Between 1950 and 1970, the ownership of some of the largest business conglomerates in India changed from British to Indian hands. Almost without exception, the firms formerly under the management of British conglomerates saw bankruptcy, nationalization, relative decline in corporate ranking, and on rare occasions, reinvention of identity. In Indian business history scholarship, this episode is underresearched, even though hypotheses on the transfer-cum-decline exist. Combining a new source, legal documents, with conventional ones, this article revisits the episode and suggests revisions to current hypotheses.

Business history is not a field whose problematic I know, although these papers and one I read by Angel Kwolek-Folland, which was given here last spring, provide a helpful introduction. Instead, I come from exactly those fields, as the papers point out, that have been the traditional ones for thinking about women and gender: women's history and labor history. The challenge is to extend insights from those fields to business history.

European multinationals followed a different path of development from that pursued by United States firms, but European multinational manufacturing began even earlier than did American, and its story is no less significant. Dr. Franko offers a range of relevant data and analysis about the evolution of direct foreign investment by Western European manufacturers.

An 1879 contract between Western Union and Bell partitioned the electrical communications industry between the telegraph and telephone markets. Historians typically view this contract as the start of both Western Union's decline and Bell's rise, and they have treated these as largely separate processes. This article argues instead that these processes were linked by a porous and shifting boundary between the two industries. Legal, technical, and regulatory factors interacted to shape this boundary over the next century. The 1879 contract failed to keep Bell out of long-distance communications, as Bell used its market power, geographic reach, and technological superiority to penetrate this boundary. Throughout much of the twentieth century, federal regulators and Western Union executives attempted to strengthen this divide through regulatory means. The attempt failed because AT&T controlled key telegraph technologies and had considerable market power. While regulators propped up Western Union as the only competitor to AT&T, by the 1960s it was offering only token competition.

In this article, Dr. Newbury focuses on the technical and financial reasons for amalgamation at the Kimberley mines in South Africa, drawing on primary records to account for the rise of De Beers as the world's major diamond mining company in the 1880s. He finds that prior experience in local government and on the mining boards prepared company directors for competition in joint stock enterprise, while differences in production policies and performance influenced the pattern of mergers within and among the four Kimberley mines. De Beers's close relationship with diamond merchants and private banks in London, particularly N. M. Rothschild & Sons, was central to its position as a prime mover toward consolidation. Dr. Newbury views De Beers as a firm that relied for its success less on its renowned chairman, Cecil J. Rhodes, than on a combined managerial expertise that reflected the interests of both mining producers and merchant buyers.

In this examination of the beliefs of Louis Brandeis about the twentieth-century corporation, we are given a paradoxical portrait of a man strongly committed to individual liberty and fulfillment who nevertheless became an outspoken advocate of Taylorism. By tracing Brandeis's views on the law and economics of me corporation and placing them against the jurist's belief in the primacy of society's needs, the article reveals the complexities and contradictions in Brandeis's thought as he struggled to visualize an order in which the interests of individuals and society would be identical.

This article counters a common misconception that business was universally opposed to air pollution control at the beginning of the twentieth century. In comparing the reaction of German and American businessmen to smoke abatement efforts before World War I, it shows that behavior was primarily shaped by national culture, rather than by a general desire to “externalize costs.” German smoke abatement did not meet significant resistance from industrialists, with regulation being based on a general consensus of all parties involved—a process which turned out to be as much a chance for abatement as it was an impediment for reforms. The American business community was split into two factions: those opposed to smoke abatement because they feared additional costs and the intrusion of factories by officials, and others, frequently organized in Chambers of Commerce or similar civic associations, who took a broader perspective and argued that the economic prospects of their city were at stake. The ultimate success of the latter group was largely due to changes in strategy, which allowed businessmen to develop a more positive attitude toward smoke abatement while simultaneously increasing the effectiveness of regulation. Business, therefore, should not be viewed as an inevitably “negative force” in environmental regulation.

In his article “From Firm to Networked Systems,” Thomas Hughes introduces concepts, such as “infrastructure” and “networking,” that are critical to today's managerial system, but, by focusing on electric utilities, the story he tells does not go beyond the arrival of the new science of electronics in the early twentieth century. Professor Hughes, therefore, does not consider the critical role of high-technology industries–that is, those that commercialized and brought to market new products based on new scientific learning—in exploring the evolution of managerial systems.

An examination of the chief executives of leading British railways from 1850 through 1922 indicates that they emerged from predominantly upper-middle and upper class origins, and that they represented a new kind of bureaucratic business elite which enjoyed rising incomes and growing social status. In addition, available evidence reveals nothing to suggest that “executive immobility” was characteristic of British railway management, or that the railways were particularly inefficient or unprogressive in their choice of senior managers.

In Mexico, as in other parts of the world, the introduction of modern transportation and communications brought about major changes in the production and distribution of goods and in firms' management and structure. Between 1880 and 1910, the Mexican textile sector was modernized through the efforts of entrepreneurial French immigrants from Barcelonnette, whose closely knit network enabled them to succeed in overcoming limitations in the Mexican institutional framework.

