Although East Asia's silk trade with the West stretched far back into antiquity, the middle and later years of the nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable growth in the European and American demand for silk. This imparted a tremendous impetus to the Chinese and Japanese industries. For some eighty years, from the 1850s through the 1930s, trade flourished until the coming of synthetic fibers and world war curtailed its growth. The rise of so large an international business obviously had a significant impact on these countries, one that was particularly profound in the case of Japan. When the upsurge in trade began, both China and Japan were at roughly comparable stages in their economic development, but when the trade ended with the onset of war, it was Japan, not China, which had emerged as one of the leading industrial nations of the world. While few would contend that silk alone, however important, accounted for this differing course of national development, the dissimilar paths followed by the Chinese and Japanese silk industries not only reflected many themes characteristic of business enterprise in those countries but also typified their divergent national experience during this dramatic era of economic growth.

In the literature on British economic decline entrepreneurship is typically assessed by its outcome. By contrast, this paper argues that the soundness of entrepreneurship is best tested by viewing it ex ante. In other words, it is the process, and not the product, of entrepreneurship that is important in determining its quality. When this is accepted, competence, rather than infallibility, becomes the criterion by which entrepreneurship is best judged. In the latter half of the article, this approach is applied to the British paper industry's search for a new source of cellulose in the second half of the nineteenth century.

That human needs and social realities are the roots of all systems of jurisprudence is nowhere more demonstrable than in the evolution of the law of business. Professor Freyer shows that neither the English common law of negotiable instruments nor the modifications made in it in the colonial era were adequate in the lusty, far-flung, and rapidly growing young nation that the Constitution of the United States created. Innovation, he reveals, promptly followed.

This study analyzes the Brazilian experience as a case study in the role of banking in the early stages of economic growth and development.

Recent events in Europe have given rise to renewed speculation about the possible economic threat of a resurgent united Germany. This article examines six leading German firms in the electrical and chemical industries over the course of the twentieth century in an attempt to understand the historical realities of the foreign market strategies of Germany's largest firms. The author concludes that the changed configuration of international markets, the post-Second World War “Americanization” of German management, and the growing perception of a “European home market” have combined to remove the threat implicit in “the German question.”

This study demonstrates how business desires to improve information regarding foreign operations and a genuine interest in America's image abroad combined with civil-service reform sentiment to effect change in a vital branch of government service.

Based on theoretical findings of the new institutional economics, this examination of the history of the Swiss chocolate company Suchard (founded in 1826) and the Verband Reisender Kaufleute der Schweiz (Association of Swiss Commercial Travelers) describes the economic significance, social image, and everyday life of traveling salesmen between 1860 and 1920. By 1900, commercial travelers formed a critical link between the enterprise and the market, helping to drive the vertical integration of production and distribution. They enjoyed high standing within the company, and many were promoted to executive levels. Traveling salesmen were largely responsible for procuring information and expanding product sales in an era that preceded specialized market research and the domination of advertising companies.

Leaders of business schools and other educational institutions have enjoyed decades of stability. Today, we confront a set of systemic global challenges, including a pandemic, severe economic weakness, heightened inequality, racial injustice, and a climate emergency. Taken together, these challenges redefine the environment in which we operate—and offer us an opportunity to reimagine our organizations. We can learn about how to deal with this level of upheaval by studying how leading U.S. business schools responded to World War II. All shrank as students and faculty were drafted, most innovated in fairly traditional ways while still maintaining existing activities alongside of war-time innovations, and some pushed forward long-standing institutional change. One school choose a different path, shutting all peacetime programs as it fully committed not only to helping win a global war but, just as importantly, to forging a lasting peace—the long-term economic prosperity that followed the war. The lessons we can draw from academic leaders from nearly eighty years ago are apt today.

Aristotle Onassis was a leading figure in creating the new global tanker business in the second half of the twentieth century. This article examines the first thirty years of his career, before he became renowned worldwide, setting his business in the context of global shipping developments. Onassis is the most famous of the shipping tycoons that transformed maritime business in the post–World War II transitional period. He is among those “new men”—Greek, Norwegian, Danish, American, Japanese, or Hong Kong shipowners—who replaced the old order of the traditional British Empire shipowners. These new pioneers established the global shipping business in the era of American dominance.

