This article investigates the change in relations between Parisian haute couture and the French textile industry in the 1950s and 1960s. This study is grounded in the multiple changes that occurred between the two decades with the end of a state-sponsored and textile-backed aid to couture plan in 1960, the dematerialization of fashion in the 1960s and the advent of brands and licenses, and the waning of couture’s influence throughout the period. It cross-references archives from multi-stakeholder meetings between the state, couture, and textile representatives with the couturiers’ trade association archives and diplomatic archives to show how the changing fashion landscape impacted their interactions. This study shows that while the couture and textile industries drifted apart, the government’s interest in couture grew. This reframes the narrative on couture’s alleged influence as the spearhead of the textile industry while illustrating its wider prestige influence and its relevance to the state.

Business is commonly regarded as one of the powerful actors in the world today. However, this position is neither as straightforward as often believed nor particularly new. Nevertheless, business historians have not focused on the topic of business power to date, often leaving it as something lurking in the background of their analyses. There are signs that this may be beginning to change with the growth of studies on the history of capitalism, but this revised presidential address encourages business historians to engage more fully and explicitly with the concept of power and to recognize the different ways in which the concept can be used to enlighten the study of business history.

This article analyzes the so-called turn to the market in Sweden, with an emphasis on aspects that are typically absent from large-scale narratives. How did the changes known as neoliberalization and financialization enter everyday life and mundane financial practices? And which analytical tools can historians use to meaningfully connect the experience of changes on the micro level to those on the macro level? Zooming in on the the year 1979 and focusing on two empirical cases—the popularization of stock saving and the domestication of consumer credit—allows us to elaborate and apply a set of analytical entry points about (1) mundane micro-infrastructures, (2) financial knowledge as learning and unlearning, and (3) moral boundary work. This framework offers a way of exploring when and in what ways new financial practices were experienced and eventually embraced by those who had previously been skeptical or even hostile. It also reveals the role played by actors and institutions not typically seen as agents of marketization.

We examine the Scotch Whisky Association’s (SWA) role in protecting “Scotch whisky” between c. 1945 and c. 1990. Using new archival evidence, we demonstrate that the SWA intensively lobbied the UK government to achieve coordination between domestic and European regulations governing Scotch whisky and whisky. The SWA’s nonmarket activities were consonant with some trade associations but in other respects they were atypical. The SWA extended its activities to supranational bodies and engaged in extensive domestic and foreign litigation. The key message from this article is that the SWA built the world-renowned appellation “Scotch whisky” even though this marque was not registered as an appellation until the late twentieth century.

This article examines a patenting conflict between the Halliburton Oil Well and Cementing Company and an independent inventor named Cranford Walker. It argues that Halliburton’s effort to lower the barriers to entry into the oil well depth measurement industry facilitated the re-emergence of materiality as a pre-condition for the patent eligibility of inventive processes. In 1941, Walker sued Halliburton for infringement of three of his patents, and Halliburton responded with an aggressive defense aimed at invalidating them. Over the next five years, the courts handling this conflict adopted very narrow legal theories developed during the Second Industrial Revolution to assess the patent eligibility of inventions that involved mental steps—processes such as mathematical computations, which people can perform in their minds. The resulting legal precedent cleared the path for Halliburton’s short-term industrial goals and continued to shape patent law for the rest of the century.

The turbulent 1830s saw a sequence of great political and social reforms in the United Kingdom. One such reform was the introduction of a locally funded Poor Law in Ireland. The development of a nascent welfare system in 1838 coincided with a boom in the formation of microfinance institutions in Ireland. The focus of this study is the expansion of a hybrid organizational form, Loan Fund Societies (LFSs), in the ten years prior to the Great Irish Famine of 1845–1849. LFSs were legally established with a conflictual structure: acting as commercially viable charitable institutions required to provide credit to the deserving poor (to enable them to be self-sufficient) while dedicating their “profits” to supporting the indigent poor. This study uses an analytical framework drawing inspiration from institutional logics to explore and better understand Irish microfinance in the early nineteenth century, a period of profound socioeconomic and socioreligious changes. It seeks to explain the factors that motivated the establishment and de-establishment of microfinance institutions amid this tumult. Legislative changes in LFS business parameters in 1843 made the tensions between being charitable and commercially sustainable salient; and, for some, it made continued existence untenable.

