Welcome to Volume 25, No. 4 of Enterprise & Society. By tradition, this issue carries the presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Business History Conference. Sharon Murphy delivered a compelling talk on the topic “Doing Business in the Public Interest,” intermixing sharp reflections with personal family history. We are delighted to present Sharon’s fine essay here. Also, by tradition, this issue carries summaries of the dissertations shortlisted for the Krooss Prize at the annual meeting in the spring. This year four finalists presented their work to the conference. The four finalists were Manuel Bautista-González, Liane Hewitt, Jordan Howell, and Ellen Nye. This year’s winner of the Herman E. Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History was Ellen Nye. Unfortunately, personal circumstances have prevented Dr. Bautista-González from completing his summary in time for this issue, but we look forward to publishing his contribution as soon as possible.

It is my pleasure to introduce Volume 25, No. 2 of Enterprise and Society. In this issue, we are pleased to present a special section on “Corporate Responses to Racial Unrest,” guest-edited by Michael Thate and Tyesha Maddox. The section commences with a scene-setting introduction from the guest editors, followed by three papers. The first is from Keith Hollingsworth on the aftermath of the Atlanta race riot of 1906, followed by Mattie Webb on an exercise in the art of the possible, waging the battle against Apartheid in South African workplaces. This section is rounded off by Sethulego Matebesi’s exploration of responses to civil society mobilization among South African mining companies. Taken together, these four essays break important new ground and indicate promising lines of future research.

Welcome to Volume 25 of Enterprise and Society. In this first issue, we are delighted to present a new symposium on “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety,” built around a lead article of that name by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele. This challenging new essay is followed by three comments—“Concealing Martial Violence,” by Brittany Farr, “Capitalism Indivisible,” by Katie Moore, and “How to Define (or Not to Define) the New History of Capitalism,” by Sharon Murphy—with a final response from Lindsay. We want to thank Lindsay for initiating this challenging new symposium and the other three authors for their thought-provoking commentaries.

The year 2020 set into motion a perfect storm that would lead to the global panic ignited by the murder of George Floyd in late May of that year. The COVID-19 virus impacted billions of people around the world. With many forced to shelter in place at home, some Americans for the first time (and an exhaustingly innumerable time for others) observed up close the inequality apparent in American policing. On average, Black Americans are 2.9 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police, with very few officers held accountable and prosecuted for these deaths.1 One cannot make sense of this special section on Corporate Responses to Racial Unrest without an examination of this fact and the events leading up to Floyd’s murder. Statistically speaking, however, the year 2020 did not signal anything unusual. In that year, according to Statistica.com, U.S. police killed 1,020 people. Fatalities had been rising steadily from 981 in 2017 to 983 in 2018 and 999 in 2019. 2 It is not immediately apparent how best to interpret these numbers. What justifies police use of deadly force, and in turn, what is an acceptable rate of police killings per year? Or is this even a productive line of thought? The effectiveness of police power in the United States has been a standing debate since the foundations of American government.3 And the nature of inequality marked by race within policing has been demonstrated countless times in the literature.4 Reforming the phenomenon of “policing” in the United States, however, though simple to call for, is complicated to enact—not least owing to the “blue wall of silence” that protects police officers from the consequences of misconduct and the near-term spikes in crime and expenses that the very communities who are most disadvantaged by current policing practices are forced to bear.

The theme of the 2024 Business History Conference was “doing business in the public interest,” but what does it actually mean to “do business in the public interest?” This presidential address challenges the idea of shareholder primacy as the main purpose of business enterprises historically and examines various ways that business historians might approach the idea of businesses acting in a public interest. In particular, it analyzes instances in which corporations made a decision in the public interest without clear evidence that it would benefit their bottom line; cases where it would demonstrably hurt their bottom line to prioritize the public; corporations that made a decision allegedly in the public interest that actually turned out to be bad for the public interest; and corporations that made a decision that was bad for the public interest that also turned out to be bad for their own bottom line.

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.

This address calls on historians and other social scientists to delve deeper into the nature of human imagination and its role in business. Interpreting a business plan written by my father prior to his death, I draw attention to the opportunity to use such sources to study the formation and consequences of “entrepreneurial imaginaries.” By this term, I mean the situated and embodied process by which human beings imagine desirable future ventures. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology, I explore how recognizing the embodied nature of human imagination can deepen our understandings of how our subjects (a) imagine their ventures, (b) imagine themselves, and (c) imagine the moral worth of their venture in society. I conclude by highlighting why some of the sources and methods used by business historians may be particularly well suited for studying imagination and its relationship to entrepreneurship and change.

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.

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.

