This article recounts the story of the Bombay Plan of 1944, a bold vision of economic transformation for postwar India put forth by business leaders. The Plan represented a turning point in the history of Indian business. It marked the institutionalization of a long relationship between business and nationalist leadership as well as a historic moment when business groups, for the first time, unhesitatingly aligned themselves with nationalist aspirations. Underlying the Bombay Plan was the idea of a close partnership between business and the state. Yet, within a decade, this optimism died out as the autarchic features of economic policy became increasingly pronounced in independent India. The story of the Bombay Plan provides an insight into the relations between business and state in the context of development planning in India.

Analysts of the post-war German “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) have diverged sharply over its origins and dynamic. The well-known Olson thesis stresses the importance of a radical break in institutions and interests, while other historians have recently posited the centrality of continuities from the fascist era to the Bonn republic. This article examines the history of Volkswagen, the largest firm in the crucial automobile industry, to understand the balance between continuity and change and systemic and conjunctural factors in the impressive success of this firm. Tolliday rejects the Olsonian notion of institutional “cleansing” and argues that the legacies of both fascism and the British Occupation were vital but that during the 1950s overlapping institutional structures, argumentative interest groups and rival political coalitions at VW could well have choked off growth in the absence of quite favorable circumstances.

In the years following World War II, the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) regained the political effectiveness it had lost during the New Deal. This article analyzes NAM's resurgence within the context of the rising popularity and political strength of organized business in the postwar period. It argues that NAM's success is only partly explained by external factors, such as the policies of Truman administration and divisions among labor organizations. NAM's renewed ability to shape national affairs resulted from an internal transformation that vastly improved its administrative capacity, and from a change in its public relations and labor policies. These efforts came to fruition when NAM proved able to dominate the proceedings of the 1945 Labor-Management Conference.

Accounts of the “birth of the petroleum industry” traditionally have emphasized the discovery and exploitation of early oil fields. Equally important, however, was the growth of a market for the production of those fields. Little information has hitherto been available about Dr. Abraham Gesner and his Kerosene Works. Here was one of the significant origin points for a major industrial development. Gesner's story, interesting in itself, contributes greatly to an understanding of all phases of the early petroleum industry.

Looking back on the 1920's, it has become fashionable to accuse black businessmen of betraying and exploiting the Negro masses for their own gain. The career of George W. Lee, however, suggests that some black capitalists did much more than use racial pride for economic profit. They could be the real cutting edge of Negro protest, providing local leadership and a militant philosophy in a period characterized by capitulation to the white majority.

Rogue trading has been a persistent feature of international financial markets over the past thirty years, but there is remarkably little historical treatment of this phenomenon. To begin to fill this gap, evidence from company and official archives is used to expose the anatomy of a rogue trading scandal at Lloyds Bank International in 1974. The rush to internationalize, the conflict between rules and norms, and the failure of internal and external checks all contributed to the largest single loss of any British bank to that time. The analysis highlights the dangers of inconsistent norms and rules even when personal financial gain is not the main motive for fraud, and shows the important links between operational and market risk. This scandal had an important role in alerting the Bank of England and U.K. Treasury to gaps in prudential supervision at the end of the Bretton Woods pegged exchange-rate system.

Although the U.S. steel industry's concentrated market structure and well-established production technology curbed active research by most steel firms, between 1880 and 1910 vertical research arrangements between steel producers and steel consumers, notably the Pennsylvania Railroad, became a key factor in promoting both increased innovation in basic steel products and increased innovative effort by steel producers, albeit slowly and gradually. Thus, research into steel was initiated not by steel producers but by steel consumers, who established in-house industrial research laboratories and interfirm cooperative research arrangements as a means to solve their technical problems with steel products. They also began to work toward creating an institution—the American Society for Testing Materials—that would allow for effective interaction with other consuming firms and, eventually, with producing firms to exchange information and build consensus.

For the first few years of this century, Brazil was the major supplier of rubber to the world. However, the Amazonian wild rubber industry was unable to compete, in either price or quality, with the Asian plantation rubber that began to appear on world markets after 1906. Development of a successful plantation culture in the Amazon seemed imperative, but even with public subsidy, plantations remained an economic impossibility. By 1945 the Brazilian rubber industry, overwhelmed by Asian production, had virtually disappeared.

Business history has been a thriving academic industry in Britain for the last three decades. Following some pioneering case studies of Industrial Revolution entrepreneurs by the early giants of the discipline of economic history, the postwar generation has produced a series of high quality company histories. The first of these, published in 1954, was Charles Wilson's history of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, formed by a merger of Lever Brothers and Margarine Unie in 1929. Wilson's book set the pattern for a high standard of scholarship, resting on complete freedom of access to company archives, and for publication based on scholarly independence rather than the public relations needs of the commissioning organization. If some of its terms of reference now seem dated, and its framework of analysis somewhat unscientific, then that is an indication of the incentive Wilson provided for others to do better, particularly in the use of economic theory and of comparative analysis setting firms in their industrial or international context.

