This article examines the history of mining in British Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the histories of the Burma Corporation and the Duff Development Company, which were located in British-occupied Burma and Malaya, respectively. It argues that despite being represented as “rogue” corporate ventures in areas under “indirect” colonial rule, the contrasting fates of each company—one successful, one not—reveal how foreign-owned businesses operating in the empire became increasingly beholden to British colonial state regulations during this period, marking a shift in policy from the “company-state” model that operated in prior centuries. The histories of these two firms ultimately demonstrate the continued significance of business in the making of empire during the late colonial period, bridging the divide between the age of company rule and the turn toward state-sponsored “development” that would occur in the mid-twentieth century.

In this article, we study the role that media plays during a speculative bubble on an emerging market, and in particular the London financial press’s relation to the West African mining bubble of the early twentieth century. The focus is on the leading company in this sector at the time, Ashanti Goldfields Corporation. The London financial press lacked access to independent, reliable information on the ground, so it often failed to provide readers with relevant factual information. In some instances, the press might have even fueled the speculative cycles through the reporting it provided.

More than ten years after the financial crisis, the challenges of European banking and of the eurozone highlight that the existence of a European common market in banking is at best partial. Examining how British and French commercial banks and banking associations responded to the plans for a European common market in banking between 1977 and 1992, this article contributes to explaining this partial character, and highlights that this project was primarily political. This challenges the widely held view that large companies tended to push for more integration. This article shows that until the mid-1980s, the banking sector was not necessarily calling for European financial integration in the form of a common market in banking for at least three reasons: they doubted the usefulness of such a move, they feared an increase in regulation, and they focused more on domestic or global matters than on European ones.

Over the past two decades, the Japanese apparel industry has lost its competitiveness after experiencing a period of fast growth from the postwar years to the early 1990s. In international literature in social sciences, most scholars offer ethnic-based explanations of fashion in Japan, stressing some specificities such as street fashion or star designers in Paris. This article, however, argues that such views are biased and cannot explain the current lack of competitiveness of the Japanese apparel industry. Using the concept of the “fashion system” and following a business history-oriented approach, we offer a new interpretation of the emergence of Western clothing and fashion in Japan during the second part of the twentieth century. This interpretation demonstrates that the characteristics of the Japanese fashion system lie in a focus on the issues of production and technology, both of which led both to an extreme segmentation of the domestic market and to weaker brands.

By looking at the policy termination of state aid to shipbuilders in Amsterdam, this article illustrates how a major policy paradigm shift within recent history, and the change from Keynesian to neoliberal policies, can be explained. The article is informed by a multilevel governance approach to policy change analysis and is based on different types of sources. It presents an in-depth case study of the closing of the Amsterdam shipyards and analyzes the role of policy change at different governance levels (i.e., city government, national Parliament, national government, and the European Commission). In doing so, we are able to illustrate how new actors—in this case the European Commission and the Commissioner for Competition—were able to terminate long-existing policies of state aid to shipbuilders under the auspices of improving competition and the free market at the start of the 1980s.

Scholars increasingly acknowledge the contingent, varied, complex nature of capitalism, yet overlook a viable vision of the early nineteenth-century United States: communal capitalism. Communal societies proliferated in the early United States as a way to regulate the market. The most industrious, materially successful model of this approach was George Rapp’s Harmony Society, established in 1805. Rapp was a radical Pietist, immigrating with his followers from Württemberg in order to establish a purified community that would persevere into the millennium he predicted was imminent. Despite a ban on private property, the Harmonists embraced the market, building textile factories and conducting market activity under the moniker “Rapp & Associates.” Technologically innovative, shrewd in business, and dogged in pursuit of a “divine economy,” the example of the Harmony Society helps us better understand how religious businesses helped shape the early American capitalist system and, specifically, the contributions of German Pietism to economic thought in the Atlantic world. Ultimately, we discover how the Harmonists’ communal capitalism forsook wages and private property, while embracing stocks, bonds, leases, mortgages, patents, trademarks, licenses, litigation, and contracts as they built an incredibly successful and wealthy manufacturing community in the then-western United States, even as George Rapp’s authoritarian leadership style created tensions within his workforce of immigrant women, men, and children.