This article examines the aftermath of the 1897 Riksbank Act in Swedish banking. The act placed banks with unlimited liability and those with limited liability on equal footing, removing the note-issuing privileges of the former. We consider whether changes in risk preferences occurred subsequent to the act, or whether extended liability was a sufficient deterrent. We conclude that when legal differences were removed, lower transaction costs for unlimited liability banks (ULBs) spurred aggressive competition, reflected in narrower interest spreads relative to limited liability banks (LLBs). ULBs also took on greater leverage and held less liquidity, which supports the Coasean interpretation that the shareholder liability regime mattered little. After 1897, ULB shareholders continued to receive higher dividends, enjoyed substantially superior returns on equity, and maintained an array of corporate governance controls to shield themselves against their additional risk.

The ability to combine technological innovation with innovation in product design has been recognized by business historians as an important characteristic of a successful business. This article examines the use of product design as a source of competitive advantage by leading firms in the Manchester cotton, Macclesfield silk, and Staffordshire pottery sectors in the period 1750–1860. Four design strategies are identified: copying (direct imitation and adaptation), commissioning, capacity building, and collaboration. Distinction is made between proactive firms, which innovated whenever there was an opportunity, and reactive firms, which innovated only when necessary.

Professor Cohen recounts the operations of the famed auction system in New York, suggesting reasons for its success in the years after the War of 1812 and its decline in the decade of the 1830's.

The more deeply scholars probe the evolution of management methods and structure, the earlier are antecedents of modern practice detected. The 1882 report on the Pennsylvania Railroad organization exhibits a highly refined conceptualization of big business administration and must stand as a significant milepost in the history of management. Here are to be found many of the ideas and even some of the terminology to which much more recent birth dates have hitherto been ascribed.

Hikojirō Nakamigawa, the famous head of the Sanyō Railway and the huge Mitsui business combine, has long been characterized by historians as the epitome of the modern entrepreneur. In this article, Professor Yui, after a brief survey of the highlights of Nakamigawa's career, challenges the traditional interpretation by presenting a more balanced view of this controversial figure.

Sensing the opportunity to reap great profits by selling fruit to hungry urban consumers back East, nineteenth-century entrepreneurs flocked to California to establish commercial orchards and citrus groves. Invasions of fruit pests, however, threatened years of investment and patient cultivation, and made the public wary of the uneven quality of California fruit. In this article, Mr. Seftel describes how fruit growers organized and called on government to check the menace. Between 1880 and 1920, orchard owners created an elaborate regulatory network, linking local, state, federal, and academic institutions with their enterprise. These fruit-growing capitalists came to believe that only compulsory compliance with government-enforced pest control regulations could ensure their success. During these four decades, the growing horticultural bureaucracy helped transform California fruit growing from an entrepreneurial venture of uncertain promise into the state's second largest industry.

The years following the Civil War witnessed a rapid expansion in the power of the federal judiciary. In this article, Professor Merkel reveals that the construction of the transcontinental railroad played an important role in this development. Beginning in 1868, the management of the federally chartered Union Pacific Railroad sought legislation that would authorize the company to remove lawsuits from hostile state courts to more sympathetic federal forums. Congress was accommodating, passing laws that expanded the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts. Consequently, these courts resolved many questions of transportation law, often in ways that benefitted the railroads.

The organizational and financial sides of Negro publishing are examined in this study of weekly newspapers before World War I.

Within the postwar financial regulatory system, state-level regulations—particularly interest rate limits—constrained the profitability of bank credit card plans. But differences in law among the states allowed motivated institutions to circumvent local laws using these mobile financial instruments. Eventually, banks themselves became mobile, placing irresistible pressure on states to eliminate local restrictions on consumer finance. The critical moment came when Citibank relocated its credit card business to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, in 1981. By examining this move in its longer context, this essay provides a new perspective on the rise of consumer finance in the late twentieth century, one that emphasizes strategic manipulation of local law by firms pursuing a national customer base.

This research note uses the case of nineteenth-century Chile to argue that the phenomenon of early green entrepreneurship was not confined to the United States and Europe. It focuses on Chile-based inventors who pursued intellectual-property protection in solar, tidal, wave motion, water flow, and wind power. The backgrounds and careers of these inventors are examined. The case contests the popular assumption that knowledge always originated in the developed North and flowed southward. Instead, at least in the case of renewable energy, knowledge emerged endogenously in Chile and sometimes even flowed northward. This research note argues that the circulation of knowledge was strongly linked to the mobility of individuals rather than to the mobility of patents between North and South.