The Hudson's Bay Company traded European goods for furs that were hunted, trapped, and brought down to the Bayside posts by Native Americans. The process of exchange was deceptively simple: furs for goods. Yet behind this simple process lies a series of decisions on the part of the company about which goods to provide, what levels of quality to provide, and what price to set. We examine the marketing strategies used by the Hudson's Bay Company and the role played by Native traders. We find that Native Americans were demanding consumers, concerned not only with the quantity of goods they received but also with their quality and variety. In a world where neither side could coerce the other, Natives' preferences were paramount.

This article considers the neglected legacies of the Lancashire cotton industry and their impact on the U.K. outdoor trade. Studies of the decline of the Lancashire cotton industry after the Second World War have concentrated on the collapse of coarse cotton spinning and weaving, largely ignoring the impact of the knowledge and skills related to the finishing trades. The examination of the evolution of rainwear, coatings, and high-performance fabrics in the nineteenth century provides a backdrop to a study of the innovation process that emerged in the U.K. outdoor trade after 1960.

Although medieval pilgrimage has been the subject of extensive historical research, the economic and financial dimension has been somewhat neglected. This paper is an attempt to provide a synthesis of published and unpublished work on pilgrimage, focusing on the business management and promotional aspects of pilgrimage shrines. From the literature reviewed, it is clear that many ‘modern’ business practices were being widely used by pilgrimage centers throughout Europe in the middle ages. Examples can be found of active brand management and promotional techniques adopted by shrines operating within a highly competitive market for pilgrimage services.

Women flourished as producers, directors, screenwriters, and editors in the first quarter-century of the film industry. But by 1925 their presence in all but screenwriting was severely diminished. The argument of this essay is that the process of gendering the industry ultimately closed studio doors to female filmmakers. As studios moved from the artistic and entrepreneurial stage, conducive to the perceived qualities of women, to the corporate stage, the needs of the industry became masculinized and women were excluded. This process is explored by examining the assumptions regarding gender inherited by the early movie industry and the context in which gender was discussed within the industry, and by asking whether explicit assumptions about the fitness of women and men were ever factors in determining what and who a filmmaker should be.

This article demonstrates the usefulness of the notion of embeddedness to the historical study of Italian industrial districts of small firms and of local economic change more generally. The development of gold jewelry production in two Italian towns, Valenza Po and Arezzo, shows that vertical disintegration was enabled by the creation of networks of heterogeneous social relations. In both towns, social and political ties led to the creation of institutions of collective governance, which in turn produced a workable level of trust between economic actors. The production of trust, however, never ceased to be a contentious process, endowed with multiple and often contradictory meanings embedded in specific networks and contexts, ranging from collective projects of modernization in Valenza Po to the cementing of a secretive informal economy in Arezzo. The embeddedness approach to economic action is superior both to the communitarian arguments of much of the literature on the Italian industrial districts and to transaction-cost theories, which tend to view institutions in instrumental and functionalist ways.

This article analyzes the long-term strategies employed by multinational oil corporations in a late industrializing country with powerful business groups when faced with economic nationalism. I study the case of Royal Dutch-Shell in Chile from 1913 to 2005, where two oil multinationals controlled 100 percent of the Chilean market until forced by the government to accept a domestic private company, COPEC, into a new three-member cartel. The multinationals accepted this arrangement reluctantly, but in the long term it proved beneficial. COPEC's involvement in Chilean business groups protected the multinationals from hostile actions by the government and gave legitimacy to the cartel. These benefits ended when Chile abandoned its import substitution industrialization strategy in the 1970s.

While the first business organizations to reach large size in the late nineteenth century did so through the route of vertical integration—formal ownership of assets and direct employment of workers—mid-twentieth-century franchising firms pioneered a new path to bigness, relying on restrictive contracts rather than formal integration to control their business organizations. Franchised chains replaced formal ownership and employment with contractual mechanisms known as vertical restraints (contractual controls on separate firms, such as price and supplier restrictions) to achieve uniformity and control over their outlets, without directly owning them. While most existing accounts of franchising focus on efficiency reasons for the evolution of the business form, this paper identifies a policy and legal mechanism: the relaxing of antitrust prohibitions on vertical restraints. These policy and legal changes were heavily lobbied for by franchising firms themselves. Whatever the efficiency implications of franchising, the increasing legalization of vertical restraints also had the benefit for franchising firms of allowing them to pull in the legal boundaries of the firm, leaving workers and other stakeholders outside. At the same time that they pursued franchising as a kind of vertical integration by other means, franchisors lobbied to preserve the legal benefits of having franchisees considered separate firms under a variety of laws, such as access to Small Business Administration loans and exclusion of workers at franchised establishments from access to collective bargaining and other rights against them.

