Dutch Multinational Enterprises in the United States: A Historical Summary

Mira Wilkins

doi:10.1017/S0007680500080569

Dutch Multinational Enterprises in the United States: A Historical Summary

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 December 2011

Mira Wilkins

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Mira Wilkins: Affiliation:
MIRA WILKINS is professor in the Department of Economics at Florida International University.

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Abstract

The story of Dutch business in America began in the colonial period and continues into the present. The early Dutch trading companies of the seventeenth century, including the Dutch West India Company, were followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by such firms as the Holland-America Line, Unilever, Royal Dutch Shell, and NV Philips. The historical pattern of these Dutch businesses contributes to the growing literature on multinational enterprises (MNEs) and is relevant to recent debates on the historical convergence and/or divergence of living standards and productivity in national economies. An examination of the history of Dutch MNEs operating in the United States reveals some of the ways that these firms fit into the larger framework of Dutch business overall and provides a way to compare the strategies of Dutch MNEs with those of MNEs from other countries.

Type: Articles
Information: Business History Review , Volume 79 , Issue 2 , Summer 2005 , pp. 193 - 273

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680500080569 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 2005

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References

¹ On the growing literature on the history of multinational enterprise, see Jones, Geoffrey, Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Oxford, 2005)Google Scholar; Bonin, Hubert et al. , Transnational Companies: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Paris, n.d. [2002])Google Scholar; Wilkins, Mira, “The History of Multinational Enterprise,” in The Oxford Handbook of International Business, eds. Rugman, Alan M. and Brewer, Thomas L. (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar. The term “varieties of capitalism” comes from the title of Hall, Peter A. and Soskice, David, eds., Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantages (Oxford, 2001)CrossRef Google Scholar. See also Cassis, Youssef, Big Business: The European Experience in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1997), viiiGoogle Scholar, on types of capitalism.

² The convergence/divergence debate has compared through time advanced economies and those around the globe. It has also dealt with regions and the gap between rich and poor within a particular country. Maddison, Angus, in Dynamic Forces in Capitalist Development: A Long-run Comparative View (Oxford, 1991), 48Google Scholar, argued that a major characteristic of capitalist development had been the post–World War II convergence in levels of per capita income and productivity between advanced countries–the United States, European nations, and Japan–something that was not true of the world as a whole. In ibid., 52, Maddison noted that the “convergency process” had not been “monotonic”–and that from 1820 to 1950, there was among the now advanced countries “a strong divergence over a period of 130 years.” See also Baumol, William J., Nelson, Richard R., and Wolff, Edward N., eds., Convergence of Productivity: Cross-National Studies and Historical Evidence (Oxford, 1994)Google Scholar. Barro, Robert J. and Sala-i-Martin, Xavier in Economic Growth (New York, 1995)Google Scholar, as well as in other works on growth theory, elaborated on Maddison's data (see especially, ibid., 332–34, for graphs on real per capita GDP of advanced countries), considering the causes of economic growth. In an exciting work, Jeffrey G. Williamson (in Aghion, Philippe and Williamson, Jeffrey G., Growth, Inequality and Globalization: Theory, History and Policy [Cambridge, U.K., 1998], 105–200Google Scholar) argued that there was convergence in the Atlantic economy countries, from 1850 to 1914, which stopped in 1914–1950 because of “de-globalization and implosion into autarchy,” making for divergence; and then there has been, among advanced countries, convergence since 1950. The assumption among economists was that with globalization, with factor movements, and with “catching up,” convergence among national economies would increase. Yet, in time the surprise emerged in the enduring varieties in economic growth patterns, and if “advanced countries” seemed to converge, this continued not to be true globally. Thus Maddison, Angus, in The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris, 2001), 17CrossRef Google Scholar, emphasized divergence in the growth process between advanced countries and the rest of the world: “Divergence is dominant but not inexorable. In the past half century, resurgent Asian countries have demonstrated that an important degree of catch-up is feasible.” See also the greatly revised second edition of Barro, Robert J. and Sala-i-Martin, Xavier, Economic Growth (Cambridge, Mass., 2003)Google Scholar, which has updated treatments of cross-country growth regressions. Paralleling the comparative discussions of economic growth–but with no formal modeling–have been ones on managerial styles, prompted initially by Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Scale and Scope (Cambridge, Mass., 1990)Google Scholar. Chandler did not discuss convergence per se. For that, see Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism, 181–83.

³ Typically in the literature on MNEs, the “home” country defines the nationality of the MNE. On my work by nationality, see Wilkins, Mira, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from the Colonial Era to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970)Google Scholar, and The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise: American Business Abroad from 1914 to 1970 (Cambridge, Mass., 1974)Google Scholar. In Wilkins, Mira, “The Free-Standing Company, 1870–1914: An Important Type of British Foreign Direct Investment,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 41 (May 1988): 259–82CrossRef Google Scholar, and “The Free-Standing Company Revisited,” in The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy, 1830–1996, eds. Wilkins, Mira and Schröter, Harm (Oxford, 1998), 3–64Google Scholar, I considered a special kind of foreign direct investment that did not conform to the “American model.” In Wilkins, Mira, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989)Google Scholar–henceforth cited as Wilkins, , The History, I–and Mira Wilkins, The History of Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914–1945 (Cambridge, Mass., 2004)Google Scholar–henceforth cited as Wilkins, The History, II–I dealt with all nationalities as they invested in the United States. My more specific studies by nationality and their investments in the United States have included: “Japanese Multinationals in the United States: Continuity and Change, 1879–1990,” Business History Review 64 (Winter 1990): 585–629CrossRef Google Scholar; “The History of French Multinationals in the United States,” Entreprises et Histoire 3 (May 1993): 14–29CrossRef Google Scholar; “Swiss Investments in the United States, 1914–1945,” in La Suisse et les Grandes Puissances, 1914–1945 [Switzerland and the great powers, 1914–1945], ed. Guex, Sébastian (Geneva, 1999), 91–139Google Scholar (this essay considered portfolio as well as direct investments; it also covered a more limited time span than the articles on Japanese and French multinationals); and “German Chemical Firms in the United States from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Post–World War II Period,” in The German Chemical Industry in the Twentieth Century, ed. Lesch, John E. (Dordrecht, 2000), 285–321.CrossRef Google Scholar

⁴ An early version of this paper was presented at a workshop entitled “The Internationalization of Dutch Business,” Utrecht, The Netherlands (November 2004).

⁵ For the colonial period, I use the words “America,” “American,” and “Americans” as they relate to the geography and to the residents of those colonies that would in time become part of the United States. When (throughout this article) Canada is included, I use the term “North America.” After the establishment of the “American” nation, by themselves the terms “America” and “American” become synonymous with the United States (U.S.). One exception exists: American securities are not the same as U.S. bonds. The former cover all securities; U.S. bonds refer specifically to government issues. For this paper, I will often draw on my own work, in particular, The History, I, and The History, II. In preparing those two volumes, I depended heavily on the help of (and writings of) Keetie Sluyterman and Guus Veenendaal, who were a splendid help as I sought to decipher Dutch business in the United States. I also found useful Bosch, K. D., Nederlandse Beleggingen in De Verenigde Staten (Amsterdam, 1948)Google Scholar. Before I wrote this paper, Keetie Sluyterman shared with me the manuscript of her excellent book, Dutch Enterprise in the Twentieth Century: Business Strategies in a Small Open Economy (London, forthcoming). I cite only the chapter numbers here, as the manuscript had not been published when I was completing this article. I have also read with pleasure Goey, Ferry de, “Dutch Overseas Investments in the Very Long Run (c. 1600–1990),” in Multinational Enterprises from the Netherlands, eds. Hoesel, Roger van and Narula, Rajneesh (London, 1999), 32–60Google Scholar; in addition, I have consulted other essays in that volume.

⁶ Foreign direct investment is typically defined as an investment that carries with it some element of management and control (foreign portfolio investors, by contrast, typically do not have any expectation of intervening and do not have large enough holdings “to take control”). To repeat, foreign implies a nonresident, out-of-country investment. The adjectives “foreign” and “foreign-owned” are used interchangeably, as are “Dutch” and “Dutch-owned.” America was a land of immigrants, including those from Holland. There was Dutch migration from the colonial period onward. With a net inflow of twenty-four million people from 1840 to World War I, America became very much a melting pot for immigrants from Europe. Compared with British (including Irish), Germans, and Italians, and then in later years eastern European immigrants, the Dutch component was very small. See Easterlin, Richard A., “Twentieth Century American Population Growth,” in Cambridge Economic History of the United States, eds. Engerman, Stanley L. and Gallman, Robert E. (Cambridge, U.K., 2000), 535–36Google Scholar; and U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States (Washington, D.C., 1960), 56–57Google Scholar. Subsequent to the colonial period, very little of the history of Dutch direct investments in the United States can be explained in terms of links with immigration patterns, albeit the information flows certainly helped encourage those investments.

⁷ Wilkins, , The History, I, 9–12.Google Scholar

⁸ I define “foreign” broadly: a Dutch nonresident investment in a Dutch colony (as well as in a British one) is by my definition a foreign investment.

⁹ See, for example, Wilkins, , The History, I, 23.Google Scholar

¹⁰ Ibid., 29–39.

¹¹ Ibid., 42–43, on the Holland Land Company.

¹² Ibid., 37–39.

¹³ And, as such, would be classified as FDI.

¹⁴ The best work on this subject is Veenendaal, Augustus J. Jr, Slow Train to Paradise: How Dutch Investment Helped Build American Railroads (Stanford, 1996).Google Scholar

¹⁵ Wilkins, , The History, I, 118.Google Scholar

¹⁶ Ibid., 118, 203; Wilkins, , The History, II, 36.Google Scholar

¹⁷ Wilkins, , The History, II, 9Google Scholar. Gales, Ben P. A. and Sluyterman, Keetie E., “Outward Bound: The Rise of Dutch Multinationals,” in The Rise of Multinationals in Continental Europe, eds. Jones, Geoffrey and Schröter, Harm G. (Aldershot, 1993), 65Google Scholar, give the Dutch direct investment figure at $135 million in 1914. I am not adamant that my figure is superior to theirs; the numbers are both estimates and are quite close.

¹⁸ Wilkins, , The History, I, 514–15Google Scholar, on Dutch mortgage companies in the United States. Land and real estate are difficult to classify. I have classified real estate as FDI, since the investor had “control.” Real estate was often more like foreign portfolio investment (FPI), because it tended not to be “management intensive.” Usually, real estate was an income-generating asset (at other times, it was bought to be sold at a later date for a higher price, with appreciation the goal). The mortgage companies clearly were managed activities and qualified as FDI.

¹⁹ On free-standing companies, see Wilkins and Schröter, eds., The Free-Standing Company. This is a term that I originated, which has become part of the standard literature on the history of multinational enterprise.

²⁰ Wilkins, , The History, I, 467, 856Google Scholar. Bank branches by foreign banks in New York were forbidden by state law (and not authorized by federal law). A licensed agency–under New York State law–was a direct investment. The first licensing by the New York State banking authority began in 1911. NHM could participate in trade finance, without a licensed agency.

²¹ Ibid., 484.

²² Best's Insurance Report, Fire and Marine, 1914–1915, 111 (Dutch Underwriters), 114 (East India Marine and Fire Insurance CompanyGoogle Scholar).

²³ The Great Baltimore Fire was in February 1904, which does not help confirm either date. On the Baltimore fire of 1904 and its effect on insurers, see Trebilcock, Clive, Phoenix Assurance and the Development of British Insurance, vol. 2 (Cambridge, U.K., 1998), 263–64Google Scholar. Data on Dercksen and on the 1903 exit are from Gerarda Westerhuis, 16 Nov. 2004 communication with author; and Gerarda Westerhuis, “How did Dutch Companies Structure their Expanding Activities in the United States? A Comparative Study of Algemene Bank Nederland and Nationale Nederlanden, 1970–1990,” 4–5, paper presented at a workshop, “The Internationalization of Dutch Business,” Utrecht, The Netherlands, Nov. 2004Google Scholar. Her source is a 1987 report of Nationale Nederlanden. This Dutch historical reconstruction does not correspond with information available from U.S. sources. The first issue of Best's Insurance Reports, 1900, 115, provides the following information on the “Netherlands Fire Insurance Company, established in 1845, The Hague, Holland” (there was no separate entry for the Netherlands Insurance Company): “This company was organized in 1845, and entered the United States in 1897 [my emphasis].” It was licensed to do business in twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia. Its U.S. managers were Weed & Kennedy, New York, which also managed several other European companies. Best's Insurance Report, Fire and Marine, 1914–1915, 250, puts the date of its exit as 1901: “It originally entered the United States in 1897 and transacted an agency business in this country up to 1901, when it reinsured all its outstanding risks and withdrew:” Thus, the Dutch source, when compared with American ones, gives an earlier date of entry and a later exit date for this “round 1” of its U.S. business. Ben Gales, an expert on Dutch insurance, writes (in an e-mail to Mira Wilkins, 16 June 2005) that the firm tried to get a U.S. foothold in the late nineteenth century, failed to do so, and retried from 1896 to 1898. Its U.S. business was not profitable, and its activities were curtailed–with an exit in 1904. This would seem to reconcile Westerhuis's findings with those in U.S. sources.

²⁴ Data on the 1911 reentry contract of Netherlands Insurance Company from Gerarda Westerhuis, 16 Nov. 2004, and her paper, “How did Dutch Companies…?”; her source is once again a 1987 report of Nationale Nederlanden. Best's Insurance Report, Fire and Marine, 1914–1915, 250, gives the title as Netherlands Fire and Life Insurance Co., The Hague, Holland; United States Branch, Chicago.

