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.

We examine the formation and growth of the distressed asset investment industry during the late twentieth century, with specific focus on the strategies of the leading firms. The distressed asset investment industry is dominated by firms based in the United States and is relatively concentrated, due in large part to early movers developing distinctive investment capabilities through participation in landmark transactions, relationship-specific resources, and exploitation of scale effects. We argue that the participation of these firms in the bankruptcy and corporate restructuring markets has resulted in private-sector workouts becoming more competitive and more efficient over the last thirty years, especially in the United States.

The twentieth-century history of the Swedish welfare state and public-service sector is critical to understanding the changing role of women in Sweden, as the expansion of the country's service production, beginning in the 1960s, has been mainly the result of wel-fare-state policies. Yet women's self-employment and wage work in the service industry has been neglected as an economic factor in both traditional economic and business history accounts and in historical studies of gender. Some suggestions are made for future explorations of the Swedish service sector as it operates in the shadow of the welfare state.

In this article Professor Perkins reexamines President Andrew Jackson's objections to the bill to recharter the Second Bank of the United States, as expressed in his famous veto message of 1832. He observes that, in addition to its exaggerated rhetoric, the veto message discusses at length a number of alleged deficiencies in the existing charter provisions. Professor Perkins's systematic analysis of the probable ramifications of a series of judicious alterations reveals that a compromise bill reformulated to meet most of the president's stated objections would not have seriously undermined the institution's position in American financial markets. Although several opportunities for sensible compromise arose, Nicholas Biddle and other members of the probank faction disregarded them. Perkins argues that the failure of bank supporters to consider comparatively modest modifications in the terms of recharter was a major blunder that ultimately doomed the Second Bank.

The Cuba Company was the largest single foreign investment in Cuba during the first two decades of the twentieth century and remained one of the largest corporations. This article presents a detailed history of the commercial networks forged between political officials and North American and Cuban businessmen through the development of the company. These networks proved crucial to the success of the Cuba Company and subsequently shaped the development of the new Cuban Republic.

Skilled textile workers migrated from Scotland to Massachusetts in the 1850's because of a large wage differential and low steerage rates for the transatlantic passage. For each one of 56 women weavers in the Lyman Mills, expenditures on current consumption took less than 75 per cent of income. But the circumstances were unusual, so this sample does not permit any conclusions about the role of wage-earners' savings in the accumulation of capital in New England. In this mill, two-thirds of the labor force in 1860 had been working there less than three years. The impact of this high degree of labor mobility on labor relations and on the technology of the industry is tentatively assessed.

In order to facilitate commercial transactions and economic investment after the American Revolution, many inhabitants of northern Virginia became convinced that the region needed financial institutions. Indeed, most politically active residents of the region—at least after the 1790s—saw banks as crucial agents of economic development. Thus, the philosophy of “agrarian republicans” such as Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Carolina—who saw banks as monopolistic and anti-republican institutions—had limited appeal in the region. Moreover, the banks of northern Virginia were not controlled by planters who sought capital to finance the purchase of slaves and land. Instead, banks supported a wide range of economic endeavors—agriculture, industry, internal improvement projects, and commercial activities. The broadening access to bank capital in northern Virginia reveals that in the South—as in the northern states—there was a “democratization” of banking in the years after Revolution.

In his seminal 1972 essay on the “organization of industry,”G. B. Richardson argued that economists had generally viewed firms as “islands of planned co-ordination in a sea of market relations.” Business historians, too, had focused predominantly on the firm (or entrepreneur) and the market. In drawing attention when he did to the “dense networks of co-operation and affiliation by which firms are inter-related,” Richardson was on the forefront of what would become a noticeable shift in the analysis of business organization. There were many reasons for this transition. In particular, the comparative success of the “Japanese model,” with its “intermarket” keiretsu disturbed standard assumptions. (Richardson himself pointed to Japanese firms as thriving examples of interfirm relations.) Furthermore, it was becoming clear that in many emerging industries networked relations of industrial clusters were increasingly important. Comparative research suggested that new-technology firms with tightly drawn boundaries were at a competitive disadvantage compared to firms that had developed cooperative links not only to suppliers but even to competitors. To explain such developments, economists, organizational theorists, and business historians alike looked beyond not only the conventional boundaries of the firm but also the conventional boundaries of their disciplines. In particular, they turned to theories of networks, the topic of this special issue.

The Arabian American Oil Company's plan to build a pipe-line from eastern Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean seemed to many an ideal project for business-government cooperation. A sound business project for the company would give American policymakers more and cheaper oil to aid plans to rebuild Western Europe, as well as a significant presence in the Middle East. Events in that tumultuous region, however, soon embroiled both the company and the U.S. government in a more complex relationship than had been envisioned.

