When Alfred P. Sloan, Jr., assumed the presidency of General Motors, the corporation was little known beyond Wall Street, which recognized GM simply as the holding company that controlled several nearly autonomous automakers and their subsidiaries. The following article describes how Sloan used the imagination and advertising talent of Bruce Barton to create a corporate image for GM, not only in the mind of the public, but among GM's own headquarters staff and division executives as well. Through the metaphor of the corporate “family,” Sloan and Barton finessed a potential public relations liability—the corporation's immense size—into an image of efficient cooperation and internal cohesion.

Reflecting recent studies that have highlighted the importance of product cost accounting, this article traces the resistance of American railroad managers to the tool, despite growing pressure from academic and engineering economists. This study reveals widespread misunderstanding among managers about the nature of railroad costs, particularly misconceptions about the proportion of fixed and variable costs and the definition of direct costs. It illustrates the impact of these misapprehensions through a detailed examination of Southern Pacific's interwar passenger strategy.

The stock market crash of 1929, a major trauma that still haunts the national memory, has received surprisingly little attention from scholars in seventy years and has produced even less agreement as to its causes and consequences. This review of the literature suggests that the disagreements and debates over the crash reveal as much about what can and cannot be known for certain about the event as they do about potential answers to the mysteries of the crash.

Professor Arnould analyzes the reasons for concentration in the American meat packing industry from 1880 through 1920, then describes and evaluates the varied forces which have led to declining concentration since the end of World War I.

The energy and interplay of Latin American and foreign businessmen in enduring the uncertainties of independence and the obstacles of nature are underscored in this example from the Colombian experience.

Firms engage in a multitude of interactions with the external environment, most critically with government and its regulatory agencies. Despite an extensive literature on “regulatory capture,” little attention has been paid to the interactions between merging firms and competition authorities. Yet the possibility of capture exists where there is a recurring series of merger investigations of one firm by the same authority. This analysis of the impact of political influence on the merger history of the brewing firm Scottish & Newcastle extends into a discussion of regulatory capture in the oversight of British brewery mergers during the 1980s and 1990s.

Although fuel wood still supplied 70 per cent of the total energy requirements of the United States in 1900, a marketing mechanism for the millions of cords consumed each year is not evident. Professor Cole concludes that no other commodity of such importance had such little effect on distributive institutions.

In the following essay on the railroad industry, Maury Klein examines preconceptions and misunderstandings surrounding Americans' views of regulation and competition. He argues that the United States seems to want competition without losers and that, at least in the case of railroads, regulation has often tried to ensure this outcome without a real understanding of the economics of the industry.

In recent years, business history has become a rich and varied terrain for research in Latin America. In this essay, I will present an overview of key aspects of banking history in the region, with an emphasis on the sources that are available in Argentina and Mexico. The extensive archives that have been built up in both countries offer historians the opportunity to study an array of topics: histories of individual banks; the evolution of banking systems; the relation between banking firms and industrial and agricultural development; the role of banks in government finance; the unique historical trajectories of central banks; the rise and relative decline of state-development banks; and the complex history of foreign banks in Latin America from the nineteenth century to the present.

In the late eighteenth century, northern Virginia's grain-based slave economy prompted a thriving but risky overseas trade. The merchants who conducted this trade sought to manage their risks by purchasing marine insurance, initially from British and northern U.S. sources. After the American Revolution, however, the expense and inconvenience of obtaining insurance abroad prompted merchants to create local institutions modeled on northern practices. Most notably, in 1797 Alexandria merchants established the Alexandria Marine Insurance Company, an incorporated entity that helped manage the risks of overseas trade during the dangerous Napoleonic Wars, enlarged local sources of capital, and, in turn, played a significant role in stimulating regional economic development. The appearance of this marine insurance company (and others like it) reveals the significant role that financial intermediaries played in the development of the southern slave economies in the early republic.

Edith Penrose's work on the multinational enterprise and the political economy of globalization and development is assessed as it relates to her views on business history. This essay was written on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Penrose's classic 1959 book and her 1960 prize-winning paper on Hercules Powder, which was published in the Review. Penrose came close to providing a theory of “internalization,” compared foreign direct investment to market-type contracting relations, and even discussed transaction costs–related arguments. However, she largely accepted the existence of fi rms and did not examine why firms exist vis-à-vis alternatives, such as markets. Her views on the political economy of globalization, relations between multinational enterprise and the state, and development have proved to be incisive, mostly accurate, and ahead of their time.

Focusing on the private investment bank of J. P. Morgan & Co., this article examines the unique perspective that the history of private investment banking offers the study of reputation with regard to the role of social ties. Drawing from a larger study that looks at intersecting social and economic networks of New York private bankers before the Second World War, the article studies the ways in which the Morgan partners' social networks worked to maintain their reputation by creating an institutional structure for firm cohesion, establishing access to information and resources outside the firm, and fostering a culture of exclusivity that signaled the firm's standing and its ties relative to their competitors or other elite bankers.