²⁵ Wilkins, , The History, I, 517.Google Scholar International Mercantile Marine Company, an American giant, owned 25 percent of the equity in Holland America. Ibid., 518. In turn, Dutch portfolio investors had substantial interests in IMM. Wilkins, , The History, II, 100.Google Scholar The ownership story was even more complicated than I realized. See Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 1, for the German involvements. Moody, John, The Truth about Trusts (New York, 1904), 97–107Google Scholar, has a splendid description of the early history of IMM, which was organized in 1902 during the turn-of-the century U.S. merger movement.

²⁶ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 1 (on Van Houten and Van Berkel's). I have added the fact that the name Van Houten for cocoa was well known in America.

²⁷ Swierenga, Robert P., Faith and Family: Dutch Immigration and Settlement in the United States, 1820–1920 (New York, 2000), 198.Google Scholar It is not clear how long these firms remained foreign direct investments. Swierenga writes of the Dutch Jewish craftsmen in the diamond trade who migrated to the United States.

²⁸ Neal, Larry, The Rise of Financial Capitalism (Cambridge, U.K., 1990), 168.Google Scholar

²⁹ Not only are the parent companies' annual reports available, but there are also books, for example, such as Gerretson, F. C., History of the Royal Dutch, 4 vols. (Leiden, 1953–1957)Google Scholar, and Beaton, Kendall, Enterprise in Oil (New York, 1957)Google Scholar. A new three-volume history of Royal Dutch Shell is being prepared by a group that includes Jan Luiten van Zanden, Joost Junker, and Keetie Sluyterman, which will cover all the firm's international operations, including those in the United States. It is scheduled for publication in 2007, associated with the 100th anniversary of the Royal Dutch and Shell merger.

³⁰ Wilkins, , The History, I, 287–92Google Scholar, on the entry and the impact of antitrust.

³¹ Ibid., 292.

³² Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 1. On the international business of Brush and Edison, see William Hausman, Peter Hertner, H. V. Nelles, and Mira Wilkins, Global Electrification (forthcoming); and Wilkins, The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise, 52–58.

³³ Heerding, A., The History ofN. V. Philips' Gloeilampenfabrieken, 2 vols. (Cambridge, U.K., 1986, 1988), vol. 2: 181–84, 302–5, 343–44.Google Scholar

³⁴ Wilkins, , The History, I, 333–35, 342–43Google Scholar; Wilkins, , The History, II, 146Google Scholar. The Lamont in the title was Thomas W. Lamont, who became a partner in J.P. Morgan & Co. in January 1911.

³⁵ On the ownership relations, Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 1; de Vries, Johan, The Netherlands Economy in the Twentieth Century (Assen, 1978), 75Google Scholar; and De La Pedraja, René, The Rise and Decline of U.S. Merchant Shipping in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1992), 8.Google Scholar

³⁶ Indicative of this, Veenendaal ends his book Slow Train in 1914. See Wilkins, The History, II, for Dutch stakes in U.S. railroads.

³⁷ Hartwell Cabell, “Report to the Alien Property Custodian, on Mutzenbecher and Ballard, Inc., now known as Sumner Ballard,” 23 Sept. 1918, p. 9, in Record Group (RG) 56, Entry 406, Box 1, National Archives, College Park, Md.

³⁸ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 1, points out the long-existing transit trade to Germany–and how the Dutch shipbuilding sector benefited from its relationships with Germany, for example, through the purchase of cheap steel from that country. Whereas the German immigrant community had many influences on America's relations with Europe (specifically in relation to FDI), the same could not be said of Dutch immigrants. As indicated in note 6 above, the Dutch immigrant community was relatively small and during the twentieth century did not have a substantial impact on Dutch direct investments in the United States–or on American-European political relationships. In the nineteenth century, the kind of influence that Dutch immigration had is reflected in the 1848 correspondence of a Dutch settler in Iowa, who urged his friends in the Netherlands that “men with means who intended migrating to the United States [should] buy ‘uninhabited’ land rather than lend their funds … if they wished to maximize their profits [emphasis added].” Swierenga, Robert P., Pioneers and Profits: Land Speculation on the Iowa Frontier (Ames, Iowa, 1968), 100Google Scholar. Swierenga is an expert on Dutch immigration to the United States, but his main emphasis is on settlers, not on the immigrants' relationship with Dutch out-of-country direct investors. See also his Swierenga, Faith and Family, 197–98, where he discusses (as noted above) the Dutch diamond industry (where there was an immigration–FDI link). Veenendaal, Slow Train, 43–45, argues that Dutch settlers provided information in their letters home and did have some indirect influence on Dutch portfolio investments. In addition, there was a clear connection between Dutch immigration and shipping. See Swierenga, Faith and Family, on the Holland America Line. Swierenga believes that Dutch migration to America was larger than the existing figures have suggested, but nowhere in his work does he claim that Dutch migration had the impact of, say, German immigration on nonresident out-of-country FDI (his discussion of the Amsterdam firms in the diamond industry is exceptional).

³⁹ Wilkins, , The History, II, 16–17Google Scholar; for more insights on NOT, see van Zanden, Jan L., The Economic History of the Netherlands, 1914–1995 (London, 1998), 96–97.Google Scholar

⁴⁰ Wilkins, , The History, II, 17.Google Scholar

⁴¹ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 2; Safford, Jeffrey J., Wilsonian Maritime Diplomacy, 1913–1921 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1978), 124Google Scholar. On Dutch-German shipping during World War I, see de Vries, The Netherlands Economy, 75.

⁴² The act was passed on October 6,1917, and the licensing was under an Executive Order, signed by the President on December 7,1917; see data in RG 56, Entry 406, Box 2, National Archives.

⁴³ “List of all Foreign Companies other than Enemy Companies licensed to do business in the United States under the Trading with the Enemy Act up to and including September 15, 1919,” n.d., in RG 56, Entry 406, Box 1, National Archives.

⁴⁴ Based on data in RG 56, Entry, 406, Boxes 8 and 11, National Archives.

⁴⁵ Wilkins, , The History, II, 118, 698nn313–14, 256–57.Google Scholar

⁴⁶ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 1.

⁴⁷ Wilkins, , The History, II, 225Google Scholar, on the Dutch intermediary, and 225–26, for Hope's activities.

⁴⁸ The 1920 law was amended on February 7, 1927, to make it applicable to potash leases. When American Potash & Chemical (in connection with leasing public land) was asked in December 1938 to indicate its ownership, it declared of its shareholders that “237 were citizens of the United States, 23 of Great Britain, four of Canada, and one of the Netherlands. These included four English, two Canadian, and one Dutch corporation.” By 1939, Canada, Great Britain, and the Netherlands had all been accepted as “reciprocating countries” under the terms of the 1920 Mineral Lands Leasing Act, and companies with ownership from those countries were eligible to lease public lands. No such specification had been made in relationship to Germany. See U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on the Study of Monopoly Power, Committee on the Judiciary, Study of Monopoly Power, Hearings, 81st Cong., 2nd sess. (1950), pt. 5, 84. The Dutch cloak was not, however, to allow American Potash & Chemical to lease public land: that was merely an added bonus. In the 1930s, the cloak served to cope with the difficult political situation.

⁴⁹ Wilkins, , The History, II, 235–36.Google Scholar

⁵⁰ The British Courtaulds' subsidiary was the leading producer of rayon in the United States in 1929. Wilkins, , The History, II, 234, 236Google Scholar. For the British Courtaulds' role in the formation of AKU and its stockholdings in the early 1930s (and in the entire 1930s), see Jones, Geoffrey, “Courtaulds in Continental Europe,” in British Multinationals, ed. Jones, Geoffrey (Aldershot, 1986), 129–31Google Scholar. In what was perhaps a twist of fate, many decades later, the successor company of AKU, Akzo Nobel, acquired Courtaulds in July 1998. Akzo Nobel Web site, http://www.akzonobel.com/company/history.asp, accessed 5 Oct. 2004.

⁵¹ The approval of the liquidation was 21 Dec. 1936. Wilkins, , The History, II, 403.Google Scholar

⁵² Wilkins, , The History, II, 403, 468.Google Scholar

⁵³ These were set up directly, as in the case of Mendelssohn & Co. and Deutsche Bank, and, indirectly, as in the case of H. Albert de Bary & Co., a subsidiary of Disconto-Gesellschaft. Over the years, especially in the 1930s, H. Albert de Bary & Co. and Mendelssohn & Co. “evolved into Dutch banks.” de Vries, Joh., Vrom, Wim, and de Graaf, Ton, eds., Worldwide Banking: ABN AMRO Bank, 1824–1999 (Amsterdam, 1999), 275, 278.Google Scholar For Mendelssohn & Co. in the 1930s, see ibid., 280. On September 27,1929, the merger of the Deutsche Bank and Disconto-Gesellschaft was announced, and from October 1929 through 1937, that bank was called Deutsche Bank and Disconto-Gesellschaft, whereupon the name “Deutsche Bank” was reinstated. Gall, Lothar et al. , The Deutsche Bank, 1870–1995 (London, 1995), 230, 235Google Scholar; European Association for Banking History, Handbook on the History of European Banks, ed. Pohl, Manfred (Aldershot, 1994), 384–85.CrossRef Google Scholar With the 1929 Deutsche Bank and Disconto-Gessellschaft merger, H. Albert de Bary & Co., Amsterdam, became a subsidiary of the newly joined entity. In 1936, Deutsche Bank, worried about its international business, tried to disguise H. Albert de Bary & Co. as a Dutch company, nominally moving the shares into Dutch hands. Gall et al., The Deutsche Bank, 329–30. After the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940, the shares were repurchased by the Deutsche Bank. Ibid., 330.

⁵⁴ Wilkins, , The History, II, 468Google Scholar; for other Dutch cloaks, see ibid., 469.

⁵⁵ Peyer, Hans Conrad, Roche: A Company History, 1897–1996 (Basel, 1996), 143Google Scholar, and Wilkins, , The History, II, 415, 417, 514Google Scholar; Arnoldus, Doreen, Family, Family Firm, and Strategy (Amsterdam, 2002), 54–55, 131Google Scholar (on the establishment of NV Organon in 1923 by Saal van Zwanenberg). For more on the history of Organon, see Tausk, Marius, Organon: Degeschiedenis van een bijzondere Nederlandse Onderneming (Nijmegen, 1978)Google Scholar, and Verboog, Jeroen, Seventy Five Years Organon, 1923 to 1998 (Oss, 1998).Google Scholar

⁵⁶ On the German connections and their U.S. implications, see Kobrak, Christopher, National Cultures and International Competition: The Experience of Schering AG, 1851–1950 (Cambridge, U.K., 2002), 325, 345Google Scholar, and Tausk, Organon, 140–45, 216–20, 299–309.

⁵⁷ Blanken, Ivo J., The History of Philips Electronics N.V., vols. 3 and 4 (Zaltbommel, 1999)Google Scholar; Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 3; Wilkins, , The History, II, 260.Google Scholar

⁵⁸ Wilkins, , The History, II, 821n335.Google Scholar

⁵⁹ Blanken, , Philips Electronics, vol. 4: 62–65.Google Scholar

⁶⁰ Ibid., 120.

⁶¹ Wilkins, , The History, II, 105.Google Scholar

⁶² Ibid., 109.

⁶³ Priest, Tyler, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” in Foreign Multinationals in the United States: Management and Performance, eds. Jones, Geoffrey and Gálvez-Muñoz, Lina (London, 2002), 189.Google Scholar

⁶⁴ Wilkins, , The History, II, 109.Google Scholar

⁶⁵ See, for example, ibid., 265.

⁶⁶ In oil, see ibid., 264, 323; in chemicals, see ibid., 246–47.

⁶⁷ Ibid., 103–9, 263–65.

⁶⁸ Ibid., 265.

⁶⁹ Ibid., 323–24, 394–95. For its huge losses in 1931,1933, and 1934 (which were not offset by a small profit in 1932), see Beaton, Enterprise in Oil, 364.

⁷⁰ Wilkins, , The History, II, 457–61.Google Scholar

⁷¹ Ibid., 782n140. The standard work on Unilever is Wilson, Charles, The History of Unilever, 3 vols. (New York, 1968)Google Scholar. The first two volumes were republished in 1968 (they were initially published in 1954); the third volume, which covered 1945 to 1965, was added in 1968. Geoffrey Jones's book on Unilever, Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition (Oxford, forthcoming Sept. 2005)Google Scholar, will be the continuation of the Wilson contribution. My own work, cited herein, has been in part derivative (based on the research of others) and in part based on original research, done in 1981, in the Unilever archives in London. I have been very thankful for the guidance from the late Bill Reader and Geoff Jones. Also useful is the brief Reader, W. J., Fifty Years of Unilever (London, 1980).Google Scholar

⁷² For background on its pre-1914 activities, see Wilkins, , The History, I, 340–43Google Scholar; for 1914 to 1929 activities, see Wilkins, , The History, II, 22, 53, 145–46, 228.Google Scholar

⁷³ Jones, Geoffrey, “Control, Performance, and Knowledge Transfers in Large Multinationals: Unilever in the United States, 1945–1980,” Business History Review 76 (Autumn 2002): 436CrossRef Google Scholar, for a succinct explanation. See also Wilkins, , The History, II, 375, 801n107. For the complex reasons for the transfer to Dutch ownership, see J. D. Keir to Sir David Orr, 21 Apr. 1981, and attachments (copy provided to Mira Wilkins from J. D. Keir, 26 Oct. 1981). I have had interesting discussions with Ben Wubs, who is writing about Unilever during World War II, on why the transfer to Dutch ownership was made–including the “dividend equalization” provisions, the avoidance of double taxation, and the development of a structure that might be appropriate were war to start.Google Scholar

⁷⁴ In 1897, Lever had bought a controlling interest in Curtis Davis Co. In the process, Lever Brothers acquired Francis A. Countway. The latter rose in the ranks of Lever's U.S. subsidiary to become in 1912 general manager of the American Lever Brothers. Wilkins, , The History, I, 340–42.Google Scholar

⁷⁵ On Unilever and Lever Brothers in the United States in these years, see Wilkins, , The History, II, 228, 289, 324–25, 401.Google Scholar

⁷⁶ Lipton had begun in the United States as a buying agency for hogs and then had gone into meat packing; his meat-packing operation ended in 1902, and from that point on Lipton's American activities had been concentrated on the tea business. For background on Lipton in the U.S., see Wilkins, , The History, 1, 311–12, 337–38Google Scholar; Wilkins, , The History, II, 145, 324–25, 840n67, and especially 881n48 (on Countway's role, Continental Foods, and further expansion).Google Scholar

⁷⁷ Best's Insurance Reports, Fire and Marine, 1922–1923, 360, has the following on the “name change”: “The name of the Company was formerly the Netherlands Fire and Life Insurance Company, having been changed to the above title [the Netherlands Insurance Company] in the latter part of 1921.” This passage was repeated in subsequent Best's Reports. See, for example, ibid., 1929–1930, 444. See also Best's Insurance Reports, Fire and Marine, 1930–1931, 480 (for the Netherlands Insurance Co.) and 108–10 (for the Caledonian group).

