Historians have often looked to industrial capitalism to further our understanding of “time consciousness.” This article explores time consciousness through the experience of a railroad in pre-Civil War South Carolina. Examining the South Carolina Railroad allows us to examine how time consciousness operated in a region not associated with industrial capitalism, and also see how multiple times could function simultaneously. While clocks were important to railroad operations, companies also had to address an array of non-clock times. Moreover, companies were never fully in control of their own time, but were in constant conflict and negotiation with various groups in the community. While industrialization and factory labor remain important ways to understand time consciousness, looking beyond the factory walls can help historians make better use of the analytical power of time.

Detachable collars, essential to men’s appearance from the 1840s to the 1920s, have left a lasting legacy: the term ‘white collar’ and the “Arrow Man,” the centerpiece of Arrow collar advertisements from 1907 until 1931. The Arrow Man was the visual representation of the “New Man,” and Arrow collars were preserved in American culture through the lyrics of a 1934 Cole Porter song, “You’re the Top.” Both the Arrow collar and the Arrow Man derived from business decisions that reflected emerging and changing American consumer tastes and markets, an expanding middle class, and shifts in culture, especially in new ideal images of manliness that were less class-based, contributing to Americans’ impression that social distinctions were more blurred than in the past. The Arrow Man embodied in a single compelling image the resolution of social contradictions that persisted beneath the increased similarity of men of different backgrounds.

The 1960 establishment of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) represented a watershed to Norwegian consumer goods industry. Since the end of World War II domestic manufacturers had been thriving on a small but lucrative home market characterized by an unparalleled demand, effectively protected from foreign competition by strict import regulations and tariffs barriers. The onset of international free trade would dramatically change this market situation, allowing cheap foreign products access to the Norwegian market while at the same time offering export opportunities to an industry traditionally geared to the domestic market. Operating in an industry where appearance is anything but superficial, the crockery manufacturer Figgjo Fajanse realized that product design would be a crucial tool in the reorganization of its operations when adapting to this ‘brave, new world’ of international free trade. Devising a flexible basis for a rational product differentiation, Figgjo made severe cuts in an oversized product portfolio and developed a small range of new models that could accommodate a wide range of decorative patterns of highly different styles. This strategy required elaborate and creative negotiations on the part of the company's designers, creating a ‘third way’—a moderate modern design carved out in the space demarcated by the industrially rational, the commercially viable, and the aesthetically ethical.

Capitalist development involves ongoing technological changes in which a series of innovations develop and diffuse.Wars and other discontinuities periodically break the process, thwarting some innovations and generating others. Wartime experience hence illuminates the question of whether innovation responds to the changing economic environment or maintains earlier directions. The paper examines the roles of peacetime factors and wartime dislocations in the development of three Civil War innovations, firearms, shoe mechanization, and petroleum. Using patent data, government procurement records, and selected firm records to compare antebellum and wartime activities, I argue for the continuity of innovation in its content and in the occupation, network status, and location of patentees. Wartime innovation evolved out of antebellum firms, networks, and inventors. It drew on machinists, engineers, and applied scientists to transfer critical antebellum capabilities into innovating sectors. The war accelerated innovations in firearms and shoe mechanization and may have slowed petroleum innovation. Whereas the North continued antebellum innovation processes during the war, the South, with little capability in any of the sectors, was unable to innovate successfully even when military need was strong.

This study widens the historical perspectives of how a firm coordinates its activities to simultaneously achieve financial and political ends while using regional efforts to enact a national strategy. It examines how AT&T organized Bell Telephone Securities (BTS), a transitional subsidiary during the period 1921–1935, to broaden ownership of corporate shares and to develop political and cultural identities with Bell among small investors, particularly in the South and West. Equally significant was BTS’s maintenance of liquidity of the Bell shares in the stock market, particularly in support of periodic rights offerings and debt conversions that were primary channels for increasing corporate equity. The subsidiary was eventually disbanded when its defining financial policies became unsustainable because of the radical socioeconomic and regulatory changes brought on by the Great Depression, but by this time many of its original objectives had been realized.

During the 1920s, the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) greatly expanded the kinds of activities it undertook, leading to a sense that the agency was ubiquitous. Some of the agency’s new activities were quasi-regulatory: they sought to shape markets and make products safer. The bureau was a part of the Department of Commerce, and its expansion of market-shaping activities took place when Herbert Hoover was Commerce Secretary. In Ellis Hawley’s influential, oft-repeated interpretation of the bureau’s actions during this period, Hoover pioneered an “associational” mode of governance that emphasized industry self-regulation and rational coordination via conferences, trade associations, and other gatherings. In this essay I show how the NBS under Hoover went well beyond fostering industry self-regulation, thus suggesting the need to revise Hawley’s interpretation. This essay is divided into two main sections: the first section examines the thinking of George K. Burgess, who rose to head the NBS in the early 1920s and who put forth an ambitious vision for the bureau’s role in society, particularly around its potential to improve products on the market. The second section then examines one case of the agency’s proliferation of new organizational routines, namely those around the automobile. A close consideration of Burgess and the NBS’s new routines indicates that the NBS extended its reach far beyond its traditional bounds. Most of these novel efforts were aimed at increasing the market’s virtues.

