Between 1870 and 1910, big business established itself as a prominent feature of the American economy. American economists paid close attention to its rise and confronted the difficulties of integrating large firms into economic theory. The result was a theory that emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship, that enlarged the scope of competition, that distinguished profit from other forms of income, and that was compatible with large-scale enterprise. The insights of earlier American economists have been lost to modern economic theory, which extols the virtues of small firms.

Regulating environmental outcomes without stipulating the technologies to accomplish them is a characteristically American form of governmental intervention. This approach aims to encourage industry to address public-policy concerns while minimizing interference in its affairs. However, California's zero-emission-vehicle mandate of 1990 implied the development of specific technologies with highly disruptive sociotechnical effects. The most practical zero-emission vehicle of the day was the all-battery electric vehicle, a technology characterized by the temporal mismatch of its components. Batteries have shorter life-spans than electric motors, a durability dilemma that rewards battery-making. In response, General Motors and Toyota devised strategies to mitigate this risk that involved mediating the technology of the Ovonic Battery Company.

The promotional, financial, and manufacturing enterprises of the Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, Inc. are examined in this study of its most prosperous years.

After World War II, Weirton Steel remained a critical barrier to the unionization of the steel industry. Weirton kept unions at bay through a plan of high wages, welfare, and company unionism, which it combined with an authoritarian style of management. Forbidden from using intimidation by the federal courts, Weirton substituted a celebration of Americanism that associated freedom with limited government and an absence of unionism. Foreseeing a union drive in 1950, Weirton staged a pageant to dramatize its version of patriotism. The steelworkers countered with a competing version that stressed trade unionism as a way to give workers a democratic voice. This article reveals how postwar patriotic pageantry was rooted in the struggle between labor and capital.

The article analyzes a list of the hundred largest private and state-owned employers in the Russian Empire in 1913. It explains the validity of sources underlying the data and contributes to the methodological debates concerning the interpretation of such lists. It examines the geographical and sectoral distribution as well as the ownership structure of the largest Russian employers in a comparative context, using lists from Germany and the United Kingdom. The annexed list contributes to a more representative dataset of large firms beyond western Europe and therefore adds to the discussion on the rise of big business.

Taking as its starting point Alfred D. Chandler's studies of big business, this investigation explores how the largest corporations in Italy and Spain transformed their strategies and structures during the second half of the twentieth century. Empirical evidence reveals that, in contrast to the more advanced nations of Europe, these two southern European countries did not adopt either product diversification or the multidivisional structure until later in the century and, even then, did so only partially. By forming business groups and focused companies, the two nations came up with their own viable alternatives to the dominant paradigm that originated in the United States and spread among the bigger European economies.

This article examines the establishment of the field of operations research (OR) at the Arthur D. Little consulting firm and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. OR advocates envisioned the field as a new kind of bureaucratic organ dedicated to general studies of business problems, staffed by trained scientists who could employ sophisticated methods if needed. The crux of their promotional strategy was to use their appreciation of general managerial practice to overcome the tensions to be expected from their claims to apply generic scientific methods to nonscientific activities. However, they discounted possible intellectual competition with established professions. This competition ultimately confined OR's identity to a jurisdiction defined by novel mathematical techniques.

Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practices used by Medici entrepreneurs were first theorized by Giovanni Botero and others as what would become an “Italian model” in political economy, a model that had a profoundly wide-ranging impact, and that puts the lie to the commonplace in the history of ideas that the Italian Renaissance, so precocious in other fields, was silent on the topic of political economy.

The 1920's and early 1930's witnessed the beginnings of federal oil regulation in the United States. Professor Nordhauser argues that oil executives rather than government officials led the way in the movement for regulation and that their dominant goals were the stabilization of prices and profits.