⁷⁸ In 1917, the International Mercantile Marine Company had sold most of its shares in Holland America, according to Gras, N. S. B. and Larson, Henrietta M., Casebook in American Business History (New York, 1939), 589Google Scholar. Also during World War I, the Holland America Line was able to repurchase the shares previously owned by the German shipping concerns. De La Pedraja, The Rise and Decline, 8.

⁷⁹ Wilkins, , The History, II, 443Google Scholar. This census figure on the size of Dutch direct investment in the United States is substantially larger than those figures presented for 1937 by the U.S. Department of Commerce, which gave the Dutch direct investments in the United States as $179 million (for mid-1937) and $178.5 million for year end 1937. U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Foreign Long-term Investments in the United States, 1937–39, by Dickens, Paul D. (Washington, D.C., 1940), 21Google Scholar (mid-1937), 34 and 38 (year end 1937). I think the 1941 number was much larger, not because of mere “front” or “shell” companies, but because there were in fact (1) more Dutch investments and (2) the 1937 figures were low (based on lack of effective monitoring). No Dutch direct investment figures for 1938 and 1939 are provided in the Dickens report. The $336 million figure in the 1941 census is, however, smaller than the 1938 one ($380 million) given in Gales and Sluyterman, “Outward Bound,” 65.1 think their $380 million is a mistake, based on my reading of their sources. The 1941 figure of $336 million in Dutch direct investment in the United States should be compared with the $125 million or $135 million in 1914 (see text and note 17 above).

⁸⁰ Wilkins, , The History, II, 442.Google Scholar

⁸¹ Note that the census (as of 14 June 1941) was taken after Dutch assets in the United States were frozen (10 May 1940). This, of course, influenced the result. Many of the liquid investments in securities had been disposed of by June 1941 (in some cases, their owners had migrated to the United States, in which instance these would not be “foreign” investments; alternatively, the investments were otherwise cloaked). The 1940 Commerce Department report only gave overall figures for FDI in the United States for year end 1939; it did, however, break down the overall figures for all long-term foreign investment in the United States by nationality. The Commerce Department's estimates for total long-term Dutch investments in the United States at year end 1939 was $ 888 million. This number is substantially more than the total determined during the census of June 1941, which was $319.8 million in securities, plus $336.0 million in controlled enterprises, plus $11.7 million in other long-term Dutch investments, or $667.5 million. Wilkins, , The History, II, 72, 445.Google Scholar The numbers suggest to me that from year end 1939 to the date of the census, there was a reduction in Dutch portfolio investments in the United States, while Dutch direct investments probably rose in value in this same period.

⁸² For estimates of U.S. direct investments in the Netherlands, at year end 1929, 1936, and 1940, see U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, American Direct Investments in Foreign Countries: 1940, by Sammons, Robert L. and Abelson, Milton (Washington, D.C., 1942), 4Google Scholar; for Dutch direct investments in the United States, at year end 1934 and mid-1937, see Wilkins, , The History, II, 390–91.Google Scholar

⁸³ Wilkins, , The History, II, 452–54.Google Scholar

⁸⁴ Blanken, , Philips Electronics, vol. 4: 150–71.Google Scholar

⁸⁵ Wilkins, , The History, II, 475.Google Scholar

⁸⁶ Ibid., 474.

⁸⁷ The Royal Dutch Shell group had a large refinery in Curaçao, which handled Venezuelan oil exports, so there were Shell people already present on this Dutch West Indian island.

⁸⁸ Wilkins, , The History, II, 474.Google Scholar The Van Zwanenberg family members, who were involved in Organon, had long had Dutch-British connections. See Arnoldus, , Family, 55, 131–32.Google Scholar

⁸⁹ Van Zanden, The Economic History of the Netherlands, 118; New York Times, 8 June 1940. According to the New York Times, some of the Holland America ships “are in trades to the Netherlands East Indies and some have been operating from Holland ports to California, and presumably these will be exempt from the new charter arrangements.” The newspaper also reported that, on June 7 [1940], “the Holland-America liner, Pennland was moved to the Cunard White Star terminal at West Fourteenth Street, and loading of war supplies was started immediately. She will sail shortly for an allied port.”

⁹⁰ Wilkins, , The History, II, 450.Google Scholar Billiton would form two American subsidiaries, the Tin Sales Corporation and the Tin Processing Corporation. The latter had a capital of merely $10,000 and was set up to receive the fee (initially paid by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation) for Billiton to operate the Texas tin smelter. Gruythuysen, M. V. M. M. and Kramer, R., Inventaris… N.V. Billiton-Maatschappij, 1872–1970, vol. 1, Nederlands-Indische/indonesische aktiviteiten (The Hague, 1990), 21Google Scholar, and e-mail correspondence with John Hillman, Trent University (Canada), 27 Mar. 2005. Hillman is an expert on the global tin industry.

⁹¹ Information from Hillman, Mar. 2005.

⁹² Wilkins, , The History, II, 450.Google Scholar

⁹³ Ibid., 541. After the German invasion of Holland, the Deutsche Bank bought most of the Dutch shares of AKU. See Gall et al., The Deutsche Bank, 330 (the source is a memorandum of 14 Aug. 1941). By the time the Germans did so, the assets of AKU in the United States had been frozen and were not available for German use.

⁹⁴ Billiton had begun explorations in Surinam in 1938; in 1942, its first bauxite in Surinam was produced. Gruythuysen, and Kramer, , Inventaris, vol. 1: 21Google Scholar. This output was imported into the United States by the Dutch MNE for use by American companies in aluminum production.

⁹⁵ U.S. House of Representatives, Subcommittee on the Study of Monopoly Power, Committee on the Judiciary, Study of Monopoly Power, Hearings, 81st Cong., 2nd sess. (1950), pt. 5, 36, 84; and Wilkins, , The History, II, 518Google Scholar. The World War II Office of Alien Property Custodian was established on 11 Mar. 1942. Ibid., 517.

⁹⁶ Wilkins, , The History, II, 413, 543Google Scholar; Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 194. Shell Chemical Company became, in October 1943, the “Shell Chemical Division of Shell Union Oil Corporation.” On 1 Jan. 1946, it was reconstituted as Shell Chemical Corporation. Beaton, Enterprise in Oil, 758–59.

⁹⁷ Wilkins, , The History, II, 548.Google Scholar

⁹⁸ On Philips's wartime activities in the United States, see ibid., 549, and Blanken, , Philips Electronics, vol. 4: 301–10Google Scholar. A brief (one page) “History of Philips USA,” provided by NV Philips, 18 Nov. 2004, notes that during World War II, North American Philips produced X-ray equipment at Mount Vernon, New York (at the prewar factory), and then crystal and cathode ray tubes for communication equipment and radar at Dobbs Ferry, New York (at new facilities); tungsten and molybdenum products at Lewiston, Maine; and electronic tubes (Amperex Electronics), in Brooklyn and then in Hicksville, New York. In addition, in 1940, the trust had set up Philips Export Corporation for the Latin American trade.

⁹⁹ Wilkins, , The History, II, 541, 580.Google Scholar On the post–World War II claims against Vereinigte Glanzstoff-Fabriken AG (VGF) with regard to AKU (and the takeover by Deutsche Bank of AKU stock following the occupation of Holland), see Gall et al., Deutsche Bank, 855n120. Presumably the AKU stock went back to Dutch ownership. The plants in the United States that had a German genesis were not returned to Dutch ownership.

¹⁰⁰ Wilkins, , The History, II, 580–81. I did not deal with the Holland America Line in my volume (and probably should have). It apparently had resumed certain German contacts in the interwar years, which it was able to unscramble. The New York Times, 18 Apr. 1948, on the occasion of the Holland America Line's “75th Anniversary,” noted that “despite war losses the company today operates twenty-four ships.…” A Line official reported that its fleet tonnage was about 72 percent of its prewar strength. The Line's “official history, 1939–1945.” on the Holland America Web site, (http://www.hollandamerica.com, accessed 13 Oct. 2004), indicates that at the start of World War II, the Holland America Line had twenty-five ships and nine remained at war's end. “At the beginning of the war, the Westernland, berthed at Falmouth, England, became the seat of the Netherlands government. All Holland America Line ships were chartered by the Dutch, British, or U.S. governments.…”Google Scholar

¹⁰¹ Wilkins, , The History, II, 513–16Google Scholar. An anonymous referee queried: “International business in the 1920s and 1930s was regulated by cartels (e.g., Shell, Philips). I still do not understand why there was no such cartel in the international food industry (Unilever and P & G). Or is this ‘a best kept secret’?” The inquiry merits a response: (1) certain industries were regulated by numerous patent agreements and so-called cartels (oil, chemical, electric industries stand out); but others were not so characterized, for example, automobiles. Automobile MNEs internalized international business. (2) In the 1930s, Unilever and P & G were in food, but were far more important (at least in the U.S. market) in the soap industry. For the American food industry and its international relations in the 1930s, see Horst, Thomas, At Home Abroad: A Study of the Domestic and Foreign Operations of the American Food-Processing Industry (Cambridge, Mass., 1974)Google Scholar. There were international agreements in facets of the “food industry.” And, so, too, as P & G moved into synthetic soaps, there were division-of-market agreements. What is important is that each industry (and often each product within an industry) was different. A full answer to this question would require a lengthy discussion of industry (and corporate) structures, which alas I do not have room to pursue in this article. In the 1950s (as we will see) Lever and Unilever were not exempt from U.S. antitrust policies, albeit the initial application was to detergents, not “food.” Also, a good part (not by any means all) of the 1939–50 international antitrust fervor was linked to German connections, which in soap (and food) in the United States were not fundamental, as related to U.S. business.

¹⁰² Wilkins, , The History, II, 529–36.Google Scholar

¹⁰³ Ibid., 535, 864; Blanken, , Philips Electronics, vol. 4: 307–8.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁴ See Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, 285–408.

¹⁰⁵ Wilkins, , The History, II, 567–68, 571–76, 579–81.Google Scholar

¹⁰⁶ See above and ibid., 580.

¹⁰⁷ Ibid., 575. See also Jones, “Control, Performance, and Knowledge Transfers,” and Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil.”

¹⁰⁸ On the first of these reasons, see Blanken, , Philips Electronics, vol. 4: 314.Google Scholar I have introduced the second reason, which was only germane in the immediate postwar period, but then that was when the decision was made to keep the trust form. Wilkins, , The History, II, 581.Google Scholar On the third reason, Philips had the experience in 1947 of having its clearance cancelled. Blanken, , Philips Electronics, vol. 4: 313.Google Scholar Blanken adds that in 1949, NV Philips was accused (improperly he believes) of selling modern electronics equipment to the Soviet Union. In July 1950, a month after the Korean War started, this issue was resolved and North American Philips and Amperex became eligible for defense contracts. Ibid., 313–14; see also (in the future) Mira Wilkins, “The History of Foreign Investment in the United States after 1945,” book manuscript in progress (material that is based on what will be documented in that book–henceforth cited as Wilkins, The History,” III) on the cold war, Defense Department regulations, and how other foreign companies coped with the restrictions. On the fourth reason, see ibid. Blanken writes that O. M. E. Loupart of Philips had ruled out any activity by the parent in Philips's core areas of lighting and radio, because of agreements with GE and RCA. Loupart considered it was “impossible and undesirable for Philips to undertake any industrial activity in the U.S. on its own”; it would need partnerships with American companies, but “for this to be possible it was essential that NAPC [North American Philips Company] be able to present itself as an American company.” Blanken, , Philips Electronics, vol. 4: 313–14.Google Scholar This seems to be the way Philips interpreted U.S. antitrust law–at least initially. In addition, perhaps there was another consideration: in Philips's “way of doing business” (its corporate culture), national companies were seen as having a great deal of autonomy; it was part of corporate strategy. Yet this could easily have occurred with alternative legal corporate structures, so I would not associate this directly (or exclusively) with the trust's continuation.

¹⁰⁹ Wilkins, , The History, II, 548, 881n48.Google Scholar

¹¹⁰ Much of what follows on Unilever in the United States in the postwar years comes from Jones, “Control, Performance, and Knowledge Transfers,” 435–72, and discussions with and advice from Geoffrey Jones; I have also used Wilson, , The History of Unilever, vol. 3: 228–36Google Scholar; Reader, Fifty Years of Unilever, 55–113; and substantial material in the Unilever archives in London (consulted in 1981).

