This paper discusses the origins of rating in the second half of the nineteenth century. We review and criticize existing narratives, which—echoing a story told by lawyers favorable to (or employed by) the agencies—have alleged that a cultural shift in normative views, evidenced in an evolution of court decisions, provided legal protection (against libel) to agencies, and permitted the development of printed credit reports. Such a view is inconsistent with evidence from actual judicial decisions and from our exploration of archival material. Looking at both litigated and settled cases, we show that the rise of mercantile agencies in the late nineteenth century was the product of a farsighted corporate strategy applied ruthlessly to a legal system that was still very reluctant to permit the agencies to “commoditize” credit.

Privatization is closely associated with the ideological turn to neoliberalism and regarded as a cornerstone of Britain’s “Thatcherite project.” Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government did not undertake its major privatizations of state-owned businesses until its second term began in 1983. We argue in this article, however, that the 1980 disposal by the National Enterprise Board of its controlling interest in the engineering and electronics company Ferranti offers significant insights into the development of privatization policy and practice, as well as the changing role of the state in British business. This disposal reflected the early caution of some of the Thatcher government’s actions but contributed to fulfillment of an electoral commitment and provided valuable privatization experience in addressing difficult financial, industrial, and political issues.

In 1868, the prominent British firm, Jardine, Matheson & Co., opened the Niuzhuang Oil Mill, one of China’s earliest mechanized factories, but closed it in 1870. The mill faced no oppositions from local government officials but suffered from some technical defects. It produced better quality products that obtained higher prices. This essay argues that the mill’s failure had to do with high capital costs and low profitability.

We trace the history of Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel’s entrepreneurial journey as a fashion designer from her early years as an outsider (early 1900s) to her rise to success and consecration as an icon within the French haute couture field (early 1930s)—a field controlled by powerful insiders. Our study sheds light on the social forces and historical circumstances underlying an outsider’s journey from the margins of an established field to its core. Drawing on unique historical material, we develop a novel process view that highlights the shifting influence of forces operating at different levels in the accumulation, deployment, and conversion of various forms of capital (i.e., human, social, economic, and symbolic) that outsiders need to promote their ideas. In particular, our multilevel perspective accounts simultaneously for the individual’s efforts to push forward these ideas (micro-level), as well as the audience dynamics (meso-level) and exogenous forces (macro-level) that shape their recognition. Chanel’s historical case analysis also affords a window into one of the first female entrepreneurs with global impact in business history, with the added challenge of establishing herself in what at the time was a male-dominated and mature field.

Because most histories of military-industrial relations have rested on the examples of arms production and shipbuilding, balanced accounts of military procurement and technologies during the nineteenth century are difficult to find. In fact, weapons and ships accounted for a relatively small fraction of all the goods and services consumed by nineteenth-century armed forces. This article, which describes the tent industry in the United States during the Civil War, suggests that many military enterprises of the period were characterized by an industrial dynamic that was relatively extensive rather than intensive. In the U.S. tent industry, the leading military contractors were mercantile firms, which stood at the center of disintegrated production and distribution networks. Featuring relatively low-capital production arrangements, large numbers of women workers, and powerful mercantile intermediaries who linked manufacturers and army purchasing agents, the Civil War tent business is an example that challenges traditional accounts of the economic foundations of nineteenth-century military capability.

From an international perspective, the Dutch system of old age provisions stands out for its wide coverage, fixed benefits, and an overall actuarial soundness that seem to make this system more shock proof to demographic shifts and economic adversities than those in other “Western” countries. Its actual foundation is a compulsory old age insurance for all citizens, enforced by law and implemented by the state; this insurance is supplemented by fully funded pension schemes for workers and employees, operating under legal control; and finally there is a variety of additional and noncompulsory pension benefits and individual insurance arrangements. The main impetus to the genesis of this system came from employers who, with different agendas, created various pension funds; eventually it was the state, which set a decisive example with a funded pension fund for its civil servants. This became the standard to all corporate pension schemes and provoked innovations like branch funds. These initiatives were supported and regulated by legislation that made these arrangements compulsory and guaranteed their juridical independence and actuarial soundness. Only after this legally promoted maturation of private funds, the state set out to create public arrangements on a “pay-as-you-go” basis for all citizens. This delicate interplay between private and public pension arrangements is highly characteristic of the Dutch variety of capitalism in a broader context. In the polarity between liberal and coordinated market economies, as developed by Soskice and Hall, the Dutch system of old age provisions has played a prominent role in ranking this country more firmly into the latter category. However, within this range of countries the Dutch system of old age provisions is also a bit atypical: private corporate and branch arrangements were encouraged and at the same time embedded in a legal framework. The role of the state was also remarkable: a supervisor of the private funds, a collector and distributor in a universal insurance system, and an employer with an exemplary pension scheme.

