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.”

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.

We surveyed fifty-eight professors of history and management to develop a ranking of the greatest entrepreneurs and businesspeople in American history. The goal of this research is to begin an ongoing conversation about what constitutes “greatness” in American business history, and, in particular, how academics perceive greatness among business leaders. The results were predictable: Henry Ford topped the list, followed by Bill Gates, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Thomas Edison. We also surveyed these scholars regarding greatest female and most underrated entrepreneur or businessperson in American history to make the exercise more interesting.

The first wave of globalization, from 1850 to 1914, is considered to be a period when global trade and investment increased at a steady pace, impacting on global economic growth. Yet that evolution was not consistent across all industries. This article explains why, during that period, global trade in wines and other alcoholic beverages was reversed. Apart from diseases that affected vineyards in the main wine-producing countries of the Old World, various factors in the New World—including local government incentives and the presence of consumers (immigrants) with acquired habits of consumption from European countries—created strong incentives for the imitation and adulteration of wines. This study looks at the strategies used both by the imitators in expanding their businesses and by the innovators to survive in institutional environments that were weak with regard to the protection of their intellectual property.

This issue brings together five articles on the modern petroleum industry. Two cover the growth of the industry in the early twentieth century: Michael Adamson's study of the development of California's coastal oil region by independent oilman Ralph Lloyd; and the study by Lisa Bud-Frierman, Andrew Godley, and Judith Wale of the British entrepreneur Weetman Pearson's operations in Mexico. Two articles treat the post–World War II period: Nathan Citano looks at the budding interests of U.S. oilmen in the Middle East and Daniele Pozzi traces the transformation of the Italian company ENI into an international oil firm. Finally, Keetie Sluyterman examines the ways in which Royal Dutch Shell handled environmental issues from its inception in 1907 to the present. The issue also contains a survey of recent historiography on the oil industry in Latin America by Marcelo Bucheli and a review essay by James Bamberg on a recent four-volume history of Royal Dutch Shell.

This article explores the globalization of knowledge-based services and their impact on host-country firms’ organizational capabilities. Two drivers of such globalization—foreign aid and foreign direct investment coming from the United States—contributed to the development of engineering consulting in Spain in the beginning of the new global economy. The largest Spanish engineering firms have been able to integrate imported knowledge into their own organizational capabilities, enabling them to compete successfully in international markets. This imported knowledge was disseminated in two ways: through private companies, via affiliates and strategic alliances between locals and foreigners; and through the technical and military aid the U.S. government provided during the Cold War.

In this essay, I grapple with three main questions: What effect did the nationalization of telegraphy in 1868–70 have on the structure of the news market in Britain? How did this market structure affect the pricing and supply of news? What effects did subsequent technological change have on the structure of the news market? I show that nationalization resulted in a tripartite market arrangement characterized by collusion that benefited the provincial press over the London press, but retarded the productivity of the General Post Office and the adoption of new technology.

Every schoolboy knows that a large fraction of the American public domain was granted to pioneer railroads in the nineteenth century. But was the federal land-grant policy socially beneficial? Professor Mercer provides one imaginative answer based upon an analysis of the economic issues involved and estimates of the private and social rates of return on the investment in the subsidized railroads.

The International Business Machines Corporation adapted early on to the opportunities created by the cold war economy in the United States. This account of IBM's adjustment to the circumstances of that time unveils the detailed process by which a firm situated outside the traditional defense industries forged new institutional allegiances between business and government and between science and industry. Beginning in 1949, IBM's Applied Science Department, under the leadership of Cuthbert Hurd, enabled the company to enter new technical markets that had been created by federal research and defense expenditures. But there were also broader consequences to IBM's decision to embrace scientific culture, among them the transformation of its traditional sales and product development strategies in ways that were not indisputably functional.

The primary importance of long-distance telephone service to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company in the first two decades of the twentieth century was not commercial but organizational and political. The so-called Bell System was not a single firm before 1910 but was, rather, an association of regional companies with considerable autonomy. As AT&T's leaders worked both to overcome independent competitors and to curtail the autonomy of their own local affiliates, long-distance service offered them a powerful technological justification for the consolidation of control. Outside the Bell System, long distance also served as a vivid symbol of interconnection and integration. Long distance proved central to AT&T's campaign to convince Americans of its own legitimacy and that of nation-spanning corporations in general.

This article examines the mid-twentieth-century transformation of U.K. pension fund investment policy known as the “cult of equity.” It focuses on the influence exercised by the Association of Superannuation and Pension Funds over actuarial and corporate governance standards, through actuaries who were members of its council. This intervention led to increasingly permissive actuarial valuations that reduced contributions for sponsors of pension funds investing in equities. Increased demand for equities required pension funds to adopt a more permissive approach to corporate governance than insurance companies and investment trusts, and contributed to declining standards of corporate governance.

