The familiar neighborhood paper boy was a product of the Depression, born of the need to boost revenues and improve readership. Operating funds for newspapers swiftly declined in the wake of the 1929 stock market crash. Circulation managers responded with one of the few resources at their command—inexpensive juvenile labor. Drawing on connections linking men and boys in the marketplace, circulation heads fashioned a gendered managerial philosophy that was distinctive to their industry. This approach, here termed masculine guidance, revitalized daily news delivery and transformed the relationship between middle-class childhood and paid work in the United States.

The history of advertising’s global expansion has generally focused on the activities and experiences of American-based agencies. Within these conventional narratives, the “center” of advertising lies in New York. Deemed “peripheral,” markets such as Singapore scarcely feature. However, the transnational agencies operating in Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s challenge this narrative. By examining these agencies’ activities during this period, this article reveals that Singapore’s advertising industry has long been connected to global networks spanning Europe, Australia, Asia, and North America. Such connections not only offer an insight into the development of Singapore’s advertising industry, but they also cast broader questions about the degree to which historical interpretations of the growth of the global advertising industry have been informed by American perspectives.

This article is a pioneering exploration of technological change in the U.S. foundry industry from the period of its most dramatic growth through its interwar stagnation and decline. Not only does it describe key changes in the mechanization and reorganization of manufacturing processes that helped transform parts of the industry into sites of classic “Fordist” mass production, but it also explains why the impact of these changes was so slow and limited. Through analysis that divides the “foundry industry” into its constituent parts (defined in terms of the forms of business organization and the types of product market that characterized them), the article locates change and continuity within different sectors of an “industry” that was in fact plural rather than singular.

This article analyzes the goals and strategies of a medium-size machine-building enterprise located in Chemnitz, the “Saxon Manchester,” during the Nazi period. The Wanderer-Werke AG produced a broad range of goods, from machine tools to business machines, during the years before World War II. It pursued an essentially conservative strategy, adhering to its established product line and not embarking on armament production until required to do so. This policy, however, did not prevent the firm from acting on strategic opportunities offered by Nazi occupation policy, as in 1940 when it sought to establish “cooperation” with the French punch-card producer Compagnie des Machines Bull. The article considers the extent to which enterprises like Wanderer—medium-sized companies with products of some value to the war effort—could pursue autonomous strategies within the framework of the National Socialist regime.

The diversity of paths to industrialization is illustrated by the example of the cabinet- and furniture-manufacturing industry in Ontario, Canada. Complex and unpredictable demand combined with smaller markets and lower incomes than those in the United States and the relative abundance of wood to limit mechanization and the size of enterprise in the Canadian industry. Small and unpowered workshops remained competitive throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, creating a distinctive industrial experience that reflects the unique interaction of local demand and supply.

Since the 1990s, a new model for market control organized through tripartite standards regimes (TSR), has expanded globally and affected most market exchanges through standard-setting, accreditation, and certification. This article investigates business-consumer relations under this regime, with a specific focus on the functions of accreditation and certification. In our case study of Sweden, a new picture of consumer protection under late capitalism evolves. Seeing it as a form of neoliberalization, the article uncovers a transition between two regimes of control; from one built on a potential conflict between consumer and business interests, to one based on the assumption that business interests are beneficial for all parties. Although business interest was formulated as pleasing the consumer—or the “customer”—by both certification firms and the Swedish Accreditation Authority, in practice consumer interest as something worth protecting was made abstract in the era of the TSR.

My dissertation traces the invention and development of a new form of banking, body banking. Today, the body bank as an institution that collects, stores, processes, and distributes a human body product is a taken-for-granted aspect of medicine in the United States. We donate to blood banks, we cherish sperm bank babies, and we contemplate many sorts of banks, including cord blood banks, gene banks, and egg banks. Such institutions have existed for the past century in the metaphorical shadow of financial banks, and like those better-studied banks have stirred considerable controversy. The driving question behind my dissertation is simply, why banks? How did we come to use “bank” to apply to bodies as well as to dollars? More intriguingly, what does this analogy show us and what is it hiding?

Bankruptcy is a precise legal process defining, ex ante, the rules for allocation of assets when debtors fail to repay their legally constituted debts. Ultimately, these rules determine willingness to lend and to borrow, and thus economic growth. In 1706, Parliament in England passed a bankruptcy statute that allowed, for the first time, bankrupts to exit the state of bankruptcy prior to full repayment of all debts. This represented a fundamental change in English bankruptcy rules: creditors could now choose to discharge a bankrupt. Obviously, bankrupts benefitted from such a discharge, but creditors could also benefit from greater asset revelation. We document that discharge was quickly adopted, and estimate that many bankrupts received a second chance in business.