When the ticker tape was first invented in the 1860s, it promised a revolution in financial markets. Pricing information was now no longer solely the domain of the trading floor but was relayed continuously and simultaneously to ticker tapes long distances away from the stock exchange. Both nineteenth-century financiers, and the modern scholars who study them, have been enamored with the ticker tape and how it changed the way financial markets were perceived and experienced. However, a focus on how nineteenth-century financiers read and responded to the ticker tape has missed the real reordering of power that the ticker helped usher in. This article argues that between the 1860s and 1890s the London Stock Exchange and the Exchange Telegraph Company powerfully centralized their control over the distribution and transmission of financial information through the mundane infrastructures that underpinned the ticker tape system. Seeming technicalities, like the placement of batteries, the construction of electrical circuits, and the laying of wires and cables, were leveraged by these institutions to create a ticker tape system that distributed financial information unequally to financiers and investors throughout Britain. By the end of the nineteenth century, social and political questions about who should have access to financial information and markets, and on what terms, became helplessly intertwined with the mundane technicalities of the material infrastructures of modern finance.

An analysis of corporate profitability leads to a reevaluation of economic policy during Argentina’s Great Depression. While the overall profit rate collapsed, some sectors were more affected than others: Commerce, insurance, and agriculture were worst hit, followed by transportation, industry, and finally banking, which was a beneficiary of economic policy, especially the decision not to default on or renegotiate the external public debt. Had a different economic policy been pursued, it is likely that the international crisis would not have affected Argentina so severely. Most importantly, it would have been possible to further devalue the peso, which would have benefitted both agriculture and industry. Moreover, interest rates would have been lower, and continued government borrowing would not have crowded out investment in the private sector. An analysis of corporate profitability thus leads to a less positive view of economic policy during Argentina’s Great Depression than is often found in the existing literature.

In this paper, we offer an alternative to class-based studies of saving behavior by using individual-level ledger records from accounts opened in 1830 in the Limehouse Savings Bank, London. Our analysis suggests that such banks served a valid financial purpose for a much wider constituency of savers than the targeted “industrious poor.” True gaming of the system by the middle classes appears to be relatively limited, and instead depositors were using accounts for a variety of means and motivations. We suggest that the contemporary consternation around class was misplaced and that we can better understand and predict depositor behaviors through analysis of transaction data.

The boundaries of Business History, as a discipline, are constantly revisited. There have been contradictory views on the nature of our field for many decades, and they still exist today, reformulated by new generations and interest groups. As if these differences were not enough, there are also substantial disparities on when and how the subject has evolved worldwide. The discipline has expanded to new geographies recently, and several signals point to a more multicultural business history setting. However, some critical aspects still need to be addressed. How can we reinterpret and overcome the perpetuation of some hierarchies in our field? What are possible key insights from embracing an even more inclusive, global, and pluralistic vision of business history? My proposition is that these issues can be reinvigorated as part of a broader epistemological debate on humanistic and social sciences. This brief article considers possible alternatives for embracing even more diversity and complexity in our field from a Latin American perspective.

This essay argues that American printers motivated by a deep commercial interest in fast and effective communication worked to overturn the British imperial postal service in 1774 and 1775. Printers enlisted merchants and members of the revolutionary elite, who also relied on long-distance communication through the post office for their own commercial and political purposes, to provide financial and political support. In making their case, printers mobilized a broad array of political ideology and imagery already familiar to colonists during the decade-long imperial crisis, emphasizing the political necessity of replacing the imperial institution. At the same time, they uncontroversially asserted that a new American post office would safeguard their precarious commercial ventures. The essay therefore demonstrates that printers were not “mere mechanics” but actively shaped the political debates leading to the American Revolution as part of a process that scholars have recently highlighted in a work on the economic and commercial influences on the Revolution. Furthermore, it grants the post office its due as part of the Habermasian public sphere; although understudied, the post office—both as a physical space and as a network through which information could travel—was a crucial means by which Americans developed a national infrastructure for political communications. Exploring the overthrow of the British post office, and the creation of an American post office, reveals an understudied but crucial episode to explain the symbiosis between politics and commerce during the American Revolutionary era.

This article examines the role of British exchange and import controls in stimulating the dramatic increase in overseas (particularly American) multinationals in Britain from the end of the Second World War to the late 1950s, together with the ways in which the government used controls to regulate the foreign direct investment (FDI) inflow. Exchange controls were both an important stimulus to inward investment and a powerful and flexible means of regulating its volume and character. Government was relatively successful in using these powers to maximize the dollar balance and industrial benefits of FDI to Britain, given initially severe dollar and capacity constraints, and in liberalizing policy once these constraints receded and competition from other FDI hosts intensified.

This paper looks at the position of CEOs in Dutch listed companies in the context of institutional change. Following up on discussions on Varieties of Capitalism and the contrasts between coordinated and liberal market economies, we explore the position of the CEO in the Netherlands in the second half of the twentieth century. On the basis of our database of Dutch CEOs, as well as an analysis of articles and published interviews, we show that the move toward a more liberal market economy had a clear impact on the position of CEOs and on the way their role was perceived. This paper highlights the importance of studying leaders in their historical context, with implications for the selection of future CEOs as they face increasing pressure on issues such as inequality and climate change.

Cathay Pacific’s shifting shareholder base underscores the dynamic interactions between the state and the market in an ever-changing geopolitical landscape. Focusing on its later transformation from a British airline, this article explores how Cathay Pacific refashioned its shareholding to respond to the shifting political climate of Hong Kong. In the protracted process through which Britain yielded jurisdictional power of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, Cathay Pacific responded preemptively, first by enhancing its local profile, and then by appealing to economic nationalism of the sovereign state poised to take charge. The privately owned airline fashioned its corporate nationality in a bid to negotiate with political forces that affected its business development. The case of Cathay Pacific demonstrates how, in the absence of warfare, companies still need to mitigate political risks in a fluid geopolitical setting. By modifying its shareholding, Cathay Pacific crafted its corporate nationality, which proved instrumental in allaying political risks and managing business relationship with the state. The airline’s strategy attests to its dexterity as well as the pliability of the notion of “corporate nationality,” winning management the “license to operate”—legitimacy and state sponsorship—during a period of swift geopolitical shifts.