This article uses a prosopographical methodology and new dataset of 1,558 CEOs from Britain’s largest public companies between 1900 and 2009 to analyze how the role, social background, and career pathways of corporate leaders changed. We have four main findings. First, the designation of CEO only prevailed in the 1990s. Second, the proportion of socially elite CEOs was highest before 1940, but they were not dominant. Third, most CEOs did not have a degree before the 1980s, or professional qualification until the 1990s. Fourth, liberal market reforms in the 1980s were associated with an increase in the likelihood of CEO dismissal by a factor of three.

This article challenges the prevailing narrative surrounding the Japanese manufacturing industry in the post-World War II era, which predominantly centers on large corporations and male engineers. It sheds light on the vital role played by Japanese housewives in shaping product innovation. It argues that the exclusion of consumers, particularly women, from existing industrial models carries a gendered dimension. By presenting Japanese housewives as active stakeholders who defy stereotypes and enhance their lives by expressing their opinions, we aim to offer a fresh perspective on innovation and product development. The article specifically focuses on the electric appliance industry and draws upon a diverse range of sources, including women’s magazines and corporate archives, to uncover the hidden aspects of gender within the Japanese economic miracle. It shows that housewives have played an active role in product innovation and that women’s magazines have made this possible by acting as intermediaries between women and companies.

This paper examines the transformation of Venetian commerce across the twelfth century, arguing that the strategies of Venetian merchants are best described using two distinct models. One was locally integrated and geographically decentralized, typical of merchants who settled abroad and became part of local societies, sometimes retaining few clear links to Venice. The other was far more centralized, characterized by short-term, profit-focused ventures originating in Venice that precluded deep entanglements in foreign economies. Both models were facilitated by the unstructured nature of Venetian overseas administration, which accommodated a degree of autonomy for expatriates while providing the infrastructure necessary for transient commerce. The decline of the integrated model began with the imperial sanctions of 1171 and culminated with the Fourth Crusade (1202–1204), after which the centralized model came to dominate. The subsequent importance of the “sedentary merchant” in Venetian trade was shaped as much by political as by economic factors.

The provision of pensions for Civil Servants and other employees in public office, such as the police, as well as in large private businesses, became more widespread in the second half of the nineteenth century. Such pensions, and other non-pay benefits, including sick pay, not only helped with recruitment but also provided a means of managing the retirement of workers who were deemed to be incapable of performing their roles. The rules governing eligibility to receive a pension in the Metropolitan Police in London were closely linked to the certification of poor health. Police doctors restricted the certification of sickness as a reason for retirement because it impacted the size of the force, resulted in the loss of more experienced men, and added to the cost of the pension fund. This strategy generated conflict with the workforce, resulting in industrial unrest. Piecemeal reforms failed to address workers’ concerns until 1890, when the rights to receive a pension were improved. These reforms, rather than stricter vigilance by police doctors, were an effective way of retaining experienced officers in the police force.

This study analyzes the long-term power of mercantilist firms and brands in industries characterized by high uncertainty and asset specificity. It contrasts the reputation-building and protection strategies employed in two similar industries in Portugal in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; namely, those of Madeira and Port wine. The Portuguese crown created a collective brand for Port in 1756, the first regional appellation in the world. Madeira wine only received similar protection in the late twentieth century. This study argues that the Madeira wine industry relied on a different type of mercantilist proto-brand—a diffuse and multi-faceted “global” umbrella brand—of the British East India Company, which during its heyday more than rivaled the power of the Portuguese state as a product certifier and endorser.

In April 1785, the British prime minister, William Pitt, proposed to give Ireland “compleat liberty and equality” with Britain “in matters of trade.” Historians cast the stakes around Pitt’s “Irish” proposals in terms of ideologies about trade, but this paper focuses on the concrete economic issues involved. It shows that Pitt’s proposals emerged from years of debates in which contemporaries conceived of the British Atlantic economy in terms of an integration of trade, shipping, and credit that evokes a British system of colonial capitalism. Ireland’s dependent relationship to that system, and the perceived failure of “free trade” to overcome its poverty, generated a battle among Irish “improvers” over rival plans to attract “men of capitals” to Ireland. Pitt played an important role in this fierce Irish debate by favoring one plan, but the British prime minister and his main Irish advisor, Thomas Orde, were never convinced by that plan’s logic of improvement, supporting it instead for fiscal reasons. That calculus made Pitt’s proposals vulnerable to attack from economic interests in Britain that took Ireland’s plans for economic improvement more seriously.

This article contributes to scholarship on business history and gender in twentieth-century energy transitions. It examines Canadian electric power utility marketing plans and materials, newspaper and magazine accounts, and oral history interview records. Utilities initially sought to sell power as capital and labor rationality, mirroring industrial ideals of producing more with fewer resources. As those labor savings were realized, they increasingly sold power as a means to perform new organizational and emotional jobs of creating a more intimate, happier, and child-centered family life. In doing so, they redefined social life, from family-as-labor unit to family-as-leisure unit, while also redefining leisure-as-labor for women. Women in utility marketing materials, as observed in subsequent time-use studies, eventually saw fewer hours of housework and family care, although offset by increasing leisure jobs. Mobilizing social groups to advance an electrification agenda, utilities sold this new labor as an extension of energy service work in homes, public spaces, and leisure facilities.