¹¹¹ In the 1950s, everyone enjoyed Good Humor ice cream. See the pictures (in connection with Geoffrey Jones's article) of President Eisenhower and his wife eating Good Humor ice cream. Business History Review 76 (Autumn 2002)Google Scholar, front and back covers. The pictures were taken in the 1950s, before Unilever acquired Good Humor.

¹¹² Wilson, , The History of Unilever, vol. 3: 235.Google Scholar

¹¹³ See, for example, Williamson, Harold F. et al. , The American Petroleum Industry, 1899–1959 (Evanston, Ill., 1963)Google Scholar, and Haynes, Williams, American Chemical Industry, 6 vols. (New York, 1945–1954), esp. vol. 6: 380–82Google Scholar, on Shell Chemical Corp., and vol. 6: 382–85, on Shell Development Co. Shell Oil's employment is given in Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 193. I doubt that that figure includes the Shell Chemical Corp. employment. (The Shell Chemical Corp. employment figures are from Haynes, , American Chemical Industry, vol. 6: 382.)Google Scholar

¹¹⁴ Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 188–89.

¹¹⁵ United States v. Standard Oil Co. (N.J.), Civil No. 86–27,1953 Trade Case, CCH Para, nos. 66,075, 66,081. Wilkins, “The History,” III. See also U.S. Federal Trade Commission, Staff Report submitted to the U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Monopoly, Select Committee on Small Business, The International Petroleum Cartel, 82nd Cong., 2nd sess., Committee Print No. 6 (Washington, D.C., 1952)Google Scholar. In the grand jury investigation of the alleged oil cartel, in 1952 the government of the Netherlands “reacted sharply to the subpoenas demanding that their corporate nationals submit records.” Brewster, Kingman, Antitrust and American Business Abroad (New York, 1958), 48–49.Google Scholar Indeed, according to Hans Smit (professor of law at Columbia University and involved in a project on European Legal Institutions), the Dutch passed a Law on Economic Competition, effective on November 19, 1958. Section 39 of the law prohibited (in the absence of a specific exemption by the Dutch government) anyone from “complying intentionally with measures or decisions originating in a foreign country that relate to antitrust matters.” The Dutch government would invoke this legislation “to prohibit production of evidence by Dutch oil companies [read Royal Dutch Shell] sought in connection with an American investigation of anti-competitive practices in the oil industry.” See statement by Hans Smit, U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Committee on the Judiciary, International Aspects of Antitrust, Hearings, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 1967, pt. 1, 400–402. There was a final judgment in 1960, in United States v. Standard Oil Co. (N.J.), Civil No. 86–27, 1960 Trade Case, CCH Para. no. 69,649, and then there was, dated 9 July 1968, a “Superseding Final Judgment,” see United States v. Standard Oil Co. (N.J.), Civil No. 86–27, 1969 Trade Case, CCH Para. no. 72,743; this superseding final judgment did not include Shell Oil, but did include the foreign companies, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Petroleum Company, and Shell Transport and Trading Company (the last two were Shell Oil's parents). The judgment concerned their relations to Gulf Oil.

¹¹⁶ Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 192–93; Wilkins, “The History,” III (background). Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 197, writes of a “paranoia” on the part of the Royal Dutch Shell group's managing directors on the issue of minority stockholdings. Part of the concern was minority stockholder suits. Also, minority shareholders interfered with corporate flexibility within the multinational enterprise. And then in the background there were antitrust law interpretations that suggested that “transactions between parent companies and partially owned subsidiaries could be considered as discrimination against outside firms,” i.e., a predatory practice, subject to antitrust penalties. Wall, Bennett H., Growth in a Changing Environment: A History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey): Exxon Corporation, 1950–1975 (New York, 1988), 66Google Scholar, for that interpretation of the decision in the 1957 Du Pont-General Motors case.

¹¹⁷ On lamps, see United States v. General Electric Co., et al., Civil No. 1364, 82 F. Supp. 753 (DNJ 1949); Civil No. 1364,115 F. Supp. 835 (DNJ 1953); the lamp suit arose out of the late 1930s investigations and had been suspended after the U.S. entered the war. Blanken refers to this as “the Trenton case” (named after the location of the New Jersey court where the case was heard). On “home entertainment apparatus,” which was defined as “radio and/or television receiving sets,” see United States v. General Electric Co., et al., Civil No. 140–157, 1962 Trade Case, CCH Para. no. 70,342. For the Dutch government protests in the lamp case, see Brewster, Antitrust and American Business Abroad, 46–49. U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, Committee on the Judiciary, International Aspects of Antitrust, Hearings, 89th Cong., 2nd sess., 1967, pt. 2, 817–970; 971–1020, has the full text of the judgments in the 1949 and 1953 lamp litigation. The quoted passage is from page 954 of this rendition. The court ruled that foreign corporations such as NV Philips could enter into agreements abroad “without fear of antitrust suits here, so long as what they do is not done wilfully to restrain United States trade and does not have a direct and substantial restrictive effect upon it.” Ibid. The latter was, however, subject to broad interpretation. See also pp. 1012–14 that deal specifically with Philips.

¹¹⁸ Under the post–World War II interpretations of antitrust law, not only could U.S. companies not stop foreign companies from entering the U.S. market, but American companies could not agree to stay out of foreign markets. Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 3 (on the Marshall plan); Wilkins, The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise, 292–300, 338–39, 549n30, on the effects of U.S. antitrust policies on American business abroad, 1945–1970. On GE's sale of its interest in Philips, see ibid., 295. The stock sale meant that Philips no longer represented GE in the designated markets abroad.

¹¹⁹ Wallace E. J. Collins, vice president and secretary of the North American Philips Corporation, to Mira Wilkins, 11 Nov. 1975. On the view from Philips's headquarters in Eindhoven, Holland, I have benefited from discussions with Philips's historian, Ivo Blanken, Nov. 2004, and his e-mail to me of 6 Dec. 2004. After the settlement of the lamp case, Philips made a new cross-licensing agreement with General Electric (25 June 1954) on lighting that conformed with the strictures within the final judgment. See Blanken, I. J., Geschiedenis van Koninklijke Philips Electronics NV, vol. 5 (Zaltbommel, 2002), 177Google Scholar. Its cross-licensing agreement with RCA had been renewed in 1949. Ibid., 179. After the inauguration of the 1954 antitrust case against RCA and the 1958 final judgment in the RCA antitrust suit, Philips and RCA revised the agreement to conform with the consent decree. On the final judgment in the RCA case, see United States v. Radio Corporation of America, Civil No. 97–38, 1958 Trade Case, CCH Par. 69,164 (28 Oct. 1958). Philips was not a defendant in the RCA case. None of the newly written agreements formally limited markets.

¹²⁰ This was also true in the lamp case, the “Trenton case,” settled in 1953, but that case was not so remarkable, since it was based in large part on activities of the parent before North American Philips had been formed.

¹²¹ United States v. General Electric, et al. Civil No. 140–157, 170 F. Supp. 596; 1959 Trade Case, CCH Par. 69,267 (SDNY 1959); for background, see Brewster, Antitrust and American Business Abroad, 53–59, 62–63. As indicated in note 115 above, the Dutch passed a Law on Economic Competition, effective 19 Nov. 1958. Section 39 of the law prohibited (in the absence of a specific exemption by the Dutch government) anyone from “complying intentionally with measures or decisions originating in a foreign country that relate to antitrust matters.” In note 115, following Smit, I linked the legislation to matters related to Royal Dutch Shell. It could just as easily be associated with Philips's antitrust problems, and not only the ones in relation to the home entertainment case, started 24 Nov. 1958, but also the RCA consent decree (in Civil Case No. 97–38) on 28 Oct. 1958, and prior to that, in United States v. Radio Corporation, Civil No. 155–107, 1958 Trade Case, CCH par. 69,116 (28 July 1958), RCA was asked to provide substantial information on its international relations. In addition, Unilever was facing an antitrust suit related to the takeover of the detergent “All” (see above).

¹²² See United States v. General Electric, et al. Civil No. 140–157, 1962 Trade Case, CCH par. no. 70,342 (SDNY 1962). And although the court said it had jurisdiction, in this case (as in the earlier ones) Philips was treated differently from General Electric.

¹²³ See e-mail, Ivo Blanken to Mira Wilkins, 6 Dec. 2004, on NV Philips's small operation in Canada. When NV Philips was charged, individuals in Holland found this litigation very strange, since they considered North American Philips to be independent. The New York law firm of A. A. Berle advised the Dutch company not to raise that issue, for Berle suggested it would trigger an investigation of North American Philips. On the Canadian “radio patents pool,” see Blanken to Wilkins, 6 Dec. 2004; and Leyton-Brown, David, “Multinational Enterprise and Conflict in Canadian-American Relations,” International Organization 18 (Autumn 1974): 738.Google Scholar The Canadian government wanted the restrictions on U.S. imports into Canada, to protect Canadian manufacturing. When I write “within a multinational enterprise,” the court's assumption was that NV Philips could control North American Philips's exports.

¹²⁴ On its U.S. activities, see Faith, Nicholas, The Infiltrators: The European Business Invasion of America (London, 1971), 80–84.Google Scholar Still better, see Blanken, , Geschiedenis van Koninklijke Philips, vol. 5: 304–43.Google Scholar

¹²⁵ Faith, The Infiltrators, 80. Like most commentators, Faith considered North American Philips an affiliate of the Dutch company.

¹²⁶ As noted Lever (and Lipton) were technically 100 percent Dutch owned at this time.

¹²⁷ Blanken, , Geschiedenis van Koninklijke Philips, vol. 5: 304.Google Scholar Regrettably this volume is not yet translated into English; a translation will be forthcoming in several years.

¹²⁸ Based on ibid.; explanatory sheets prepared by Blanken, Nov. 2004, e-mail from Blanken to Wilkins, 6 Dec. 2004, and e-mail from Jan Paulussen to Wilkins, 1 Dec. 2004, as well as “History of Philips USA,” a chronology provided by Blanken and Paulussen, Nov. 2004. On the compliance with the old agreements, even though they were no longer in effect, see Blanken, Ivo J., “An Industrial Federation: Patterns of Internalization at Royal Philips Electronics, 1895–1970,” 13 (unpublished paper prepared for a conference in Utrecht, Nov. 2004).Google Scholar As noted earlier, new cross-licensing and nonexclusive agreements were made after the consent decrees in the GE lamp case (1953) and the RCA case (1958). On very complicated mergers, acquisitions, and reorganizations that resulted in minority shareholders in North American Philips, see explanations on sheets 3–10, prepared by Ivo Blanken, Einhoven, for Mira Wilkins, 18 Nov. 2004.

¹²⁹ Wilkins, “The History,” III; Peyer, Roche, 164; Arnoldus, Family, 55; and Faith, Infilitrators, 72–74. The bid for International Salt was ultimately successful, albeit it was held up by U.S. antitrust authorities, until after the AKU-KZO merger. Ibid., 73, 211. The fact that KZO stood for two separate entities created confusion in the literature; I have spelled out the names to differentiate the sequence of companies. There are two histories of Organon: Tausk, Organon, and Verboog, Seventy Five Years Organon. The AKZO story is complicated by the three separate Dutch stories that converged in Holland and the U.S.: those stemming from AKU (American Enka), from Koninklijke Zout-Ketjen/KZO (the interest in International Salt), and from Organon/KZO (Roche Organon Co./Organon). The existing operations of AKU and KZO in the United States were merged into Akzona Inc. in 1970; the latter's Dutch parent was AKZO. Stopford, John M., Directory of Multinationals, 2 vols. (New York, 1992), vol. 1: 33.Google Scholar

¹³⁰ See the Web site: www.scripophily.com/nybankhistory.htm, accessed 1 Oct. 2004. By year end 1969, ABN had two New York branches: one at 84 William Street and the other at 301 Park Avenue. New York State, Banking Department, Annual Report 1969, 226.

¹³¹ Wilkins, “The History,” III.

¹³² See Best's Insurance Reports, Fire and Marine, 1950, 386–87, where it is indicated that the U.S. branch of the Netherlands Insurance Company, est. 1845, The Hague, Holland, had its offices in the Caledonian Building, in Hartford, Connecticut. The branch was under the same management as the U.S. branch of the Caledonian Insurance Company of Edinburgh, Scotland. Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Liability, 1970, 889; New York Times, 17 Sept. 1956; and 8 Jan. 1957 (on the association between Peerless and Netherlands Insurance Company, est. 1845). Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Liability, 1970, 889 (the period of Peerless's ownership of Caledonian).

¹³³ Based on Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Liability, 1970, 797–98 (Netherlands Insurance Company, est. 1845), 889–90 (Peerless Insurance), as well as information from Gerarda Westerhuis, 16 Nov. 2004. Westerhuis, “How did Dutch Companies…?” 6, is the source for the 10 percent interest in Peerless in 1957; this is nor in Best's Insurance Reports. Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Liability, 1990, 2020, says the Nationale-Nederlanden Group acquired Peerless Insurance Company, beginning in 1974, with 100 percent ownership obtained in 1982, but this is not inconsistent, for the 10 percent interest may not have been perceived as part of an acquisition process.

¹³⁴ Westerhuis, “How did Dutch Companies…?”, and Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Casualty, 1990, 2020–22, on the 1963 merger and the formation of Nationale Nederlanden. Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Liability, 1970, 797 (the listing). In 1963 (and 1970), National Life Assurance Bank had no U.S. investments. A 1976 Commerce Department report contained a section on FDI in the United States in insurance. It pointed to the importance of British, Canadian, and Swiss firms, “although firms from other Western European countries and Japan also participate.” The Canadians were involved in life insurance. Most of the other foreign insurers operated in the nonlife field, i.e., property and liability. The three largest foreign insurers in the United States in the mid-1970s were British owned; in second place were the Swiss. The report added, “Scandinavian, Dutch, French, German, and Japanese firms also have small portions of the [property and liability insurance] business.” U.S. Department of Commerce, Foreign Direct Investment in the United States, 9 vols. (Washington, D.C., 1976), vol. 1: 92–95 (hereafter cited as 1976 Commerce Department Report). The report is consistent with my finding that in 1970 the Dutch involvement in the U.S. insurance market was small.

