Trademark theory implicitly assumes that laws favoring the interests of the producer will inevitably serve the interests of the consumer. Such a claim justifies the way that trademark law privileges the voice of the producer in the marketplace. Historical work has tended to endorse this view, explaining the development of trademarks and trademark law in terms of the information needed for consumers in the modern marketplace. Taking both a historical and “informational” perspective, this essay argues that the producer’s and the consumer’s interests do not so easily align. It speculates that a less varnished history of the mark shows more of a struggle between producers, who seek to have their voice heard without dissent, and consumers, who often want to find alternative yet informed voices to endorse or qualify the information provided by the mark. This alternative view would help explain why, as the paper seeks to show, despite conventional evolutionary narratives, the history of trademarking in the United States is in fact far from linear.

This paper discusses the origins of rating in the second half of the nineteenth century. We review and criticize existing narratives, which—echoing a story told by lawyers favorable to (or employed by) the agencies—have alleged that a cultural shift in normative views, evidenced in an evolution of court decisions, provided legal protection (against libel) to agencies, and permitted the development of printed credit reports. Such a view is inconsistent with evidence from actual judicial decisions and from our exploration of archival material. Looking at both litigated and settled cases, we show that the rise of mercantile agencies in the late nineteenth century was the product of a farsighted corporate strategy applied ruthlessly to a legal system that was still very reluctant to permit the agencies to “commoditize” credit.

This essay explores market talk in early nineteenth-century Britain through a close reading of the correspondence of the cotton-spinning firm McConnel & Kennedy of Manchester between 1798 and 1813. I argue that two distinct “narratives” of price and value emerge from these letters, and that the cleave between them pointed both to a deep anxiety about the market, and to a clear and clever bargaining strategy. McConnel & Kennedy clung stubbornly to a definition of “value” that they understood to be fictive, in order to avoid frank surrender to what they saw as cannibalistic price-competition. Rhetoric was, then, no small thing to them. They conceived supply and value as being inversely related, and this idea, I argue, was implicit also in wider contemporary anxieties about the relationship between proliferation and meaning.

This article takes criticisms of employment discrimination in the aftermath of the creation of workmen’s compensation legislation as a point of entry for arguing that compensation laws created new incentives for employment discrimination. Compensation laws turned the costs of employees’ workplace accidents into a risk that many employers sought to manage by screening job applicants in a manner analogous to how insurance companies screened policy applicants. While numerous critics blamed insurers for discrimination, I argue that the problem was lack of insurance. The less that companies pooled their compensation risks via insurance, the greater the incentives for employers to stop employing people they would have previously been willing to hire.

This study examines the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s strategies for selling family sewing machines on a global scale. In marketing the sewing machine, the American-headquartered Singer focused on ornamental embroidery or “fancy” sewing, defining home sewing as art, to distance the company and the appliance from negative perceptions of women’s garment work as industrial manufacturing. Singer created its Embroidery Department in the early 1890s in response to consumers’ sewing preferences. The department reflects how the home became a site where global capitalism was constructed and articulated. Singer’s Embroidery Department had representatives in many countries, coordinating expositions and other advertising. In the case of Singer in Spain and the United States, women who took part in the department’s work were an essential part of the corporate-integrated operation. This article examines the relationship between Singer’s corporate strategies and gender and culture in Spain and the United States.

In this article I interpret 150 years of financial history with a focus on shifts in the role of finance in society. I argue that over time the role of finance has shifted twice from that of servant to that of master of society, and that this process has been driven by sense making through narratives that legitimized and shaped these changes. When finance became a master rent seeking, cultural capture and out-of-control financial innovation resulted in financial and social instability. Finance as a master was the characteristic of finance capitalism from around 1900–1931 and of financialization from around 1980 to today. Finance capitalism and financialization were enabled by a dominant narrative that legitimized the power of finance. The shifts in the role of finance happened when crises undermined the meaning of the existing narrative and created for a new narrative able to make sense of the crisis and point society in a new direction. This sense-making process stabilized when a new narrative was established that could explain the crisis and legitimize and shape a new role for finance. The article is based on my presidential address presented at the Business History Conference’s annual meeting in March 2014 in Frankfurt.

