Historians generally agree that modern brands arose from the vertically integrated corporations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and were used as competitive weapons between like firms. Looking at the alcoholic beverage trade and drawing on trade press, court reports, newspaper advertising, business records, and accounts of consumer behavior, I suggest that, on the contrary, supply chains made up of small firms played both an earlier and a significant part in the genesis of modern brands. In these chains, firms used branding not only to fight direct competitors but also to discipline and subordinate other links in the chain over whom they had no direct control and with whom they had to cooperate.

In this article, we explore how reformers, manufacturers, and traders perceived British food consumers and the significance of those perceptions in debates about food quality and regulation. By considering basic commodities, our analysis extends a literature on consumption that is otherwise derived primarily from the study of luxury commodities, and it identifies conflicting images of the interests, competence, and concerns of early twentieth-century consumers. We find that discussions of appropriate policy involved competing interpretations of modernity and its implications for food consumers, and these discussions anticipated later twentieth-century debates.

J. Walter Thompson (JWT), the leading American advertising agency until the 1970s, established a branch office in Paris in 1927. While many of JWT's worldwide branches became the leading agencies in their respective countries, notably Great Britain and Germany, JWT-Paris foundered from the late 1920s through the early 1960s. This article focuses on the reasons why: cultural clashes between the French and Americans, a regulated and protected French market, anti-Americanism among French businesses, and American condescension and insensitivity. It concludes with an analysis of and the reasons for JWT-Paris's achievement of limited success by the late 1960s.

In this article I examine corporative management practices in electronics firms in Boston and in Silicon Valley from the 1920s to the 1960s. Managers in several key firms developed these practices in response to political and professional ideologies and as a way to address the problems of hiring, using, and retaining a highly skilled work force. They did this independently of the welfare capitalism plans of corporations such as Eastman Kodak and before the guru theorists and work empowerment programs of the 1960s. The corporatist methods first developed in Boston and further refined in Silicon Valley later diffused to most U.S. firms in the software, computer, Internet, and biotechnology industries.

In this article I explore the powerful sense of regional solidarity that accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the early years of Stanford University, the university's leaders saw its mission as service to the West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry. Thus, regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development. The distinctive regional ethos of the West during the first half of the twentieth century is an ingredient of Silicon Valley's already prepared environment, an ingredient that would-be replicators ignore at their peril.