This article examines shoplifting from department stores and variety chain stores in interwar America and Britain. Patterns of shoplifting show strong similarities—with stores facing a predominantly female, and disproportionately affluent, army of amateur shoplifters, together with a much smaller corps of professional thieves. The incidence and characteristics of shoplifting are explored, together with the stores’ legal and other strategies to deter shoplifters. The article also examines why apparently prosperous women had the highest propensity to shoplift. Britain and the United States had strong commonalities in terms of open display retail formats, the methods used to deter shoplifters, and typical legal penalties. However, America had one critical difference—the much higher incidence of a type of store criminal who specialized in deliberately getting apprehended in order to sue the store for false arrest and, often, false imprisonment, slander, and a range of related charges. This reflected the higher damages typically awarded by U.S. courts compared with their British counterparts, inflated by local antagonism to retail corporations, together with a system—at least in some U.S. cities—whereby corrupt lawyers and judges connived in shoplifting acquittals that paved the way for lawsuits.

Although the automobile industry has served as the backbone of much business history scholarship, business historians have paid little attention to this industry’s actions concerning the complex of environmental issues that took hold in the 1960s. Volvo represents a captivating case study to gain insight into why the automobile industry’s growth has been difficult to align with the shift toward environmental sustainability. Although Volvo pioneered the exhaust emission control technology on the U.S. market in the 1970s and gained an international reputation for high environmental and safety standards in the decades that followed, the company was unable to seriously address climate change in the 1990s. This article identifies several key factors impacting the automobile industry’s passive response to environmental challenges—for instance, weak and asymmetric emission control regulations on international markets, consumer preferences for larger cars (SUVs) in the 1990s, and a lack of systematic regulatory pressure to shift from fossil fuels and the internal combustion engine. In the case of Volvo, world leadership in safety standards, rather than low carbon emissions, constituted the company’s competitive advantage as climate change emerged as one of the most critical environmental issues in the 1990s.

Executive education programs offered by business schools became a global phenomenon for developing top managers in the 1960s. These programs were established in more than 40 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America in less than two decades. This article explores the phenomenon in three different Latin American contexts: Central America, Peru, and Colombia. In all these cases, initiatives led to successful executive programs, which contributed to the growth of business schools that gradually achieved high international reputation. By studying the way that various U.S. actors interacted differently with local actors in the three cases, the article contributes to three discussions within business history: the history of Americanization, management education, and the alternative business history of emerging markets.

This paper presents a detailed historical account of the Bank of Twente (Twentsche Bankvereeniging), launched in 1861 and, for most of the subsequent decades, the largest, fastest-growing, and most profitable bank in the Netherlands. It follows the narrative analysis approach to illustrate that the circumscribed use of a limited partnership was rooted in the organizational form having a flaw of its own that, under particular circumstances, created serious agency costs. As the bank grew, so did the agency costs, finally forcing the bank to incorporate in 1917.

This article examines the development of buyer-supplier relations in the telecom sector. The literature on telecoms in Scandinavia has been dominated by the narrative praising the trusting and collaborative relations between Telia, the Swedish public telephone operator (PTO), and Ericsson, the equipment supplier. The Norwegian PTO, Telenor, diverted from this path and was a pioneer in preferring competitive tenders and arm’s length relations with its suppliers starting in the 1970s. The article argues that Telenor’s history and nationality had a significant impact on its business strategy. In addition, the article examines why some business narratives persist while others remain unknown. One finding is that shareholder-friendly narratives have a handicap because they focus on self-interest and money, and not societal values.

Business confidence is a measure of optimism or pessimism that managers feel about the commercial prospects for their organizations. This paper uses later medieval high-value English credit data as a proxy gauge of merchants’ business confidence or uncertainty. It discusses whether mercantile restriction of credit during the fifteenth-century recession reflects uncertainty, whereby merchants became increasingly risk-averse and so reduced the amount of credit they extended to their customers. It discusses the chronological trends in English lending between 1353 and 1532. This paper examines medieval debt restructuring and argues that this might similarly reflect merchants’ commercial confidence or uncertainty. In contrasting two sample years (1375 and 1433), the paper seeks to identify the motivations and influences that lay behind medieval merchants’ business decisions more fully. It argues that merchants’ investment behavior was guided more by local commercial circumstances than it was by profound economic shocks, such as plague and bullion famine.