Corporate elites have been all-male bastions until the twenty-first century. The recent inclusion of women in the corporate elite needs explanation because it is an abrupt change in recruitment practices. We consider female presence in corporate boards as a sign of the democratization of elite social networks. Building on a case study of the Netherlands that covers the last four decades, we show that the corporate elite has become more open to nonmembers of traditional elites. In the process, women have also entered the boardroom. Initially, these were predominantly female politicians, but more recently many large corporations have recruited foreign females. We argue that the incremental feminization of the corporate elite was in the beginning—that is in the 1970s—initiated by the state but was subsequently pushed forward by the internationalization of corporate governance. We have traced the professional background of all female board members of the largest firms in the Netherlands over the period 1969–2011. We show that the female board members do not form a homogeneous group. The first wave of female directors had a political background, the second wave had an academic background, whereas the third wave was recruited from within the corporations. In this third wave, foreign female directors became predominant. Elites open up their ranks and privileged positions to women, but they do so reluctantly and under outside pressure.

This essay conceptualizes and historically documents a negle cted trade association function: legitimacy-seeking. It uses the Committee of London Clearing Bankers case to show how an association can, by using manipulative public relations techniques, fulfil that function for its members. To the circumstances that prevent rent-seeking associations from becoming industry level efficiency enhancers, the essay adds a new factor—a political legitimacy crisis. Through the Committee, the banks’ leaders responded to such a crisis in the 1970s prompted by the threat of bank nationalization. The case yields the following generalizable point. When members are faced with an external legitimacy threat, a trade association, even one with a history of collaborative learning, can get stuck at the rent-seeking end of the associational spectrum. By morphing from a cartel into merely a vehicle for asserting its members’ political legitimacy through instrumental public relations, this is just where the Committee remained on that continuum.

This article argues that an information ecosystem emerged rapidly after World War II that made possible the movement of knowledge about computing and its uses around the world. Participants included engineers, scientists, government officials, business management, and users of the technology. Vendors, government agencies, the military, and professors participated regardless of such barriers as languages, cold war politics, or varying levels of national economic levels of prosperity.

This article examines the business–government relations during the policy and decision-making processes that preceded the 1938 corporate tax reform in Sweden. This reform involved creating a new tax system under the turbulent economic conditions of the interwar period. But while literature on tax history has found that such circumstances often disable actors from agreeing on tax policies, a constructive outcome was still reached in the Swedish case. In this regard, it is demonstrated that one crucial factor behind the creation of the 1938 corporate tax reform was the formation of a coalition between the Social Democratic party and the business peak associations around a number of areas where their taxation interests coincided. Here, the Social Democrats agreed to shelter profits from corporations as long as they were managed according to the intentions of their countercyclical economic policy that encouraged industrial investments and employment expansion.

Where Imperialism Could Not Reach examines the impact of the Japanese model of industrialization on China through a history of policy recommendations and economic ideas in practice. In the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War (1894–1895), Chinese regional policymakers learned a Japanese-style industrial policy that focused on the use of exhibitions and schools to disseminate information and stimulate rural innovation. In focusing on the treaty ports and the impact of European and American capitalism that has a larger and more quantifiable source base, many scholars have ignored the vital intra-Asian dimensions of China’s economic development, underpinned by shared position of China and Japan on the global semiperiphery and the pursuit of labor-intensive industrialization focusing on improvements to labor quality. The dissertation also aims to demonstrate the primary importance of information and incentives for innovation—rather than overcoming capital constraints—in Chinese strategies for economic growth.

The future matters to business history, because the adoption of new technology and new organizational forms has often been driven by acceptance of a collective sense of what the future will be. Investments are made and strategies set on an industry-wide basis, influenced by the predictions of business consultants, industry groups, and futurists. To explore the part played by the future in shaping the past, we focus on the establishment and early acceptance of the idea of a rapid and inevitable transition to a “cashless society” in the US retail financial services industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Our aim is thus to advance a methodological point rather than to arrive at a definitive conclusion about the future of money.

