Drawing from the literature strands of philanthropy, business, and history, this work explores the business, prosocial, and political activities of a prominent family in the Scotch whisky industry, with specific emphasis on two brothers’ philanthropy and its impact on a place—the city of Perth, Scotland. In our analysis, we tell the story of the second-generation owners of Dewar’s Scotch whisky company, brothers John Alexander and Tommy Dewar, and their journey of prosocial place-based service and giving. Consistent throughout are the themes of global success, family, local and national networks, and regional embeddedness, alongside the role of formal and informal giving. We offer an analysis of the prosocial activities that represent unexplored dimensions of business success, placing them in both spatial and temporal contexts. Within this is the story of a multigenerational family business’s international growth and success.

This article examines the role of state-owned firms in economic growth. While some scholars denigrate state firms, most analysts of East Asian development have noted their importance. To date, however, little work has been done on how state firms operate and how they have actually contributed to industrial development and economic growth. Looking closely at postwar Taiwan as a newly industrializing country and the case of Taiwan Machinery Manufacturing Corporation (TMMC), this article argues that state enterprises resolved coordination failures and provided manufacturing capacity to infant industries. Drawing on company archives and state records, I argue that TMMC helped drive growth through the provision of manufacturing machinery, equipment, parts, repairs, and upgrading. By supplying firms with the necessary technology and materials to modernize production and be competitive on the global market, I show how TMMC helped facilitate Taiwan’s economic miracle.

The theme of the 2024 Business History Conference was “doing business in the public interest,” but what does it actually mean to “do business in the public interest?” This presidential address challenges the idea of shareholder primacy as the main purpose of business enterprises historically and examines various ways that business historians might approach the idea of businesses acting in a public interest. In particular, it analyzes instances in which corporations made a decision in the public interest without clear evidence that it would benefit their bottom line; cases where it would demonstrably hurt their bottom line to prioritize the public; corporations that made a decision allegedly in the public interest that actually turned out to be bad for the public interest; and corporations that made a decision that was bad for the public interest that also turned out to be bad for their own bottom line.

“Imperial Crucible” tells the story of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) from the company’s founding in Pittsburgh in 1888 through the 1950s. Although scholars have long contended that American multinational corporations played a pivotal role in the industrialization of the United States, the building of a global working class, and the transformation of European empires, they have tended to see these stories as distinct, rather than interconnected. In contrast, Imperial Crucible focuses on a single firm to draw together the political-economic, working-class, and imperial history of American business. What the industrialists behind Alcoa built, I argue, was not a multinational but a transimperial corporation.

Cartels today are illegal and illegitimate across the globe. Yet until the end of World War II, cartels were legal, ubiquitous, and popular—especially in Europe. How, then, did cartels become bad, if they had been considered a positive force for capitalist stabilization and peace in the first half of the 20th century? That is the question this dissertation poses. By the 1930s, over 1,000 monopolistic agreements regulated nearly half of world trade. International cartels governed the interwar world economy, setting prices and output quotas, dividing world markets, regulating trade flows, and even controlling the transfer of patents across firms and sovereign state borders. I conceptualize this regime as “cartel capitalism.” Most cartels were headquartered in industrial Europe. First, I trace how a surprising consensus in interwar Europe—comprising national governments; international organizations like the League of Nations; industrialists, led by the International Chamber of Commerce; federalists; and even socialists—backed cartels as a panacea to the problems of reconstruction after 1918, namely the quest for peace and stable markets. However, in the wake of 1945, most countries in Western Europe—along with the new supranational European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951) and European Economic Community (EEC)—started prohibiting cartels. My project illuminates the causes and consequences of this great reversal. Monopoly Menace reveals, for the first time, how Europe’s transnational reckoning with the shocks of the Great Depression, fascism, and total war produced a genuine anticartel revolution that rewrote the rules of the modern European and global economy. Monopoly Menace ends by illuminating how American, British, French, and West German postwar planners designed new national welfare states, the Bretton Woods Order, and the European Union on the neglected foundation of anti-cartel policies.