This article explores the powerful ways in which black business owners supported the Civil Rights movement. Business owners such as Leah Chase, Gus Courts, A. G. Gaston, and Amzie Moore, among others, contributed resources and organizational skills to the fight for racial justice. But the relationship between business owners and activists within the movement was at times characterized by tension. Although business owners sometimes found the approach of activists to be too radical and activists sometimes found the business owners’ approach to be too conservative, they found ways to compromise in order to work cooperatively toward racial justice.

The formation of the Shanghai Women’s Commercial and Savings Bank (1924–1955) uncovers the legacy of an institution founded by a group of elite women. Although the women’s bank had limited capital and a small business scope, it reflected the contributions of enterprising women to the financial field when Chinese women’s roles were evolving and feminist rhetoric appealed to women’s economic independence. This article brings the achievements of such Chinese women to the forefront, as key figures in the development and direction of the Shanghai Women’s Bank. By exploring the anxieties and endeavors of the Shanghai Women’s Bank and shifting the focus to the female figures involved in shaping the bank, this article argues that they, alongside their elite social network, contributed to the bank’s longevity and portrayal in the media landscape. Although emphasizing gender in its initial creation, the bank ultimately pursued similar business strategies to other banks with both men and women working behind-the-scenes to uphold the institution. Moreover, this article contributes to a more inclusive history of women and finance in order to illuminate the endeavors of Chinese women in Shanghai banking amongst its global counterparts.

We examine the Scotch Whisky Association’s (SWA) role in protecting “Scotch whisky” between c. 1945 and c. 1990. Using new archival evidence, we demonstrate that the SWA intensively lobbied the UK government to achieve coordination between domestic and European regulations governing Scotch whisky and whisky. The SWA’s nonmarket activities were consonant with some trade associations but in other respects they were atypical. The SWA extended its activities to supranational bodies and engaged in extensive domestic and foreign litigation. The key message from this article is that the SWA built the world-renowned appellation “Scotch whisky” even though this marque was not registered as an appellation until the late twentieth century.

Incorporated on the eve of the Panic of 1837, the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina owned and hired enslaved individuals to labor in their ironworks, but they also leveraged the market value of this enslaved property by exchanging them for shares of company stock and offering them as collateral in loan contracts. These slaveholders actively experimented with increasingly sophisticated financial tools and institutions in order to facilitate investment, market exchange, and profit maximization within the system of enslavement. Although historians have examined the role of enslaved labor in industrial concerns, they have largely ignored their role in the financing of these operations. Understanding the multiple ways that southerners were turning enslaved property into liquid, flexible financial assets is essential to understanding the depth and breadth of the system of enslavement. In doing so, we can move beyond questions of whether slavery was compatible with industrialization specifically and capitalism more broadly, to an understanding of how slavery and capitalism interacted to promote southern economic development in the antebellum period. At the same time, the experience of the Nesbitt Company reveals the limits of enslaved financing. The aftermath of the Panic of 1837 demonstrated that the market value of enslaved property was much more volatile than enslavers cared to admit. Although southerners could often endure this volatility in the case of enslaved laborers working on plantations or in factories, it made the financialization of slavery a much riskier endeavor for an emerging industrial regime.

Corporations can be viewed as large information ecosystems, not more narrowly as corporate entities, and the author uses the example of IBM to defend this point. This essay illustrates issues and topics that can be studied to enhance understanding of corporate history, building on prior methods used by scholars. It builds on research the author performed in writing a history of IBM from the 1880s to the present.

The literature on early modern credit markets emphasizes both the social embeddedness of credit relationships and the role of notaries. To enhance our understanding of how credit markets functioned in a “less-developed” economy, we investigate the local lending activities of a merchant-banker family that operated at the intersection of formal and informal credit. A combination of economic rationality and social motivations in lending decisions emerges. The credit network of this family firm provides a portrait of the social structure of the local community, where the central position of a few trusted notaries and members of the business and political elite highlights the prevalence of relationships of power and favor over impersonal market exchange. The predominance of informal credit reveals a preference for loans made outside of notarial circuits. Nonetheless, notaries were crucial in lending to borrowers of lower social status and with weak ties, thus helping the liquidity of these merchants to “trickle down” into local society.

In this article, I describe the partial forward integration of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Boston breweries. I argue that both brewers and saloonkeepers used the fluid market in capital lending as a lever of power. An analysis of the minutes of three breweries and their loan records, covering more than ten years, reveals that saloonkeepers were often delinquent in repaying their annual loans and brewery owners only infrequently threatened to call the loans. Using the structure-conduct-performance paradigm, I suggest that the particular conditions in Boston (a limited number of saloon licenses and a geographical position that precluded long-distance shipping of beer) gave the saloonkeepers much greater leverage in the so-called “tied system.” Brewers used vertical restraints but, because of obligations to British owners, did not fully forward integrate by buying saloon property, as brewers did in the United Kingdom.