¹³⁵ Company history on Web site of the Holland America line, http://www.hollandamerica. com, accessed 13 Oct. 2004 and 9 May 2005; I have also viewed the Web site of Carnival Corporation & PLC, http://carnivalcorp.com, accessed 9 May 2005. Holland America retained certain Dutch links: an advertisement in the New York Times, 15 May 2005, noted the “ships' registry: Netherlands, Bahamas.” By the time the company moved its headquarters across the Atlantic, there was no indication of “Dutch” ownership and control; this certainly came to an end when the name and certain assets were acquired by Carnival Cruise Lines.

¹³⁶ I know of no published history of the Brenninkmeyer firm, much less of its sizable international business. My principal sources on the Orbach takeover are the following: New York Times, 26 Jan. 1962; Business Week, 5 Sept. 1977; New York Times, 23 Mar. 1983 and 22 Jan. 1995. Several sources indicate that the Brenninkmeyers first entered U.S. retailing in 1948, when the family firm opened a store in Brooklyn. New York Times, 16 Apr. 1948, and Hoover Company Records, “American Retail Group,” 15 Mar. 2005, accessed 8 May 2005. On its earlier international business, see the group's Web site, http://www.c-and-a.com, accessed 8 May 2005. When in 1962 the firm bought Ohrbach's—through the Dutch-American Investing Company—the Dutch firm was said to have “formerly operated” a Fifth Avenue store and had stores in Brooklyn and Queens (Jamaica). New York Times, 26 Jan. 1962.

¹³⁷ Figures on 1950 U.S. direct investment abroad are from the Survey of Current Business, Nov. 1954, 11; 1950 figures on FDI in the United States are from the U.S. Department of Commerce, Foreign Business Investments in the United States (Washington, D.C., n.d. [1962]), 34. Figures on U.S. 1970 direct investment abroad are from the Survey of Current Business, Nov. 1972, 30, while 1970 figures on foreign direct investment in the United States are from ibid., Feb. 1973, 30.

¹³⁸ In response to the rapid rise, major studies of FDI in the United States began to be conducted in the 1970s. The 1976 Commerce Department Report, vol. 5: G-135, gives the Dutch guilder-U.S. dollar exchange rates, 1965-1975. The depreciation of the dollar vis-à-vis the guilder between 1970 and 1975 was truly dramatic. The drop in the value of the dollar made imports into the United States more costly, which meant they were less competitive. This, along with an undercurrent of protectionist talk, encouraged a number of foreign manufacturers, Dutch ones included, that had previously exported to the United States to acquire or to start up manufacturing within the country. For more on exchange rates and the upturn in FDI in the 1970s, see Fry, Earl H., Financial Invasion of the U.S.A. (New York, 1980), 2, 37Google Scholar.

¹³⁹ See Survey of Current Business, July 2004, 40, for 1982-2003 figures, which updates the information provided in Mira Wilkins, “Foreign Companies in the United States, 1945-2000,” in Foreign Multinationals in the United States, eds. Jones and Gálvez-Muñoz, 22-23, 45n5. Since the early 1980s, the U.S. Department of Commerce has measured FDI by historical cost, market value, and current cost. For a few years at the turn of the twenty-first century, measured by market value, FDI in the United States did exceed U.S. direct investment abroad; but, by all three measures used to make the calculations, in 2002 and 2003 the level of U.S. business abroad exceeded that of FDI in the United States. Survey of Current Business, July 2004, 42.

¹⁴⁰ These Dutch-only figures are based on selected 1930s data and year end 1950 and 1970 figures, provided earlier in this paper. They are based on historical cost. Year end 2000 figures for Dutch direct investment in the United States ($138.9 billion) are in the Survey of Current Business, Sept. 2003, 67; 2000 year end figures for U.S. investments in the Netherlands ($115.4 billion) are in ibid., 119. In recent years, comparative figures on U.S. direct investments abroad and FDI in the United States have been provided, in summary, in the July issue of the Survey of Current Business and in detail typically in the September issue of the same publication. The Survey of Current Business, July 2004, 48-51, gave revised figures for the level of inward Dutch investments at year end 2002 and new ones for year end 2003; these show for the first time U.S. direct investments in the Netherlands ($164 billion at year end 2002 and $179 billion at year end 2003) were greater than Dutch direct investments in the United States ($154 billion at year end 2002 and $146 billion at year end 2003). The level of Dutch direct investment in the United States actually was lower at year end 2003 than at year end 2002. At the time this paper was completed, the latest U.S. figures available were those of 2003.

¹⁴¹ Some authors have marveled at how foreign MNEs–including Dutch ones–went for years with poor returns and still stayed in the United States. Wilkins, “The History,” III.

¹⁴² Survey of Current Business, Sept. 2004, 78. Dutch direct investment in the United States grew when compared with year end 2000, but, as indicated in note 140, the level fell from 2002 to 2003.

¹⁴³ Dutch central bank figures on Dutch direct investment flows to the United States—see Table 5.6b (provided on the central bank's Web site, http://www.statistics.dnb.nl/index.cgi?lang=nl&todo=Balans, accessed 13 May 2005)—show that instead of Dutch direct investments flowing into the United States, in 2002 and 2004 there was a retreat from such investments. It is far too early, however, to identify “a trend.”

¹⁴⁴ According to figures provided in ibid., in 1982 (the first year of the figures on the Web site), flows to Europe were higher than to the United States, but in 1985,1987, and 1988 the flow of Dutch direct investment into the United States exceeded the flow of Dutch direct investment into all of Europe combined! These were the only three years in the period from 1982 to 2004 that this was the case. Again, according to ibid., in 2000 when the Dutch direct investment flow to the United States was ∈35.1 billion, the flow to all of Europe was ∈40.6 billion and to the European Union, ∈35.6 billion. In short, throughout, the United States remained significant for Dutch investors.

¹⁴⁵ 1976 Commerce Department Report, vol. 5: G-125, G-129–130. A Fortune list of the top industrial companies in the world by sales in 1978 had only four that were not American in the top dozen, and both Royal Dutch Shell (no. 3) and Unilever (no. 12) were included. Philips ranked sixteen (enlarging the number of non-American companies to five); the other two non-American companies in the top sixteen that year were British Petroleum (no. 7) and National Iranian Oil (no. 9). In short, Unilever and Philips were the only non-oil, non-American companies on the top list. The list was reprinted in Reader, Fifty Years of Unilever, 89.

¹⁴⁶ See Arpan, Jeffrey S. and Ricks, David A., Directory of Foreign Manufacturers in the United States, 4th ed. (Atlanta, 1990), 42, 70, 135, 157, 235, 246, 321Google Scholar, on DSM investments and Thyssen Bornemisza investments in subsequent years. For background on DSM, see Aftalion, Fred, A History of the International Chemical Industry (Philadelphia, 1991), 303.Google Scholar Thyssen Bornemisza should probably be considered Dutch. For its history and the reason for the name, see Wilkins, Mira, Foreign Enterprise in Florida (Miami, 1979), 30Google Scholar, 145n18. In 1947, in Holland, this business was known as Bank voor Handel en Scheepvaart (Bank of Commerce and Shipping), headquartered in Rotterdam. The firm's name was changed to Thyssen Bornemisza in 1970.

¹⁴⁷ 1976 Commerce Department Report, vol. 5: G-120–146; the list is on page G-131. There are other such lists on Dutch manufacturing companies available for later dates. See for example, Arpan and Ricks, Directory of Foreign Manufacturers, 381, 384. The reader should not be concerned that the 1941 census identified 179 Dutch “controlled enterprises in the United States,” while the Commerce Department report only listed 30 firms. The first related to all Dutch firms (including those with sales outlets, those in banking and insurance, and those on “paper”— i.e., not set up for operations—companies), while the second list only included Dutch firms that manufactured in the United States. I do not think the 179 number in 1941 was greatly inflated because of wartime considerations, causing Dutch companies to transfer their business temporarily to the U.S., although that may have been the case in some instances.

¹⁴⁸ 1976 Commerce Department Report, vol. 5: G-132; Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4, notes that Royal Dutch Shell started to invest in nuclear energy projects in 1973 and gave them up in 1980. The General Atomic Company joint venture for U.S. business began in 1973. when “experts” in the United States (and worldwide) thought that nuclear energy would be a low-cost source of power. For various reasons, these expectations were not realized. After the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, there was a sharp turn away from the nuclear-energy route in America. In 1981, the joint venture ended, and Gulf Oil took over the Scallop Nuclear part of the partnership. See New York Times, 22 Dec. 1981.

¹⁴⁹ 1976 Commerce Department Report, vol. 5: G-133.

¹⁵⁰ The quote is from ibid.

¹⁵¹ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4, discusses how all four of these companies (Royal Dutch Shell, Unilever, Philips, and AKU/AKZO/Akzo Nobel) went through a global diversification strategy in the 1960s and 1970s, and then an “inversification” strategy after the mid-1980s. The timing of changes in the U.S. market seems to reflect the overall international strategies.

¹⁵² On Heineken, see Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism, 184. On the publishing companies, see Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4. In November 2002, two London based venture capital firms (Candover and Civen) bought Kluwer Academic Publishers from Wolters Kluwer, and in May 2003, Candover and Civen purchased BertelsmannSpringer from Bertelsmann AG. In 2004 Springer and Kluwer Academic Publishers merged, and the German Springer's name prevailed. In 2005 it was the Berlin-based Springer, rather than the Dutch Wolters Kluwer, that had the largest U.S. operations. Based on information in the Financial Times, 17 Sept. 2003, 2 July 2004, and 11 Apr. 2005, and Academia: An Online Magazine, Oct. 2004 (http://www.ypb.com/acad/features/1004_springer.html, accessed 10 May 2005).

¹⁵³ 1976 Commerce Department Report, vol. 5: G-129. On recent Shell history, I have found very useful Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 188–206.

¹⁵⁴ Royal Dutch Shell acquired Billiton in 1970 (its ownership of that company lasted until 1994, some twenty-four years). Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4.

¹⁵⁵ Wilkins, “The History,” III; see also Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 200–2.

¹⁵⁶ Shell Oil, Houston, press release, 27 Nov. 1985. Royal Dutch Shell had not put all its American business in Shell Oil and the latter's subsidiaries. Over the years, certain group business was kept separate. This was no longer necessary after the parent became 100 percent owners of Shell Oil. Nonetheless, some still remained separate.

¹⁵⁷ Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 203. Wall Street Journal, 2 July 1991, and 1 Feb. 1993. For a long explanation of the corporate difficulties, see Wall Street Journal, 30 Aug. 1991. In 1988, the company experienced two serious accidents that had a large impact on performance: that year, a key gasoline refinery of Shell Oil blew up in Norco, Louisiana (three years later, the refinery had still not been restored to full capacity); and, in 1988, there was a major (and very costly) pipeline rupture. Company employees complained of low morale caused by concerns over quality control and safety. By July 1991, Shell Oil was reporting its first quarterly loss in fifty-seven years, since the Great Depression. Earlier, in 1984–85, Shell had had labor strife at its Appalachian coal mines. Glickman, Norman J. and Woodward, Douglas P., The New Competitors: How Foreign Investors are Changing the U.S. Economy (New York, 1989), 66, 149–50Google Scholar. Royal Dutch Shell's coal business (worldwide) was not fully divested until 2000, albeit most of its U.S. coal assets had been divested long before 2000. Wilkins, “The History,” III, on oil companies and the diversification into mining, especially coal. When, in 1992, Shell Oil sold its large mining subsidiary to Ziegler Coal Holding, it did not sell Billiton Metals Inc., New York, a mineral trading company with about twenty employees. Shell Oil, PR Newswire, 19 June 1992. This Shell Oil news release is the best source I have seen on the history of Shell Oil's coal mining operations in the United States. When the divestment was made, Shell Mining ranked as one of the ten largest coal-producing companies in the United States. The sale of Billiton Metals Inc. came later, after the 1994 divestment of Billiton by the parent, Royal Dutch Shell. Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism, 69. Billiton Metals Inc. was a metal trading company.

¹⁵⁸ Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 203; Wall Street Journal, 30 Aug. 1991.

¹⁵⁹ Priest, “The ‘Americanization’ of Shell Oil,” 203. In Gittelman, Michelle, Kogut, Bruce, and Barrett, Rachel, “The Continuing Impact of Foreign Multinationals on the United States Economy” (unpublished report supported by the Reginald H. Jones Center, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 2000, pt. 1, 3, and pt. 3, 191)Google Scholar, information is given for the U.S. employment of Shell Oil Co. in 1998 that seems to reflect the further downsizing. The number of Shell Oil Co. employees was 20,463. (This figure did not include another 8,447 employees, which would bring the number up to 28,910, who were in Shell Pipe Line Corp., Shell Offshore Corp., Shell Energy Resources Inc., and Shell Catalysts Ventures Inc. It also did not include any employment figures for Shell Chemical Corp.) In my text earlier, I gave the “Shell Oil” numbers as 34,000 in the late 1980s, 32,000 at the start of 1991, 25,000 at the end of 1992; I am assuming that the 20,463 in 1998 would be the analogous figure–although I am not sure. There continued to be a difference between the number of people employed by the various Shell companies in the United States and the number employed by “Shell Oil.”

¹⁶⁰ Details on these two joint ventures are given in a Shell Oil Company press release, 18 Mar. 1997.

¹⁶¹ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4.

¹⁶² New York Times, 9 Feb. 2002. Of the approximately 13,000 gas stations with the Texaco name, it set out to rebrand and upgrade about 90 percent, shutting down the balance.