This article reflects on foreign direct investment (FDI) and intellectual property rights (IPRs) over the long term, and analyzes the case of Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although the interactions between IPRs and FDI have attracted significant research efforts in distinct economic and business areas, the results lack permanent answers. Our findings demonstrate that, from a macro-level perspective: (1) FDI and IPRs are effectively related over the long term; (2) weak IPR protection does not seem to have stopped FDI; and (3) the countries with major FDI in Spain were less worried about IPR management than were other countries with less FDI.

In this article, the process leading to decriminalization of pornography in Sweden in 1971 is analyzed. The interplay between the structural institutional level and company behavior is stressed, with an emphasis on business strategies. The article shows that the division between hard-core and soft-core pornographic magazines in Sweden was quite different than the development in the United Kingdom and the United States. It also shows how the business strategies used by hard-core pornographers challenged the obscenity legislation and regulation of national distribution, making them obsolete. Even though there was fierce competition between the pornography companies, producers formed joint alternative distribution channels crucial to the survival of the industry.

Offshore development is one of the most important but least analyzed chapters in the history of the petroleum industry, and the Gulf of Mexico is the most explored, drilled, and developed offshore petroleum province in the world. This essay examines offshore oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, highlighting the importance of access and how the unique geology and geography of the Gulf shaped both access and technology. Interactions between technology, capital, geology, and the political structure of access in the Gulf of Mexico generated a functionally and regionally complex extractive industry that repeatedly resolved the material and economic contradictions of expanding into deeper water. This was not achieved, however, simply through technological miracles or increased mastery over the environment, as industry experts and popular accounts often imply. The industry moved deeper only by more profoundly adapting to the environment, not by transcending its limits. This essay diverges from celebratory narratives about offshore development and from interpretations that emphasize the social construction of the environment. It challenges the storyline of market-driven technology and its miraculous ability to expand and create petroleum abundance in the Gulf.

This article examines a familiar Cold War event, the Polish Crisis of the early 1980s, but from an unfamiliar perspective: international financial history. Historians have yet to examine how the growing international activity of Western commercial banks and the Eastern Bloc’s heavy borrowing on international capital markets during the 1970s influenced the course of the late Cold War. This article covers the history of the Eastern Bloc’s largest borrower—Poland—and its road to sovereign default in 1981. It examines how financial diplomacy among banks, communist countries, and the U.S. government catalyzed the formation of the labor union Solidarność (Solidarity). Ultimately, this article speaks to an important theme in the history of U.S. capitalism since World War II; namely, how the construction of global finance influenced U.S. foreign policy. The end of the Cold War in the fall of 1989 was the result not only of communism’s loss of legitimacy among the peoples of Eastern Europe, but also its loss of creditworthiness on global financial markets.

Firms dealing with “Made in Spain” fashion products (e.g., textiles, apparel, and footwear) have increased their presence in the world market over the last two decades. This paper focuses on the origins of this process. After constructing a new database of export districts, it first investigates the sources of the international competitiveness of these districts. Second, it explores whether industrial districts boosted the internationalization of Spanish fashion firms. The paper concludes that most of today’s outstanding Spanish firms in fashion-related international markets emerged from 1980s’ districts, which could have benefited from classical Marshallian externalities, while also taking advantage of the organizational capabilities of leading firms.

Following the seminal work of Lévi-Strauss, developed by Baker and Nelson and Duymedjian and Rüling, this paper analyzes the role that entrepreneurial bricolage played as an innovation tool in the origins and growth of four important Spanish tourism companies: Meliá, Barceló, Iberostar, and Riu. Their development has been deeply embedded in the island of Majorca (Spain), whose historical market conditions shaped and drove the companies’ bricolage actions. Entrepreneurial bricolage has generally been studied from a short-term perspective; however, this work adopts a dynamic approach that, instead of focusing on the concept of bricolage, aims to explain its evolution over time. To this end, four historical and qualitative case studies are used. The main contribution made by this paper is that the four companies did not limit their bricolage actions to contexts of scarcity but made this type of entrepreneurship a regular mechanism in their business practices, as the island’s tourism context thrived. However, the resulting innovations, as well as their main drivers, did indeed change over time.

