Why did subcontracting remain, well until the end of the nineteenth century, a viable way to organize metropolitan manufacturing? This article addresses historically and theoretically the reasons for the permanence of subcontracting as a viable alternative to centralized forms of production in London. It also questions the literature that equates the decline of subcontracting with the rise of sweating and argues for a reinterpretation of traditional explanations that saw the “sweater” as a central figure in the “degeneration” of the metropolitan productive system. The article concludes by proposing a reinterpretation of the “decline of subcontracting” and argues that the logic of flexibility of subcontracting was challenged by the increasing power of London wholesalers and retailers and the demands of fin-de-siècle mass consumption.

A renewed political interest in profit sharing and employee codetermination prompts an analysis of the Swedish wage-earner funds, implemented by a Social Democratic government in 1983 and dismantled by a center-right government in 1991. This article explains the funds’ financial performance and the political decisions surrounding their dismantlement. It finds that the funds underperformed slightly in relation to financial targets. Reasons include inexperienced boards, limited investment opportunities, and a hostile attitude from the business community. For the center-right parties, getting rid of the funds was an ideological decision. Transferring the assets to research foundations and public venture capital funds would improve the business climate, compensate firms for taxes paid to finance the wage-earner funds, and ensure that the Social Democrats would not be able to reinstate the funds. The intense debate surrounding the wage-earner funds, their implementation, how they functioned in practice, and their dismantlement clearly contributed to Sweden’s sharp market turn in the 1980s and 1990s.

In this article, we study the role that media plays during a speculative bubble on an emerging market, and in particular the London financial press’s relation to the West African mining bubble of the early twentieth century. The focus is on the leading company in this sector at the time, Ashanti Goldfields Corporation. The London financial press lacked access to independent, reliable information on the ground, so it often failed to provide readers with relevant factual information. In some instances, the press might have even fueled the speculative cycles through the reporting it provided.

The antimonopoly critique of big business that flourished in the United States during the 1880s is a neglected chapter in the history of American reform. In this essay, a revised version of Richard R. John's 2011 Business History Conference presidential address, John shows how this critique found expression in a gallery of influential cartoons that ran in the New York City–based satirical magazines Puck and Judge. Among the topics that the cartoonists featured was the manipulation of the nation's financial markets by financier Jay Gould.

American merchant networks facilitated, and were in turn transformed by, the War for Independence. They also played a crucial role in the establishment of financial and political institutions in the new republic. John Carter (a.k.a. John Barker Church) and Jeremiah Wadsworth were among the foremost merchants and financiers of the Revolutionary era. This article follows their careers from the beginning of their wartime activities through to the end of the Federalist Era in 1800. It explains how they created and manipulated networks of supply and credit, and how they invested the proceeds of their success in the years after the war. Through this case study, the article demonstrates how wartime requirements reshaped merchant networks, not simply by increasing risk and encouraging retrenchment, but by creating influxes of credit and pressures for expansion. It argues that war led to increased inequality among merchants in terms of wealth and credit. Furthermore, this increased inequality impacted the nature of postwar finance and commerce. It shaped the economic and political structures of the new republic, in part through the agency of successful merchants like Carter and Wadsworth.

When the Sears, Roebuck Company opened its first store in Mexico City on February 28, 1947, an observer reported that the crowds on opening day were generally “well behaved, but impatient; they wanted to buy! buy! and buy!” Saleswomen panicked “as a sea of hands thrust pesos toward them, into their pockets, into their blouses, anywhere—just to complete a purchase.” Customers not only refused to leave at the end of the day; they stayed outside the store after closing. They jammed the street at night trying to look through the windows. On Saturday, two days after the store opened, Sears observers reported that customers outside the store screamed, “Let us in! Let us in! They waved money at us. They tried to sneak in through the back doors, and they cut the ropes guarding the entrance.” About 110,000 guests visited the store during its first three days of operation. So many customers visited Sears during its first two weeks in Mexico City that, according to John F. Gallagher, the vice-president of Sears' Latin American operations, “There were employees and lady customers who fainted due to the heat, agitation, and the crowdedness in the store.”

Naval shipbuilding was one of the most ambitious industrial undertakings of World War II. A marginal business, in 1939 employing only twelve shipyards, it expanded over the course of the war into a massive network of shipbuilding firms, engineering works, steel mills, and specialty producers that built the world's largest fleet. At its peak in 1944, warship building employed one million shipyard workers, a million others in collateral industries, and consumed one-fifth of the nation's steel output in the construction of aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, and thousands of smaller combatants.

The idea, and to a lesser extent the reality, of themodern home improvement store was born in the first quarter of the twentieth century. After 1905 the manufacturers of mail-order kit houses soon grew to threaten the local monopoly of retail building suppliers. Themost important of these suppliers were the lumber merchants who provided most of the materials and credit used by building contractors. At first dealers responded by mounting boycotts and by supporting trade-at-home campaigns, but these were successfully challenged in court. A survey of trade journals shows that after 1914 dealers began to act more constructively. Encouraged by the trade press, and helped by state and national associations, by the 1920s they were advertising more effectively and offering a widening range of goods and services to consumers, including house plans. Because many new customers were women, dealers had to hire more courteous staff, clean up their yards, mount better displays, build showrooms and, in time, relocate to more salubrious and heavily-trafficked parts of town. The emergence of the home improvement store is a significant chapter in the history of urban housing, and especially the marketing of housing services, in the twentieth century.

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.

