The United Planters' Association of South India (UPASI), formed in 1893 at the zenith of British colonial rule in India, was an organization dedicated to the interests of British planters, mainly tea planters, of South India. In the first half century of its history, UPASI enjoyed an unusual degree of effectiveness and control. Its authority and reach owed to the fact that, unlike many other planters' organizations of the time, such as the Ceylon Planters' Association and the Planters' Association of Malay, UPASI was an “association of associations,” a cartel of cartels, its members being district associations. But its power also derived from the homogeneous ethnic composition of the firms that constituted and managed this body, making it an exclusive association of Europeans in an Indian world. In this article, I show how this combination of ethnicity and cooperation, dynamics that manifested across the entire range of modern businesses started in colonial India, proved to be both a source of strength and a point of weakness.

Economic and geographic centralization are typically seen as critical components of the industrialization of food during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the fresh- and processed-tomato industries during this period offers an important counterexample to this dominant narrative. Between the late nineteenth century and World War II, the most salient characteristic of both fresh- and processed-tomato production was economic and geographic decentralization. This article argues that the emergence of sites of tomato production and processing in virtually every region of the country played a vital role in fulfilling the long-standing quest for year-round access to both fresh and processed tomatoes.

Banians acted as intermediaries for European merchants in Bengal. They were highly influential in the eighteenth century but their importance waned thereafter. This article reexamines their role in the nineteenth century and argues that their importance persisted but evolved in response to changes in the Bengal economy and issues of contracting and governance. It shows that the banians remained a nexus between the local and global economies, facilitating a bidirectional transfer of knowledge. They enabled the development of innovative Indian business forms and contributed to the emergence of a diverse ecology of organizational forms and ownership in Bengal at the end of the nineteenth century.

The Selfridge Collection of Medici manuscripts at Harvard Business School's Baker Library is the largest collection of Renaissance Florentine account books outside Italy. This collection documents both the business and personal economic activities of one branch of the Medici family through six generations, extending from the early fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth century. It would be difficult to find, even in Florence, another family whose economic activities are so well documented over such a long span of time, a period we know as the Renaissance. This patrimony of family documents was sold by the Medici heirs through an auction at Christie's of London in 1918; and in 1927 the buyer, H. Gordon Selfridge, deposited the ledgers at the Harvard School of Business Administration. Around one hundred ledgers arrived at Harvard at that time, but one item in the Christie's inventory was missing. In 2007, I found this missing item in the catalogue of a Munich antiquarian book dealer, but it had already been sold to a private collector in Germany. When informed of its importance for the Harvard collection, the new owner of the ledger kindly permitted Laura Linard, director of Historical Collections at Baker Library, to have it microfilmed; and so finally, after eighty years, the missing item has returned, at least in a photographic version, to its original home, thereby completing the Selfridge Collection. This event could be the occasion for a reevaluation of a major collection of business documents too long ignored by historians.

IBM Finland, a small national subsidiary, was at once a Finnish business and an interface to much larger networks of technological innovation and knowledge sharing. We contextualize its development within a nested set of institutions and identities: IBM's Nordic operations, its European business, and its World Trade Corporation. Its development was profoundly shaped by Finland's unique geopolitical position during the Cold War. IBM's internal structures anticipated and paralleled those of the European Union, with mechanisms for international cooperation, for the creation of transnational identities, and for the resolution and regulation of disputes between national subsidiaries.

While researchers have pointed to numerous methods of expanding state capacity in the Progressive Era, the literature has overlooked the creation of nominally private companies relying on implicit government guarantees, later known as government-sponsored enterprises. This article explains the novelty and structure of the nation's first such enterprises, the Federal Land Banks, and describes how their design embodied several fragilities that contributed to their collapse and bailout in 1932. The article then demonstrates why, despite these problems, the land banks became the model for subsequent enterprises and financial reforms.