The bitter opposition of businessmen to the New Deal in its early stages is well known. Not so well known, however, are the efforts of a few business leaders to maintain constructive communication with the President and his advisers. Professor Collins traces these efforts, from the early stages during which both groups labored in mutual distrust, through the remarkable transformation in which such strong business personalities as Beardsley Ruml, William Benton, and Paul Hoffman helped persuade a deeply conservative Franklin D. Roosevelt to adopt compensatory deficit spending as a means to recovery. Finally, he shows that World War II marked not the end but a continuation of these positive efforts by businessmen to adapt to the new philosophy, and led directly to the founding of the Committee for Economic Development.

Japan experienced a transformational phase of technological development during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that an important, but so far neglected, factor was a developing market for innovation and a patent-attorney system that was conducive to rapid technical change. We support our hypothesis using patent data and we also present a detailed case study on Tomogorō Ono, a key developer of salt-production technology who used attorneys in connection with his patenting work at a time when Japan was still in the process of formally institutionalizing its patent-attorney system. In accordance with Lamoreaux and Sokoloff's 1999 influential study of trade in invention in the United States, our quantitative and qualitative evidence highlights how inventors and intermediaries in Japan interacted to create a market for new ideas.

Dramatic evidence of the vital role played by the British East India Company in Britain's rise to preeminence in world trade is revealed in the intimate relations between the Company, Parliament, and Charles II. Britain needed an agency for pressing the struggle against the resourceful Dutch, and the King needed revenue. The Company needed assurance in the form of a charter that its existence would be continuous; Navigation Acts to give meaning to its trading monopoly; laws against “interlopers” in its trading areas; and relief from mercantilist prejudices so that it could buy for cash where British goods were not in demand. Government and Company provided each other with all these, in a pragmatic arrangement that overrode prejudices and political sensitivities.

In attempting to meet government-mandated profitability and efficiency goals, the British Rail Board behaved not simply as the government directed, but rather according to internal needs and initiatives, as this careful examination of the implementation of sector management demonstrates. Even in the early days of movement toward privatization, the board tried to develop its own policies, and, though it soon became clear that full divestiture was to be the goal, events proceeded through various stages, rather than in a forced march along a government-designed path.

Professor Hidy considers many recent contributions to business history and suggests some fruitful areas for future research.

This article considers the changing nature of remittance procedures in the eighteenth-century British slave trade. It explains why bills of exchange became the preferred form of making payment for slave sales, rather than specie or produce. It also indicates the legal and institutional practices that informed the circulation of bills of exchange in a notoriously risky form of long-distance trade. The growth and complexity of the British slave trade, which was conducted mainly by private merchants, led to procedures such as remitting bills “in the bottom” of ships that had supplied slaves to North American and Caribbean markets and the extension of lengthy credit periods to purchasers. Colonial factors played a role as well, acting as the agents for coordinating remittances, and secure British merchant houses were deployed as “guarantees” for payment by bills. The development of credit practices associated with the slave trade, including remittance procedures, helped to strengthen the British economy by providing sound, complex intermediary instruments for the realization of profits from international trade.

The modern corporation arose out of the trusts, mergers and holding companies of the late 19th century, an evolution that generated volatile political reactions. Though economists and business historians have analyzed the rise of the corporate form, they have neglected a second, related problem: Did attacks on the modern corporation depress business activity, as critics of Theodore Roosevelt and Howard Taft claimed? This paper has three aims. First, it covers the relevant analytical issues, including the effects of policy uncertainty on business investment. Second, it reviews the history of shifting governmental policy in the light of its possible economic effects. Finally, it examines die statistical link between antitrust enforcement and business activity for the years 1891–1914. Antitrust case filings against large firms coincided with business downturns, while filings against small firms did not. These findings provide supporting evidence though not decisive proof for the charge that trust-busting hurt business activity.

Product innovation, a decisive factor in modern economies, is usually analyzed from one point of view–that of the producers. A more realistic approach to the subject would add at least four dimensions to a consideration of the topic: the perspective of consumers and the cultural context within which they form their views; the differences in how experts and consumers acquire knowledge about products; the increasing influence of retailers at the point of sale; and the technological options available to producers and households. Two twentieth-century German case studies–on the scientific innovation of yogurt and the preserving and canning of food–connect the often separate perspectives of business, consumers, and culture.

In 1989, Edgar Woolard began his tenure as chief executive of the chemical giant DuPont by calling for a new “corporate environmentalism.” DuPont has changed dramatically since then to become more environmentally sustainable, but the company still has a poor record in some areas. The sustainability push also had mixed financial consequences. Though eco-efficiencies saved DuPont billions of dollars, the effort to create more sustainable engines of corporate growth failed to meet Wall Street expectations. The DuPont story offers important insights into the difficulties of greening an established industrial enterprise.

Historical scholarship on business—environment interactions has largely sidestepped the study of corporate innovations that had both economic and environmental benefits. This issue is examined through late-nineteenth-century initiatives sponsored by the British Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, whose aim was to document and promote the creation of profitable by-products out of polluting industrial waste and emissions. A case is made that the individuals involved in this effort not only anticipated concepts and debates now at the heart of the modern sustainable development literature, but also that their work questions some fundamental premises of this discourse.