Ethnographic methods are applied to this investigation of the links between language and business culture found in letters exchanged in the 1880s, 1900s, 1930s, and 1940s among members of a long-lived family-owned business. The letters are contained in three sets of correspondence between three different generations of the Bates family, who were merchants, shipowners, and private bankers based in Liverpool. The aim is to develop a different perspective from which to consider communicating processes, business culture, social mobility, and the socialization of managers. The study invites consideration of the appropriateness of accepted behavioral assumptions attributed to economic actors and the significance of judgment and instinct in decision-making.

International capital flows are strongly influenced by countryspecific patterns that can be best understood in historical and comparative perspective. A long-term empirical analysis of French and German investment in Spain reveals that the core capabilities of foreign fi rms and their relations with local partners have spurred the rise and development of two national models of international investment, characterized here as “political” and “technical.” The research identifies the main actors and the ownership advantages of the two models that have proved to be so resilient over time.

From the late 1890s through the 1920s, a new set of nonprofit, business-funded organizations spearheaded an American campaign against commercial duplicity. These new organizations shaped the legal terrain of fraud, built massive public-education campaigns, and created a private law-enforcement capacity to rival that of the federal government. Largely born out of a desire among business elites to fend off proposals for extensive regulatory oversight of commercial speech, the antifraud crusade grew into a social movement that was influenced by prevailing ideas about social hygiene and emerging techniques of private governance. This initiative highlighted some enduring strengths of business self-regulation, such as agility in responding to regulatory problems; it also revealed a key weakness, which was the tendency to overlook deceptive marketing when practiced by firms that were members of the business establishment.

The risk of hurricanes made planting in the British Greater Caribbean, a region stretching from Barbados through South Carolina, an especially volatile and uncertain business during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The storms were a new experience for European colonists, and they quickly became the most feared element of the region's environment. Hurricanes routinely leveled plantations and towns, destroyed crops and infrastructure, and claimed hundreds of lives. The widespread destruction resulted in significant losses for planters and necessitated major reconstruction efforts. Most planters survived these economic shocks, often with the help of outside credit, but at times hurricanes were the breaking point for smaller or heavily indebted planters. The profits that came from sugar and rice kept planters rebuilding, but the threat posed by the storms shaped the experience of plantership in the region throughout the period.

According to a key participant, members of both the outgoing and incoming administrations worked side-by-side during the banking crisis of 1933. Their concern was not politics, but rather the search for a solution to the nation's financial problems — even though relations between President Herbert Hoover and President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt were not so amicable. Thus, the resultant banking holiday and Emergency Banking Act were not sole products of either the Republican or the Democratic administrations but the results of pragmatic, cooperative attempts to meet and solve the crisis.

The first magnetic recorder, the telegraphone, was invented in 1898 in Denmark. Despite favorable publicity and considerable investment, the telegraphone was a commercial failure. This article uses the theoretical concept of “frames of meaning” to explain that failure, focusing on three factors in particular: Denmark's status as a technologically peripheral country, the telephone orientation of the telegraphone's inventors, and management failures by the firm set up to manufacture the machine.

This article analyzes all known cases of foreign direct investment in British manufacturing prior to 1890. From 1890 onwards the bulk of foreign entrants were industrial goods producers. Before 1890, the pioneering entrants were mostly consumer goods manufacturers. The article demonstrates that, with one monumental exception, these pioneers were narrowly focused, driven entirely by a concern about enhancing access to the British market. Typically they failed. The one exception was the Singer Manufacturing Company. This investment was of an entirely different nature. Singer's commitment was large and non-reversible from almost the very beginning, and was predicated on an awareness of the possibility of using Britain as an export platform. Its consequence was the emergence of Singer as the world's first modern multinational enterprise and as one of the world's largest firms by 1900.

It has been claimed that the diversified mercantile capitalist of eighteenth-century Britain was replaced by the specialist industrialist of the nineteenth. This study of Manchester cotton merchants who moved into fire insurance in the 1820s examines the neglected strategy of collective diversification. It argues that the merchants' decision to diversify cannot be explained by short-term financial or economic considerations arising out of the insurance or cotton markets and only partly by long-run issues such as profit maximization and constraints on growth. Collective diversification is best understood as part of a broader attempt to create a system of interlocking services by an urban oligarchy seeking both to improve the economic infrastructure of their region and to consolidate the economic and political power of their group.

Nineteenth-century newspapers, exchanges, and governments relied heavily for their daily information upon an alliance of four international telegraph services: Havas (Paris), Reuters (London), Wolff's (Berlin), and the Associated Press (New York). The connections of the wire services to financial and official circles bred suspicions that they offered privileged information and suppressed or inserted reports on behalf of special interests. Corporate and official records reveal the wire services’ reliance upon the subsidies, information, and telegraph facilities of firms and governments. As a result, world news coverage was, if not “poisoned” at the source, at least dammed up, filtered, channeled, or watered down.

