transformative strategy. In this way, the company managed to renegotiate the terms under which it operated so that it eventually came to accept and even embrace the ending of chartered rule, rather than to oppose it.

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 be considered as an interesting testing ground for business history, which seems to be searching for a new identity among history, economics, and organizational and managerial studies. In addition, Russian business history still has considerable potential for providing new voices and stories and for contributing to international debates and a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between enterprise, state, and society.

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). It focuses in particular on the reforms made to the “New Approach to Technical Harmonization” and the “Global Approach to Testing and Certification” and examines the ways business groups responded to the creation of common systems for assessing conformité européenne. This history offers an expansive view of regional market integration and a new perspective on the dynamic between companies and regulators in the European business environment.

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 their imagery to different host markets and cultures. This study shows how trademark data provides alternative and complementary angles on particular economic phenomena—in this case, on how industries and countries build global competitiveness despite being technologically less developed.

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 but had the practical effect of destroying symbols of Black economic progress. The context that drove the opening of Black banks in Mississippi as “monuments of protest” also made Mississippi's new banking law a powerful tool with which state actors and even regular citizens could strike blows against African Americans’ growing economic, social, and political agency.

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, is often highly dependent on the support of other organizations. Specifically, we show how Enron combined resources from partner firms with its own capabilities, manipulating the energy market and capitalizing on the crisis. From a methodological point of view, our study emphasizes the growing importance of digital sources for historical research, drawing particularly on telephone and email records from the period to develop a rich, fly-on-the-wall understanding of a phenomenon that is otherwise hard to observe.

There is general consensus that tax havens have long played a major role in the evolution of the capitalist system on a global scale. There is also no doubt that Switzerland is one of the first, if not the first, tax haven to have emerged, as well as one of the most important in the world. However, knowledge and understanding of the history, particularly the distant past, of tax havens remains lacking, despite the considerable volume of literature devoted to them. Therefore, this article attempts to make two innovative contributions. The first is an attempt to explain the emergence of the Swiss tax haven, by analyzing the processes and factors whose intertwining led to its emergence. It thus improves the general understanding of the genesis of tax havens at an international level. The second contribution is to show that already on the eve of World War I, the Swiss Confederation possessed the necessary characteristics for a tax haven.