Property-as-real-estate emerged in Bombay at least by the turn of the nineteenth century. Real estate is historicized through previously unexplored archival sources (qualitative and quantitative) by analyzing how property was transacted in a colonial port, and how it became embedded in global circuits of commerce and the accumulation strategies of locals and the English East India Company. The paper demonstrates the existence by this time of legal institutions of publicity and property registration, specialized intermediaries, price-finding mechanisms such as auctions, and imaginaries of a property market as an abstract entity marked by general trends and values. Contrary to the literature that sees prices in this period as erratic and inconsistent, a systematic analysis of prices suggests a rationalized and standardized property market. These findings push back the timeline usually associated with the development of real estate in India.

By providing fresh insights into the development of Egyptian corporate networks and business groups between the early 1920s and late 1940s, this article extends the geographical ambit of an expanding field of study. Data from contemporaneous sources were analyzed through social network analysis techniques, in the search for an improved understanding of both the nature of and motivations behind networking in Egypt. In conducting this exercise, this article assesses the success with which the state acted to stimulate local entrepreneurship in its search for greater economic independence. By linking the Egyptian case to a wider literature on corporate networks, the article reveals similarities with other cases of how developing economies responded to the challenges of that era.

This article investigates how Chinese apparel companies have been able to acquire and upgrade knowledge over the last four decades. Based on a broad range of published sources and official data, it identifies the dominant firms that enabled the industry’s dramatic expansion during two distinct phases: export oriented in 1980–2005 and domestic market oriented in 2005–2020. Using the global value chains model, we analyze the varieties of knowledge needed during these two periods and how firms acquired it to boost their competitiveness.

This article explores the early history of two American peanut companies: Planters and Tom’s. Both food manufacturers developed major commercial brands through the ownership of intellectual property. In this case, the sourcing of different peanut types figured into the marketing of salted peanuts. Through a legal dispute involving Tom’s patented retail bag, I examine how food packaging changed the way that peanuts were advertised, distributed, and consumed in the United States. The argument is made for an historical analysis of food brands that considers how intellectual property domains interacted with one another and with the material properties of food itself.

This paper examines how the British South Africa Company (BSAC; the Company), the founding administrator of Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, navigated the creation of a fiscal system of the colony from 1890 to 1922 and how the fiscal system shaped political decisions regarding the colony’s administrative structure. It casts light on the early efforts of the colonial state-making process under the BSAC and how it established its administrative structure. Once occupation was completed, the Company’s ability to finance the cost of governance and administration was the most critical factor facing it. Whereas earlier scholarship has discussed various aspects of Southern Rhodesia’s early economic endeavors and political evolution, this paper demonstrates the significance of the fiscal system in shaping both the economic and political trajectories of the early administration. Through analyzing the Company’s revenue collection and expenditure patterns, the paper reconstructs the contours of shifting notions of what constituted the Company’s commercial and administrative revenue. It argues that the BSAC’s fiscal and budgetary administration approach was gradual, experimental, and sometimes ad hoc, resulting in continuous conflicts between the Company administration and the settlers. The paper relies on a wide range of sources that include the BSAC annual reports, historical manuscripts, Legislative Council debates, newspapers, and other political pamphlets to unpack the tensions between the Company government and white settlers over the fiscal and administrative evolution of the colony.

How may elites experience a symbolic fall from grace? Elite scholarship has typically described how symbolic structures contribute to consecrate and reinforce existing power relations. Processes of deconsecration are, however, less well described. Deconsecration as a social process is distinct from déclassement, as well as from cultural or juridical processes of exclusion. It is the loss of the very status as “elite.” We address the question of deconsecration through a historical case study of the exclusion of elite groups from the Danish Who’s Who and professional bodies in the wake of the liberation after the German occupation of Denmark 1940–1945.

This article documents how business lobbying groups, corporate leaders, and even some members of the Nixon administration drew on futurist discourse and rhetoric to defeat the Burke-Hartke bill, proposed legislation that would have imposed new taxes on multinational corporations. For several years, self-described futurologists had reconceptualized multinational corporations as ideal institutions for securing world peace and, more broadly, meeting society’s needs, thereby taking over some of the government’s functions. These ideas allowed business interests to invoke a utopian vision of the multinational corporation while working toward the more concrete goal of building a global economy defined by free trade and fending off unwanted regulation.