¹⁶³ Ibid., 28 Sept. 2002.

¹⁶⁴ World Investment Report 2003, 203.

¹⁶⁵ New York Times, 20 Sept. 2003. The $3 billion divestitures in 2003 included its agreement to sell 491 oil and natural gas wells in Michigan to the Merit Energy Company for $445 million.

¹⁶⁶ The Dutch parent firm was forced to revalue (to reduce the value of) its proven oil and gas reserves.

¹⁶⁷ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4.

¹⁶⁸ My thanks to Geoffrey Jones for the Shell press release, 28 Oct. 2004, and for thoughts on the implications of this change. Would the creation of the British company, the “PLC,” mean that this was no longer a “Dutch,” but now a British direct investment in the United States? For some interpretations of the change, see Financial Times, 28 June 2005. On that date, the stockholders voted to endorse the “marriage” proposal. New York Times, 29 June 2005.

¹⁶⁹ Based on material given me by Geoffrey Jones from chapter 3 of his forthcoming Renewing Unilever.

¹⁷⁰ I do not have the number of employees in the United States. North America included the United States and Canada. This number is from a booklet: Hoven, H. F. van den, Managing an International Company (Rotterdam, 1979), 6.Google Scholar Jones writes me that the “North American” figures reflect “the management group.” He believes that the employment in Canada was only a small part of the total (less than 10 percent). E-mail from Jones to Wilkins, 19 Oct. 2004.

¹⁷¹ Jones, “Control, Performance, and Knowledge Transfers,” 473–74; Jones, Renewing Unilever, ch. 3.

¹⁷² Wilkins, “The History,” III. I have profited from discussions with Geoffrey Jones on these matters. See also Jones, Renewing Unilever, ch. 4.

¹⁷³ It is not clear whether this figure is for 1997 or 1998, but it is probably 1997. It is given in Gittelman, Kogut, and Barrett, “The Continuing Impact of Foreign Multinationals,” pt. 3, 234.1 have found their employment figures very difficult. Gittleman, Kogut, and Barrett give the following figures for Unilever in the United States: (1) Unilever United States Inc. (26,946); (2) Helene Curtis Industries Inc., “subsidiary of Conopco” (2,500); (3) Helene Curtis Inc., subsidiary of Helene Curtis Industries Inc. (2,500); (4) Good Humor Corp., subsidiary of Unilever NV (2,000); and (5) Diversey Lever Inc., subsidiary of Unilever United States Inc. (1,400). I think entries 2 and 3 are the same, for they have the same sales and the same number of employees. Gittelman, Kogut, and Barrett did not include Lipton or Lever Brothers, probably because they were put under the holding company Unilever United States Inc. in 1977. Gittleman, Kogut, and Barrett added up numbers 1, 2, and 4, excluded 3 and 5, and got 31,446 Unilever employees in the United States, undated, but I think it was 1997. See ibid., pt. 1, 2, for my guess that this is for 1997.

¹⁷⁴ Financial Times, 24 Nov. 2001; Wall Street Journal, 14 Feb. 2003.

¹⁷⁵ In 2003–04 the label on Hellmann's Real Mayonnaise in small print did indicate that this was a product made by Unilever Bestfoods, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, and that BRING OUT THE BEST and HELLMANN'S were registered trademarks of “Unilever Bestfoods Affiliated Companies.” On the other hand, the box containing Lipton's Cup-a-Soup had no identification with “Unilever,” only with Lipton, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey. A 2005 box of Dove soap did identify it as a product of Unilever, Trumbull Conn., “Made in U.S.A.” But there was no identification of Unilever as a “foreign” company on the Dove soap label—or on the label of any of its many products.

¹⁷⁶ Wall Street Journal, 14 Feb. 2003.

¹⁷⁷ I have relied on Geoffrey Jones (14 May 2005) for an explanation on these changes.

¹⁷⁸ 1976 Commerce Department Report, vol. 3: A-66–67. An even better source on the variety of products as well as the major divisions and subsidiaries are North American Philips, Annual Reports, which were issued beginning in 1970 (when there came to be minority shareholders).

¹⁷⁹ “Royal Philips Electronics N.V.,” Hoover's Company Records: In-depth Records, 6 Oct. 2004 (henceforth cited as “Philips History, 2004”), p. 4 of 9. In 1972, NV Philips's Phonographische Industrie (PPI), a company established in Holland in 1950, was renamed Phonogram International BV; at origin, it became a subsidiary of the new PolyGram BV, which was 50 percent owned by Philips and 50 percent owned by Siemens. That year, 1972, PolyGram acquired Mercury Records, which was then renamed Phonogram Inc. By 1975, PolyGram had sales organizations in some twenty-five countries, including the United States, and its record labels included Philips, Mercury, and others. Jan Paulussen, “Brief History of PolyGram,” 29 Nov. 2004 (received from author). See also Bakker, Gerben, “The Making of a Music Multinational: The International Strategy of Polygram, 1945–1998,” AFM Working Paper no. 12 (Summer 2003)Google Scholar, Department of Accounting, Finance, and Management, University of Essex.

¹⁸⁰ On Sony and Matsushita's entry into the United States, see Kenney, Martin and Florida, Richard, Beyond Mass Production (New York, 1993), 220–21.Google Scholar On Philips's possible partnership with Motorola in the immediate postwar period, see Blanken, , Philips Electronics, vol. 4: 312Google Scholar; NV Philips had two joint ventures in Japan with Matsushita (for manufacturing and marketing). The most important was Matsushita Electronics Corporation, started in 1952; it produced, on the basis of Philips technology, the components for the end products of Matsushita Electric Industrial Company. Philips had no influence on its Japanese partner's U.S. strategies; Matsushita's entry into the United States was seen by the Philips management as a competitive challenge, not as a cooperative arrangement. Chronology from NV Philips, Nov. 2004, on the 1952 joint venture; data from Ivo Blanken, Nov. 2004, on the arrangements. Matsushita Electronics Corporation, the manufacturing joint venture between NV Philips and Matsushita Electric Industrial Company, was controlled by the latter. On this venture and on the second joint venture, Philips Japan, see Putten, Frans-Paul van der, “Corporate Governance and the Eclectic Paradigm: The Investment Motives of Philips in Taiwan in the 1960s,” Enterprise and Society 5 (Sept. 2004): 492, 497, 499Google Scholar; Blanken, , Geschiedenis van Koninklijke Philips, vol. 5: 185–99Google Scholar; and data provided to me by Blanken, 25 Oct. 2004. On Magnavox, chronology from NV Philips, Nov. 2004. In 1974, the other four leading color TV brands were Zenith, RCA, Motorola (just taken over by Matsushita), and Sylvania. For the rankings, Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, Inventing the Electronic Century (New York, 2001), 32.Google Scholar The 1974 acquisition of about 84 percent of the Magnavox Company almost doubled the size of North American Philips (in 1975, it completed the acquisition, obtaining 100 percent). North American Philips, Annual Report 1975, 2.

¹⁸¹ 1976 Commerce Department Report, vol. 3: A-69.

¹⁸² Data from Wallace E. J. Collins, vice president and secretary, North American Philips Corporation, to Mira Wilkins, 15 Nov. 1975: for 1961, Philips Roxane, Inc., sales office, animal pharmaceutical products; for 1968, the S. & H. X-Ray Company, sales and service office, medical X-ray equipment, and Thompson-Hayward Chemical Company, distributors, industrial and agricultural chemicals; for 1971, Amperex Electronics Corporation, consigned inventory, electronics components; Verd-A-Ray Corporation, sales office, electric lamps and lighting fixtures; and Philips Roxane Laboratories, Inc., warehouse, pharmaceutical products; for 1972, Advance Transformer Company: consigned inventory, transformers and ballasts for fluorescent and high-intensity discharge lamps; for 1974, North American Philips Communications Corporation, sales office, telephone equipment; for 1975, National Components Industries, manufacture of tantalum capacitators. The dates mark the entry into Florida business as provided by Collins. He also provided me with the other information given herein.

¹⁸³ See North American Philips Corporation, Annual Report 1980, on the 1981 acquisition of GTE Sylvania, which included radio as well as television activities. Ford Motor Company had acquired Philco in 1961, and a dozen years later, in 1973, Ford spun off the brand name and two of its Philco plants to GTE Sylvania—so that in 1981, in the process of buying GTE Sylvania, Philips got the brand name Philco as well as the Sylvania brand name. Chandler, Inventing the Electronic Century, 41. Sylvania had been among the first of the U.S. television makers to set up a maquila plant in Mexico in the 1960s, under the 1965 maquiladora program. “Maquiladora Industry: Past, Present, and Future,” Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, El Paso Branch, Issue 2 (2002), accessed on Web, 2 Jan. 2005. Over the years, Philips would establish a number of Mexican plants tied in with its U.S. business. When in 1995, the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) came into being, Philips already had plants in Mexico, integrated with its U.S. business.

¹⁸⁴ NV Philips's interest in the Japanese Matsushita Electronics Corporation did not stop Philips from its tie-ups with Sony, a rival of Matsushita. Indeed, in the United States, Matsushita was also very much a competitor of Philips. “Philips History, 2004,” p. 4 of 9 (Westinghouse); Chandler, Inventing the Electronic Century, 76.

¹⁸⁵ Paulussen, “Brief History of PolyGram.”

¹⁸⁶ Chronology, dated Mar. 1991, from NV Philips. It is extraordinary how long the trust form was maintained (from its pre-World War II origins to 1986, more than forty-five years). In 1970, one commentator, Nicholas Faith, was already predicting that its days were numbered. Faith, The Infiltrators, 84. The longevity is explained by Jan Paulussen as (1) a historical legal structure that seemed difficult to change; and (2) the notion of autonomous national organizations that was embedded in the Philips culture and seemed assured by the trust form. Paulussen, memorandum, 18 Nov. 2004. On the role of autonomous national organizations in NV Philips's international business and the desire in the mid-1980s to introduce product division responsibility on a global basis, see Pankaj Ghemawat and Pedro Nueno, “Revitalizing Philips,” Harvard Business School Case N9–702–474 (2 May 2002), 2–5. It should be pointed out that by the last half of the 1980s, some of the original reasons for the form were no longer germane, for example, the antitrust considerations (U.S. antitrust policy had entered a new phase). Moreover, with a “global economy,” sourcing for national organizations was no longer national.

¹⁸⁷ Philips, “Philips USA” [1990], 1, 3.

¹⁸⁸ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4. In 1998 the parent was once more renamed, this time from Philips Electronics NV to Royal Philips Electronics NV.

¹⁸⁹ See North American Philips, SEC 10K form, document date 31 Dec. 1991, filing date, 3 Mar. 1993, for fiscal year ended 31 Dec. 1991. This form is headed “cross-reference: subsidiary of Philips NV (NYS)—11/87.” David Yoffie indicates Philips's success with its 1975 acquisition of Signetics. While other European companies had entered the semiconductor market, he writes that Philips was the only European firm to remain a top-ten semiconductor firm in 1991. Yoffie, David B., “Foreign Direct Investments in Semiconductors,” in Foreign Direct Investment, ed. Froot, Kenneth A. (Chicago, 1993), 210n11.Google Scholar See also Philips, “Philips USA” [1990].

¹⁹⁰ According to Ghemawat and Nueno, “Revitalizing Philips,” 5, Jan Timmer had taken over as CEO of NV Philips in 1990 “amid rumors that the company was going bankrupt.” It got out of the computer business entirely. In 1993, it sold its U.S. defense business to Carlyle (a privately held Washington-based merchant bank). In 1996, AT&T bought its cellular communications business. That year, it put its television plant in Greeneville, Tennessee, up for sale. In 1998, it sold its 75 percent interest in PolyGram to Seagram (Philips had listed Poly-Gram shares on the New York Stock Exchange in 1990, yet at the same it retained 75 percent of the shares, while 25 percent were publicly traded). On its problems and divestments, see Chandler, Inventing the Electronic Century, 76–77; Wall Street Journal, 28 July 1993; “Philips History, 2004,” p. 4 of 9; New York Times, 7 Sept. 1996; and Paulussen, “Brief History of PolyGram.” There were additional divestments by the parent as well, including its interest in Matsushita Electronics Corporation (its joint venture in Japan with Matsushita Electric Industrial Company). In the process of downsizing, Philips sold this minority equity interest in 1992. Some of the divestments were not based on “loss-makers,” but were rather done to bring in new resources to revitalize the business.

¹⁹¹ Wall Street Journal, 28 June 1996.

¹⁹² For a number of years, in consumer products, it had combined the Magnavox name with the Philips one as Philips-Magnavox. It decided in 2001 that this was confusing; it continued to use the Magnavox name, but positioned the latter in the lower end of the market. See Philips Web site, “Philips—2002, posted Sept. 2, 2004,” accessed 7 Oct. 2004; New York Times, 17 Sept. 2004. As for its Mexican operations, as of December 2003, Philips had eight export manufacturing plants in Ciudad Juarez, employing five thousand Mexicans. It also had Mexican plants in Monterrey, Queretaro, and Tijuana. These had been built over the years, under the Mexican-border program and with NAFTA. See note 183 above. Philips's Mexican operations in December 2003 were smaller than they had been in 2001. The cutback had been partly based on the high transaction costs of doing U.S.–Mexican business with the restrictions imposed after the events of September 11, 2001, and partly on the expansion of Philips's operations in Taiwan and China, which complemented (provided inputs for), but also substituted for, some of the Mexican business. On all of this, see Mira Wilkins, interviews in El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, 21–22 Sept. 2000; “Maquiladora Industry: Past, Present, and Future” (2002); Mexico's Maquila Information Center, Weekly Bulletins, 1 Dec. 2003, 23 Apr. 2004, accessed on the Web, http://www.maquilaportal.com/bulletin/bulletin104.htm, 2 Jan. 2005. The Mexican operations of Philips were linked logistically with the U.S. business as well as with businesses in other countries.

