What effect does political instability in the form of a potential secession from a political union have on business formation? Using newly collected data on business creation, we show that entrepreneurial activity in Ireland in the late nineteenth century was much lower than Scotland, and this divergence fluctuated over time. Several factors may have contributed to this, but we argue that political uncertainty about the prospect of a devolved government in Ireland played a role. The effects were most acute in the North of Ireland, the region that was most concerned by potential changes.

As companies became larger and shareholders more numerous in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, the conventional wisdom is that the free-rider problem inhibited active shareholder participation. Discontented shareholders could sell in the market, but it was long before the takeover bid mechanism facilitated the removal of underperforming incumbent boards. We show, using a sample of fifty cases in the period from 1888 to 1940, that UK shareholders overcame the free-rider problem by using committees of investigation on a sufficiently large scale to present a credible threat to board malfeasance. Although there was more to corporate performance than corporate governance, this aspect of good governance plausibly contributed to London's precocity in divorcing ownership from control in domestic companies up to World War II.

Chartered companies were important tools of European colonialism, but also institutions with a political agenda of their own. In this study, we focus upon one key chartered company, the British South Africa Company, in particular the ending of its charter in 1923/24, in order to study the business diplomacy strategies employed by the company. We show how the company during the period under study moved from a reactive and defensive diplomacy strategy concerning its charter, to a proactive and transformative strategy. In this way, the company managed to renegotiate the terms under which it operated so that it eventually came to accept and even embrace the ending of chartered rule, rather than to oppose it.

Much thought has been accorded to the evolving nature of business history. It is only relatively recently, however, that attempts have been made to articulate methodological issues in a more epistemologically explicit and reflexive fashion. This article contributes to this burgeoning agenda by examining the methodology underpinning an intensive archival study of the British interwar management movement (1918–1939), a major force in British management education between the wars. We explicate the methodology employed and question what this material tells us about the interwar management movement, in terms of its determination to modernize management, encourage openness between firms, and extend a new spirit of partnership. We show that the interwar management movement was characterized by organized cooperation and methodological openness. Our main contribution is to demonstrate that interpretations themselves can become entrenched and prone to inertia, inviting us to revisit these periodically and, if appropriate, recast them.

Between 1974 and 1986, the intervention of various French governments on both the right and the left—in addition to corporate maneuvering and increased focus on competitiveness and lean production—resulted in foreign direct investment, mergers, plant closures, and bankruptcies among struggling French automotive suppliers. This article will explore why these efforts were unsuccessful by revisiting the first Japanese attempts to enter the European automobile industry. It does so not only through the case of Nissan in the United Kingdom in 1984 but also through the essentially unfamiliar and contemporaneous example of French automotive suppliers.

When faced with Esther Sahle's, Edmond Smith's, and Dane A. Morrison's recent books on English and American merchants, their activities, and their communities, a reader with any level of exposure to the field of early modern and early republic business history might legitimately ask, do we really need more? Historians have so completely associated early modern economic activity with merchant activity that many have deemed the period an era of “merchant capitalism.” The field is full of excellent studies and one might rightfully ask whether historians such as Jacob Price (Capital and Credit in British Overseas Trade [1980]), David Hancock (Oceans of Wine [2009]), Cathy Matson (Merchants and Empire [1998]), and Francesca Trivellato (The Familiarity of Strangers [2009]), among many others, have not plumbed the depths of the subject. Scholars of the Black Atlantic have also increasingly questioned the legitimacy of projects that continue to render the violence of slavery ancillary to discussions of business practice. To some extent, genuine historical engagement with merchants must reproduce the views of colonizers and enslavers to make the people whom it studies legible to modern audiences. This reproduction does damage as it illuminates, and business historians must engage this critique directly to maintain the legitimacy of their projects. In a crowded field with foundations that are seriously challenged by an emergent strain in this historical discipline, it is worth skeptically asking what three additional studies can add.

Rahul Bajaj, long-time chairman of the more-than-120-year-old Bajaj empire—best known for Bajaj Auto, one of the most valuable motorcycle firms globally, and Bajaj Finserv, its financial services arm—was a larger-than-life figure in Indian industry and public life. Famed for his probity, Bajaj twice served as president of the Confederation of Indian Industry, was an elected member of the Rajya Sabha (the upper house of Parliament), was awarded a Padma Bhushan (the third-highest civilian award), and was a fearless and outspoken public figure. His business career, which started in 1958 at the height of India's License Raj, in many ways charts the story of India's dramatic economic transformation over the decades.