Women's work has often been portrayed as unskilled and lowpaid labor done for the benefit of others. But the role of female enterprise in eighteenth-century Lyon presents another dimension: non-guild women workers who secured control of raw materials, labor,and distribution networks within an underground economy. In an unusual twist of fortune,a small but significant number of women in the silk,hat-making, and button-making industries turned to their own benefit the advantages customarily provided to male entrepreneurs. These women workers stole materials from the guild workshops in which they were employed. Having learned the technology needed to manufacture silk,hats,and buttons from guild masters,they set up clandestine workshops and trained their own workers. Even in the face of official guild protest,their low prices and competent workmanship induced some masters to buy their goods to reduce the cost of their own products. The women used a set of capitalist practices to survive in a difficult transitional era of superficially regulated norms.

Firms use a variety of strategies to limit competition that would otherwise erode profits. Firms innovate, creating new technologies, new markets, and new firms. Innovations allow them to distinguish their products or lower their costs and thus maintain profits. Their ability to innovate depends on the existence of social institutions that allow them to amass the resources—labor, capital, and information—necessary to compete successfully. Firms also maintain profits by manipulating the political process to maintain preferred access to markets, technology and resources. Finally, firms take actions to limit competition directly. Waves of consolidation, justified by an assumption of the inevitability of increasing firm size, have limited competition and entrepreneurship. Cartels and other forms of collusion, sometimes thought to have disappeared from US markets after the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, are still active in a wide variety of national and international markets.

The direct selling industry has a long history, with roots snaking back to the nineteenth-century “Yankee peddlers” who roamed the countryside selling tools, teas, and liniments door-to-door. Its reputation has suffered from the prevalence of misleading and illegal schemes such as pyramids, which generate income by paying money or other compensation solely for the act of recruiting, charge high entrance fees, and sell products of questionable value. Nonetheless, some advocates note that direct sales work, which often involves family and flexible working hours, has provided an excellent alternative to the traditional bureaucratic employment relationship that has historically been less receptive to women.

Numerous historians of deindustrialization argue that industries went into decline because established manufacturers moved production to cheaper locales to escape unions and high wages. A different pattern of decline occurred in the New England cotton textile industry, where downsizing began in the 1920s. Rather than fleeing their home area to build facilities elsewhere, most New England manufacturers were driven out of business by lower-cost competitors in the American South. Southerners founded, managed, and financed a heavy majority of the textile companies in their region. Although some New England firms did set up Southern plants, this was a defensive reaction to changing market realities. New competitors have brought about deindustrialization in other core U.S. industries. Recognizing this trend is important for a full understanding of the political economy of modern capitalism.

The history of insurance has been characterized in most countries by the coexistence of a wide range of organizational forms. The reasons for this plethora of vehicles remain unclear, as does the impact of this diversity on the development of insurance around the world. Drawing on the latest research, this paper examines, first, the different functions of the state in relation to insurance in a wide range of national markets from the early modern period to the present century; second, the path-dependent effects that determined the historical distribution of public and private forms of insurance; and third, the relation between public and private insurance and its impact on market development.

The London House of Rothschild depended on Brazil to maintain its reputation. This became a problem in the 1890s, when the Brazilian government almost defaulted on its sovereign debt after a change of regime had made politics unstable and economic policy unorthodox. This article shows how the relationship between the bank and the state developed to the point that Rothschilds was forced to rescue its client. Exposure enabled Brazil to implement policies designed to defend the regime at the expense of payment capacity without defaulting. The debt crisis ended only after the political situation stabilized toward the close of the century, when the bank pressured the government to tighten economic policy.