This paper examines a pivotal moment in the history of the built environment in America. At the beginning of the twentieth century, factions within the American paint industry fought in state and federal legislatures over the definition of paint: What was pure paint? Were new paint formulations to be encouraged, or labeled “adulterated”? Was the known toxicity of lead to be a consideration? Despite some opponents' recourse to a rhetoric of toxicity and public health, all sides agreed that the best paints contained a significant quantity of lead, and that government should stay out of setting industry standards. This accord all but assured that Americans would apply tons of lead paint on the walls of their homes.

This article examines the relationship between J.P. Morgan & Co. and France during the First World War. It argues that the dealings between the French government and the partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. from 1914 to 1918 were characterized by personal difficulties between successive French representatives and the partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. Contributing to a strained relationship was the place of Morgan, Harjes, the French affiliate of J.P. Morgan & Co., within the House of Morgan. Herman Harjes, the senior partner in Morgan, Harjes, though a proponent of Franco-American amity, became disenchanted with his New York partners as the war continued. The feeling was shared by those in New York, who reevaluated the role of Morgan, Harjes within the House of Morgan—until the French affiliate's eventual disappearance in 1926. While sympathetic to France, and instrumental in sustaining French credit during the war, the partners of J.P. Morgan & Co. conceived of the Allied cause as the British cause, a perspective that led them to rebuff calls for greater Franco-American financial cooperation.

During the Civil War era, when the U.S. explosives industry was already dominated by a handful of firms, the leading manufacturers of black powder tried repeatedly–with mixed success–to fix prices in commercial and military markets. Their surviving correspondence reveals some of the dynamics of oligopolistic collusion and competition. In commercial markets, price-fixing by leading explosives makers was undermined not only by competition from small powder manufacturers but also by rivalry among their own selling agents. The same agency problems that made price-fixing more difficult, however, may have actually made it easier for manufacturers to sustain the social foundations of cooperation by allowing them to blame the failures of their agreements on forces outside their control. Maintaining cooperative relations over the long run proved useful to manufacturers in wartime military markets, in which price agreements were easier to sustain. But during the Civil War, the leading powder producers found that even successful collusion in the military supply business did not guarantee high profits, because government bureaus could prove to be demanding consumers.

The Reichskuratorium (RKW) was founded in 1921 by Carl Friedrich von Siemens and his subalternate, Carl Köttgen. The organization strove to implement measures of industrial and organizational efficiency in Germany in the interwar era following the American models of Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford. This study uses the organization as a vehicle to evaluate varieties of organized capitalism in German business and industrial history since the late nineteenth century. Most recent research has identified forms of organized capitalism that include significant input from organized labor along with state and industry as the most “modern” forms. While these efforts stagnated and eventually failed in Germany's interwar Weimar Republic, they are still seen as the origin of a characteristic and successful postwar model of organized capitalism. Acknowledging that this view is accurate, this study draws attention to the alternate model of the RKW which strove to implement technical and organizational measures of industrial and economic efficiency using state funding but avoiding significant input from organized labor. This variation of German organized capitalism emerged from the more traditional, self-regulating patterns of the late nineteenth century. It persisted through the Weimar Republic, through World War II, and into the postwar era. Less fruitful for understanding the character of the RKW are models from the 1970s Cold War era which elaborated a strongly symbiotic version of organized capitalism between state and big business, which allegedly subordinated efforts of big business to state interests.

Historians of Progressive Era conservation measures have focused on the efforts of government resource experts to free environmental management decisions from special-interest groups. Professor Judd argues that this emphasis has obscured the importance of economic factions in securing conservation legislation reflecting their various interests. His examination of Maine's ongoing efforts to manage its lobster industry demonstrates that scientific conservation codes received legislative sanction only when they could be made to conform to the commercial needs of the industry's competing groups.

In the 1920's, the Supreme Court reversed its previously hostile position on the legality of many activities of trade associations. Professor Carrott finds that the primary cause of the court's shift lay in the changing social milieu of the decade, as the older insistence on rigorous competition was supplanted by an emphasis on the value of cooperation in business.

This article argues that Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse, despite some shared characteristics in their approach to technical problems and a common interest in electric power, pursued distinct markets for innovation. Edison sold novelties to upper-class urbanites, whereas Westinghouse provided equipment to railroads and other industrial customers. As a consequence, the two entrepreneurs consistently exhibited different attitudes toward the process of innovation and different inclinations as businessmen. Westinghouse, more than Edison, foreshadowed the coming of corporate research and development.

One of the leading experts on the history of multinational enterprise, Mira Wilkins here sets forth the history of American multinational investment in Japan and Japanese multinational investment in the United States during two crucial decades. The tumultuous years from 1930 to 1952 forced these companies to deal with the vastly different challenges of depression, war, and peace. Professor Wilkins explains how they adapted to their changing environment. She also provides noteworthy support for the view that cross-investment was not symmetrical.