From 1900 to 1905 the United States government, working with a small group within the emerging profession of economics, developed—for the first time—a financial policy toward foreign dependent areas. The policy devised and carried out by this first generation of experts in foreign currency reform—who included Charles Conant, Jeremiah Jenks, and Edwin Kemmerer—sought to bring nations onto a gold-exchange standard, with their gold funds deposited in New York and their coinage denominated on American money. In this article, Professor Rosenberg describes this gold standard diplomacy, suggesting that it reflected the nation's growing economic power; its increasing stake in maintaining an integrated, stable, and accessible international order; the emergence of a new profession of foreign financial advising; and the government's new desire to play a leading role in international currency matters. She concludes that policymakers and economists would build on this foundation in developing the gold-exchange standard and currency stabilization programs of the 1920s.

In the recent debate over minority contract set-asides, many policy-makers have forgotten this program's origins. Richard Nixon, moved by philosophical, practical, and political considerations, made minority business enterprise a theme of his 1968 presidential campaign and his first administration. By using set-asides, the Nixon administration overcame its meager funding of the Office of Minority Business Enterprise (OMBE) and encouraged minority entrepreneurship. Nixon's actions influenced federal policy toward minority owned businesses for two decades.

Two major forces have been remaking the organizational setting of the United States in the recent past. The third industrial revolution and globalization are having a dramatic impact on the structure and process of American economic institutions and on the nation's political process. This third version of the organizational synthesis probes, with varying degrees of success, the vast literature that has accumulated around these two themes in the years since 1983, when the Business History Review published the second version of the paradigm. While much has changed in the nation's history and its historiography, bureaucratic institutions continue to dominate the society's organizational landscape. Pressed to change, to adapt to the need for greater efficiency and innovative capability, the surviving bureaucracies and the professionals who people them have experienced wrenching changes in recent years. To date, this “American solution” to global competition and technical transformation has been expensive in human terms but an overwhelming economic success for America.

Development, modernity, and industrialization became dominant themes in corporate advertising in Africa in the 1950s and remained prevalent through the following two decades while many African nations were gaining independence. British businesses operating there created a publicity strategy that couched their presence in less developed countries in terms of a commitment and a positive contribution to the progress of the new states. Eventually, British companies tried to “Africanize” their corporate image through these campaigns.

Merchants formed an important component of British foreign direct investment before 1945. Locating in parts of Asia, Latin America and other developing economies, they often diversified into non-trading activities, including the ownership of plantations. This article examines three such British firms active initially in Asia, though with operations also in North America, Europe, and Africa. Often regarded as handicapped by managerial failings, especially from the early twentieth century, the authors cast these firms as more entrepreneurial and possessing greater managerial competencies than has been suggested. The article argues that their business strategies continued to evolve in the interwar years and that, when viewed as business groups, their organizational forms were robust, though considerable diversity in the performance of the three British firms can be observed. This evidence is shown to have implications for wider debates about the competencies of British management as a whole.

Many observers of the corporate restructurings that reached major proportions in the United States in the 1980s have believed that the market for corporate control had a serious negative impact on companies' long-term investment, which in turn contributed to the United States's decline in global competitiveness. In the following study, the author looks carefully at the effects of financial restructurings on investment, especially at expenditures on R&D, in a large set of companies categorized according to their level of technology and the length of their investment horizon. She then compares the U.S. situation with that in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. She concludes that, though many such events occasioned no change at all in investment strategies, restructuring pressures and declines in investment tended to concentrate in certain industries. She also finds that investment decisions were usually rational, given high interest rates and a tax environment that favored debt over equity.

American multinational advertising agencies first made inroads into the British advertising industry in the early twentieth century. Some were pioneers, but most came to Britain to service the advertising of American–based multinational companies. Their impact on British advertising was significant, particularly from 1945 until the late 1970s, years when American multinational agencies dominated the top end of the business. The British staged a major counter-challenge in both the British and American markets in the early 1980s, however, with considerable success. The basis of the British challenge was improved access to capital, which permitted expansion through acquisition, rather than the servicing of British–based multinational companies. Professor West places these developments in the context of multinational enterprise theory, using new data and evidence drawn largely from trade sources.

Did the doctrine of usury hamper businessmen and retard economic growth during the Middle Ages? Professor de Roover suggests an answer through examination of the conceptual modification of the doctrine in relation to banking and foreign exchange.

The fostering of worker confidence in the organization has been a major goal of big business for a century. Professor Nelson, a well-known authority on the history of human resource management, here provides a new look at company unions. His view shows that the characterization of these organizations by liberal and labor critics was not always accurate. Some company unions represented noteworthy contributions to the development of a professional approach to labor relations.

