This article examines how Danish cement factories and building contractors, in particular F. L. Smidth & Co. A/S and its business partner Højgaard & Schultz A/S, used forced and slave labor in Estonia, the Polish General Government, and Serbia as they worked for the German authorities during the Second World War. The article presents new evidence on the use of forced and slave labor inside the European “New Order” and emphasizes the willingness of the companies to expand and engage in morally questionable behavior. The findings illuminate the close connection between political and economic collaboration and contribute to the discussion about the relationship between business and politics during dictatorship, war, and occupation.

During the 188's and 1890's, the innovations of James Buchanan Duke first disrupted and then rationalized the American tobacco industry. Duke's career and the early history of his American Tobacco Co. serve as case studies in both the history of business administration and in the coming of “big business” to the United States.

By the start of the twentieth century, the two organizational forms most used by Dutch banks to raise capital through the dispersal of their ownership were the cooperative association and the public company. Share ownership in cooperatives was typically restricted to customers, while companies permitted outside investors. Neither organizational form dictated specific shareholder liability arrangements. New specialist banks targeting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) combined these two organizational forms and flexible liability rules to create hybrid forms. I find those that took the public company form were more likely to suffer distress during the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s. Liability arrangements for shareholders, by contrast, had a negligible impact on these banks’ resilience.

This historical comparison of the Vickers and Alcoa experiences with “borrowed” German airship technology highlights the importance of studying the way industrial R&D has been organized, both within industries and inside individual companies. Professor Graham shows that Alcoa's move in 1919 to organize its corporate Technical Department to include balanced research and development capabilities allowed it not only to appropriate Duralumin technology, but also to build on that technology so that it could be used to supply the infant U.S. airframe industry. Lacking such integrated R&D at the corporate level, Vickers obtained only short–term financial returns on its investment in Duralumin expertise. This article suggests that the differences in exploitation of high–strength aluminum derived partly from different national climates for R&D in the United States and England after the First World War.

Business history is expanding to include a greater plurality of contexts, with the study of Chinese business representing a key area of growth. However, despite efforts to bring China into the fold, much of Chinese business history remains stubbornly distal to the discipline. One reason is that business historians have not yet reconciled with the field's unique origins and intellectual tradition. This article develops a revisionist historiography of Chinese business history that retraces the field's development from its Cold War roots to the present day, showing how it has been shaped by the particular questions and concerns of “area studies.” It then goes on to explore five recent areas of novel inquiry, namely: the study of indigenous business institutions, business and semi-colonial context, business at the periphery of empire, business during socialist transition, and business under Chinese socialism. Through this mapping of past and present trajectories, the article aims to provide greater coherence to the burgeoning field and shows how, by taking Chinese business history seriously, we are afforded a unique opportunity to reimagine the future of business history as a whole.

Hardware wholesalers organized trade associations in the late nineteenth century in an effort to achieve stability and uniformity in prices and profit margins. These organizations, like those of manufacturers in the same industry, met with some success.

This article uses the example of the postwar consolidation of the American newspaper industry to demonstrate that the process of industrial evolution is not simply the consequence of arbitrary market forces nor strictly the result of enterprising individuals' innovative schemes. Rather it is interaction of the two. Moreover, by examining the technological, laborrelated, and regulatory forces behind the industry's dramatic change in ownership structure, the article also illustrates the cumulative and sequential nature of industrial change.

Re-emerging from the disruption caused by the Revolution and the War of 1812, the American whaling industry grew to dominate the seas between 1820 and 1860, only to suffer a severe decline during and after the Civil War. In the following article, Professors Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins examine the hypothesis that the U.S. whaling industry collapsed because the stock of whales was being depleted. After investigating the size of the original whale populations, their breeding habits, and the estimates of whales taken during the nineteenth century, the authors conclude that the overfishing of whales of various species occurred either not at all or too late to have been a contributing factor in America's whaling decline.

The historiography of Latin America's oil industry has evolved since the period between the 1960s and the 1980s, when most scholars were focusing on the rise of nationalism in reaction to the multinationals' control of the oil sector. Beginning in the 1990s, the emergence of new methodologies enabled historians to study other aspects of the industry, such as its environmental and cultural impact, local elites' role in its development, the industry's impact on the long-term development of Latin American countries, and the organizational evolution of state-owned oil companies. However, the literature continues to be dominated by studies of Mexico, while the subject of oil consumption is largely ignored.