The change in brand from British Railways to British Rail (BR) marked an important moment in the history of Britain’s railway. Running alongside BR’s modernization was a wider process of “professionalization” within the field of marketing. This paper explores how the wider professionalization of marketing impacted BR’s own marketing practices, showing that after 1965 BR opened its doors to new methods, means, and perhaps most importantly, specialists from outside the railway industry. Such marketing efforts helped to frame the railway in terms of individual travelers’ specific economic needs: by 1968 it had effectively segmented its passengers into demographic audiences, and by 1975, BR had a much better understanding of its markets. These individual economies were often highly gendered and saw only mixed success, but ultimately demonstrated an application of research, advertising, and promotion.

This article examines the role of the mass media in driving anticartel debates during a coal crisis in Germany in 1900. Threatening the fuel supplies of millions of people, the nationwide energy shortage marked the beginning of the anticartel movement, adding a decisive thrust to antimonopoly sentiment toward the cartelized Ruhr coal industry. While hitherto overlooked, this symbolic chapter of German antimonopoly history was profoundly shaped by daily newspapers, a medium that revolutionized public communication during this period. By cross-referencing newspaper articles with records of the coal industry, this paper investigates how newspapers raised public concern for the fuel shortage and thereby forged narratives blaming the coal industrialists as well as how the coal producers responded to the ever-intensifying public scrutiny. As such, this study would serve to identify the mass media as a key determinant in the broader history of cartels and cartel politics in the twentieth century.

Recently, women’s presence on top boards of directors has significantly increased, challenging the long standing of male-led corporate elites. In light of the still-developing literature, this article provides a century-long examination of women’s entry into the Spanish corporate elite, offering several original contributions. In addition to its pioneering input into the country’s historiography, the work uses a holistic model to introduce a comparative European approach. Moreover, it empirically examines the significant yet previously unexplored impact of elite training institutions on the advancement of female directors as well as their arrival through a national holding company and their presence in leading publicly traded companies. Findings showed four distinct stages in their trajectory: discriminatory exclusion, during the first third of the twentieth century; exceptional inclusion, with early positions in their family-owned firms; gradual incorporation, with increased political representation and expanded academic access in the latter decades of the last century; and promotion, supported by twenty-first-century political strategies, while still revealing the handicap of women’s delayed entry into the corporate network.

This paper examines the population of corporate directors of Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the period 1881-1911 the corporate form became the most common mode of business organisation for large businesses. As their number increased, the population of directors expanded and reflected an increasingly diversified corporate landscape. Based on a large-scale dataset, this paper analyses the characteristics and networks of this wider population of directors. The study goes beyond previous work, which has mainly focused on elite directors or prominent companies, and shows three key findings. First, the population of directors was very connected into a large network, complete isolation from this network was rare. Second, over 1881-1911 director interlocks with banks became less important for most sectors, while interlocks with other financial institutions such as trusts became increasingly important. Insurance companies stood out as the most connected sector spanning smaller local companies and larger international ones. Third, during the period studied there was a shift from director clusters that were mainly based on proximity, to those that were connected through industries.

Turn-of-the-century America witnessed many forgotten risk-making experiments that probed the limits of insurability by stepping beyond the familiar fields of life, fire, and marine insurance. One attempted to underwrite firms’ lost profits during strikes.

The ensuing debates on strike insurance’s practicability revealed scientistic expectations of never-ending actuarial progress that united an otherwise-divided business community. Yet attempting to realize strike insurance quickly meant grappling with the limits of insurability. Labor strife’s fuzzy causality involving human agency forestalled the homogenous classification that underlay actuaries’ averaging. Thus, strike underwriters sidestepped actuarial ratemaking to offer uniform premiums to those deemed acceptable risks. This solution not only left them susceptible to adverse selection and moral hazard but also highlighted the limits of insurers’ ability to transform uncertainty into commoditized risk, more broadly.

Recognizing these limits has important historiographical implications. Based largely on studies of life insurance—the gold standard of insurability—the rise of financial risk management has claimed a central place in the history of American capitalism. This literature thus threatens to obscure the ongoing significance of unclassifiable, unquantifiable uncertainty. Uncovering forgotten risk-making projects like attempts to establish strike insurance, where Americans grappled with the limits of insurability, is thus a crucial corrective.

