Articles in this issue of Business History Review examine the role of governments in regulating business enterprise and also the consequences, sometimes unintentional, of those regulatory efforts. In “Contractual Freedom and Corporate Governance in Britain in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Timothy Guinnane, Ron Harris, and Naomi Lamoreaux describe the effects of a flexible legal regime that allowed corporations latitude in shaping their own articles of association. The authors argue that, contrary to the findings of recent research done in this field, corporations tended to write contracts that shifted power from shareholders to directors. In their article on the European Single Market, Michael Mayer, Julia Hautz, Christian Stadler, and Richard Whittington analyze the efforts of many European companies, after 1992, to adopt strategies of diversification and internationalization. Britain's exception to this general pattern, they suggest, foreshadowed its later exit from the European Union. In the “Origins of American International Retailing,” Nicholas Alexander and Anne Marie Doherty describe the way a famous New York jewelry store, Tiffany & Co., expanded overseas through the development of numerous international partnership agreements. Finally, in “Arc of Empire: The Federal Telegraph Company, the U.S. Navy, and the Beginnings of Silicon Valley,” Stephen Adams suggests that the origin of Silicon Valley's expansion in the twentieth century was linked to the priorities of American foreign policy and the array of federal funds and government technology devoted to meeting those goals.
This issue also features two review essays: Catherine O'Donnell's review of Heather A. Haveman's Magazines and the Making of America: Modernization, Community, and Print Culture, 1741–1860 and Michael Green's survey of recent books on the development of the American West, including T. J. Stiles's Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America and two edited collections, Civil War Wests: Testing the Limits of the United States and Empire and Liberty: The Civil War and the West.