After more than a century of political and economic integration, Southern Ireland exited the United Kingdom in 1922. By identifying the leading business firms of the era and the political and religious allegiances of their owners, this paper explores the perspective of the Southern Irish business establishment on the issues involved. While the mass of the population was Catholic and by 1918 favored secession, the business elite is shown to have been predominantly Protestant and strongly supportive of continued integration. Business elite perceptions of the consequences of exiting the United Kingdom are explored, and post-independence economic and business developments assessed in light of the concerns expressed at the time. The paper also charts the post-independence fate of the leading former unionist firms and the erosion and eventual disappearance of the sectarian divisions then prevalent in Irish business life.

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.

This article discusses the role of employers and their organizations in promoting or hindering social insurance schemes and, ultimately, the welfare state. Unlike most studies that center on countries in periods of democracy, this research focuses on the role of employers, and specifically employers’ mutuals, in the development of the industrial accident scheme during the Franco dictatorship in Spain. The institutional elimination of the class struggle, by repressing the working class and prohibiting class-based unions, led to an evolution of the industrial accident scheme and employers’ liabilities that revolved around the interrelationship between employers and the state. While employers tried to keep control of the management and low cost of the insurance, the state maintained significant bureaucratic intervention and increased auditing and control. The democratic period that began in 1977 prolonged the structure fostered during the Franco regime and enhanced the power of the mutuals in managing this insurance.

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.

By nature, wars appear hostile to commerce, bringing disruption to international relations and to everyday life. By focusing on the individuals involved in continuing commerce, however, an increasing body of scholarship has shown that merchants in a number of contexts continued to operate successfully during periods of war. This article builds on these recent methodological shifts in business history, applying them to the three Anglo-Dutch wars of the seventeenth century. Although these conflicts have been described as being harmful to commerce, there has been no focus hitherto on merchants’ experiences of or responses to these wars. This article addresses this problem and, in so doing, proposes a different way of analyzing and thus characterizing the relationship between the Anglo-Dutch Wars and business. Through examining the surviving correspondence of merchants operating during these wars, I investigate the various methods used—both successfully and unsuccessfully—to navigate obstacles to business during these conflicts. The value of considering this activity in broader British and European contexts is explored, and the range of concerns exhibited by merchants during these periods of conflict is analyzed, showing that war was not paramount among their concerns, despite the political context. Throughout, I show that although all three Anglo-Dutch Wars had an impact on commerce, this was not necessarily negative, and that the most enterprising and proactive merchants benefited from commercial opportunities created by the conflicts.

After reflecting on the thematic evolution of business history as a field over the past 50 years, this revised presidential address invites readers to consider the potential payoffs of expanding the contexts in which business historians work together on research projects, as well as with colleagues from cognate fields and with students. In addition to charting the steady growth in collaborative research among business historians since 2000, the essay also identifies areas that especially lend themselves to this mode of historical inquiry, including comparative or transnational analysis that requires detailed knowledge of multiple societies, the development of oral history projects, and the use of data science techniques. It concludes by exploring the advantages of incorporating interdisciplinary research teams into curricular structures, using the example of the Bass Connections program at Duke University.

The Victorian City of London’s financial center expanded and renewed its building infrastructure virtually unimpeded by considerations of urban preservation, conservation, or public opinion. The next phase of massive rebuilding, during the long post-1945 boom, appeared likely to follow the same pattern. However, by the mid-1960s, the freedom of City office owner-occupiers and developers to do as they wished with their buildings had become substantially constrained by rising conservationist sentiment. This paper explores this process through the history of the design, building, and eventual aborted demolition of Gibson Hall, the Bishopsgate headquarters of National Provincial Bank for over a century. This paper charts the life of Gibson Hall, in particular its conception, design, and, ultimately, its attempted redevelopment. We also consider the long-term consequences of the rebalancing between economic and conservation objectives for the nature of British urban redevelopment and the adoption of a “throwaway” business headquarters style—to remove any risk of popular support for preservation.

This article explores the link between the history of small-firm associations and the development of Dutch financial infrastructure geared toward small firms. In particular, it tests Verdier’s thesis about the origins of state banking using an in-depth case study of the Dutch small-firm movement. This article shows that Dutch small-firm associations did not simply became politically relevant and use their power to lobby for state banking, but rather used the topic of insufficient access to credit to rally support, mobilize members, and obtain subsidies from the government. During this associational process, they had to navigate local contexts and power structures that, in turn, also shaped the financial system. State banking was initially not demanded by small firms, but arose as the result of failed experiments with subsidized banking infrastructure and a changing position of the government on how to intervene in the economy.