This paper compares the corporate network strategies between multinational corporations of two different origins (United States and Spain), business groups, and state-owned enterprises in the public utility sector of a developing country going through economic and political transitions. The transitions we consider are from an import substitution industrialization model to an open market economy and from a democratic regime to a dictatorial one and back to democracy. We analyze the Chilean telecommunications sector between 1958 and 2005 and find that during a democratic regime all firms sought to build more networks with each other, while incentives decrease under an authoritarian regime. In the protectionist era, US investors built links with Chile’s corporate elite, while in times of an open economy, Spanish investors built these links with the government. State-owned corporations did not attempt to build links with other actors at any time, and business groups sought to build most networks among members of the group. Our findings challenge two commonly held assumptions: first, that open economies decrease incentives for domestic actors to build links with each other and, second, that close political regimes increase incentives to build networks among economic actors.

The article addresses the question to what extent American antitrust policy in Germany and Italy during the 1950s, was a success or not. Did these nations adopt this policy, did they adapt themselves to it, or did they completely reject it? By a detailed comparison of these two big European nations, Germany and Italy—both defeated powers of the Second World War, and both therefore strongly dependent on postwar American aid—the effects of the American antitrust policy will be analyzed. Eventually, the Germans better adapted, after initial resistance of German big business, to the American plans than the Italians, however, only in an amended and softer form. The Italian resistance—but we even use the expression prolonged rejection—to the economic reforms were much stronger. The US administration envisioned a unified free European market without cartels as early as 1943, however, it would take another fifty years before these ideas would be implemented.

This paper compares the corporate network strategies between multinational corporations of two different origins (United States and Spain), business groups, and state-owned enterprises in the public utility sector of a developing country going through economic and political transitions. The transitions we consider are from an import substitution industrialization model to an open market economy and from a democratic regime to a dictatorial one and back to democracy. We analyze the Chilean telecommunications sector between 1958 and 2005 and find that during a democratic regime all firms sought to build more networks with each other, while incentives decrease under an authoritarian regime. In the protectionist era, US investors built links with Chile’s corporate elite, while in times of an open economy, Spanish investors built these links with the government. State-owned corporations did not attempt to build links with other actors at any time, and business groups sought to build most networks among members of the group. Our findings challenge two commonly held assumptions: first, that open economies decrease incentives for domestic actors to build links with each other and, second, that close political regimes increase incentives to build networks among economic actors.

Founded in 1956 by Billy Graham, L. Nelson Bell, and a cadre of evangelical theologians and business leaders, Christianity Today (CT) was—and still is—the world’s foremost Christian periodical. From the late 1950s through the early 1970s, CT’s editors also branded it as a new vehicle for conservative discourse and public assertiveness, especially regarding the relationship of the state to church, business, and society. Given CT’s theological and political stances, it garnered financial support and institutional direction from oil executive J. Howard Pew. This essay examines Pew’s contributions as a way of understanding the crucial role played by business elites in the construction of American conservative evangelicalism. Moreover, through a case study of CT, this essay re-periodizes the origins of corporate-evangelical alliances to the early twentieth century and evaluates the relative successes and failures of conservatives in postwar evangelicalism, state policy, and cultural politics.

This article provides an analysis of the impact of the abolition of individual resale price maintenance (irpm) in 1964 on the relationships between retailers and suppliers and, wider, on defining features of the UK economic structure. It describes the role of irpm prior to 1964 in a complex competitive environment that existed across a range of goods and services. A key feature of this environment was the influence manufacturers had over retail margins and pricing. It shows how the 1964 Resale Price Act both unraveled this system and provided the legal prerequisite of today’s dominance by large retailers, as oligopolists and oligopsonists. The study delineates how a different set of business relationships came to dominate the retailing sector: in place of retailing as a manufacturer’s marketing strategy, conditions of supply were determined by the business strategies of multiple retailers. Retailing was further characterized by mutual dependencies among multiple retailers, commercial property investors, and the financial sector. In tracking this shift in business relationships, a historical analogy suggests itself that the Act has parallels with the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, for both changed the balance of economic power between two key business sectors in Britain.