The Italian Clothing Industry Association (AIIA) was the first employers’ association founded to protect the interests of the nascent Italian ready-to-wear industry. According to the literature on the subject, there were three factors that allowed business interest associations (BIAs) to operate effectively at a meso-organizational level: their internal organizational structure, the activities of bureaucratic support of companies and lobbying in defense of entrepreneurs’ interests, as well as the ability to adapt to the more general context in which they worked. Based on a detailed empirical analysis, this article examines what the AIIA accomplished in each of these three areas. There are two objectives: (1) analyzing the circumstances that led the AIIA to fail in its purposes of representing the Italian ready-to-wear industry, and (2) investigating, in a typical creative industry, the hidden costs in terms of competitiveness of BIAs’ planning efforts and their consequences for the creation of an efficient and internationally competitive fashion system.

This article analyzes the causes for the long-term success of the Barcelona (Spain) and São Paulo (Brazil) automobile industry clusters. Comparative evidence suggests that both clusters emerged in the early twentieth century through the formation of Marshallian external economies. Nevertheless, neither Barcelona nor São Paulo reached mass automobile production before 1950. The consolidation of the clusters required the adoption of strategic industrial policy during the golden age of capitalism. This policy succeeded in encouraging a few hub firms to undertake mass production by using domestic parts. The strategic policy also favored these leading corporations transferring their technical, organizational, and distribution capabilities, which in turn amplified the advantages of the clusters. Local institutions did not make a significant contribution.

The Social Democratic Party not only ruled Sweden for most of the twentieth century but also owned one of the country’s largest advertising groups. The company, founded in 1947 as Folkreklam and later renamed Förenade ARE-Bolagen, rapidly became dominant in outdoor advertising in Sweden and remained in that position until the late 1980s. This paper expands the previous research on party-owned enterprises, a type of businesses that is rare in the Western democratic world, covering the history of ARE from its inception to its eventual merger with JCDecaux in 1997. It is shown that the owner relationship with the party was highly beneficial for the company, as it provided preferential access to adverting space and public contracts from government agencies and municipalities without formal competition. The party benefited from the control over sensitive information pretraining to strategies in political propaganda during elections and from the financial contribution of ARE.

Multinationals experienced a great growth after the European postwar boom. Factors in the 1970s included increasing competition from the United States, the emerging European market, as well as ongoing economic crises and changes in the international economy. The articles analyzes three case studies of Western European chemical companies—Hoechst, Akzo, and Rhône-Poulenc—to show the consequences of structural changes on management and the workforce. This article argues that (1) domestic export-oriented supplement investments lost importance, and the domestic workforce had a harder time meeting qualification requirements; (2) organizational changes incorporated divisional competitive elements into a company’s organization of work; and (3) managers had to learn to respect national path dependencies and specific skills of the local workforce. Furthermore, it illustrates the developments of the workforce in Europe and abroad and stresses the importance of nationality within the management of multinationals.

This paper uses a data set of freehold land and property transactions from medieval England to highlight the growing commercialization of the economy during that time. By drawing on the legal records, we are able to demonstrate that the medieval real estate market provided the opportunity for investors to profit. Careful analysis of the data provides evidence of group purchases, multiple transactions, and investors buying outside their own localities. The identification of these “investors” and their buying behaviors, set within the context of the English medieval economy, contributes to the early commercialization debate.

Today, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones. Issuing identity documents is commonly perceived as a task for state authorities, but in Swedish society banks have played a dominant role as identificators. The first contribution of this article is that it explains this unique emergence of bank identity and traces the historical roots of a financial identification society to the mid-1960s. Banks started issuing standardized identity cards as a complement to the new system of paying salaries and wages by direct deposit to checking accounts, and these cards eventually became quasi-official identity documents. The Swedish story thus contrasts the scholarship on identification and state control. By treating identity as both a socio-cultural category and a materialization of a technology of control, I argue that the formalization of official identity documents for everyday use was intertwined with the creation of new financial identities. The introduction and general distribution of ID cards were parts of a process whereby wage earners became financial consumers, and the banks transformed themselves into retail companies. My second contribution therefore relates to the scholarly narrative on the financialization of everyday life since the 1980s. While the mass move to financial identification in Sweden, highlighted in this article, certainly fits the content of this narrative, it questions its chronology.