How knowledge is created, accessed, stored and disseminated has become a major focus of study when assessing the success or failure of industrial clusters. Marshall (1890; 225) initiated this debate when he noted: ‘The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air’. In the edited collection by Wilson, Corker and Lane (2022), emphasis has been placed on the links between knowledge, knowledge flows and how innovation systems evolve and adapt. This paper builds on their work examining how tacit and codified knowledge is created and disseminated across a cluster. Bathelt et al (2004) have demonstrated how successful clusters build effective ‘global pipelines’ to access knowledge generated elsewhere, prompting us to think how a business history analysis can incorporate these concepts and how these processes have worked in practice. The paper analyses two English clusters and the processes involved in the formation of a common body of knowledge, a ‘knowledge-cum-industrial zeitgeist’ which explains the cluster’s performance. Specifically, it proposes a model that links internally-generated knowledge and ‘global pipelines’ that clusters develop to tap into externally-generated knowledge, which through effective feedback into the ‘local buzz’ results in further innovation and strengthens the cluster’s competitive advantage.

This article explores the growth of abortion-related businesses in New York State that emerged to encourage Canadian women to travel across the border to access care. Referral agencies and clinics advertised their services, publicized their fees, and competed with each other. Canadian women living near the border were used to crossing to access goods and services not available in their home market. Their practice of traveling to New York for abortions was shaped by their experiences as consumers. The media used the language of commerce to explain this phenomenon, describing those involved in referral agencies as entrepreneurs and businessmen, highlighting the profits being made and evaluating the services being offered.

This article brings agency to discussions on financialization and financial education in Sweden by zooming in on two barely examined actors and arenas: civil society and public schools, respectively. The civil society organization Aktiespararna (Swedish Shareholders’ Association, founded in 1966) attempted to access and impact school education starting with its launch of youth efforts in the 1980s. Aktiespararna was joined in these efforts by Unga Aktiesparare (Swedish Young Shareholders’ Association), founded in 1990. This study describes the organizational strategies—tools, techniques, and discursive approaches—to reach Swedish upper-secondary school students. The result shows a crucial transition on how young Swedes were expected to relate to investing in stocks: from a special interest to pursue as either side activity or profession, to an inevitable part of everyday consumer life. The Swedish example is especially illuminating because it is general in its overall development from welfare state to market orientation. Yet, it emerges as distinctive in its pace and character. Apart from the apparent brisk, straightforward march from social-democratic hegemony, and one of the most regulated national economies in the mid-1900s, to a highly marketized and financialized society in the 2000s, Sweden holds a sociocultural history of strong popular movements and civil society associations. The article demonstrates important links between this aspect of collective engagement for individual progress and the financialization process.

In 1936 Gianni Caproni, one of the biggest aircraft producers in Italy, bought one of the biggest engineering companies in Emilia Romagna, the Officine Meccaniche Reggiane, and started manufacturing and exporting some of the topmost fighters ever produced in Italy. Based on different archival sources this paper would like to shed light on why, despite a national technological obsolescence in the field a company, which focused on the production of railway material, was able to come up with the most technologically innovative fighters (the Re. 2000 and successive models) which soon conquered the Italian and foreign markets. The author would like to indicate the original characteristics which help explain its primacy: the unique features of the Reggiane, the role of the new owner, risk-taker and forward-looking entrepreneur Gianni Caproni and in particular the importance of the transmission of knowledge, which in those autarchic years and in this particular case was reached by attracting human capital from abroad. The general argumentation of the paper would like to show the importance of deeply excavating in the company’s history, managerial choices, risk-taking attitudes, and knowledge transfer in explaining an otherwise almost inexplicable international business success in a such a competitive sector. The approach is not purely descriptive: the paper analyses the facts and figures of the Officine Meccaniche Reggiane before and after the Caproni takeover, it evaluates the company’s innovative production strategy in the new field of aircraft production and offers new interpretations on its success story in this field.

This paper explores American tariff politics and the embrace of protectionism within the Ohio Valley in the two decades following the War of 1812. During these years, residents of the western states navigated the emergence of steam transportation, a growing number of state-chartered banks, and intense population growth. This fueled an economic boom that went bust during the Panic of 1819. Western farmers, merchants, and manufacturers blamed harmful patterns of trade for this economic crisis, which bolstered a distinct regional identity that embraced a properly constructed restrictive tariff as a “western” measure. Consequently, the decade of the 1820s featured the most sustained period of conflict over the tariff issue in the antebellum era. This article examines western participation in conflicts over commerce and roots the political economy of trade policy in changing economic conditions that inspired distinct northern, southern, and western perspectives on trade and economic development. I conclude that both protectionist claims to economic nationalism and free trade embrace of international exchange overlook the individual assessments of local and regional markets that set the terms on which participants in the tariff debates of the early republic imagined future development.