A study of the career of Ignaz Jastrow, guiding spirit of the Berlin Handelshochschule, invites attention to the broader subject of academic education for business. There was a close relationship between the educational philosophy embodied in the founding of the Berlin school in 1906 and in that of the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration in 1908. This relationship was not accidental, and establishment of these two institutions constituted a decisive point in a long history, beginning in the eighteenth century. Over the years, the basic difficulty had been that of endeavoring to raise professional training for business above the secondary school level. In those instances during the nineteenth century where university-level training was attempted, the result was overemphasis on the general background of business. In 1900, despite the many promising experiments in European countries and America, a sound foundation for high-level business training was still lacking. Jastrow's Handelshochschule was the first institution that focused on the real world of business and at the same time was truly academic in nature. This same combination was also effected at Harvard, where the basic objectives were implemented by reformed teaching techniques and by a continuing program of research upon business subjects.

This study explores how Norway, as a latecomer to oil production, was able to develop both effective oil companies and an internationally competitive oil service industry. The article focuses on two rather distinct phases: the protectionist phase, in which a strong focus on local content fostered skilled Norwegian oil companies as well as a national oil service industry, and the phase of liberalization or financialization, where new forms of contact and openness to foreign ownership laid the basis for internationally oriented Norwegian oil companies and oil supply and service firms.

The origins of the market are obscure, but substantial documentary evidence survives from the eleventh century onward, when chartered markets and new towns were established across Western Europe. The expansion of the market system is important for business history because it created new opportunities for business growth. There has been no systematic literature review on market evolution since Henri Pirenne and Raymond de Roover, and this article attempts to fill the gap. It shows that successful markets were regulated–often by civic authorities–to maintain a reputation for reasonable prices and quality control. Markets were located at both transport hubs and centers of consumption, even when the latter were quite remote. However, as transport and communication costs declined, shakeouts occurred and only the larger markets survived.

In the waning decades of the age of mercantilism, Great Britain intensified her efforts to keep at home the new industrial technology—technicians and machines—that the inventiveness of her people had produced. From his researches in the records of the Board of Trade, which played a major role in coordinating these efforts, Mr. Jeremy shows that as time wore on the policy of prohibiting emigration and exports became more and more internally contradictory and incapable of enforcement despite great ingenuity on the part of those responsible.

Professor Chandler uses data compiled by two of his students, Harold C. Livesay and P. Glenn Porter, whose work is condensed in the charts and tables which accompany this article, to propose a historical explanation for the changing industrial structure of the modem American economy.

During the Great Depression, counterfeiters of the newest styles posed a challenge to the high-fashion designers who dominated Parisian design. Meanwhile, New York, traditionally the destination of the first corporate buyers of Paris couture, became a potential contender for the role of fashion capital. Scrutiny of French and American laws reveals that strong national interests were at stake in the fashion business. In France, the law safeguarded copyrights of fashion design while, in the United States, legislators denied such protection to American fashion.

Decarbonization has been identified as necessary to preventing catastrophic climate change, creating a dilemma for the global oil industry. This article examines the industry's reaction to this dilemma and focuses on its historical response to market and governmental regulatory pressure. The article argues that differing national climate policies provoked some oil companies to develop proactive decarbonization strategies. However, the continued growth of fossil fuel demand, the industry's vested interests, and the voluntary nature of climate governance have resulted in the industry taking very little meaningful action to achieve decarbonization.

Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means famously declared in 1932 that a separation of ownership and control was a hallmark of large U.S. corporations, and their characterization of matters quickly became received wisdom. A series of recent papers has called the Berle–Means orthodoxy into question. This survey of the relevant historical literature acknowledges that the pattern of ownership and control in U.S. public companies is not monolithic. Nevertheless, a separation between ownership and control remains an appropriate reference point for analysis of U.S. corporate governance.

In this article Projessor Miranti contrasts the differing reactions of leaders in the public accounting profession to the structure of national economic regulation that emerged in America during the first decades of the twentieth century. Specifically, he focuses on the actions taken by two national professional organizations, the American Association of Public Accountants and its successor, the American Institute of Accountants, at two important junctures in the history of financial reform: the establishment of the Federal Reserve Board and the Federal Trade Commission and the organization of the Securities and Exchange Commission. In assessing these experiences, his article concentrates on identifying the changing circumstances and political contexts that gave rise first to an associationalist response and then to a statist response to the problem of ordering the nation's financial markets.

When American railroad promoters, in the years immediately after 1830, had to look beyond their own regions for capital, they turned first to Broad Street in Philadelphia, where Nicholas Biddle and his associates served as the agents for marketing vast amounts of sterling bonds in London. This mechanism was disrupted by the failure of the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania in 1841. Then State Street in Boston became the center, and common stock became the chief instrument, of American railroad finance. The sharp recession of 1847 showed that the Boston capitalists had already made long-term investments in excess of the liquid capital available to them. New York merchants, bankers, and brokers now took up the task of financing the railroads of the South and West, and Wall Street became the undisputed financial center of the country.

Personnel management as we know it today grew out of welfare work, on the one hand, and Scientific Management on the other. It came to embrace added functions and concepts, the most important of which was that idealism and realism were compatible in dealing efficiently with human beings.