The development of the administration of business firms has been studied by many scholars in the last 25 years. By comparison, the history of the administration of trade unions is an untouched field; most historians of the American labor movement have dealt only summarily with administrative changes. But efficient internal organization was crucial, in the years after 1873, to trade union survival and growth. Under the prodding of Samuel Gompers, the Cigarmakers' International Union pioneered several improvements. Its major innovations were: centralized control, especially of strikes; benefit payments for sickness, unemployment, and death; high dues and high initiation fees.

In the rush to gear-up the American economy during World War I, what role did those business executives who were recruited into government service play? This study of a notable example of the “dollar-a-year man” suggests that a reciprocal learning experience on the part of both business and government was the result.

Industrialization, urbanization, and commercial expansion following the Civil War altered the social and economic landscape in America and contributed to the rapid development of new consumer markets. Manufacturers began to vie aggressively for consumer spending. It was the advertising trade card that met the need for an effective national advertising medium, heralding the arrival of an extraordinary variety of manufactured goods newly available to the American public.

Business enterprise in a market setting is the principal institutional artifact of capitalism, while capitalism itself is the creation of powerful evolutionary forces that were present in the culture of Europe. Those evolutionary forces continue their play into the present, working within the distinctive cultural context determined by an evolving capitalism. Every type and style of history dealing with European society and its offshoots must ultimately face and accommodate this central historical fact if it is to generalize its findings and acquire real intellectual weight and significance.

I examine the factors underpinning the British radio-equipment sector's particularly poor interwar productivity performance relative to the United States. Differences in socio-legal environments were crucial in allowing key players in the British industry to derive higher monopoly rents than their American counterparts. Higher British rents in turn, had the unintended outcome of stimulating innovation around restrictive patents, initiating a path-dependent process of technical change in favor of expensive multifunctional valves. These valves both raised direct production costs and prevented British firms from following the American path of broadening the radio market beyond the household's prime receiver.

Since the early 1970s, as shipping has undergone a period of structural change, Swedish shipping has rapidly declined from a position of global importance. The Swedish-controlled fleet has dwindled, and the structure of the industry itself has changed. This article explores the influence of shipping markets, shipping regulations, company strategies, maritime know-how, and financial resources on the development of Swedish shipping from 1970 to 2010. A comparison is made between, on the one hand, the direction taken by two failing companies and, on the other, the courses followed by two companies that managed to grow despite difficult conditions. On a broader level, the article traces the development of expertise in a declining industry.

Since 2008, academics and policymakers have frequently debated why bond rating agencies such as Moody's, S&P, and Fitch enjoy considerable power and influence. The 2008 financial crisis focused our attention on the bond rating agencies that had previously categorized mortgage-backed securities as investment grade. Scholars have attributed the power enjoyed by the rating agencies to regulations that confer a privileged status on those agencies that are designated as nationally recognized statistical rating organizations (NRSROs) by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). While these authors mention in passing that the relevant regulation went into effect in 1975, none has conducted archival research to examine why this regulation was introduced at that time. This article is the first historical investigation of the creation of this crucial regulation, which entrenched the concept of the NRSRO in federal securities law. It shows that the SEC mandated the use of NRSRO-created ratings even though SEC officials vigorously debated whether it was wise for the commission to endorse ratings produced by agencies that operate on the basis of the controversial issuer-pay model. This article contributes to our understanding of the SEC's role in the development of the distinctive features of American capitalism.

This article examines the strategies employed by multinational banks to mitigate political risk following the onset of revolution in their host countries during the early twentieth century. It does so by exploring the activities of multinational banks in China during the Revolution of 1911 and its aftermath. This article first describes the measures that multinational banks took to maintain China's credit on foreign bond markets after the outbreak of revolution. It then examines how these bankers curtailed political instability by first withdrawing financial support from both the Qing government and the revolutionaries and then providing financial assistance to the new Chinese Republican government.

This article answers, in part, questions raised by new rural and agricultural historians concerning how farmers interacted with the rise of large-scale organizational society in the era after the 1896 Presidential election. It argues that California citrus growers reacted by bringing the revolution of corporate capitalism to Southern California, 1893–1920. The article tests the activities of California orange growers against the theoretical models of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and Martin J. Sklar. It concludes that a pro-corporate group of orange growers embraced corporate managerial capitalism at a time when most other American farmers were in open revolt against industrialization. In 1912, these growers appointed G. Harold Powell, pomologist with the USDA's Bureau of Plant Industry, as General manager of their mammoth California Fruit Growers Exchange. By 1920, Powell and the Exchange board of directors completed the corporate consolidation of the citrus enterprise, and by example the reconstruction of California's potent agricultural empire.

An Atlantic approach to the history of early American trade challenges traditional British opinions and, indeed, much Anglo-American scholarship regarding the commercial prospects of the new United States. Contemporary Spanish observations, in contrast to the more familiar and widely cited ones in English, correctly predicted the post-Revolutionary War integration of American and Spanish imperial markets. As political, diplomatic, and economic upheavals broke down the old mercantilist system, U.S. merchants quickly succeeded in exploiting their comparative advantage in the expanding Atlantic economy. The debate over the “decline” of the British West Indies is amplified by examining the concurrent “rise” of the Spanish West Indies, particularly Cuba, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

Women substantially increased their presence in Washington, D.C.'s federal civil service during World War II. Accordingly, agency administrators struggled to define and address the “needs” of these new government women. This article analyzes the crucial role that gender played in the renegotiation of management strategies and policies during the 1940s. It examines the popularization of the human relations school of management in federal agencies and reveals how gendered concepts of authority impacted the employment prospects of female civil servants. The war provided an opportunity for some managers to promote a more “feminine” interpretation of human relations, but as this article demonstrates, that interpretation rested upon stressing the difference between male and female workers. In addition, postwar conservatism allowed for a reassertion of more hierarchical, “masculine” approaches to employment management in the civil service.

The interaction of business and political goals and strategies is emphasized in this critique of a key state bank's role in national affairs of the 1830's.

The following article reexamines the role of business leaders in the structural reform of American city government during the Progressive Era. In presenting a careful analysis of the fate of redevelopment plans after Baltimore's great 1904 fire, this case study argues against an unsophisticated good guy/bad guy approach to urban and business history. Historians are urged, however, not to abandon attempts to make reasoned moral judgments concerning the consequences of structural reform, but rather to base those efforts on a recognition of the deepening complexity of twentieth-century urban society.

Professor Blomquist describes and analyzes various forms of business association in an important northern Italian city during the period of economic growth in the thirteenth century. These included two basic forms of partnerships, as well as an early version of limited liability association.

Many opportunities for fruitful research emerge from this survey of those holdings of the National Archives which are pertinent to the historical study of government-business relationships in the United States.