As a result of the partial privatization and public listing of two large state-owned enterprises in 2001, the Norwegian state became the largest owner at the Oslo stock exchange. A new mode of corporate governance was developed, through which retainment of the corporate headquarters (HQ) of hybrid state-owned enterprises became the sole political goal of continued state ownership in these corporations. This article explores the perceived benefits to the national economy of these company HQ through an investigation of public documents and interviews with key stakeholders. The article argues that the main function of the goal of HQ retainment was to portray national interests and political goals as mere (positive) externalities of HQ location, and that this goal was formalized due to a perceived need to depoliticize the corporate governance of hybrid state-owned enterprises.

This article contributes an account of a key moment in the development of venture capital. I argue the US Small Business Administration’s Task Force on Venture and Equity Capital for Small Business, established in 1976 and headed by William J. Casey, had an outsized impact on the development of modern venture capital and its close associations with the high technology sector. The Task Force’s 1977 report was influential in establishing both the figure of the venture capitalist and the business model of institutionally supported, limited partnership venture capital in the minds of policymakers, businesspeople, and the general public. This article traces the influence of one part of the Report: a prominently featured schematic model, entitled “Life Cycle of a New Enterprise: Model of a Growing and Successful Company, 1975-1976 Financial Market Conditions.” I trace the influence of the LCM as it spread through the developing high technology sector, as shown by its appearances in business publications, governmental reports, and congressional testimonies offered by industry leaders. The LCM was genericized away from its original authors and intentions, becoming part of the economic imaginary of the technology and innovation sector.

This article presents a business history of the Barranquilla Railway and Pier Company (BRPC) and its impact on Colombia’s Caribbean region. It explores the company’s operations, profitability, shareholders, infrastructure development, and competition with other coastal railways for insights into the role of foreign capital in regional growth. The BRPC’s railway and port infrastructure connected the coastal city of Barranquilla with the Colombian interior, allowing the city to supplant Cartagena as the country’s principal international port. Statistical analysis reveals the railway’s remarkable profitability, which attracted transnational investors, who consolidated majority control. The company’s ability to leverage engineering expertise and capital underscored its strategic significance, yet its interests centered on protecting its transport monopoly. The railway’s lack of visibility in London and information asymmetries shaped investor perceptions. Extending the pier demonstrated BRPC’s role in accommodating rising export volumes during Colombia’s “despegue cafetero.” However, the railway faced obsolescence, as the government opened the obstructing Bocas de Ceniza sandbank and pursued railway nationalization. The railway’s redundancy, demographic shifts, and rise of Buenaventura underscore its eventual decline. This paper reveals the complex dynamics between foreign capital, infrastructure, and trade monopolies in shaping uneven development. It highlights the BRPC’s overlooked yet fundamental role in Colombia’s export economy and Barranquilla’s ascendancy.

Via an investigation of the collaboration between banks and foreign offices, this article demonstrates that the restructuring of China’s state debt before and after the revolution of 1911 was not simply a part of Chinese globalisation undertaken under the benign stewardship of foreign banks. Rather, the contest for Chinese loans reflected a power struggle for regional hegemony between expansionist states that hinged on both competition and cooperation, as well as Chinese attempts to preserve their economic and territorial sovereignty. It further shows that the notion that financial institutions operated independently of the state does not reflect the clear record of close coordination between states and financial institutions during loan negotiations.

This address calls on historians and other social scientists to delve deeper into the nature of human imagination and its role in business. Interpreting a business plan written by my father prior to his death, I draw attention to the opportunity to use such sources to study the formation and consequences of “entrepreneurial imaginaries.” By this term, I mean the situated and embodied process by which human beings imagine desirable future ventures. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology, I explore how recognizing the embodied nature of human imagination can deepen our understandings of how our subjects (a) imagine their ventures, (b) imagine themselves, and (c) imagine the moral worth of their venture in society. I conclude by highlighting why some of the sources and methods used by business historians may be particularly well suited for studying imagination and its relationship to entrepreneurship and change.