Over the second half of the 20th century, Greek governments failed to tax business income in line with the country’s level of economic development. This paper uses the “slippery slope” model of tax compliance to explain why the reform of income and corporate taxation in the late 1950s met strong resistance in the business sector. We argue that the negative legacy of interwar reforms, the lack of sustained and credible investment in trust building in coincidence with the postwar reforms, and the intensification of coercive threats in tax enforcement led to an antagonistic tax climate and a degradation of enforced and voluntary compliance. Our qualitative analysis based on original primary sources shows that the arguments publicly voiced by entrepreneurs and their organizations reflected their persistent perception of tax power as unfair, arbitrary and extractive. Using aggregate tax returns data, our quantitative analysis finds evidence of systematic and increasing income underreporting both by unincorporated and incorporated businesses. This vicious circle of non-cooperation and mutual distrust explains why governments got trapped into a persistent low tax capacity equilibrium that still casts a shadow on the Greek economy.

In the early post-Second World War period, Migros of Switzerland was the first European retail business to adopt the American supermarket model. Its success, however, has not only been a matter of technological and logistical innovation. Migros’ founder, Gottlieb Duttweiler, was convinced that consumer education was part and parcel of a new style of selling consumption. This conviction was at the basis of a strategy entering foreign markets and of exporting the Migros model abroad. Similar to post-World War II economic rehabilitation programs, Duttweiler pursued an indigenous modernization agenda, based on a new principle of “rational consumption”—he did not hesitate to label this as a genuine version of entrepreneurial development aid. Against the backdrop of the establishment of Migros’ activities in Turkey, this article discusses the participation of entrepreneurs in the international development policies after the Second World War. The history of Migros Türk sheds light not only on the entrepreneurial approach to modernization policy, which was often different to that adopted in government programs, but also on how this influenced critical consumerism inside and outside Switzerland over the long term.

Welcome to Volume 24, No. 4 of Enterprise and Society. There is a slight deviation from tradition for this issue this year. As is well-known, the final issue of the year typically carries both the Presidential Address, delivered at the annual meeting in the spring, as well as summaries by all Krooss Prize finalists. Those of you able to attend the annual meeting in Detroit in March 2023 will have been spellbound by Dan Wadhwani’s Presidential Address, which wove together strands of his rich historical entrepreneurship scholarship with threads of his own fascinating family story. Converting such a personal address, combined with the continuous uncovering of materials, has involved intricate ongoing work. Dan and I have agreed to hold his address back to give him the opportunity to write the piece he really wants to write. Personally, I cannot wait to read it.

“Building Blocs” charts a global history of the last great crisis of globalization—the transwar decades from the 1880s through the 1940s—by centering strategic minerals needed to make steel. Little studied, but critically important, alloying minerals like tungsten and manganese were only needed in small amounts, but they were essential to the foundations of both national prosperity and security: steel and military production. Herein lay a fundamental problem: none of the industrial powers possessed adequate domestic deposits of these minerals, which were concentrated in remote locations such as central India, the Caucasus, southern China, Brazilian jungles, the Australian outback, and southern Africa. In a world in which steel was power, “Building Blocs” shows that resource anxieties motivated interwar quests for autarky and autonomy in the form of self-contained blocs. The scramble for strategic minerals escalated tensions and put rivals on the road to war, reshaping the forms and structures of geopolitical entities and international institutions throughout the transwar period.

This article analyzes the AFL-CIO’s international economic policy activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the context of the collapse of Bretton Woods monetary system. It shows that AFL-CIO economists developed a far-reaching critique of multinational corporations that encompassed not only concerns about import competition and capital flight but also charges that multinational firms contributed to the United States’ balance of payments woes. Fighting charges that union wages drove inflation, labor leaders maintained that private capital outflows and intracompany transactions exacerbated U.S. payments deficits. They therefore advocated for capital controls and import restrictions as alternatives to fiscal and monetary restraint. Their efforts to preserve the expansionary policies underpinning postwar liberalism, however, ultimately failed. By calling attention to the AFL-CIO’s failed activism in international monetary politics, the article offers a new vantage point for understanding organized labor’s declining influence in the last third of the twentieth century.