“Imperial Crucible” tells the story of the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa) from the company’s founding in Pittsburgh in 1888 through the 1950s. Although scholars have long contended that American multinational corporations played a pivotal role in the industrialization of the United States, the building of a global working class, and the transformation of European empires, they have tended to see these stories as distinct, rather than interconnected. In contrast, Imperial Crucible focuses on a single firm to draw together the political-economic, working-class, and imperial history of American business. What the industrialists behind Alcoa built, I argue, was not a multinational but a transimperial corporation.

After the murder of George Floyd, businesses across the United States stepped up with pledges and commitments to lessen systematic racism, reflecting a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR). But are these actions really concerned with social uplift? Or a form of woke-washing? This was not the first time corporate America reacted to racial upheaval and violence. In this paper, the author examines the reaction of the Atlanta business community to the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. At that time, Atlanta’s business elite effectively usurped municipal and state authority to manage the aftermath of the horrific events. They were determined to protect the reputation of Atlanta as progressive and a place of relative racial harmony. How do we consider their actions in the context of CSR and woke-washing? The businesses sought mainly to protect their economic future rather than truly uplifting society or improving racial relations. Still, their actions impacted Atlanta positively for many decades to come, leading to better outcomes during the Civil Rights era and beyond.

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.

The Wiehahn Commission, a government body that proposed a multipronged 1979 South African labor reform, accelerated the corporate recognition of Black trade unions in apartheid era South Africa. Gradually implemented over the course of two years, the reforms complemented international workplace codes and the burgeoning reformist push for ethically sound business practices in the workplace. Although U.S. multinational firms in South Africa did not initially voice support for Black trade unions, in the aftermath of Soweto, many were faced with cascading internal and external pressures to negotiate with these emerging unions. By incorporating the Sullivan Principles, a U.S. code for ethical business conduct, into the broader scholarship on the South African trade union movement and the late apartheid era Wiehahn Commission reforms, this article examines how corporate reforms landed in South Africa, probing the business response to worker demands. South African workers were not merely passive recipients of workplace reform, but rather active participants, shaping the form and direction of U.S. and South African policy.

Cartels today are illegal and illegitimate across the globe. Yet until the end of World War II, cartels were legal, ubiquitous, and popular—especially in Europe. How, then, did cartels become bad, if they had been considered a positive force for capitalist stabilization and peace in the first half of the 20th century? That is the question this dissertation poses. By the 1930s, over 1,000 monopolistic agreements regulated nearly half of world trade. International cartels governed the interwar world economy, setting prices and output quotas, dividing world markets, regulating trade flows, and even controlling the transfer of patents across firms and sovereign state borders. I conceptualize this regime as “cartel capitalism.” Most cartels were headquartered in industrial Europe. First, I trace how a surprising consensus in interwar Europe—comprising national governments; international organizations like the League of Nations; industrialists, led by the International Chamber of Commerce; federalists; and even socialists—backed cartels as a panacea to the problems of reconstruction after 1918, namely the quest for peace and stable markets. However, in the wake of 1945, most countries in Western Europe—along with the new supranational European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC, 1951) and European Economic Community (EEC)—started prohibiting cartels. My project illuminates the causes and consequences of this great reversal. Monopoly Menace reveals, for the first time, how Europe’s transnational reckoning with the shocks of the Great Depression, fascism, and total war produced a genuine anticartel revolution that rewrote the rules of the modern European and global economy. Monopoly Menace ends by illuminating how American, British, French, and West German postwar planners designed new national welfare states, the Bretton Woods Order, and the European Union on the neglected foundation of anti-cartel policies.

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.

During the 1690s, both the English and Ottoman states developed new institutions for longer-term borrowing and reformed their imperial monetary systems. These synchronous but divergent developments present a puzzle that has not been answered by rigidly separate English and Ottoman historiographies. “Empires of Obligation” follows merchants trading between England and the Ottoman Empire to understand how both states responded differently to the challenges of global trade and fiscal crisis. At this time, English merchants were the most powerful European traders in the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Empire represented England’s greatest single market for its woolen textiles, its largest industry. As Levant Company merchants swapped woolens for silk, they also blended international private credit with domestic public finance. They were the largest merchant investors relative to the size of their trade in the Bank of England and helped facilitate Ottoman longer-term public borrowing through the mālikāne system. From within England’s bureaucracy, they also worked to ease global trade through an “intrinsic value” theory of money, the idea that coins represented a government commitment to provide a fixed amount of precious metal. At the same time, the Ottoman state sought to redefine money as an instrument of the state, not a tool of trade. Following merchants who themselves bridged two empires that are rarely compared shows interconnected but divergent responses to the challenges of making money work both within and between states at the end of the seventeenth century.

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.”

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.