Following the loss in 1712 of its previous monopoly over British trade with West Africa, the Royal African Company found itself unable to compete with smaller, lower-cost British slave traders and nearly collapsed entirely. Salvation seemed to arrive in 1720 in the person of James Brydges, the Duke of Chandos, who led a massive re-capitalization of the company and made the strategic decision to move its focus to the commodity trade between Europe and Africa and on the search for new botanical and mineral resources in Africa itself. While Chandos directed the RAC’s employees in implementing this radical new scheme, he kept it secret from his fellow shareholders, leading them to believe that his plans were aimed at revitalizing the company’s mature but declining line of business in the transatlantic slave trade. The Duke’s strategy, however, proved overly ambitious and failed to reverse the company’s decline.

Tensions arose in the X-ray department of the Philips research laboratory during the interwar period, caused by the interplay among technological development, organizational culture, and individual behavior. This article traces the efforts of Philips researchers to find a balance between their professional goals and status and the company's strategy. The X-ray research, overseen by Gilles Holst, the laboratory's director, and Albert Bouwers, the group leader for the X-ray department, was a financial failure despite technological successes. Nevertheless, Bouwers was able to continue his X-ray research, having gained the support of company owner Anton Philips. The narrative of the X-ray department allows us to explore not only the personal tensions between Holst and Bouwers, but also the interaction between individual goals and company strategy in an industrial research laboratory.

The chemical industry was a leading sector in Italy’s “economic miracle,” but after remarkable growth in the 1950s, it declined in the next decade. Montecatini rose to a dominant position in inorganic chemicals and fertilizers in the 1950s, but its quasi-monopoly of traditional chemicals was soon challenged, first by the state-owned Eni and then by Edison, one of Italy’s giant electric power companies, which was diversifying into new sectors. The “chemical wars” of the late 1950s and early 1960s pitted the three companies against one another, as they competed for state support by building plants in Italy’s underdeveloped south, often with little commercial rationale. Although the “war” was finally resolved by a merger of Montecatini and Edison, the new company failed to achieve internal rationalization or to develop advanced chemical products. By the 1970s the sector was in disarray, and the opportunities of Italy’s rapid postwar development in chemicals had been squandered.

Gordon Moore designed Moore’s Law as a multifunctional tool to drive process and product innovation, sell Fairchild’s and Intel’s microchips, and outcompete other semiconductor firms. Because Intel’s ability to stay on Moore’s Law depended upon other corporations developing materials and manufacturing equipment for exponential scaling, Moore and his closest associates heavily promoted Moore’s Law in the microelectronics community. They also established the national and international technology roadmaps for semiconductors in order to set the direction and cadence of innovation in microelectronics at the national and, later, global scales. Moore’s and his successors’ relentless pursuit of Moore’s Law and their deft management of the roadmaps significantly reinforced Intel’s competitiveness and helped it to dominate semiconductor technology and industry until the mid-2010s.

Interlocking directorates can encourage innovation, cooperation, and adherence to best practices or can contribute to collusion, corruption, and the stagnation of ideas. Research has identified the contingent nature of director networks, with outcomes dependent on the nature of the tie; the firms and individuals involved; and the institutional, sociopolitical, and cultural context. Distinguishing between helpful and harmful interlocks thus requires understanding the foundations on which they were built. This article is the first systematic, longitudinal analysis of the antecedents of interlocking directorates in Australia, complementing substantial international efforts to understand and compare director networks across the twentieth century. The network has been characterized by a relatively consistent long-run level of connection but substantial variation in the causes of interlocks. The director network in Australia has responded to the pragmatics of the board member occupation, with corporate governance regulations, the progress of the professions, banking and prudential practices, and the form of large organizations encouraging ties that were built on professional expertise and geographic proximity. These findings are important for policy makers, regulatory bodies, and scholars, highlighting the importance of understanding the contextual foundations of interlocks when assessing their potential for harm.