This article analyzes the transfer of tacit knowledge between countries and continents, based on a case from the shipbuilding industry. The South Korean shipbuilder Hyundai Heavy Industries (HHI) was established in the early 1970s and had by the late 1980s become the world’s leading shipbuilder. Aided by foreign loan capital, HHI acquired technology through foreign licenses and imported equipment. However, shipbuilding is about more than hardware. This article presents and analyzes another important means of knowledge transfer: the acquisition of tacit knowledge in the form of shipbuilding skills, including shipyard processes and operations. This transfer was mainly accomplished through the “import” of foreign managers and the dispatch abroad of South Korean employees. One important element, which we investigate in detail, was the Korean personnel that HHI sent in 1972 to the Scott Lithgow shipyards in Scotland to observe and learn. Based on archival sources and interviews, we detail the manner in which tacit knowledge could be transferred across language and cultural barriers.

This article reinterprets Asian industrialization during the Cold War through the lens of a forgotten commodity: the South Korean wig. Wigs were critical to Asia’s “miraculous” economic growth—a US$1 billion industry in 1970, as well as the number two export in South Korea and number four in Hong Kong at the height of export-oriented industrialization. The article makes a methodological argument, suggesting that we see industrialization differently when we “follow” a commodity transnationally—from the heads of rural South Koreans to the hands of Seoul factory workers to the shoulder bags of Korean American peddlers to the heads of African American women—and when we integrate bottom-up and top-down views of the commodity’s “life.” Only by taking this global perspective can we see how U.S. imperialism shaped the ways people and things moved across borders and oceans and how Cold War commodities were haunted by the lives of the people who touched them.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, many U.S. business leaders resolved to go “beyond compliance” with environmental regulations. Manufacturers sought to become more eco-efficient by reducing how much waste they produced per unit of output. Some companies developed greener products. However, the new commitment to sustainability only went so far: Few executives fundamentally rethought their business models. What drove the rise of corporate concern about sustainability, and why did those drivers fall short? The incentives to become greener were partial. They affected some companies more than others, and they only rewarded efforts to reduce some environmental impacts. By analyzing the limits of corporate interest in sustainability in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this article offers fresh insight into the challenge of greening the economy.

Over the past two decades, the Japanese apparel industry has lost its competitiveness after experiencing a period of fast growth from the postwar years to the early 1990s. In international literature in social sciences, most scholars offer ethnic-based explanations of fashion in Japan, stressing some specificities such as street fashion or star designers in Paris. This article, however, argues that such views are biased and cannot explain the current lack of competitiveness of the Japanese apparel industry. Using the concept of the “fashion system” and following a business history-oriented approach, we offer a new interpretation of the emergence of Western clothing and fashion in Japan during the second part of the twentieth century. This interpretation demonstrates that the characteristics of the Japanese fashion system lie in a focus on the issues of production and technology, both of which led both to an extreme segmentation of the domestic market and to weaker brands.

In this article, I trace the credit and debt practices of a company incorporated in the UK to extract “wild rubber” in the Amazon. Based on reports by Sir Roger Casement, an officer of the British diplomatic service, I present a general description of the organization of the Peruvian Amazon Co., whose operation did not depend on investment in technology or infrastructure but, rather, on the flow of credit in the form of merchandise. I will discuss debt-peonage as the form of labor privileged by the wild rubber industry in the Amazon and show how it works when indigenous peoples and their territories are involved, as was the case in Putumayo. I argue that the concept of debt-peonage is misleading in this situation, as it obscures both the conditions and the relations into which the Indians, as a society, were forced. I will highlight the role of debt in this relation, commonly referred to as the “conquest” of the Indians, as constitutive of both physical and symbolic violence. I conclude showing how credit and debt, usually considered to be instrumental for the development of capitalism, are here at the core of a system that not only was opposed to the logic of the market, but also strangled local production and exchange networks. The “credit engine” became here an instrument of genocide.

This article explores early twentieth-century debates about wine regulation in order to understand how emerging food standards could be mobilized in order to produce and protect value around particular geographical locales. Ohio and Missouri winemakers sought to protect their practices of “amelioration,” or the addition of sugar and water to acidic or foxy wines, by establishing the regulatory designation of “Ohio and Missouri Wine” as separate from “Wine.” In doing so, they turned food standards into a form of intellectual property mobilized to protect their practices and enhance the market value of Ohio and Missouri wines. Conversely, they argued that “universal” wine standards were unduly preferential to California wines. This compelling yet forgotten historical episode inverts the rationale behind geographical indications (a form of intellectual property designed to protect the intrinsic benefits of place) producing a unique argument for geographical protections based not on value but on lack.

An analysis of corporate profitability leads to a reevaluation of economic policy during Argentina’s Great Depression. While the overall profit rate collapsed, some sectors were more affected than others: Commerce, insurance, and agriculture were worst hit, followed by transportation, industry, and finally banking, which was a beneficiary of economic policy, especially the decision not to default on or renegotiate the external public debt. Had a different economic policy been pursued, it is likely that the international crisis would not have affected Argentina so severely. Most importantly, it would have been possible to further devalue the peso, which would have benefitted both agriculture and industry. Moreover, interest rates would have been lower, and continued government borrowing would not have crowded out investment in the private sector. An analysis of corporate profitability thus leads to a less positive view of economic policy during Argentina’s Great Depression than is often found in the existing literature.

During the Renaissance, visual images were legitimate and authoritative sources of information that influenced behavior and directed public opinion. Against a background of political and religious unrest and growing pressure for economic reform, it is maintained that Annibale Carracci’s painting of The Butchers Shop (ca. 1580–1583) sought to legitimize the professionalism of Bologna’s butchery trades, reinforce the reputation of the guild system, and remind audiences of the dangers of papal interference in commercial endeavor. By implicitly advocating the value of institutional hegemony and trade protectionism, The Butchers Shop represents a form of late sixteenth-century visual propaganda and image management.