In this essay, I reflect on the growing political obstacles to doing business history in China and how, in my doctoral dissertation research, I attempted to overcome them. More specifically, I discuss how I drew on unconventional historical sources and novel data to examine the relationship between informal entrepreneurial activity and economic change in Maoist China (1949–1978). Through the quantitative analysis of thousands of case files of individuals prosecuted as “speculators and profiteers”—discarded administrative documents that were recovered from Chinese flea markets—I reassessed the scale and scope of informal entrepreneurial activity in Maoist China. I then went on to triangulate these data with evidence found in other sources to illustrate how, over time, informal entrepreneurial activity became more collusive, encompassing, and impossible to contain. Ultimately, I argued that China’s “Reform and Opening Up” was not the state-led watershed event that it is often made out to be; rather, economic and institutional change was, at least partly, the result of a bottom-up transformation, decades in the making. This essay thus suggests that the use of unconventional sources and mixed methods presents opportunities both for doing research in contexts where history is being actively securitized and for producing countervailing narratives that decenter the state.

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s essay “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” attempts to provide more structure to the field known as the new history of capitalism (NHOC) by defining martial capitalism as a new variant. In contrast, this essay asserts that the lack of definitional precision within the NHOC is not a bug, but rather one of its key features. To define capitalism would be to delimit where it was and was not present historically. If part of the argument of the NHOC is that capitalism pervaded—indeed infected—all aspects of American life, then defining the term would be self-defeating. In the end, martial capitalism suffers from the same shortcomings of the NHOC more generally, in that it places all “warlike activities” of the state under the undefined umbrella of something vaguely called “capitalism.”

From the 1940s to the 1970s, British governments steered manufacturing businesses to peripheral regions designated as needing more employment. This approach was delivered through a Regional Policy that deployed industrial location controls and financial incentives. Effectiveness varied over time but was dramatic in the mid-1940s, when it boosted the regional stock of secondary manufacturing to the extent that its legacy remains visible today. The literature describes how this Regional Policy was a peacetime policy, albeit one formulated during the war. This article, however, proposes that the most successful phase of Regional Policy was an extension of wartime policies governing regional manufacturing businesses producing munitions. It uses a case study of Wales to make two arguments. One is that the Regional Policy associated with the postwar period began to be implemented before the war had ended. The other is that the Board of Trade pursued the policy through repurposed wartime governance mechanisms within an economy that remained subject to onerous state controls. The case outlines a short but consequential burst of assertive state involvement that shaped business activity throughout much of regional Britain, echoing Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson’s arguments concerning “the state always being in” given its role in shaping markets, business behavior, and regulations.

In the early 2000s, California-based Guayakí popularized the caffeinated drink, yerba mate, among young people and creative types. With revenues of $100 million, Guayakí dominates the U.S. market where it is synonymous with yerba mate. This essay explores how Guayakí transformed a foreign product with deep local meaning, widespread popularity, and a long history in southern South America from a shared beverage and social practice into a healthy energy drink. Typically, localization entails multinational companies and local consumers adapting and giving new meanings to an exotic foreign product or brand. In contrast, local entrepreneurs radically changed yerba mate while preserving part of its narrative. Guayakí promotes product authenticity based on a narrative of South American Indigenous origins, stimulating qualities, and health benefits that fits with superfoods, while a narrative of green capitalism promotes brand authenticity. But that was not enough to popularize yerba mate. The product had to be adapted to consumer taste preferences and values that challenge the foundational ideas of superfoods and green capitalism. As a result of consumer input acquired through grassroots marketing, Guayakí transformed a shared infusion into something closer to a soft drink—a pre-prepared, individual-sized beverage served in a single-use bottle or can with flavoring and sugar levels tailored to U.S. consumers. The essay exposes the role of local entrepreneurs and consumers in shaping product development and localization. It complicates our understanding of product authenticity and brand authenticity while exposing the limitations of green capitalism, ethical consumerism, and activist entrepreneurship.

I very much appreciate that Brittany Farr, Katie Moore, and Sharon Murphy took the time to write thoughtful and constructive responses to my essay. Collectively, their work spans three centuries and covers law, money, race, violence, financial institutions, and the social experiences of economic processes, and they approached my proposal for a new variety of capitalism from a set of shared interest and expertise in the histories of economic life. They reach drastically different conclusions on the historiographical trend known as the new history of capitalism (NHOC) generally, and martial capitalism, specifically.

