Legislation that required the registration of firms’ anticompetitive agreements (cartel registers) to reveal, and sometimes regulate, anticompetitive behavior was relatively common in many nations before 1975. Examining the introduction of these registers in sixteen mostly OECD countries between 1920 and 2000 reveals which industries and sectors appeared to minimize successfully the impact of the legislation in their jurisdiction. We find considerable variation, but in most countries, the agriculture and export sectors were especially successful in avoiding or delaying the application of a register in their areas of interest.

The economic history of Latin America offers an unusual paradox. For much of the twentieth century, nationalist governments have fostered the growth of state enterprise, but for the most part the proponents of such policies have received little attention. The Argentine petroleum industry is a case in point. While the state oil company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (or YPF) grew from relatively modest origins into the largest firm in the country, its most important architect, General Enrique Mosconi, has remained a little-known figure. In this article, however, Dr. Solberg takes note of Mosconi's career. He examines the forces that shaped it and that shaped his policies as the Director General of YPF. Mosconi's story, however, is not that of just another nationalist-turned-public servant, for his ideas and policies had far-reaching ramifications not only in the political economy of Argentina but also in that of other nations of Latin America.

In this article, Professors Doucet and Weaver examine the North American shelter business between 1860 and 1920. Drawing upon the business records of the Hamilton, Ontario, real estate firm of Moore and Davis, they analyze the construction, ownership, and management of the North American shelter staple—the single-family detached dwelling. Since these activities had significant effects on the everyday lives of urban dwellers, they reveal significant social as well as business patterns. Doucet and Weaver conclude that this firm, and by implication the industry as a whole, preferred the prudent and routine to the innovative and daring, suggesting, in contrast to the work of recent scholars, that continuity rather than change typified urban development during these decades.

One of the pioneers in the historical study of business and entrepreneurship recalls the origins of the two fields and suggests a synthesis as a basis for further research and analysis. The Editors and Dr. Cole welcome comments and discussion of these ideas.

Between 1850 and 1880, enthusiasm for horticulture swept the nation, particularly the Upper Midwest. Nursery owners and seed traders welcomed the escalating demand for trees and flowers but soon faced consumer complaints about their questionable business practices. Customer dissatisfaction had many sources, ranging from unethical entrepreneurs to faltering industry infrastructure and underhanded dealing. The nurserymen and seed dealers worked diligently to overcome these criticisms, sharing information to improve industry methods and attempting to deflect responsibility for fraudulent practice onto disreputable competitors or inexperienced customers. The conflicts between commercial horticulturists and their broadening customer base reflected tensions within America's rapidly expanding consumer culture and suggested that traditional restraints on industry practice based on personal ties and shared values would no longer suffice when dealing with a newly diversified and seemingly intractable clientele.

This article argues that migration and investment from India moved in tandem to chart the evolution of transnational Indian business in the twentieth century, first toward Southeast Asia and Africa and later toward the United States, Europe, and West Asia. With a focus on the banking and diamond sectors, the overseas investment project of the Aditya Birla Group, and the transnational linkages of India's one hundred richest business leaders, the article locates important events, policies, and actors before economic liberalization in 1991 that laid the foundation for subsequent globalization of Indian firms.

Beginning in the 1930s, American corporations increasingly turned to radio for their public relations campaigns. Major firms, including Ford, Du Pont, and General Motors, sponsored network radio programs that carried messages designed to improve their image. Other large corporations funded national radio news commentators, while smaller businesses sponsored weekly or even daily local radio programs. For twenty years, radio was an important component of corporate public relations, allowing businesses to speak more directly to the public than print advertisements had. By the mid-fifties, institutional broadcasting, combined with other public relations activities, had succeeded in helping business improve its status in American society.

In the years following World War I, British and American diplomats and businessmen fashioned a cooperative approach to the problems of international oil rivalries, building an informal entente which was institutionalized at the private level, surrounded with the mystique of enlightened capitalism, and masked behind tortured concessions to competitive symbols.

In studying the economic growth of Latin America, historians of widely divergent viewpoints have tended to emphasize the role of foreigners in the developmental process. As a result, they have often overlooked the efforts of Central and South American entrepreneurs in mobilizing capital and adopting technology to foster the growth of their countries. Chile is a case in point. Like their counterparts throughout Latin America, mid-nineteenth-century Chilean businessmen have been generally portrayed as the followers of foreign interests that dominated the nation's economy. This interpretation, however, has ignored the activity of Chileans in building railroads and promoting various other sectors of their economy. In this essay, Dr. Oppenheimer offers conclusive evidence that Chilean businessmen, closely linked to government—but not foreigners—dominated the two firms that brought the iron horse into Chile's Central Valley.