This article employs previously unused accounting data and manuscript censuses to determine the impact of the Great Depression on Brazil's most important cotton textile manufacturers. It argues that the Great Depression, when viewed at the level of the individual business enterprise, had far more serious consequences than the previous literature, which relied on aggregate statistical data, suggests. The analysis presented here leads to the conclusion that Brazil's major cotton firms were in serious trouble prior to the 1929 Crash and that they took longer to recover than most other studies of Brazilian industrialization have indicated.

While Britain never had a scientific management movement like that in America, historians have exaggerated the negative reaction of British engineers to the ideas of F. W. Taylor and other American proponents of business efficiency. A review of the leading British engineering journals in the early twentieth century reveals that Taylorism received a fair amount of attention, and much of it positive. By the beginning of the First World War, the majority of trade journals were echoing Taylor's demands for a new type of management. The misapprehension on behalf of historians stems from a number of factors: an overemphasis on articles published during years of labor agitation, such as 1911 and 1912; and, a failure to appreciate the different way in which scientific management was perceived in Britain. This fuller understanding of British responses to Taylor and his ideas helps to elucidate a chapter in the broader history of British economic performance and managerial methods in the twentieth century.

This special issue is concerned with new approaches in business history to exploration of the role of business in both creating and addressing the mounting environmental crisis that has become apparent over the last half century. Two decades have passed since Business History Review published a pioneering special issue on business and the natural environment. The guest editors of that issue, Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers, called for an “ecocultural approach” to business history and noted that strikingly little attention had been given to the issue of business and the natural environment in the field.

The Westinghouse air brake, a significant technical innovation in the railroad industry of the late nineteenth century, was applied to freight trains much more gradually than it was to passenger trains. In this article, Mr. Usselman explains why this was the case. Many factors, including the public movement for railroad safety, the organization of railroad brakemen, the rise of effective regulatory mechanisms at the federal level, and technical problems with the device, influenced the diffusion of the air brake and differentiated the freight and passenger cases. New administrative procedures for moving freight trains through the extensive national railroad system, which involved the interchange of equipment among many companies, presented obstacles to innovation that did not exist in the passenger branch of the industry. Individual companies seeking to adopt the air brake for freight service found that these procedures limited the independence they had traditionally enjoyed when assessing new technology. Most railroads equipped their freight trains with air brakes only after they developed new methods of coordinating industrywide action on matters of technological change.

The rise and fall of discriminatory legislation against traveling salesmen is fully documented in this study of a negative vein of American business history.

This study traces the evolution of several large and powerful trade associations in early twentieth-century Germany and seeks to place them in comparative perspective.

Lax regulation enabled trust companies to take excessive risks, according to previous studies of the Panic of 1907, leading to a loss of confidence and massive runs. These studies have, however, given relatively little attention to the historical development of trust companies. This article argues that a more historical perspective can lead to a better understanding of the institutional framework and the actions of trust companies. Depositors did not lose confidence because of inadequate regulation; depositors lost confidence in specific trust companies because of false rumors, and diversity among trust companies hindered cooperation to halt the Panic.

In reconstructing the early business history of black America, Professor Walker emphasizes the diversity and complexity of antebellum black entrepreneurship, both slave and free. With few exceptions, prevailing historical assessments have confined their analyses of pre-Civil War black business participation to marginal enterprises, concentrated primarily in craft and service industries. In America's preindustrial mercantile business community, however, blacks established a wide variety of enterprises, some of them remarkably successful. The business activities of antebellum blacks not only offer insights into the multiplicity of responses to the constraints of racism and slavery, but also highlight relatively unexplored areas in the historical development of the free enterprise system in the United States.

Applying a formulation devised by Burton G. Malkiel to stock prices prior to the market crash of 1929, this study finds that descriptions of the period as a “speculative orgy” are misleading.

The number of multinationals in the life-insurance sector expanded during the first era of globalization. Many of these firms gravitated to Spain, attracted by factors such as the country's small number of national companies and minimal regulatory requirements. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, the Spanish government began to impose more institutional regulations, increasing the guarantees, deposits, and reserves required of insurance companies. In response, American and British multinationals began to leave the Spanish market, propelled both by the new requirements and by a series of external factors that obliged American companies to reduce their international business. Finally, the economic disruption that accompanied the outbreak of World War I convinced American and British multinationals to withdraw from the Spanish insurance business.

Robert Noyce's career at Fairchild Semiconductor sheds light on several developments that were central to the growth of Silicon Valley and the semiconductor industry: entrepreneurship, technical leadership, and the management of growth in a high-technology company. Noyce served as Fairchild Semiconductors first head of R&D and as its general manager for the six years of the company's most dramatic growth. His technical orientation, personal interest in new technologies, and hands-off management style helped establish a culture at the firm that welcomed innovations in research, process technology, manufacturing, and marketing. As Fairchild Semiconductor grew into a multidivisional mass producer, Noyce's entrepreneurial leadership proved inadequate. Communication breakdowns between divisions, coupled with a series of poor decisions by the parent company, further contributed to the decline of Fairchild Semiconductor.