Greek family firms developed sustainable businesses in the Azov Sea area during the nineteenth century. Despite the discouraging conditions for entrepreneurship and the geographical constraints, they succeeded in constructing trading and shipping networks based on kinship, common historical experience, and close links with their place of origin. Medium-size firms represent the main bulk of Greek family enterprises that were located in the Azov port cities, and through their activities these contributed to the integration of the area's economy in the world market. Geographical mobility and diversification in transport services were their main responses to situations of high risk and controversy. The key to understanding their resilience and flexibility in adapting to environmental changes resided in their family culture, shared values, and social-network support that added value to their international performance.

Recent diplomatic historians have explained much of American expansionism at the end of the nineteenth century as the product of domestic industrial overcapacity and the resulting need to seek foreign markets. Evidence of business behavior, however, indicates that overseas expansion and exports were not a very important avenue through which U.S. businessmen sought to control prices and output. Indeed, in most of the industries which did engage in significant foreign activities, their expansion was usually the result of genuine competitive advantages rather than a sign of economic ill health.

Professor Bliss suggests that the Canadian anti-trust tradition was much more similar to the British experience than to the policies adopted in the United States. At no time, he argues, did Canadian legislation significantly expand the common law prohibition of undue or unreasonable restraints of trade, and the few prosecutions after 1900 had no significant effect in inhibiting the thrust of business resistance to market forces.

The development of the pulp and paper sector has been a highly controversial subject in Canadian business history. During the 1920s, there was a rapid growth of capacity (which reached twice the level of market demand) and a series of mergers as different firms sought to attain giant size. By 1928 several leading companies were experiencing difficulties, and by 1932 half of the producers were bankrupt while the remainder hovered on the brink of insolvency. These developments had their own logic and were driven by strategic issues and the formation of an institutional market for industrial securities. As corporate executives propelled their firms into dubious strategies characterized by excess production and unrealistic dividend policies, the status of the newsprint producers was obscured from investors by financial and accounting practices, thereby contributing to a flood of investment, which was followed by corporate collapse. The attempts to reorganize the companies began a complex process that lasted anywhere from several years to more than a decade.

Although it has not been recognized very clearly, Alfred Chandler offers a dual definition of modern business. One definition focuses on the formation of “managerial hierarchies;” this refers to the rise of professional managers, a development that eventually leads to the separation of management and ownership. The advent of the managerial firm, or managerial capitalism, symbolizes modern business. Chandlers other definition focuses on management structure and emphasizes the U-form (Unitary-form) or M-form (Multi-divisionalform), both of which are organizational types closely associated with the development of modern, large-scale firms. The modern firm usually has the characteristics of a managerial organization and employs either the U-form or M-form (typically the latter) structure.

Despite the efforts of American government officials, attempts to establish a joint Chinese-American company to develop China's petroleum potential met with failure during the initial years of the Wilson administration. Duplicity and misunderstanding on the part of Standard Oil and of the Chinese government added another chapter to the dismal history of American business in China.

As one grows old, he becomes increasingly annoyed at confusion of almost any variety; and that which continues to surround the concept of “business history” chances to impinge frequently enough upon my attention to impel me to try to reduce the disparities in concepts still existent among individuals interested in the field. Diversity of concepts was evident even among men interested enough in the area to come – in some cases, goodly distances – to attend a two-day meeting at the Harvard Business School on the teaching of the subject.

This article examines the relationship between international commercial banks and military regimes in South America. The focus is on how military regimes in the Southern Cone of Latin America and Brazil in the 1970s became heavily dependent on foreign capital provided by international banks based in Britain and France. It makes use of previously unavailable archival evidence to examine the interactions between international banks and South American governments, showing how these interactions intensified once military rule was established. It shows that international capital was used for a wide variety of purposes, including arms imports. When global banks cut loans once the debt crisis erupted in 1982, they aggravated the economic crisis but also fostered democratic change.

Professor Braeman evaluates historians' current assessment of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, finding a new consensus emerging among scholars of that important era in American history.

Led by James J. Hill, a group of businessmen expanded the use of coal as a fuel in the Northwest by monopolizing the market, apportioning the business among a limited number of people, maintaining prices, profit margins, and profit flow, thereby establishing a reputation of dependability for the fuel and a source of risk capital for further investment in the industry. This, Professor Martin argues, was a clear case of “constructive monopoly.”

There was something almost awesome, and perhaps typically American, in Henry Ford's defiance of the N.R.A. Ford staunchly maintained that the company he had founded and still ruled in absolute fashion was adhering to the law and had, in fact, anticipated many of its provisions. Critics focused their attack upon the company's labor practices, which clearly foreshadowed a coming strife, but no case was brought to court and Ford's fiercely individualistic attitude was never successfully constrained. The larger issue is not whether Ford did or did not comply, but rather what, in this period of profound social change, was to be the “fundamental American idea.”

Department stores are often seen as transformative of both retail and wider social practices. This article offers a comparative analysis of department stores in early twentieth-century Britain and Japan to assess the extent to which there were universal qualities defining the operation, practices, and experience of department stores and to explore the ways in which they might be seen as transforming retailing in the two countries. Despite similarities in their origin, organization, and service to customers, we highlight the greater diversity of British department stores and their incremental development. Japanese stores were a far more powerful force for change because they formed part of a concerted and conscious program of modernization.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, modern insurance started to spread from the British Isles around the world. Outside Europe and the European offshoots in North and South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, it began to compete with other forms of risk management and often met with stiff opposition on religious and cultural grounds. Insurance arrived in Southeast Asia via British merchants living in India and Canton rather than through agencies of European firms. While the early agency houses in Bengal collapsed in the credit crisis of 1829–1834, the firms established by opium traders residing in Macau and Hong Kong, and advised by insurance experts in London, went on to form the foundations of the insurance industry in the Far East. Until the early twentieth century, they sought to use the techniques of risk management that they had developed in Europe to win Europeans and Americans living in Southeast Asia as clients, along with members of the local population familiar with Western culture.

In this article Professor Hyde examines in detail the use of industrial spies at a large Michigan copper mine in the early twentieth century. While many historians have argued that labor spies were powerful weapons effectively used by employers in their struggles with workers, Hyde finds in his case study of the Quincy Mining Company that spies were seldom useful in providing important labor intelligence. Instead, they inadvertently provided top management with valuable information about underground working conditions and the performance of foremen and petty bosses.

Despite political pressure from their Congressional champions, small businesses were never effectively utilized in the American mobilization for World War II. The Roosevelt administration followed an ambivalent policy designed to placate the proponents of small business while giving the lion's share of contracts and scarce raw materials to big business.

Viewing the evolution of business through the unique perspective of the student of fashion behavior, this essay recasts many traditional generalizations and seeks a meeting ground for fashion study and business history.

The corporate charter, so restricted in its use in England, found a constantly broadening range of applications in America from the colonial period onward. The test of importance to the general welfare, originally confined to municipal, benevolent, or at most public-utility enterprises, was being applied to manufacturing ventures by the second decade of the nineteenth century.