The factory system in one of its earliest forms—the textile mill—made limited strides in the American South during the closing decades of the slave era. While bondsmen were put to work in mills almost from the beginning, the problem of adapting an agricultural work force to the factory system was one that had to be solved simultaneously with the development of the factory system itself. Since then, historians have wondered whether the use of slaves in early industry was an intensification of the human aspects of bondage or whether it represented a marginal improvement in their physical and spiritual welfare. Professor Miller offers no answer to these questions, nor to those of how widespread or how successful was the use of slaves as factory operatives. He demonstrates, however, that apart from the fact that bondsmen took to factory work more readily than poor whites, the problems to be solved by managers, before a successful degree of efficiency could be achieved, were common to all new industrial systems; clearly, the development of an intelligent disciplinary system, enlightened motivation, and good working conditions were as important in using slaves as in using free labor.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages was a historiographical concept with considerable traction. This article revisits the literature that brought about and engaged with that concept, with specific reference to Florence. In so doing, it draws attention to the place once held by business history in the study of Europe's takeoff. It also discusses the preliminary results of an ongoing project on limited partnerships in early modern Tuscany, which reaffirms the relevance of business history for understanding preindustrial economies but steers away from a teleological search for the origins of modern capitalism.

The National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) played an important role in the emerging conservative movement in the United States, both before and after World War II, but its contribution to the increasing militarism of that movement has received little scrutiny. Between 1958 and 1975, a combination of organizational changes peculiar to NAM and political pressures from both the right and the left led NAM to adopt and maintain a militaristic posture. In the late 1950s, a decline in the organization's membership resulted in a take over by larger corporations, which purged the board of its ultraconservative leadership. The reorganized board established a National Defense Committee (NDC) in order to promote defense industry membership and, by 1962, had selected a new permanent president, Werner Gullander. Under Gullander, the NDC moved NAM in the direction of support for defense expansion during the early 1960s.

This article explores the long-term effects of foreign direct investment on the human capital development of host economies, based on the historical analysis of the Spanish operations of four leading American firms: ITT, J. Walter Thompson, Merck Sharp & Dohme, and John Deere. Our research shows that the training and working practices of these companies had a positive impact on the Spanish subsidiaries in terms of technological upgrading and managerial development. However, the local context was also relevant, through mandatory agreements that empowered local partners from the start and the availability of locally educated professionals eager to absorb new knowledge.

The impact of the strategies of multinational companies on the Dutch business system during the twentieth century is described in relation to two fi rms. The fi rst case examines the attitude of the Dutch (in this example, Anglo-Dutch) parent company Royal Dutch Shell toward its international subsidiaries. The second looks at the approach taken by the American company Sara Lee toward its Dutch subsidiary, Douwe Egberts. Until the 1980s, both companies were prepared to adjust their organizations to national traditions and ambitions. However, when these nationally based global fi rms came under pressure during that decade, both changed their organizational structures. Their actions can be seen both as responses to globalization and as attempts to advance that process by simultaneously building international institutions and changing elements of the national business system in the Netherlands.

How does politics affect private international lending? This article highlights the relationship between international banks, their home governments, the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and international regulators during the years that preceded the debt crisis of 1982. Based on new archival evidence from different case studies, we find that the decisions of commercial banks to lend were largely based on the home governments’ preferences, competition, and the assumption that home governments and international organizations would provide lender of last resort functions to support borrowing governments. While previous works suggest the 1982 debt crisis was unexpected, we show that banks primarily reacted to the deteriorating macroeconomic situation in many emerging economies once the support of their home governments and the IMF became uncertain.

Spanish shipping firms relied on various strategies to direct the growth of their industry from 1860 to 1930. The diffusion of specialist shipowners during the second half of the nineteenth century was the result of both an increasing demand for maritime transport and a heavy rise in capital requirements owing to improvements in technology. During the first third of the twentieth century, some of these specialized firms became large companies through internal growth and/or horizontal combination. They achieved their gains without resorting to formal vertical integration, choosing instead to build social networks with other shipowners based on trust and loyalty. This approach allowed them to create intermediate arrangements, thereby diminishing transaction costs. When strategies of formal vertical integration were adopted, they primarily involved activities similar to shipping, such as ship brokering, consignment, stevedoring, and other maritime services. To document these trends, this article analyzes the organizational structure of Spain's twenty largest shipping concerns.

Unprecedented rates of consumption by the American and Allied war machine during World War II, along with a reduction in world supplies as a result of enemy victories, first brought the United States face to face with the possibility of dependence upon others for our oil after the war. Government officials attempted to avoid that outcome through the Anglo-American Oil Agreement but only succeeded in provoking domestic producers. Meanwhile, British and American oil companies provided relief by private commercial arrangements in the then-new Middle Eastern fields. While Professor Stoff's story ends in the dark ages of naive American belief that such enterprises, when countenanced by our government, constituted freedom from dependence, it is indispensable to an understanding of what came later.