Amidst other major changes to the food system, America witnessed an extensive transformation of marketing within the postwar era. Specifically, the concept of convenience quickly became a favorite of corporations across the food chain. However, despite the favorable market conditions and an outwardly receptive customer base, companies quickly found that they needed to negotiate with public perceptions of food, cultural ideals, and social realities. Using primarily corporate sources, this paper explores the development and use of convenience by food marketers. It investigates how processors sought to exploit postwar tensions between labor and gender. The project also examines how companies grappled with customer expectations of product quality. Ultimately, companies that successfully leveraged their ability to offer quick, quality meals further embedded themselves into consumer choices and lifestyles. By cultivating and marketing a specific message, corporations used convenience to make themselves appear indispensable to living and eating well in the postwar era.

America’s entrepreneurial culture is important because it promotes the search for new opportunities for innovation. Here, the author traces that culture through two industrial revolutions and focuses on the growing tension between entrepreneurship and bureaucracy inside and outside of the nation’s twentieth-century firms. Business histories are explored using categories adapted from behavioral economics. Particular attention is devoted to some of the important exceptions that throw light upon the stereotypes of the static government agency and the slow-moving industrial firm. Still, the author concludes, following World War II the economy had to be pulled out of its bureaucratic doldrums by new science- and social science-based industries that invigorated the nation’s entrepreneurial culture and promoted a wave of significant biological and digital innovations. The article concludes with a glance at the future of the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial cultures.

At International Harvester, a 1902 merger, the defining feature was discord. A J. P. Morgan financier by the name of George W. Perkins and a formal agreement initiated changes to mitigate stress and struggle. Existing research dates improvement to 1906. This paper extends the analysis and documents that, among changes, entrepreneur William Deering and his children parted with some holdings, helping to diminish tensions. Meanwhile, the McCormicks agreed to a stock dividend.  This action helped mellow strife and augment their power. How did discord affect efficiency? The conventional answer centers on management along with expansion abroad, but that analysis is enhanced through study of seven brands and their local factories, pricing, and an antitrust consent decree. When a voting trust ran out its clock in 1912, conflict at International Harvester was receding. The firm’s record suggests various governance formats could yield efficiency and profitability.

This article explores the efforts of Dallas businessmen, especially the leadership of Texas Instruments (TI), to build a science and research sector to facilitate new types of capital accumulation for Dallas and North Texas in the 1960s. The creation of the Graduate Center of the Southwest (GRCSW), and its subsequent transformation into the public University of Texas at Dallas in 1969, offers new perspectives on science and research, urban growth strategies, and the relationship between business and government in the postwar Sunbelt. TI leaders envisioned the center as a way to become more competitive in the microelectronics industry and also to direct urban growth and, ultimately, create a city and region that better reflected the private, growth-oriented interests of the Dallas business community. However, when the center began to falter economically in the mid-1960s, TI leaders sought out the state to take it over and transform it into a science and technology graduate school branch of the University of Texas system (UT). The exchange, although mutually beneficial, demonstrates how powerful businesses coopted the resources of the state to further their own ends.

Hail insurance in Britain emerged as a product by and for farming communities, expanding as wheat production rose in the mid-nineteenth century before declining in the latter decades of the century amidst wide-scale conversion from arable to livestock farming. Drawing on detailed research conducted in the remaining archives of the three major hail insurers in this period, we demonstrate the challenges of establishing a new insurance product for farmers. We argue that to make hail insurance effective, the insurance company’s central office collated and circulated information, rules, and paperwork to enable it to govern farmers, agents, and valuers at a distance. Such networks were fragile and required continual maintenance, whether to enhance reputation, manage farmers’ requests for new products, enforce rules, or tinker with rates in response to perceived risks and competitive pressures. Conceptualizing this emerging insurance business as a fragile network is a useful device demonstrating that paperwork, the governing of actors, and personal rivalries are as important as broader economic changes in explaining the development of a novel insurance product in this period.

Concentration in many industries has increased markedly in recent decades in the United States, although in Europe it has been stable or has even decreased. Where concentration has increased, the question arises as to how to measure the extent of competition (or the degree to which it is contestable) in a market in which there are relatively few competing firms, over the long term. This article explores competition in clearing banking in the UK from 1946 to 1971. This period is of interest in the context of industry concentration because clearing banking was relatively concentrated and, it has long been argued, uncompetitive. The article evaluates competition from four perspectives. First, it considers the competitiveness of London clearing banking from a quantitative perspective. Next, it evaluates competition through the lens of competition policy, particularly the extent to which monopoly, mergers, and restrictive trade practices existed in clearing banking. Third, the conclusions of the National Board for Prices and Incomes’ report into bank charges in 1967 are considered. Finally, it explores the extent to which the clearing banks were open to and embraced change, and were innovative, assuming that these qualities are more likely to be present when there is competition among banks. It questions key aspects of the dominant interpretation of clearing banking as uncompetitive and slow to innovate.

Considerations about the legitimacy of futures trading have been ubiquitous in the highly integrated world economy since the late nineteenth century. This article compares two national debates in Germany and British India from the 1880s to the 1930s. Despite significant differences in the cultural and economic contexts of the two countries and in the emergence of futures trading, there are interesting similarities. In both countries, individual futures exchanges were organized and controlled by small privileged groups of traders. These minorities were glued together by social ties, de facto controlling (or profiting from) access to futures markets and facing criticism because of their privileged position. While contemporaries and historians often focus on futures trading as trading without intent to deliver, the historical analysis in this article shows that an equally important issue was the conflict over distribution and power between more and less privileged interest groups and their respective market access.

The nineteenth-century growth of the London Stock Exchange and the development of the market for stocks and shares are familiar topics of study. This article provides an alternative perspective on them by decentering the London Stock Exchange and focusing instead on the activities of “outside stockbrokers”—those who operated outside the Stock Exchange and its rules. Often regarded as peripheral, these brokers were in fact instrumental in promoting investment and speculation to a mass market. The article examines their innovative methods, and seeks to explain why they were so successful, despite persistent—and sometimes justifiable—accusations of fraud. It suggests how perspectives from the history of consumer society provide fresh insights into the market for financial products. And it underlines the importance of looking outside formal markets by arguing that focusing on “fringe” markets can help scholars to rethink boundaries, relations, and practices in the history of capitalism.