In the first of two articles, Professors Aduddell and Cain introduce the complex relations between a dynamic meatpacking industry and a government committed, in uncertain degree, to the philosophy of antitrust. From its earliest beginnings as an industry in the 1830s, meatpacking has experienced constantly changing parameters of technology, supply, demand, and public policy. Matters reached the first of several climaxes a few years after the new and naive Federal Trade Commission was established. Admittedly the dominant factor in a highly integrated meat industry, the largest companies were diversifying into non-meat food products, giving rise to the charge that they proposed to “monopolize” the entire food industry. The outcome was a consent decree in 1920 that, in confirming the large companies in their domination of meatpacking in return for their withdrawal from non-meat foods, revealed a government with a very weak case against an industry that it had made the cynosure of 120 million Americans. True to the familiar pattern of antitrust settlements, the dynamics of technology in transportation and marketing thereupon proceeded to render the decree meaningless. The second article, bringing the subject down to recent times, will appear in the Autumn issue.

Cartels were critical to the shaping of twentieth-century market structures. Although laws against cartels began to be passed in the 1950s, the attitude toward these collusive organizations remained constant over most of the century. Enforcement did not begin until well into the 1990s. Dutch policy within the European framework underwent a series of adjustments, and changes in the Dutch business system indicate a shift toward a more liberal market economy, which was accompanied by an increasingly negative view of cartels.

Professor Yen-p'ing Hao analyzes the economic, social, political, and intellectual roles of a Chinese mercantile class which served as a link between China and the West.

This article focuses on chemical retailers Jack and Charles Colbert to, first, show the externalization processes linked to the greening of U.S. industry through stricter consumer and environmental protection regulations and, second, illustrate the limitations of nationally framed environmentalism targeting businesses in a global market. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Colberts traded chemicals that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had banned for use in the United States. They exported them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity—primarily in the global South. Rare interview material illustrates how the exporters justified their unequal business deals by misappropriating the meaning of recycling.

This paper presents a reading of British literary representations of commercial travelers between 1800 and 1939. Three forms of representation are used: nonfiction representations by others, travelers' self-representations, and fictional representations. We find remarkable continuity in representations of commercial travelers across this long time period, particularly in terms of a sustained tension between the image of the disreputable “drummer” and the more respectable “model” salesman. These readings and findings are used to address two debates: one concerned with the timing of any transition to “modern” selling and salesmanship in Britain; and the second having to do with the processes whereby British society accommodated itself to modernity, commercialization, and the birth of a consumer society.

Among the factors that have assured the success of units of “multinational” firms like the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, according to Professor Little, is the willingness of the parent's home government to use its diplomatic strengths to assure that a host government lives up to its contractual obligations, even after radical changes in its leadership. Using diplomatic correspondence of the United States with ITT and the Spanish Republic of the 1930s, he demonstrates the vital nature of these strengths at a time when the tensions between “communism” and “fascism” were new and vigorous, and reaches a startling conclusion about the sameness under the skin of the two ideologies where the rights of foreign concessionaries are concerned.

The concept of path dependence is used to compare the evolution of the organizational forms of two groups of transportation and warehousing firms, the Dutch vemen and the Antwerp naties, that operated in seaports between c.1500 and 1900 and beyond. Their adoption of cooperative forms reflected the corporative guild creed that prevailed in early modern European cities. After 1815, when their businesses were no longer regulated by local governments, the vemen and naties remained locked into the cooperative form of governance that had prevailed for so long. This organizational form gradually adapted to changing circumstances, but its egalitarian structure remained intact until the late nineteenth century (vemen), and even into the twentieth century (naties). The two groups of firms’ organizational forms evolved differently under the impact of the legacy of the early modern period and the weight of their own later distinctive experiences.

British overseas investment was a powerful force behind rapid global integration before World War I. Close to half of the total was in the form of foreign direct investment. Weetman Pearson was among the most successful of Britain's overseas-based entrepreneurs of the period. By 1919, the Pearson group of companies had become one of Britain's most valuable industrial enterprises, having diversified from international contracting into the Mexican oil industry. The Pearson group highlights the technical competence of British entrepreneurs in managing large, complex infrastructure projects, capable of navigating their way through various political systems, and adept at turning to whichever organizational form best suited their business interests. These characteristics were far removed from the now outdated stereotype of the incompetent late Victorian entrepreneur.

This paper offers a detailed case study of the emergence, organization, and development of research and development at E. Merck. During the 1890s, revolutionary changes in the scientific knowledge base, especially the rise of bacteriological research and the entry of dyestuff producers into the pharmaceuticals market, combined with the financial distress Merck was undergoing to force the firm to reorganize pharmaceutical research as a corporate strategy. Consequently, between 1895 and 1898, Merck restructured its in-house research, forming closer ties with universities and other outside inven- tors. Merck depended on these sources to generate new products, while relying on in-house scientists to improve productive efficiency. A spate of new products was launched between the late 1890s and 1905, but, in the following years, resource constraints restricted Merck's innovative capacity.

Professor Boswell here discusses how informal social control was exercised over business conduct in the six decades from 1880 to World War II. He seeks to explain why some firms were more responsive to the public than others.

In this wide-ranging essay, a banking historian surveys the major debates in the historiography of U.S. commercial banking. Touching on various controversies in the field—old, new, and brewing, from financing the Revolution to the savings and loan crisis—the article serves as a guide to the parameters of debate and provides an introductory bibliography to acquaint interested readers with banking literature from colonial times to the present.