Although Britain's electrification started with considerable technological and market advantages, it proceeded remarkably slowly and hesitantly. Using share-price data, this study investigates the conventional explanations for this disappointing outcome: notably, perverse regulation and competition from entrenched gas-light providers. It finds that these oft-cited factors had an imperceptible impact on the course of the British electrical industry's turbulent market launch in 1882. However, we show that, owing to the fledgling electrical industry's need for incessant experimentation, short-sighted, self-serving decisions by the management of the early British industry's most prominent firm squandered a well-funded start, with long-lasting adverse consequences.

This article examines the role of business interests in shaping the structures of global environmental governance between the United Nations (UN) Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio in 1992. It demonstrates how the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) managed to establish itself as a key partner for the UN while articulating a neoliberal vision that emphasized the market mechanism and business self-regulation as sources of environmental governance. The article provides empirical evidence that the ICC institutionalized business self-regulation in environmental governance and contributed to the very definition of the concept of sustainable development as we know it today.

Durant has been described as “the most picturesque, spectacular, and aggressive figure in the chronicles of American automobiledom” but he was much more than this. His career is a chssic study in the dual abilities, promotional and administrative, that created and nourished big business in America. Ultimate personal disaster grew out of Durant's failure to strike a balance between the two, yet his genius left imperishable marks, and his luster as the symbol of an era is untarnished.

From its beginnings in the private library of Pierre S. du Pont, the Hagley Museum and Library has grown into a leading resource for business historians, particularly for those interested in the development of the mid-Atlantic region of the United States. In this thorough description of the Hagley's collections, Dr. Nash demonstrates the breadth and depth of its holdings, from the papers of the eighteenth-century Physiocrats to those of New Deal and post-World War II companies and business leaders.

In the manner of the Creole tradesmen of Louisiana, whose lagniappe to their patrons is legendary, the Editor offers a similar bonus to readers of the Review. Instead of trifling presents added to a purchase, however, our lagniappe will he notes and documents illustrative of the evolution of business enterprise.

Once upon a time, in the 1950s, Alfred Chandler was a student of history, doing what most young, untenured assistant professors of history do. He was applying for a grant. His aim was to conduct research on the 1927 reorganization of the Standard Oil Corporation of New Jersey for a chapter in a forthcoming book that was to become Strategy and Structure.

Neither cash sale nor barter were adequate means for bringing a growing number of high-priced durable goods to the American consumer. The employment of installment credit facilitated the growth of a mass market for such products and provides an example of the utilization of an old commercial technique for a new purpose.

Two recent acquisitions of the Kress Library, a part of Baker Library of the Harvard Business School, will be of particular interest to business historians. The Kress Library, rich in the history of economic institutions and business life, as well as in material on the progress of economic thought, has a strong and varied collection on bookkeeping, to which it has recently added two rare volumes.

In the economic affairs of Britain the mid-nineteenth ccntury was the age of the relatively small and independent employer, conscious of a long-established prowess which had been surpassed nowhere in the world and in the conduct of the affairs of his works but little affected by the embryonic factory legislation and the feeble trade unionism of the time. Equally the large combine with its tendency towards standardization of conditions had still to come. Lord of all he surveyed, the employer's views on conditions of work are a good index of what actually was.

Professor Abrahams edits a record of a 1913 conversation between reformer Louis Brandeis and Thomas W. Lamont of J. P. Morgan & Co. In the wake of the Pujo investigation of the “money trust,” the two discussed the nature and extent of economic power wielded by investment bankers as well as some specific issues such as interlocking directorates, competitive bidding for security issues, and greater publicity about securities transactions. This document reflects the long-run, fundamental conflict between social critics fearful of the concentration of economic power in America and businessmen who disclaim power because they believe their behavior is controlled by objective business considerations which operate for the good of society as a whole.

Professor Livesay describes the prevailing marketing patterns in the various branches of the iron manufacturing industry in the United States before the Civil War. Iron products, like most antebellum manufactured goods, were distributed by independent merchants who played a dominant role in many aspects of economic life. The coming of integrated rail mills, however, foreshadowed the merchants' eventual decline later in the nineteenth century.