This article examines the nationwide campaign by financial reformers in the 1910s to convince businesses across the United States to abandon established commercial credit practices and use trade acceptances—the quintessential “real bill”—in their stead. The creation of the Federal Reserve System (Fed) and the outbreak of World War I offered a powerful coalition of campaigners the opportunity to forcefully argue that by capitalizing open account credit, trade acceptances fostered good business practices and stabilized the banking and financial systems. These campaigners relied on trade associations to disseminate, and the federal government to legitimize, their message. While some firms obliged, many businesses and banks criticized the campaigners’ arguments, casting trade acceptances as a means of financial centralization and as being contrary to the American culture of credit. Trade acceptances did not supplant promissory notes or trade in the open market and were rarely used by banks to access Fed liquidity. Instead, their legacy lies in their adoption by finance companies in the hope of securing financing for the distribution and mass consumption of consumer durables.

During the 1930s, the British government in Palestine introduced new regulation for the country’s banking sector. This regulation brought about a sharp decline in the number of banks and consolidated the large banks’ position in the country. Contrary to prior accounts of the subject, which view the regulation as a welcome governmental response to an unstable banking sector, in this article I argue that the main forces behind the regulation were the British Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial, and Overseas) and the Zionist Anglo-Palestine Bank. Based on governmental reports and internal banking correspondence, I show how, despite the opposition of local credit institutions, these two large banks successfully pushed for regulations that benefited them at the expense of their smaller competitors. The regulation of Palestine’s banking sector is therefore a case study of regulatory capture in the context of the British Empire.

This article aims to explain the considerable state ownership in listed companies in Norway (SOiN) at present. The extant literature has pointed to alleged national idiosyncrasies to explain this special feature of Norwegian capitalism. The main contribution of this article is a comparative perspective. It shows that most European countries have pursued selective protectionism (i.e., to secure national ownership in key companies). It also shows that financial capital was not crucial for selective protectionism. On this background, the article discusses why state ownership became the mode of selective protectionism in Norway. It argues that the main reason is that large private (often multinational) companies did not develop in the wake of the second Industrial Revolution. Another key reason is that a specific hybrid ownership model that was developed after 1945 became an available institutional solution for securing national ownership after 1990. A common ground and a compromise were found on this model, based both on trust and distrust toward the state: a trust in that the state could operate as a passive and private owner, and a corresponding distrust in the state as an active industrialist and owner.

In emerging economies, economic development and pro-social policies are closely entwined. Multinational corporations have presented a positive image of their economic and social activities to investors and society to justify exploiting countries’ natural resources. This study examines the Arabian American Oil Company’s (Aramco) pro-social/corporate social responsibility programs in employment, housing, and healthcare from 1932 to 1974. These programs did not stem from a philanthropic rationale but were necessary to enable Aramco to create the infrastructure to find, extract, and control the oil assets. Hierarchical control was institutionalized through racism and discrimination in employment, housing, and health regulations. However, Aramco adopted impression management strategies to present a positive image of itself as a socially responsible company contributing to the economic and social development of Saudi Arabia. We analyze management statements in company reports and internal documents to identify and categorize the application of these impression management techniques up to when the Saudi government took a controlling stake in Aramco.

In the 1990s, three Scandinavian news media companies, Bonnier, Kinnevik, and Schibsted, internationalized their newspapers. Despite doing this during the same period, competing in the same industry and institutional environment, being exposed to the same opportunities by the opening of the Eastern European markets, and all belonging to a smaller language area, they differed in their internationalization models as well as in their outcomes. Despite initial successes, Bonnier and Kinnevik eventually discontinued their newspapers in the new markets, in many cases following significant losses, while Schibsted fared better. The main explanation for using different internationalization models was differences in business models, basically striving to do business internationally in a similar way as domestically. That is, they did not choose a specific internationalization model but sought to simply expand their business models internationally. Consequently, this article finds that when researching internationalization, more focus should be placed on business models.

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the social license to operate (SLO) are widespread global phenomena in mining-dependent countries. These self-regulated frameworks are used to ensure local ownership and as a response to conflict by mining companies. Over the past two decades, CSR in the mining industry has only been more prevalent in Africa and South Africa. Studies on CSR and SLO primarily focus on community perspectives. This paper interrogates how mining companies respond to civic social pressure by considering two cases that have experienced much conflict in South Africa. Based on eighteen in-depth interviews and an analysis of company and media reports, our case studies demonstrate that mining companies primarily use CSR and SLO to assert and maintain corporate control under the guise of promoting local ownership and sustainable mining. Such strategies provide temporary relief and gradually erode CSR and SLO’s legal and political imperatives.