The 1916 Tariff Commission, created to provide expert analyses of tariffs, is an example of Progressive-Era reliance on technical analysis. However, the Commission was motivated not only by a desire to improve technical understanding of tariffs, but also by distinctly political goals. President Woodrow Wilson and Treasury Secretary McAdoo adopted this Republican invention in response to pressure to prevent potential foreign “dumping” after the First World War. Congressional Democrats supported the Tariff Commission for this and an additional reason: they hoped Commission analyses of the consumer welfare costs of protectionism would undermine future electoral support for Republican high-tariff candidates.

By examining the activities of the Bank of Nova Scotia, this article demonstrates that Canadian banks established branches in the Caribbean to finance trade with the United States rather than with Canada. The expertise of Canadian banks in the management of branch networks and in the finance of international trade was the basis on which they successfully filled an important gap in the provision of banking services for the Hispanic Caribbean and offered strong competition to the American banks that expanded into the region after 1914.

Recent years have seen the so-called New Left school of historiography cut a wide swath through the study of American diplomacy. Reacting at least in part to the exigencies of the Vietnam War, as well as to older schools of diplomatic history, its adherents have molded a point of view that has emphasized economic factors as the driving force in American foreign policy. In this essay. Dr. Braeman focuses on the 1920s, a crucial decade in New Left thinking. After probing the intellectual origins of this school of thought, he brings historical statistics to bear in his analysis of American investment abroad, the conduct of American policymakers, and the contending interpretations of American foreign policy.

Through examination of the procedural relations of British aircraft companies and the State, Professor Higham suggests broader hypotheses regarding the process of government-business interaction.

The purpose of this special issue is to explore the relationship of gender in several national contexts to the service industriesbusinesses that provide benefit to others or produce items or infrastructure that support others. Several questions have guided our overall purpose. What do we learn about business history generally, and the service sector specifically, by taking gender into account? Is what we learn the same in different national contexts? If not, why not? We hope that the answers suggested in the essays will stimulate dialogue on both national case studies and comparative themes and will illuminate transnational patterns and perspectives in the history of women, gender, and business.

The organizational alternatives available to businessmen are often important in the channeling of economic growth, as shown in this historical study of the French experience.

The term Tracht is examined with a view toward its introduction into English usage to distinguish between long-term and short-term changes in clothing style.

Continuing a long tradition, the government of New York attempted to aid domestic manufacturing in various ways during the troubled period of the Embargo, the War of 1812, and the war's aftermath. Among the most important legislative actions was the state's general incorporation law for manufacturing, passed in 1811 on a temporary basis and enacted without time limit in 1821.

Recently, a number of groups sponsored large international research projects that are concerned with business history. Harm G. Schröter's group investigated the European integration that followed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 in order to discover whether it had led to the appearance of a characteristically “European” corporation. Franco Amatori, Camilla Brautaset, and Youssef Cassis coordinated an analysis with the ambitious title “The Performance of European Business in the Twentieth Century.” The projects shared some common “Chandlerian” features: they were problem-oriented, comparative studies of the long-term development of large enterprises, and their goal was to propose illuminating generalizations. Such Chandler-inspired studies are likely to undergo a renaissance in the next couple of years. Still, as the term “renaissance” implies, Chandler's impact on European business studies has undergone upswings and downturns over the past four decades.

Generalizations about the merger movement in America at the turn of the century have too open been predicated upon inadequate information about the motives and mechanisms involved and the results achieved. This has been particularly true of those combinations in which the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company was involved. The International Mercantile Marine Company merger of 1902 has hitherto been misrepresented as a promotion of Wall Street. The subsequent course of this venture shows how even a combination of the world's most astute bankers and shipping men could be misled in analysis and held powerless to affect their own destiny by the march of economic and political events. Not all the grand combinations of the early twentieth century yielded lush promotional profits; neither should the evidence of overcapitalization in such combinations always be accepted at face value.

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in understanding Indian business history. A number of business history books have been published in the academic and nonacademic press. Special issues on India have appeared in leading field journals, more management schools in India and outside are engaging with the field, internship and fellowship opportunities have been initiated, and business archives have sprung up. This article documents these recent trends, examines the emerging scholarship, and identifies gaps that need to be addressed in the future.