Rare materials recently released by the Zigong City Archives shed light on the accounting system that was created by saltmining businesses in Zigong. The materials include forty-seven accounting books prepared by eight firms in the industry from 1908 to 1930. In this study, the materials are used to reveal how the Zigong salt-mining firms used the double-entry system. The study draws on the archival documents to reveal how the firms' innovative reporting methods enabled them to calculate profit and loss, and it explores the ways in which improved accounting information guided the decisions of Chinese proprietors who were operating in a business environment characterized by inadequate financing, considerable risk, and long intervals between investment and return.

Were Japanese entrepreneurs of the Meiji period “community-centered” and motivated by the “samurai spirit” — as often argued? The career of Yataro Iwasaki offers a different view of Meiji entrepreneurship and government policy.

The concerted actions of giant companies operating on the international stage, notably in mining and petroleum, rival the Schleswig-Holstein question in complexity. In the absence of any clear understanding of the reasons for huge mergers such as that which took place in the southern African copper mining industry at the depth of the Great Depression, rationalizations that reflect Marxist-Leninist simplism and populist paranoia have been popular. Messrs. Alford and Harvey undertake to unravel the reasons for the copper merger, concluding that this merger defies modern, formal merger theory and teaches that there is no substitute for a close study of the motives of “corporate insiders.”

Of all business-supported reform in the early twentieth century, none was more significant or widely accepted than workmen's compensation for industrial accidents. Using the experience of Massachusetts as a case study, Mr. Asher reveals the unique consensus of management and labor which produced “the first victory for the idea of the modern welfare state in the United States.”

Against the widely accepted view of the nineteenth-century Mexican peon as a hapless individual caught in perpetual debt bondage to the “company store” of the hacienda on which he spent his short life of drudgery, Dr. Cross places some unique hard evidence drawn from the account books of one such hacienda. He finds that, in this case at least, the number of peons in debt at any one time was very small and the debt well within their ability to repay, thanks in no small part to a system of payment of a large part of their wages in kind. The exceptions reflected in most cases debts incurred either to pay the local priest's stiff fees for administering such sacraments as baptism and marriage, or for funds to invest in the peasant's own agricultural enterprises.

From 1877 to 1929 the Bell System extended its qualityassurance capabilities, a step that was critical to the company's ability to certify the reliability of its equipment and apparatus and to provide economical service. Learning in this context involved the gradual development of an organizational structure for coordinating and controlling quality-assurance activities at both the staff and line levels and between the corporate elements of the Bell System. Over the course of the initiative, innovative methods of analysis emerged that provided useful new insights into the manufacturing process. The company's adaptation of probability theory, for example, enabled it to launch a comprehensive inspection regime, which became known as “statistical quality control” (SQC). Based on this new approach, Bell succeeded in broadening its manufacturing knowledge, quantifying definitions of quality, reducing costs and risk, thus assuming the more reliable operation of its vast telephone network. Eventually this upgrading of learning led to the formation of a new profession of quality engineering, which found adherents across many industries in the United States and abroad.

During the early Industrial Revolution, the discovery and widespread commercial adoption of crucial technological advances permitted enormous productivity increases in the finishing of textiles and also marked the beginnings of the modern chemical industry in Europe.

This study describes the 1920s movement (spearheaded by Herbert Hoover) to reduce unemployment by reducing fluctuations in business production and investment. Although the efforts had very limited success, they anticipated later attempts to manage prosperity for the economy as a whole.

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.

Before World War I, most foreign investment in Latin America came from Britain. By World War II, however, the United States had become the main and unchallenged foreign investor in the region. This analysis of the negotiations that took place between the British firm (Pearson and Son) and the Colombian government over oil contracts reveals the reasons for the shift in influence. The company's lack of awareness that Britain had been overtaken by the United States as the hegemonic power in the hemisphere eventually caused the negotiations to collapse. While talks were proceeding, the company failed to consider how much influence the United States had on Colombian internal politics, and it overlooked the history of U.S.–Colombia relations. As a result, Pearson never received oil concessions in Colombia; instead, they were granted to American companies, consolidating U.S. power in the region.

This article examines in detail how John Maynard Keynes approached investing in the U.S. stock market on behalf of his Cambridge College after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. We exploit the considerable archival material documenting his portfolio holdings, his correspondence with investment advisors, and his two visits to the United States in the 1930s. While he displayed an enthusiasm for investing in common stocks, he was equally attracted to preferred stocks. His U.S. stock picks reflected his detailed analysis of company fundamentals and a pronounced value approach. Already in this period, therefore, it is possible to see the origins of some of the investment techniques adopted by professional investors in the latter half of the twentieth century.