In Depression-era South Georgia, truck farmers experimenting with onion planting found that their crop emerged unusually sweet, due to the region's climate and particular soil content. But what gave Vidalia onions a unique flavor—their low sulfur and high water content—also rendered them nearly impossible to market, as the vegetable spoiled much quicker than regular onions. In their seventy-year quest to overcome the onion's natural limitations, Georgia growers would transform their formerly insular region into a hub of global supermarket capitalism. As onion acreage skyrocketed with the advent of controlled atmosphere storage, growers recruited thousands of Latin American workers. Then, when storage techniques proved imperfect, industry leaders contracted with growers across Central and South America to produce sweet onions for sale during Georgia's off-season. In striking contrast to the Vidalia onion's branding as a “down-home” southern crop, the vegetable's history reveals the contradictions in our modern food system.

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the amount of scholarship on the history of shareholding in Britain. One area that still remains relatively unexplored, however, is the problematic issue of how British investors actually went about the process of choosing their respective investments. The purpose of this article is to make a start at redressing this gap by using the (perceived) sharepushing crime wave that swept across Britain during the interwar period as a prism through which to evaluate the behavior of Britain’s shareholding population at this time. Ultimately, what it suggests is that, while the interwar British investors may well have had far more potential sources of advice and information open to them than their nineteenth-century forebears, this did not necessarily mean that they were any better informed about the workings of the British securities market.

This article concerns the rise of young entrepreneurship education programs in 1980s Sweden, which entered schools surprisingly early and quickly, backed by organized Swedish business. The increased popularity of entrepreneurship education toward the end of the twentieth century in many European welfare states is usually associated with a shift toward neoliberal, market-oriented, policies. It is argued here that an important reason for young entrepreneurship’s success was its ability to connect with the Swedish tradition of cooperation and democratic decision making, in combination with values such as individualism and competition. A case in point is the surprising compatibility between progressive pedagogical ideas and “neoliberal” entrepreneurialism. The article is based on a study of Ung Företagsamhet (Young Entrepreneurship, henceforth UF), the Swedish version of the American organization Junior Achievement, and the ambition of the consumer cooperative movement’s think tank, Koopi, to offer a different kind of entrepreneurship education. In the analysis, the concept of “the entrepreneurial self” is applied to these two different programs, and the results show how they clashed, but also overlapped, in ways that help explain the success of UF. The article is a contribution to our understanding of how entrepreneurship discourse emerged and manifested itself in everyday environments in the late twentieth century, and as such also contributes to the history of Nordic neoliberalism.

This article describes the evolution of IBM's effort to manage its relationships with the U.S. government from the time that Thomas Watson, Jr. became CEO. While the Watson family controlled the firm, the family members served as the main bridges between IBM and the government. This personalized approach began to give way in the 1960s, as the intensity and scope of pressure from the firm's political environment grew beyond the capability of any individual to handle. During the 1970s and 1980s, IBM constructed a managerial hierarchy, with a newly opened Washington office at its center, which could gather more detailed intelligence and execute more sophisticated political strategies. The firm's crisis in the early 1990s provoked a second major restructuring of the interface, as IBM became more of a Washington “special interest.” Yet, some traces of the Watson imprint remained, even in the Gerstner era. Tracing IBM's evolution helps us to understand better the broader interactions between U.S. firms and their environments in this period. These interactions entailed adaptation by firms to environmental change but also efforts by firms to exert control over external forces, including public policy.

The Manchester Chamber of Commerce established the Manchester Testing House in 1895, and introduced uniform yarn contracting rules in 1897. The chamber made these institutional “innovations” to deal with the nefarious practice of “short-reeling.” This case study explains how and why merchants were crucial to undoing weaknesses in domestic —and to some extent foreign—legislation to overcome this fraudulent activity. We argue that the Testing House and uniform contract were tantamount to developing a quasi-legal system such that private standards established through cooperative agreements had legal sanction. Our study shows how institutions evolved to improve governance along the supply chain for this highly specialized export-orientated industry. This article contributes to the growing literature on historical markets, institutions, and standards. Based on extensive archival sources, we show how specific and complementary commercial institutions developed within grounded notions of governance rather than abstracted spaces of market exchange.