The pragmatism and experimentation permitted policy-makers by the American antitrust statutes is well illustrated in this analysis of federal attitudes toward business concentrations in the late 1930's.

The following article examines U.S. investment in Mexico at the turn of the century, focusing on the tropical plantation companies and their promises of enormous profits. Viewed in the light—or shadow—of Dollar Diplomacy, the usual interpretation of such events has been that American investors exported profits and undermined internal development while the U.S. government established political hegemony. This article calls both of these outcomes into question.

This article critiques the application of Karl Polanyi's port of trade model to the development of Livorno, which has often been ascribed to commercial brokerage across cultural, political, and ecological frontiers. Livorno's neutrality during times of war and its position in the corsair and privateering economies would appear to support just such an interpretation of Livorno's growth. Nevertheless, while such interstitial roles were real, by the 1640s they were subordinate to the larger currents of regional and long-distance trade. Livorno's development is better explained with reference to the rise of commodity markets as entrepôts for managing far-flung distribution networks. The Tuscan port's rapid rise should be understood as an integral phenomenon of early modern capitalism, more akin to places such as London or Amsterdam than to the ports of trade studied by Polanyi.

In this article Mr. Secada analyzes the origins of W. R. Grace and Company and its rise as a dominant actor in Peruvian economic history. He attributes this ascendancy primarily to the arms trade in which Grace engaged on behalf of the Peruvian government during the War of the Pacific (1879–84). Grace's early status as an intimate of the dominant Peruvian elite, its deft manipulation of its ambiguous position as an American shipping house, its imaginative construction of a nascent intercontinental trading network utilizing both sea and rail transport, and its willingness to invest its own capital in the development of potential product lines—all served to catapult the firm within a period of thirty years into a powerful trading house and foreign investor in Latin America.

This article revisits and reassesses the evolution of Italian capitalism during the so called “economic miracle” (1950–1973). Using original sources, it analyzes how the average small, private firm, representing the vast majority of Italian businesses at the time, struggled to fully develop, grow, and modernize. The paper identifies the main source of the problem in a set of inefficient (or poorly-enforced) laws and regulations that allowed firms to remain competitive, and business owners to extract resources out of them, using a wide variety of borderline strategies. This article also claims that accountants (commercialisti) had a key role in implementing these strategies.

This consideration of how innovation was exploited in primary processing industries during the period of the second industrial revolution draws on case material from frozen-meat and dairy-processing industries in New Zealand between 1880 and 1910, examining how entrepreneurial networks successfully created commodity chains for the exportation of produce to U.K. markets. Latin American commodity chains are considered as a counterpoint. What is suggested is that despite the absence of large-scale firms and significant foreign capital, New Zealand producers, relying on network-based organizational forms, successfully entered overseas markets, capitalizing on information sharing, rapid diffusion of technology, and loose alliances that exploited complementary skills and assets.

I want to begin with a question. Why did the historical study of entrepreneurship take such a decidedly “organizational turn” during the 1950s? One might have thought that a Research Center in Entrepreneurial History would have stimulated work on the individual entrepreneur; that it might have encouraged a focus on such questions as exactly why and how individual entrepreneurs created and sustained new businesses.

During the six decades that extended from 1790 to 1850, British pin manufacturers were often slow to adopt new technology. Unfavorable economic conditions, particulary those spawned by the Napoleonic wars, were partly responsible for the lag between the invention and utilization of new techniques, but at other times, the shortcomings of inventors as salesmen of their inventions also contributed to the slow introduction of new technology. In this article Professors Dutton and Jones illustrate that the diffusion of new technology was (and is) anything but a costless and frictionless process, and they ultimately conclude that “this arcadian world of neo-classical simplicity would seem to be far removed from historical reality.”

This article examines the emergence of the American stove industry, detailing the complex interactions among changes in the product, the organization of production, and the methods of selling cast-iron heating and cooking equipment to consumers nationwide, particularly in the antebellum years. This highly competitive industry, composed of hundreds of proprietary firms, became a site of considerable innovation in marketing. Manufacturers integrated forward, controlling the sale and distribution of their goods through networks of small retailers nationwide. The article explains how and why.

This article explores the activities in Russia, between 1889 and the Revolution of 1917, of J. & P. Coats, the British multinational firm that manufactured cotton thread. The main motive for Coats's local manufacturing in Russia was to avoid import duties. Manufacturing facilities were secured by means of a joint venture and acquisitions in St. Petersburg, Riga and Lodz. The Russian business was under the full control of the headquarters in Paisley, U.K., and this policy contrasts with the more decentralized management style preferred by many other British multinationals of the day. Despite the unstable political situation in Russia, Coats's mills performed better than their competitors, and accounted for some 90 percent of the national demand by the time they were confiscated in 1917.