¹⁹³ On Philips Electronics' 1999 joint venture with the Korean LG (Lucky Goldstar) in LG Philips, see Murtha, Thomas P., Lenway, Stefanie Ann, and Hart, Jeffrey A., Managing New Industry Creation (Stanford, 2001), 206Google Scholar and 227n12.

¹⁹⁴ Chandler, Inventing the Electronic Century, 77; Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4.

¹⁹⁵ On recent Philips performance, I have used “Philips History, 2004,” p. 7 of 9, which shows losses for the parent of $2.3 billion in 2001, $3.4 billion in 2002, and a return to profitably in 2003, which showed a net income of $873 million.

¹⁹⁶ According to the Philips Web site (“parts of the whole”), accessed 7 Oct. 2004, the share was “one-third,” but by my calculations, based on data in “Philips History, 2004,” p. 5 of 9, $8.9 billion would be 24 percent of 2003 worldwide sales of $36.5 billion. Blanken, Nov. 2004, tells me my calculations are probably more accurate.

¹⁹⁷ The Philips Web site, accessed 7 Oct. 2004, contains descriptions of each of these businesses. In 1996, the company had had 13 product divisions; in 2000, this was reduced to six, and subsequently, the loss-making components division was eliminated and the activities were absorbed into the existing divisions. Ghemawat and Nueno, “Revitalizing Philips,” provide important historical information on the global product divisions, from the 1990s through 2001.

¹⁹⁸ New York Times, 28 Feb. 1998, on the date of the move to Amsterdam. On the 1998 employment figures, see Gittelman, Kogut, and Barrett, “The Continuing Impact of Foreign Multinationals,” pt. 3, 169. These are specifically given as 1998 U.S. figures. They do, however, include PolyGram, which was sold that year to Seagrams. And, alas, the figures do not add up. They include 2,200 employees at Polygram Records Inc., a subsidiary of Polygram Holding Inc.; 700 at Polygram Manufacturing and Dis[tribution?], a subsidiary of Polygram Holding Inc.; 4,000 at Philips Semiconductors Inc., a subsidiary of Philips Holding USA Inc.; and 22,800 at Philips Electronics North America, a subsidiary of Philips Holding USA Inc. The total comes to 29,700, rather than 34,900.

¹⁹⁹ According to the Philips Web site, accessed 7 Oct. 2004.

²⁰⁰ “Philips History, 2004,” p. 3 of 9; according to this same source, since 2001 the company has sold its health-care products group and its imaging unit. Ibid., p. 4 of 9. It seems to have sold part of what it acquired in 2001.

²⁰¹ Philips Web site, accessed 7 Oct. 2004.

²⁰² “Philips History, 2004,” p. 2 of 9; plus internet advertising of Norelco shavers.

²⁰³ “Philips History, 2004,” p. 3 of 9, and New York Times, 17 Sept. 2004. On the 1998 introduction of “Let's Make Things Better,” see Ghemawat and Nueno, “Revitalizing Philips,” 15. The phrase “Let's Make Things Better” was perceived in 2004 as indicating things were bad at the start. Mira Wilkins, interviews, Nov. 2004.

²⁰⁴ New York Times, 17 Sept. 2004. (The reduction of 30,000 employees is my number, based on the over 50,000 employees in the United States given in Philips, “Philips USA” [1990], 1, 22, and the 20,000 given in the New York Times article).

²⁰⁵ Akzo Nobel Web site, http://www.akzonobel.com, accessed 5 Oct. 2004.

²⁰⁶ See its Web site, accessed 5 Oct. 2004. The latter also gives the following information about activities in 2000–01: In 2000 in the United States Akzo Nobel purchased Bayer's “biologicals business,” Dexter Corporation's aerospace business, the U.S. “biotech” company CBSI, the U.S. powder-coating business of Ferro Corporation, and the industrial surfactant business of Crompton Corporation. In 2001, the Pharma business units Chefaro and the diagnostic business of Organon Teknika were divested. On Organon, 1970 to 1998, see Tausk, Organon and Verboog, Seventy Five Years Organon. It became part of the “pharma” group of Akzo Nobel.

²⁰⁷ Dates from New York Times, 1 Nov. 1972; see also 19 Jan. 1971. For further details, see Wilkins, “The History,” III. It is not clear how long ABN held this minority interest in ABD Securities Corporation; it was definitely not a shareholder in 1986. Gerarda Westerhuis, “The Dutch Banking Sector: National Legislation and Internationalisation: The Case of the ABN Bank,” Paper for EBHA Conference, Barcelona, Sept. 2004, indicates that ABN remained involved in ABD Securities at least until 1980; an article in Forbes, 8 Sept. 1986, 32, described ABD Securities Corporation as 75 percent owned by Dresdner Bank at that time, while an article in American Banker, 17 Feb. 1994, 5, reported that Dresdner Bank bought the extra 25 percent, which it did not own in 1986, from the Bayerische Hypotheken und Wechsel Bank. If both Westerhuis and Forbes are accurate, ABN divested between 1980 and 1986.

²⁰⁸ European Association for Banking History, Handbook on the History of European Banks, ed. Pohl, Manfred (Aldershot, 1994), 752CrossRef Google Scholar; Westerhuis, “How did Dutch Companies…?” 8–9; and de Vries, Vrom, and de Graaf, eds., Worldwide Banking, 370–71. This occurred after the passage of the 1978 International Banking Act, which altered the international banking environment.

²⁰⁹ Westerhuis, “How Did Dutch Companies…?” 9.

²¹⁰ See Wilkins, “The History,” III.

²¹¹ In 1977 the European-American Banking Corporation and the European-American Bank and Trust Company were joined in a holding company, European-American Bancorp, the subsidiary of which was the European-American Bank, which in 1978 was admitted to the New York Clearing House. In 1988, AMRO raised its interests in the European-American Bancorp by acquiring the Deutsche Bank shares (in exchange for AMRO's remaining 50 percent interest in H. Albert de Bary & Co., Amsterdam). Gall et al., The Deutsche Bank, 755–56, 768. For background, see de Vries, Vrom, and de Graaf, eds., Worldwide Banking, 369, 466. Wall Street Journal, 13 May 1987 (display advertisement for Amro Bank).

²¹² Adrian Tschogel, “US Subsidiaries of Foreign Banks since WW II: Why They Are Here?” (unpublished paper, April 2001), 10.

²¹³ The “offices” took different legal forms in the different cities.

²¹⁴ Wall Street Journal, 25 Nov. 1996; Financial Times, 31 Dec. 1996; see also Tschogel, “US Subsidiaries of Foreign Banks,” 10n11, for other acquisitions by ABN AMRO.

²¹⁵ Financial Times, 6 July 2001.

²¹⁶ ABN AMRO Web site, http://www.abnamro.com/com/homepage.jsp, accessed 22 Nov. 2000, and 15 Dec. 2000.

²¹⁷ Ibid., accessed 15 Dec. 2000. For a sense of how large that $171 billion is, according to data collected by the UNCTAD/Erasmus, in 2001 the total worldwide assets of the Royal Dutch Shell group was $112 billion, of Unilever, $47 billion, and of Philips, $34 billion. World Investment Report 2003, 187. Comparisons of banks and industrials are always flawed, but I give them to provide a sense of significance.

²¹⁸ Adrian Tschogel, “Foreign Banks in the United States since World War II,” in Foreign Multinationals in the United States, eds. Jones and Gálvez-Muñoz, 161.

²¹⁹ Tschogel, “US Subsidiaries of Foreign Banks,” 24; interviews with ABN AMRO executive in Miami, 2001. The ABN AMRO Web site is an excellent source of information.

²²⁰ Westerhuis, “How did Dutch Companies…?” 6. The same information is available in Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Casualty, 1990, 2022.

²²¹ The awkward quotation is the formulation in Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Casualty, 1990, 2022; apparently the branch was transformed into a subsidiary company.

²²² Westerhuis, “How did Dutch Companies…?” 6.

²²³ New York Times, 8 Apr. 1985.

²²⁴ Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Casualty, 1990, 2022.

²²⁵ Westerhuis lists Associated Doctors as nonlife (it handled both health and life insurance); Best's includes it as a life insurance company.

²²⁶ National Underwriter Property & Casualty-Risk & Benefits Management, 13 Feb. 1989. For more details, see Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Casualty, 1990, 2020–22.

²²⁷ Wall Street Journal, 12 Nov. 1989.

²²⁸ National Underwriter Property & Casualty-Risk & Benefits Management, 13 Feb. 1989.

²²⁹ Best's Insurance Reports, Property-Casualty, 1990, 2020.

²³⁰ Ibid., 20, for background on Aegon and its holdings in the United States in 1990. Still better, see Gales, B. P. A., Werken aan Zekerheid (The Hague, 1986), 369–90Google Scholar (English summary of the Dutch text), esp. 389–90.

²³¹ Financial Times, 31 Dec. 1996.

²³² http://www.ing.cz/cz-en/about_ing_worldwide.html, accessed 30 Sept. 2004. See also Richard Tomlinson, “Banking on America: How the U.S. Became the Land of Opportunity for Two Dutch Giants,” Fortune International, 24 Nov. 2003 (accessed LexisNexis, 28 Dec. 2004). The two Dutch giants in the title were the ING group and ABN AMRO.

²³³ wall street Journal, 2 June 1998; its “subsidiaries, Indiana Insurance and Peerless Insurance,” went along with the sale of Netherlands Insurance.

²³⁴ ING Web site, accessed 3 Jan. 2005, makes it very clear that ING in the United States intended to go far beyond life insurance and provide broad financial services.

²³⁵ Tomlinson, “Banking on America,” p. 2 of 8 (online), on ING's 2002 business. On November 18, 2004, the ING group announced that as a strategic decision it would sell the Life Insurance Company of Georgia to Jackson National Life, an indirect, wholly owned subsidiary of Prudential PLC. ING explained that the “funds generated from the transaction and the reduced capital requirements in ING's U.S. insurance are expected to improve ING Group's debt-equity ratio by 70 basis points and increase the capital coverage ratio of ING Insurance by 3 percentage points. The required capital will be reduced by ∈225 million as part of this transaction.” ING Web site, http://www.ing.com/index.jsp, accessed 3 Jan. 2005. The World Investment Report 2004, 129, noted that the trend among the largest MNEs in insurance was to diversify from nonlife insurance to life insurance, and from life insurance into other financial services. This certainly fit the ING story.

²³⁶ Top writers of “variable annuities” in the United States in 2003 (from the Insurance Information Institute) are listed in New York Times, 15 May 2005 (ING group's rank was seventh).

²³⁷ New York Times, 19 Feb. 1999; World Investment Report 2000, 110. Data on Aegon gross premiums from Ben Gales, 16 June 2005.

²³⁸ In December 2001, I was “sold” an annuity product offered by Transamerica. I got very elaborate brochures, none of which indicated the parent of Transamerica. In January 2002, I got a notice from SunTrust Securities (SunTrust had sold me the annuity product) that I owned an annuity–the insurance company, Aegon. There was no identification of nationality. The product was sold to me as an annuity from an “American company.” Subsequent statements from Transamerica did indicate Aegon as the parent, but there continued to be no identification of the Aegon group as Dutch.

²³⁹ For the sequence of acquisitions, see “The History of Fortis,” Fortis Web site, http: //www.fortis.com, accessed 1 Jan. 2005; Economist, 13 Mar. 1999 (gives size of acquisition of American Bankers Insurance Group, Inc.). According to the World Investment Report 2002, 266, in 2001 the Belgian Fortis acquired the Dutch Fortis in a transaction valued at $12.5 billion. This appears to be inaccurate. Other sources indicate that Fortis was still considered as Dutch in 2003. Its Web site describes the firm as having two head offices, one in Brussels (Belgium) and the other in Utrecht (the Netherlands). Subsequent to 2000, it was a Dutch-Belgian combination.

²⁴⁰ On the divestments, see “The History of Fortis,” Fortis Web site (accessed 1 Jan. 2005); Tomlinson, “Banking on America,” p. 2 of 8.

²⁴¹ See Hoover Company Records, 15 Mar. 2005, for American Retail Group, Inc., accessed 8 May 2005; Daily Deal, 18 Nov. 2004, found on LexisNexis, accessed 8 May 2005. The firm's Web page, advertising “C & A Spring/Summer 2005,” http://www.c-and-a.com, accessed 9 May 2005, indicates no U.S. business and a headquarters in Dusseldorf, Germany; it is not clear when this Dutch company switched its headquarters to Germany. The history segment on the firm's Web site omits entirely the foray of over fifty years into U.S. business, from 1948 to 2004. By 2005, the firm had also divested its British stores, so its European business was solely on the European continent. This family firm's business in the United States was extremely difficult to document. Secondary sources described the firm as highly secretive.

²⁴² Wilkins, “The History,” III.

²⁴³ According to Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism, 141. This was probably true for a very brief period of time, at the end of the 1990s and early in the twenty-first century. Hoover's Industry Snapshots, May 10, 2005, accessed on LexisNexis, 14 May 2005, suggests that first place in U.S. food retailing is now held by Wal-Mart, which just surpassed Kroger's. Costco, with its warehouse stores, has surged into third place. All three (Wal-Mart, Kroger's, and Costco) are American owned.

²⁴⁴ New York Times, 8 Sept. 2001.

²⁴⁵ Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4; “Royal Ahold,” Hoover's On-Line, 9 Nov. 2004, accessed on LexisNexis, 12 Nov. 2004; “Royal Ahold,” Hoover's On-Line, 10 May 2005, accessed on LexisNexus, 14 May 2005, and Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism, 141. According to the Hoover's On-Line reports, Royal Ahold had 1,489 stores in the United States at the end of 2003 and 1,499 stores at the end of 2004.