My comment highlights the key contributions and promising directions for future research of Lindsay Schakenbach Regale’s essay in this volume. While in agreement with Schakenbach Regele’s call for more specificity for different times and places, I argue that we also ought to be able to answer the question of what makes a variety of capitalism, well, capitalist. To do that, we need to delimit the theoretical and historical bounds of capitalism itself.

Capitalist ideas of productivity became central to medicine under slavery. They shaped how physicians treated enslaved patients, crafted a scientific basis for medicine, and conceived of themselves as professionals. Between the late-eighteenth-century and the mid-nineteenth-century, white male physicians in Louisiana and Cuba distinguished themselves from other healers: first, by aligning with Spanish colonialism, and then, by making themselves essential to a new form of plantation management that used clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and complex accounting systems. These technologies helped planters track the hours and days each enslaved person spent working, eating, sleeping, birthing, suffering from sickness and injuries, and recovering. This in turn enabled precise interpretations of enslaved health in terms of productivity, which was primarily measured in work time and the number of commodities produced. Physicians, who were seeking a rigorous intellectual foundation for medical knowledge production, latched onto planter methods of calculating and controlling enslaved health. One of those methods was what planters and physicians called “sick time,” which was an allotment of time away from work intended to manage illness enough for enslaved people to return to work. However, as physicians used plantation management to cast an air of scientific accuracy over their knowledge, enslaved people reconfigured their own medical practices to make themselves less visible and countable. Fugitive practices involving trees, animals, and natural springs helped enslaved people to heal by taking their own forms of sick time.

This article uses Statoil (Equinor since 2018) as a prism to explore some key features and concerns of Western oil companies’ evolving human rights awareness from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. This period saw the first human rights lawsuits brought against oil companies and a gradual change in their human rights awareness. The article uses insights from the business history literature and new archival material from the oil industry to explain why business ethicists and legal scholars are wrong to argue that the relationship between business and social responsibility, on the one hand, and business and human rights, on the other, are inherently problematic and profoundly disparate due to their divergent historical origins. In so doing, the article offers a historical take on the so-called debate between business human rights (BHR) and corporate social responsibility (CSR), and it repudiates the argument that a so-called minimal understanding of human rights has hindered business from undertaking proactive human rights initiatives. Mapping onto both the business history literature and the BHR–CSR debate, the article aims for a richer understanding of the experiences and ideas that incentivized oil companies to “get serious” about human rights.

In this essay, I turn to the example of the 1919 Elaine Massacre—the deadliest incident of anti-Black violence in U.S. history—in order to better understand how its economically motivated, state-sanctioned, and brutally indiscriminate violence were nearly erased from history. I find that white journalists, military officials, as well as the Governor of Arkansas himself, drew upon long-standing race-based fears in their characterizations of what took place in Elaine. In so doing, they were able to simultaneously glorify and obfuscate the anti-Black violence, as well as further protect the property and economic interests of the white residents who had putatively been “under threat.” The scale of the violence in Elaine and the near totality of its erasure from the official record make the Elaine Massacre a chilling example of what Lindsay Schakenbach Regele has described as “martial capitalism”: the use of concealed military violence to wrest economic resources away from marginalized communities and toward their white counterparts.

Since the new history of capitalism (NHOC) trend received national publicity in 2013, American historians have enthusiastically pursued the complexities and varieties of capitalism, producing a body of scholarship that offers a plethora of capitalism-modifying adjectives yet leaves capitalism undefined. “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” asks how historians developed these varieties and interpretations, and whether any gaps or limitations remain. To answer these questions, the essay begins with a survey of the many histories of capitalism, from the first use of the term, to America’s first business histories in the early twentieth century, to world systems theory, and up to the NHOC. It then makes the case for continued attempts at redefinition and specification by offering a new variety.

This new variety, martial capitalism, has its roots in the early national and antebellum eras and influenced the evolution of capitalism in the United States. It is a system of political economy in which concealed military power, rather than abstract market forces, serves as an invisible (“invisible,” at least, to those not subjected to it) hand and bestows economic opportunity upon some individuals. Under this system, government officials and private citizens coercively acquired resources, knowledge, territory, and “free trade” agreements in the service of aggressive economic opportunism. Steady military conflict, along with scattered and localized violence, intersected with honor, a mainstay in early American politics and culture, to engender a set of masculinized economic relations that shaped both the what/where and the how of capitalism in the United States.