This article argues that live cattle futures, launched in 1964 in Chicago, were revolutionary for professional economics, the derivatives industry, and the beef cattle industry because cattle were the first successful “non-storable” derivatives. Since the late nineteenth century, the ability of derivatives to provide financial services to risk-averse farmers rested on the assumption that futures were interchangeable with physical commodities in storage. Live cattle futures upset theories and norms, which enabled experiments in increasingly abstract forms of speculation and tremendous growth in the derivatives industry. Economists, exchange leaders, and commodity producers cooperated to make live cattle futures work, but they all understood and felt their impacts differently. The article applies market performativity theory to better understand how financial instruments and markets became first less and later more physically abstract over time. The article reveals that the changing materiality of derivatives also led to changes in the social purpose of speculative finance. Sources include published economics articles, conference proceedings, congressional hearings, historical newspapers, and archival records from the derivatives and cattle industries.

Forecasts play a central role in the development of energy infrastructure. Since building energy infrastructure is long and costly, energy system planners try to anticipate future demand to avoid both shortages and overcapacity. But energy demand forecasts aren’t neutral: they represent a certain vision of the future that forecasters hope to bring into being. This article uses a historical case study to open the black box of forecasting and the world it contains. It studies electricity demand forecasts made by Hydro-Québec, one of the biggest industrial firms in North America, from the 1960s to the 1980s. Based on linear extrapolation models forecasting exponential demand and endless growth, the state-owned firm embarked on huge hydroelectric megaprojects with deep consequences on the environment and Indigenous lands. The energy crisis of the 1970s, by disturbing energy systems, led to criticism from the provincial government and civil society towards Hydro-Québec’s bullish forecasts that justified its expansionist agenda. This uncertain context favored other methods of predicting the future, like scenario analysis, and brought scrutiny towards the hydroelectric powerhouse’s business. At the crossroads of business history, energy history, and science and technology studies, the article argues that energy forecasts are used by actors like energy suppliers and governments to produce and project power relations onto the future. They become performative when powerful interests coalesce around their vision of the future to implement it.

Histories of electrification revolve around networks of power developed by “system builders.” These histories, though immensely important, explain the progress of electrification from the perspective of institutions or individuals, rather than through everyday relationships. While the industry pushed the idea that electricity was an obvious must-have for urbanites, vast resources in the 1920s and 1930s went toward cultivating “courteous” relationships among meter readers, electricians, repairmen, billing clerks, and customers. These relationships were pivotal to electrification, especially with complaints about high bills, malfunctioning meters, and “inadequate” wiring, which led to customer curtailment and threatened the prosperity of central power stations. This article expands the notion of who counts as critical actors in the success of electric grids and counters contemporary claims: namely, that grids fail because of bad consumer behavior. By emphasizing the role of everyday relationship-building in the evolution of electric utilities, this study contributes to a history of electricity that examines invisible and mundane networks to expose the relations beneath the grid.

The construction sector has long been underrepresented in business historical studies and debates. While an application of the “historical alternatives to mass production” approach has provided a valuable conceptual framework, this paper offers a still-needed quantitative basis to assess actual long-term changes and continuities in the forms of business organization and entrepreneurship in construction. A database of c. 16,700 construction enterprises in Brussels between 1830 and 1970, drawn from trade directories and fiscal registers, uncovers evolutions in sectoral and subsectoral numbers of enterprises, firm sizes, and rates of company formation. Thus, the growing divergence at the core of the construction industry becomes clear. Industrialization and urbanization led to market concentration, firm growth, and incorporation with some capital-intensive enterprises, whereas the variability of the work on the construction site resulted, with many others, in the persistence of labor-intensive processes, and small-scale, flexible, and informal forms of business organization.

In line with recent research that regards the Second World War as a “defining moment” rather than a temporary disruption to the development of consumer societies, this paper explores how consumers were imagined in nonbelligerent Sweden. The main empirical source material consists of business-to-business advertisements from newspaper and magazine publishers aimed at potential advertisers. There, publishers portrayed their readers as suitable consumers, and, given that the division of the press constituted the main infrastructure for reaching different consumer groups, this is interpreted as a key to understanding market segmentation processes. The findings show how geographical, demographic, and psychological factors were considered in optimizing advertising influence and reaching classed and gendered target audiences. Although the segmentation process consolidated during the war, focusing on stable, large consumer groups, the imagined consumer also underwent fundamental changes, combating anxiety and despair through dreams of both future and present patriotic consumption.