The Czech Republic often has been cited as an example of successful economic transformation. The available literature has primarily focused on changes in the macroeconomic environment, although the actions of economic agents at the microeconomic level have emerged as the crucial factor explaining this success. Based on 101 oral history interviews, this article offers the firsthand experiences, frustrations, challenges, and human dimensions of doing business at that time and shows that the road from socialism to the market economy was a bumpy one. Our approach fills major information voids, and thus offers a unique opportunity for business historians to avoid slipping into the incomplete view of the world presented by written literature and archives.

This article analyzes a single bankruptcy case—Hancock v Halliday (1742–1752)—as it was litigated in the Court of Chancery across a ten-year period. By incorporating local sources, the work attempts to move away from assumptions surrounding the “implicit contract” of family, and to provide a more nuanced analysis of “family strategies” in action. I argue that business historians—looking at networks—and economic and social historians—analyzing the use and implementation of credit—should continue to explore the divisions within families, which will help to reemphasize the role of women within business transactions and the wider credit-based economy. Ultimately, this article makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on the negative aspects of familial networks of credit and debt, demonstrating how the complex and multifaceted nature of family indebtedness has been overlooked, and misunderstood, in the existing literature.

The Depression housing crisis caused enormous distress, with social, economic and political implications. The roles and experiences of some major players are well established. Tenants were evicted. National statistics on foreclosures show that many property owners lost their homes. Lending institutions went under. Municipalities struggled when property tax receipts fell. The federal government stepped in, establishing new programs and agencies, with long-term consequences.

Other parts of the story have been neglected. Many borrowers surrendered their properties voluntarily, rather than await foreclosure. As vacancies rose and rents fell, landlords, many owning only one or two properties and/or renting part of their own homes, struggled. Neglected sources show they defaulted at a higher rate than homeowners. Among lenders, private individuals held more mortgages than any type of institution. Relying on investment income, many had a hard time. Both landlords and private lenders made concessions to avoid having to evict or foreclose, mitigating the effects of the Depression on tenants and borrowers. Sources exist to document local variations in the role of landlords and private lenders. These can give us a fuller picture of the Depression, one that still has relevance today.

We contribute to the argument for a “new” business history employing a quantitative approach. We illustrate opportunities for new perspectives from this approach using a novel microlevel longitudinal database comprising 131 variables for 1,419 cooperative creameries in Denmark for the period 1898–1945, which we also document and make available to the scholarly community. We present a number of applications of the data, including investigating regional productivity differences, expenditure on fire insurance, and survivorship and reporting biases.

During the 1970s, religious activists were heavily involved in national and international campaigns against multinationals and urged firms to adapt their behavior to align with Christian ethics. This article analyzes the strategies of Nestlé in addressing religious activism at three levels: national, international, and organizational. The analysis examines Nestlé’s collaboration with other Swiss and European multinationals and high-ranking church representatives in establishing dialogue platforms that sought to improve mutual understanding and promote tolerance for global capitalism. Nestlé also contributed to the creation of guidelines for the main churches in Switzerland that were aimed at their partial depoliticization. When Nestlé’s executives faced religious shareholder activists during its shareholders’ annual general meetings, they chose to engage with them to avoid their radicalization, although most of their demands ultimately remained unanswered. Overall, Nestlé contributed to the reorientation of religious discussions to small-scale ethical problems and business self-regulation rather than to substantial reforms of the capitalist economic system.

Who managed large corporations during the first half century of their emergence? How did modernizing firms navigate periods of rapid technological change such as those that swept the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What role did engineers play in the management of large corporations? This paper draws on an original database of tens of thousands of mining and metallurgical engineers who graduated from universities during this period, examining patterns in their employment records, job descriptions, and career trajectories, matching our data on individual engineers with a linked database of mining and metallurgical corporations. We trace two distinct phases in engineers’ managerial role that corresponded to periods of rapid technological change and technological quiescence in the industry. We argue that explaining the rise of the modern corporation and the historical dynamics of corporate management requires a better understanding of technical expertise in management.