Although free-standing companies helped facilitate international capital flows in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their ability to operate effectively over the long run in a global economy has been questioned. This essay looks at one free-standing company, the Penang Sugar Estates, Ltd., in British Malaya to assess its managerial performance and strategies for transferring information. Through diversification, subcontracting, reorganization, and increased tolerance for local knowledge, the firm surmounted the information asymmetries that gave trouble during its early decades and increased profits. The Malayan sugar industry benefited from its imperial location, which brought significant advantages.

The power of history to instruct policy makers and enforcers is demonstrated in this study of the seventy-five-year effort to control pollution by the petroleum industry of the upper Texas Gulf coast. Dividing his subject into three time periods, Professor Pratt shows that the goal of economic growth, even with highly inefficient and polluting production methods, ruled until about 1914; from 1914 to 1940, progress in pollution control resulted primarily from less wasteful refining technology; and in the most recent era pollution, having become critical, is finally being controlled insofar as industry cooperation and national regulation can achieve it. But, he warns, the problem has now attained international proportions, and he asks where the social institutions to effect regulation are to be found on that plane.

Life insurance corporations were among the first businesses to expand their activities across state lines in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet their efforts were often impeded by protectionist state laws and uneven state regulations. The industry reacted by forming a trade association that pressed for federal regulation of multistate insurance sales. This article examines the life insurance industry's attempts in Congress and in the courts to alter the balance of federalism and to promote free trade in a growing national market.

Historians and social scientists have often described modern America as a uniquely pluralist society in which a collective bargaining model of industrial relations won an early triumph over other conceptions of labor relations. Professor Gerber challenges this traditional view. Comparing American and British thinking and policies relating to labor relations during and just after the First World War, Professor Gerber concludes that, in large part because of the war's impact, corporatist conceptions of political economy had by 1920 achieved a wide appeal in both Britain and America. Though a pluralist conception of collective bargaining may later have become dominant in the United States, at least as of 1920 many parallels existed between the emerging “corporatist bias” of British thinking about labor relations and American thinking about this issue.

The entrepreneurial activity of Enrico Mattei, who headed the Italian state oil company AGIP (later ENI) from 1945 to 1962, laid the groundwork for the company's growth during the 1950s and 1960s. Mattei relied on a group of knowledgeable specialists, who were equipped with a complex set of capabilities that enabled them to oversee and perform operational tasks. The task of adapting that set of capabilities began in the latter half of the 1950s, when the firm underwent a transition from its main business of producing natural gas, which it had developed immediately after World War II, to prospecting for oil abroad.

This essay examines the origins of a managerial class in American business by exploring the dynamic economic and cultural milieu in which merchants and clerks forged apprenticeship and employment relations in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury northeastern cities. Apprenticeship unraveled as an institution in countinghouses and stores throughout this period, a casualty of the Revolutionary-era narrative touting economic opportunity and independence through the cultivation of character. Increased competition for clerkships in the early republic led to the establishment of waged relationships shorn of traditional obligations. Yet in an uncertain economic climate, apprenticeship endured in idealized form within an antebellum cultural debate about the meanings of success and the ways to achieve it. As clerks' work tasks, social status, and economic prospects changed, many attempted to hitch their hopes for advancement to the coattails of merchants with capital instead of starting their own businesses, decisions that foreshadowed the formation of corporate hierarchies in the late nineteenth century.

This comparative study deals with objectives, administration, and portfolio policies of two banks that were among the earliest institutional lenders in America. Founded to assist the “frugal poor,” both banks faced the handicaps of provincialism, capital immobility, and regulation in their efforts to enlarge their services to the community. Both contributed much to a growing public understanding of banks and banking.

The focus in the literature on the political outcomes of decolonization has resulted in neglect of the business activities that took place from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s. Missing from existing accounts are the occasions when business turned impending political change to economic advantage. One such shift occurred in the central African copper-mining industry as, first, the promise of racial “partnership” during the short-lived Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland and then the prospect of African majority rule in Northern Rhodesia redefined the political context within which businesses operated. Rather than emphasizing the ethical considerations that influenced business attitudes, this study describes how corporate policies toward the job color bar were shaped by the copper industry's changing cost structure and profitability.

Global maritime business networks channeled the flows of people and goods for modern production and consumption societies. The principal instrument for constructing and sustaining these networks was the business trip. In the course of their travels, shipping-company and trading-company executives founded new commercial networks, established new routes and services, inspected agents, gathered business intelligence, and promoted new contacts and connections. These trips relied on a business culture that combined cosmopolitanism with national preferences and competitiveness with gentlemanly codes. Personal relationships remained fundamental to the networking process, despite a bureaucratization of business structures. An examination of the business trips of Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and German maritime firms reveals the centrality of global networks in modern economies, shows how such networks were constructed and maintained, and argues that face-to-face relationships continued to characterize business life deep into the twentieth century.