Despite the relevance of bankruptcy law for a number of key issues regarding business functioning and organization, little is known about the features and evolution of these legal institutions over time and space. This paper starts to fill this gap in current knowledge by analyzing a new data set providing consistent information about key features of bankruptcy law between 1850 and 2015 in the thirty largest European economies. Regarding institutional change, our analysis supports the established view of a link between macroeconomic changes and the introduction of procedures alternative to bankruptcy. However, this process shows significant differences at the national level, making it difficult to support the idea of change as the result of belonging to a given legal system (French; common law; Scandinavia; Germanic), or the degree of economic development. Instead, change in bankruptcy institutions seems to be a product of, and contributor to, the wider process of individual state formation. Similarly, the features of bankruptcy procedures seem to confirm this picture: Looking at their possible outcomes, the right to begin proceedings, and degree of application to different types of debtors, national differences appear deep and persistent, despite a generalized pattern of convergence over time toward a less punitive approach to bankruptcy. Contact Information: University of Birmingham, Birmingtonham Business School, University House, Edgbaston Park Road, Birmingham, West Midlands, B15 2TY, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. E-mail: [email protected]

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York State trust companies were successful, grew quickly, and failed rarely. The few failures, however, played a leading role in shaping the rules that governed trust companies. Because trust company failures were consistently interpreted as isolated departures from the norm of conservative management, trust companies were able to continue to participate in the rule-making process. The institutions that evolved promoted financial stability by imposing the costs of failure on decision makers and discouraging risky behavior. These failures shed new light on the treatment of failure and the development of corporate governance and financial regulation in the United States

Histories of semiconductor and computing technology in the United States have emphasized the supporting role of the U.S. state, especially the military, in answer to libertarian denials of state aid that are influential in Silicon Valley today. Somewhat implicit in that historiography, though, is the leading role of actors and organizations that blur any distinction between public and private. Some industries of this sort—telecommunications, aerospace, auto manufacturing—do figure in the historiography, but the class should be expanded further. One such industry—oil—has been exceptionally but almost invisibly influential in the development of computing and semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. Oil firms invested heavily in semiconductors and computing. There was also an “oil spillover” of personnel and technology from oil firms to computing and semiconductor manufacturing. Oil shows up in the biographies of many prominent individuals and organizations in the history of those technologies, from Fairchild Semiconductor to Edsger Dijkstra. These ties potentially hold important implications for the much-needed transition to a more sustainable energy regime.

The bursting of the “bubble economy” in 1989–1990 brought decades of challenge for Japanese Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises (SMEs), which had assumed the role of subcontractor within production networks dominated by large companies. This article explores the impact of a rapidly altered business environment, due to economic crisis, the decline of relational subcontracting, and technological change, on the management and organization of firms. It provides a needed historical account of Japanese SMEs striving to avoid “hollowing out,” and detailed case studies explain what gaining greater independence as a flexible specialist meant in practice. A focus on the immediate advantages of computerized tools could not bring about the intended strategic objectives, whereas the systemizing of new and existing resources in skills and equipment enabled sustainable competitive differentiation in production and products. The case studies map out the internal competence transformations of SMEs over time, and indicate the value of historical approaches to exploring strategic and organizational change.

The turbulent 1830s saw a sequence of great political and social reforms in the United Kingdom. One such reform was the introduction of a locally funded Poor Law in Ireland. The development of a nascent welfare system in 1838 coincided with a boom in the formation of microfinance institutions in Ireland. The focus of this study is the expansion of a hybrid organizational form, Loan Fund Societies (LFSs), in the ten years prior to the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849. LFSs were legally established with a conflictual structure: acting as commercially viable charitable institutions required to provide credit to the deserving poor (to enable them to be self-sufficient) while dedicating their “profits” to supporting the indigent poor. This study uses an analytical framework drawing inspiration from institutional logics to explore and better understand Irish microfinance in the early nineteenth century, a period of profound socioeconomic and socioreligious changes. It seeks to explain the factors that motivated the establishment and de-establishment of microfinance institutions amid this tumult. Legislative changes in LFS business parameters in 1843 made the tensions between being charitable and commercially sustainable salient; and, for some, it made continued existence untenable.

In this article, we examine the decisions made by corporate executives and government officials that led to the discharge with minimal treatment of hundreds of metric tons of dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (DDT) waste into the Pacific Ocean over several decades. After World War II, Montrose Chemical Corporation of California's Los Angeles plant began making the new wonder pesticide, and Montrose executives worked with local officials to develop a waste disposal system that funneled the plant's process wastes into the county sewer system and ultimately into the ocean. Faced with increasing scientific concern about pesticides and a changed political climate in the 1960s, Montrose vigorously defended DDT and relied increasingly on exports to remain profitable. Years after the plant closed, a federal suit forced Montrose and related companies to pay the costs of environmental cleanup.

One could make a career of throwing darts at the work of Alfred Chandler. I don't mean just criticizing him. You could take the pages of Chandler's books, paste them up on a wall, and start throwing. Almost everywhere a point struck would be a little gem of business history to draw your interest.

Few industries are as widely associated with the spread of American values, ideas, and products as the film industry. U.S. firms certainly dominated the global market for feature films, but did they do so simply by “selling America to the world” or was there more to be gained by catering to the diverse tastes of international audiences? This article examines the operations of a leading U.S. film distributor in its largest foreign market. United Artists, like other U.S. firms, was forced to offer a minimum proportion of British films for distribution in the United Kingdom in the 1930s and 1940s. Was this requirement a burden, or were the firm’s British films actually at the heart of its success in the U.K. market?