The relationship between ownership and control of distant ventures has been a major topic in business history. This relationship prompted the creation of a specific organizational form, the freestanding company, particularly active in international business before World War I. The freestanding form and railway companies such as Companhia Real share the common characteristic of being stand-alone firms based on foreign direct investment (FDI), but their legal ownership and management strategy were different. The freestanding companies offshored legal ownership; Companhia Real offshored top management since it was incorporated in the country hosting FDI. This business configuration was usual in French investments across European peripheral countries. This article introduces a new concept into the current international business literature, emphasizing the polymorphous character of foreign investment before World War I.

The nations of East Asia share a common cultural heritage, but there is a marked difference in their adaptation to the modern world. During the past century Japan has been distinguished by enormous economic development, while China has experienced profound political turmoil. East Asian historiography reflects this trend. One can compile an outstanding bibliography on economic growth in Japan, and Japan's recent challenge to American business has prompted scholars to probe more subtly the business organization and managerial practices of that country. As for China, although there are numerous studies on political revolution, there are only a few studies on business history. This special issue of the Business History Review has helped to fill this gap in scholarship.

In 1959 Harvard University, for the first time, appointed a woman to a full professorship at its Graduate School of Business Administration. The new Professor of Business History, Henrietta Melia Larson, was no stranger to her colleagues at the institution where she had worked since 1928 nor to the business historians of the United States. She was known as an outstanding scholar in her field and widely respected for her attainments. At this period of her semi-retirement from Harvard it seems appropriate to honor her by dedicating to her this issue of the Business History Review and by evaluating the contributions which she has already made to her profession.

Through a careful analysis of public policy and opinion, Professor Marburg considers the nature, allowable range, and economic effects of those business associations designated “cartels” in German usage. Marked contrasts with American theory and practice in similar fields emerge.

Attempts to monopolize the automobile industry began early in its history but were never successful because the industry possessed characteristics which made monopolization exceptionally difficult. The first of these efforts provides an illuminating example of business failure resulting from avoidable errors of judgment. The Electric Vehicle Company began its operations on the assumption that the electric automobile was going to be the dominant type; when this became demonstrably a bad guess, the company tried to compensate by using the Selden patent to collect royalties from the manufacturers of gasoline automobiles. This scheme likewise misfired, and the company collapsed into bankruptcy. The scheme also brought disaster to the Pope Manufacturing Company of Hartford, Connecticut, which abandoned a very promising position of leadership in the automobile field in order to participate in a highly speculative enterprise.

Who were the originators of the Robber Baron concept? Not the injured, the poor, the faddists, the jealous, or a dispossessed elite. Rather, it was a frustrated group of observers led at last by protracted years of harsh depression to believe that the American dream of abundant prosperity for all was a hopeless myth.

The years surrounding the origins of the term “Manifest Destiny” were a transitional period in the history of industrialization. Historians have done much to analyze the impact of major technological shifts on business structure and management, and to connect eastern markets and westward expansion. They have paid less attention, however, to the relationship among continental geopolitics, industrial development, and frontier warfare. This article uses War Department papers, congressional reports, and manufacturers’ records to examine how the arms industry developed in response to military conflict on the frontier. As public and private manufacturers altered production methods, product features, and their relationships to one another, they contributed to the industrial developments of the mid-nineteenth century.

The stellar growth of Taiwan's personal-computer (PC) industry over the past three decades represents a paradox. Participating in the global production system, local firms in Taiwan grew in association with established firms in the West. Despite their technical know-how, manufacturing prowess, and size, most leading Taiwanese firms did not develop their own capabilities in branding and marketing. A close examination of the historical evolution of the industry reveals that interactions with established companies in the West, in addition to local competition, decisively shaped capability development among latecomer firms. A few firms in Taiwan that eventually joined the ranks of global PC brands had been investing in marketing early, guided by a strategic vision rather than near-term economic calculation.

In the late nineteenth century, American shipyards started building modern metal ships, a sector dominated by the British. But, they faced a challenge: a shortage of domestic workers with the skills to fabricate large metal ships. Using census of population data, this article describes how one important U.S. shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding, overcame the shortage of skilled domestic workers to assemble an effective labor force. The results show that skilled immigrants, mainly from Britain, played an important role in the shipyard's early life while, over time, native workers were trained to fill skilled occupations.

The attitudes and preoccupations of businessmen at any given time are deemed important by historians both as clues to and reasons for business action. The year 1900 is a promising one in which to probe those attitudes and preoccupations because at that time a great many important characteristics of the business community were undergoing rapid change. Examination of business literature of the day suggests that the businessman of 1900 was preoccupied with the merger movement and with labor agitation, with shifting distribution patterns, and with trade association activity. His concern with financial techniques and public relations was intense, if erratic, and he was preoccupied with problems of administrative structure. He was, in short, concerned with those developments commonly emphasized by historians, but with so much more besides as to suggest several new research avenues. Surprising results emerge when business attitudes and preoccupations of 1900 are compared with those of 1956.

Professor Buxton examines the importance during the 1930s of the “new” industries in Britain (vehicle manufacturing, electrical engineering, rayon, non-ferrous metals, and paper, printing, and publishing) and finds that their role has been exaggerated by earlier interpretations.

An examination of the manuscript censuses of manufacturing in 1850 and 1860 indicates the forthcoming revision of many traditional interpretations of American industrial development. This study suggests that large-scale manufacturing in the South and West was quite similar in the decade before the Civil War and that antebellum manufacturing was sufficiently concentrated to imply that the model of perfect competition is as inappropriate a description of mid-nineteenth century industrial structure as it is of twentieth century industry.

Inter-agency argument within the government and indecision and disagreement among businessmen over the demobilization of America's wartime economic controls are considered in this study of government-business relations.

The forces that originally impelled manufacturers to unite were often of fleeting impact and were soon replaced by the cohesive influence of new issues. The NAM, conceived to wage a tariff war, discovered in organized labor a common enemy for its members and traced its prosperity from the date it became a gladiator in the labor arena.

China has produced wine from grapes since the second century, B.C., but interest in Western wines did not begin until the late nineteenth century. Professor Godley describes the origins of the modern industry, which he traces back to an overseas Chinese entrepreneur from Southeast Asia who, despite the obvious advantages held by foreign competitors, began the construction of the country's first modern winery in 1892. One of the more unusual capitalist ventures in the late Qing and early Republican periods, the company ran into financial difficulties, but not before it had established a precedent for what is now a rapidly expanding business. Although the vicissitudes of the grape wine industry illustrate some important points about modern Chinese economic development, the author offers this case study in business history as something of an allegory: wine as a symbol for the meeting of East and West, yesterday and today.

Public policy, grounded in the conception of urban transit as a private business and of the automobile as a public good, played a crucial role in the decline of public transportation and the triumph of the automobile in Chicago.

Between 1973 and 2002, three of Australia's largest multinational companies exited from postcolonial Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Although neither host government wished the companies to leave, the tensions that arose during the course of decolonization made their departure inevitable. Prior to independence, conflicts between Fijians and Indians and decisions about grants of land and mineral rights to foreign firms had been mediated by colonial administrators. After independence, these contentious issues were resolved through domestic political processes. Ultimately, the companies were unable to overcome the limitations of their shared administrative heritage, based on nationalistic chauvinism, that desensitized them to the importance of race relations and communal rights to land within their host countries.