²⁴⁶ Mittal Web site, http://www.rediff.com/cms/print.jsp?docpath=/money/2005/mar/ 11, accessed 2 May 2005; and two Mittal press releases, 15 Apr. 2005. Mittal Steel was formed from the combination of Ispat International NV and LNM Holdings NV. It then merged with the International Steel Group. The latter–formed in 2002–was, before the merger, the second-largest steel company in America; with the addition of Ispat International NV's American operations, Mittal Steel became the largest steel company in the United States. Before the merger with ISG, Mittal Steel had operations in fourteen countries on four continents. On Lakshmi N. Mittal, see Economist, 30 Oct. 2004. On Mittal Steel NV, Rotterdam, see also “Mittal Steel Company NV,” Hoover's Company Records, 10 May 2005, accessed on LexisNexis, 14 May 2005.

²⁴⁷ It will be interesting to see how the U.S. Department of Commerce handles this new large “Dutch” direct investment in the United States, registered in Holland with a headquarters in London. Keetie Sluyterman and Geoffrey Jones have been speculating on what will happen with the British and Dutch FDI figures when Royal Dutch Shell is incorporated as a British company with a headquarters in the Netherlands. (E-mail from Keetie Sluyterman to Wilkins, 10 May 2005, and e-mail from Geoffrey Jones to Wilkins, 14 May 2005.) These comments suggest that the figures on FDI are often very vulnerable. Note that I have not given figures on Dutch FDI in the United States, by sector. Numbers to reflect broad generalizations are impossible to obtain from the U.S. Department of Commerce data; thus we cannot determine exactly what percentage of Dutch investments in the United States is in the service sector. The latest FDI position (stock) figures for Dutch direct investments in the United States, broken down by sector, are, as in the past, extremely unsatisfactory. I have not presented figures by sector because of the gaps in disclosures owing to the concentration of the investments in so few Dutch companies. (Figures provided by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, Commerce Department, are supposed to be confidential. There are groupings to prevent disclosure of individual company information.) At year end 2003, of the total $146.1 billion Dutch direct investment in the United States, $63.6 billion was in manufacturing, or 43.5 percent. Survey of Current Business, Sept. 2004, 78. For the industry classifications on petroleum and the range of service industries, see ibid., 96–98, none of which is broken down by nationality. What is not in manufacturing is not necessarily in services. For technical reasons (changes in definitions in the series), one cannot even compare that 43.5 percent in manufacturing with earlier reported statistics.

²⁴⁸ Some of the German connections have been mentioned earlier, but it is perhaps worthwhile to summarize certain of the highly diverse post-World War II links. Dresdner Bank (on its Web site) boasts about how, in 1958, it did the first postwar launch of foreign shares–Philips and Unilever–on the German stock exchanges. And then Dresdner Bank was the partner of ABN in ABD Securities Corporation, New York/Boston in 1972. Also in the banking sector the Deutsche Bank's connection to AMRO's 1968 entry into the two European-American banks was important. Philips's joint-venture with Siemens in PolyGram in 1972 that had its spread into U.S. direct investments is part of the German-Dutch-U.S. grouping. Yet the German-Dutch joint ownerships of ABD Securities Corporation, the European-American firms, and PolyGram failed to persist. The European-American Bank became purely Dutch (until it was sold to Citibank in 2001). ABD Securities became purely German owned. So, too, with PolyGram, Philips bought out Siemens in 1985 (and later, in 1998, sold Poly-Gram to Seagrams, a Canadian firm); its subsequent history did not restore any Dutch-German connection. Commenting on the “Dutch urge to cross the Atlantic,” a writer in the Financial Times in November 2000, wrote of Dutch companies' “remarkable lack of interest in European takeovers … Takeovers of German companies have in most cases turned out to be disasters.” Financial Times, 14 Nov. 2000. There were, in fact, a number of German-Dutch twenty-first century connections (in Wolters Kluwer's sale of Kluwer Academic to Springer, as an example) that did have ramifications in the United States. (Yet, in the Kluwer case, Springer took over and the headquarters moved to Germany). Another family firm with a long Dutch history that seems to have moved its headquarters to Germany was C. & A. Brenninkmeyer; this appears to have happened at the point when it was exiting from the U.S. market.

²⁴⁹ Yet the only full exit (because of “failure”) that I have been able to identify by an earlier, well-established–for over five decades–Dutch direct investor in the United States was that of the Brenninkmeyer firm. Of course, if the statisticians decide that the new Royal Dutch Shell PLC is British rather than Dutch, it might appear that that has been a Dutch “exit.”

²⁵⁰ Reader, Fifty Years of Unilever, 93–104. See also Jones, “Control, Performance, and Knowledge Transfers.”

²⁵¹ This manifested itself in the frequent restructuring by the large Dutch companies to eliminate “loss-making” operations and concentrate on core competencies. Sometimes the “partial” exits were quite substantial.

²⁵² Some scholars bring forth evidence to claim that this was true. I have evaluated the statistics that they cite, and what I have seen is not fully convincing, albeit it does seem, since the Euro has been introduced, that this possibly may be happening. For me, the jury is still out.

²⁵³ Indicative of the new positioning of U.S. policy, “antitrust” is not in the index of either the first or second editions of the excellent book by Caves, Richard E., Multinational Enterprise and Economic Analysis (Cambridge, U.K., 1st ed., 1982; 2nd ed., 1996). The first edition, pp. 117–18Google Scholar, does have a brief section on “U.S. antitrust policy,” while the second edition has a differently written but equally brief discussion of antitrust on pp. 91–93 and 101. In the second edition, Caves writes that “traditionally” the United States applied antitrust policies more vigorously than other industrial economies with smaller, more open economies. But that was in the past. And, he writes (p. 101), “If antitrust were an active policy area today, … “ implying that this was no longer true. In my own view, antitrust did remain important as related to foreign MNEs in the United States, but it was no longer as critical a consideration as it had once been. In Wilkins, “The History,” III, I will discuss the evolution of U.S. antitrust policies as they affected all foreign MNEs.

²⁵⁴ This is assuming we are not defining “performance” as simply survival. In discussing item 5 below, I do deal with longevity, where there are clear differences by nationality. Part of the problem on performance is that we lack consistent measures that are amenable to historical analysis. On this, see Cassis, Big Business, esp. pt. 2. The PerkinElmer, “Notice of Annual Meeting and Proxy Statement 2005,” 18 Mar. 2005, specifies nineteen separate “performance goals” (measures of performance) for “performance awards.” To try to monitor all of these through time and across many companies of many nationalities is impossible. But even if we were able to make cavalier choices to measure such matters as profitability, market share, and stock prices, for example, and if we could document performance appropriately through time by nationality (and industry), my studies lead me to doubt that there is any notable pattern of performance by nationality in FDI overtime, and specifically in FDI in the United States. For more on the general issues, see Geoffrey Jones and Lina Gálvez-Muñoz, “American Dreams,” in Foreign Multinationals in the United States, eds. Jones and Gálvez-Muñoz, 6–10. They make no attempt to discuss differences between nationalities. It has, however, been hypothesized that “distance” (political, geographic, economic, and cultural) increases risk and, perhaps by implication, limits performance (or requires higher returns to offset the transaction costs). See, for example, the work of Pankaj Ghemawat, as cited in Jones, Multinationals and Global Capitalism, 5. My version of the same argument uses the word “familiarity,” rather than “distance.” Wilkins, Mira, “What Is International Business? An Economic Historian's View,” in What is International Business, ed. Buckley, Peter J. (Houndmills, 2005), 135.Google Scholar Yet, by itself, there is no evidence that either shorter distance or greater familiarity guarantees business success through time to those companies of one nationality and not another, still assuming we are not defining success as simply survival.

²⁵⁵ There were some restrictions at various times, but they certainly do not account for the lower U.S. direct investments in Holland versus Dutch direct investments in the United States.

²⁵⁶ Alas, given the space, I cannot in this case (or later) provide enlarged and detailed country-by-country comparisons.

²⁵⁷ For many reasons, I am very wary of using FDI flow figures. As indicated earlier, in note 143, the Dutch central bank FDI “outward” flow figures revealed a Dutch pulling back from U.S. investments in 2002 and 2004. In 2003, however, by these same figures, there was an FDI outflow from Holland to the United States that was greater than the Dutch directinvestment flow to any other single country around the world: BUT if we average such figures for 2002, 2003, and 2004, the pulling back from U.S. investment (in 2002 and 2004) was not offset by the positive inflow into the United States figures for 2003. Dutch central bank figures on Dutch direct investment flows to the United States are shown in Table 5.6b (provided on the central bank's Web site, http://www.statistics.dnb.nl/index.cgi?lang=nl&todo=Balans, accessed 13 May 2005).

²⁵⁸ Anonymous referee report, sent out by Business History Review, 18 Apr. 2005.

²⁵⁹ And the history of Belgian MNEs in the financial sector, and to a lesser extent in chemicals, is not to be minimized.

²⁶⁰ The Financial Times, 14 Nov. 2000, noted that the British-Dutch associations in Royal Dutch Shell and Unilever were of long standing, and mechanisms had been developed to mitigate “corporate culture clash,” but the same was nor true of the more recent British-Dutch connections in Reed Elsevier (where there were troubles) and in Corus (the combination of British Steel and Hoogovens, about which “horror stories” were told). While the Reed Elsevier connection did have U.S. spillovers, Corus did not. E-mail from Sluyterman to Wilkins, 10 Feb. 2005 (“shared … tradition”). The British-Dutch connections also had long revolved around financial markets and the associations between the British and the Dutch stock exchanges.

²⁶¹ The German connections were much less coherent than the British-Dutch ones. They were, however, multiple. From Holland America, to Fokker, to AKU, to the potash story before World War II (as examples), to the post-World War II banking connections, to the Philips-Siemens one (in PolyGram), to other miscellaneous ones (see note 248 above), there were numerous, often short-lived, relationships that spilled over to affect Dutch FDI in the United States.

²⁶² Sluyterman, Dutch Enterprise, ch. 4, Conclusion.

²⁶³ Sluyterman, to be sure, never argued that this was an exclusively Dutch characteristic.

²⁶⁴ Is it possible that the Dutch feel more comfortable with the British than the Germans?

²⁶⁵ It has been suggested that the FDI/FPI ratio in the Dutch case increased after 1970, as Dutch multinationals expanded globally. Goey, “Dutch Overseas Investments,” 46, 49. My finding is that the relative increase came much earlier; indeed, compare the 1914 and 1941 ratios provided in the text of this article: 1914, ca. 20/80; 1941, ca. 51/49.

²⁶⁶ See Wilkins, The History, II. The ratios are useful in studying the role of stock exchanges. They are useful more generally in thinking about capital markets and universal banking. In my “The History,” III, I plan to investigate the course of these ratios through the post-World War II years. I feel very cautious about generalizing at this point in my inquiries. Sluyterman suggests that these ratios may be associated with “Dutch thrift, large savings, low interest rates and the high [absolute] level of [both] fdi and fpi.” E-mail from Sluyterman to Wilkins, 10 Feb. 2005.

²⁶⁷ Van Zanden, The Economic History of the Netherlands, 49.

²⁶⁸ Sometimes the cycle is cut short and sometimes it does not repeat itself. Sometimes, too, firms not only reinvent themselves but change nationality–as in the case of Holland America, for example.

²⁶⁹ Sometimes there was discontinuity with the German and Japanese parents as well, based on the policies during the occupation of each country in the aftermath of World War II.

²⁷⁰ The ambiguity of entry and longevity was general. For example, take the case of the ING group, as traced in this article. The initial entry of Netherlands Insurance Co. was in the nineteenth century; there was an exit and reentry in the twentieth century. From that reentry, while there were degrees of involvement, there was a continuity, but eventually after mergers and new acquisitions (at home and in the United States), the original fire (property and casualty) company was divested. The ING group today has its roots in that original entry (entries) but no longer owns that particular company. The divestment was not owing to failure, but rather to a change in strategy. And what date does one use for the Dutch Unilever entry? Here again, its origins in the United States were with Lever, and even earlier with Lipton, but these were not, for many decades, “Dutch” FDI. And Azko Nobel, as traced herein: like the ING group, the first U.S. entry of American Enka had products that are no longer part of the offerings of Azko Nobel today.

²⁷¹ For some of my findings as they related to Stephen Hymer's arguments, see Wilkins, , The History, II, 593–94.Google Scholar

²⁷² Many years ago I did an article on Japanese-American cross investments and was struck by the asymmetrical character of the industries involved in those cross investments. Wilkins, , “American-Japanese Direct Foreign Investment Relationships, 1930–1952,” Business History Review 56 (Winter 1982): 497–518.CrossRef Google Scholar

²⁷³ The term “comparative advantage” is usually used to deal with countries and, thus, is probably the appropriate focus for comparisons between national business systems. Competitive advantage is often used as company specific, indicating that a firm has a competitive advantage over others.

²⁷⁴ Some students of MNEs have challenged the notion of “advantage,” insisting that many foreign companies in recent years have invested in the United States to obtain from Americans their knowledge and skills. It is indeed true that many acquisitions in the United States were for that purpose. BUT, for a successful takeover, the parent needed to be able to use (to digest) the knowledge acquired; this was by no means automatic. The parent MNE's “advantage” lay in its ability to absorb and to incorporate successfully within the MNE organization the fruits of the takeovers. MNEs not only diffuse their knowhow but also learn from their international experience, and there is–and has long been–reverse diffusion.

²⁷⁵ Apparently, over many decades, the key executives in these companies discussed with one another general international business strategies that were not industry specific. Based on Wilkins, interviews, 2004–05.

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Dutch Multinational Enterprises in the United States: A Historical Summary

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