This article traces the evolution of Italian strategies for imperial expansion from the decades after unification—when many came to believe that imperial conquest would more advantageously position Italy in the liberal capitalist global economy—to the height of the fascist colonial project in the Horn of Africa—when the fascists tried to break with the liberal global economy and construct a new, radical mercantilist and corporatist empire. Taking inspiration from their predecessors, the fascist regime extracted capital, resources, and labor from Africans and Italians to finance its war against the Ethiopian empire and its colonization of the Horn. While the war temporarily stimulated Italian industry, employed hundreds of thousands of work-hungry Italians, and consolidated the regime’s many corporatist institutions, it drained Italy’s reserves and alarmed the Duce’s allies among Italy’s industrial and financial elite. The regime, thus, shifted strategies, focusing on reducing the cost of the empire by exploiting African workers, eliminating inefficient small enterprises, and creating vast concessions for Italian industrialists. Conquering new territories and markets, acquiring a variety of primary resources, and empowering industry, Mussolini and the radical mercantilist-corporatists aimed to resolve Italy’s perceived under-development, by placing Italy at the center of a great fascist Eurafrican empire that could dictate the terms of its engagement with the rest of the world.

This article explores how the International Labour Organization (ILO) introduced management development programs in Argentina as a pilot project in developing countries in the late 1950s. By studying how the ILO worked together with actors at the national level, the article reveals how the ILO’s original idea to focus on top management development was reshaped through a dialogue with local actors within the context of tripartite cooperation between the government, business organizations, and unions. While the initiative was successful during the project period, it collapsed when Argentina’s government closed down the national productivity center with which the ILO was cooperating. While the tripartite principle was valuable for the first achievements, it was extremely vulnerable without the support of all partners.

The history of political economy is tormented by beasts. The most famous is the Leviathan, the giant serpentine monster that figures in Hobbes’s masterpiece of modern political theory. Robert Fredona and Sophus Reinert spotlight another sea monster, the Kraken, that giant octopus or squid with a particular morphology (i.e., its tentacles) that so fittingly describes the grip of multinational corporations, stateless financial capital, social media, and tech giants today. But there are still other monsters in the bestiary of political economy. In this essay, I highlight the Behemoth, a land monster that captures another critical dimension of political economy: the willful and intentional deployment of chaos and disorder as a way of governing. Franz Neumann, political and legal theorist and lawyer, Columbia University professor, and member of the Frankfurt School in exile, placed the Behemoth at the heart—and in the title—of his analysis of Germany’s political economy under the Nazi regime. Alongside the Leviathan surveillance state and the many tentacular grips of multinational, social media, and tech Krakens, the Behemoth remains a key model to better understand current forms of capitalism.

Decarbonization is a momentous challenge for capitalism and makes one ask which changes in its morphology may be necessary to achieve that objective. The contribution by the French economist Albert Aftalion (1874–1956), with its emphasis on intermediate levels of aggregation (the “meso“ approach), the differentiated time profiles of economic actoivities, and their differential speeds of reaction to dynamic impulses, provides an invaluable heuristic for conceptualizing the structural transformations required by transition to a low energy regime. Aftalion’s analysis of industrial capitalism emphasizes that structural changes occur along multiple co-existing time horizons. This provides tools to analyze the time constraints on the sequencing of structural changes for different sectors on a decarbonization trajectory without neglecting the strict time requirements for implementing effective climate change mitigation. This interplay of time horizons is central to decarbonization, and it will require a new balance between the invisible hand of markets and the visible hand of states and other public bodies. Moreover, Aftalion’s emphasis on material constraints offers a novel approach to conceptualizing the importance of intermediate levels of aggregation in economic theory, thereby offering a new basis for sectoral policymaking and a fundamental challenge to institutionalist accounts of the morphology of capitalism.

Although it has a durable institutional shape, the operation of capitalism takes different forms across space and time with varying distributive effects. This article contributes to a growing literature considering the successive forms taken by capitalism in the developed democracies since World War II. It develops a distinctive conception of these forms as “growth regimes” that are mutually constituted by the core practices of firms and reinforcing public policies specific to each historical era. The movement of firm practices and government policies is then examined with a view to identifying the growth regimes of three postwar eras of modernization, liberalization, and knowledge-based growth.

Quinn Slobodian has established himself as a leading historian of neoliberalism. Crack-Up Capitalism continues where his Globalists left off, but shifts focus from visions of global ordering to the fragmentation of the world into special economic zones (SEZs). In Slobodian’s provocative analysis, SEZs become a late neoliberal solution to the entrenched problem of democracy at the nation-state level. We follow Slobodian into the zone, thinking with him about the spatial dimensions of contemporary political economy. Although we problematize the disjuncture between Crack-Up Capitalism’s group biography of market radicals and its analysis of zones as a global economic reality, our intent is not to critique Slobodian, but to use his new book as a jumping off point to foreground other possible frames for understanding the zone: a longue durée historical outlook that can help de-exceptionalize the zone as a phenomenon of late neoliberalism, a focus on the internal diversity and political possibility of the zone form, and an emphasis on the causal link between the recent proliferation of zones and the ascendance of export-oriented industrialization as a global development paradigm.

Capitalism has taken many forms over the last 500 years. This short essay asks whether rediscovering the idea that corporations have a moral duty to contribute to the social good might help create a form of capitalism capable of addressing the massive problems that we face. I argue that the property view of the corporation, or the idea that the sole goal of the corporation should be to maximize investor returns, might once have been appropriate, but is currently causing enormous damage. I suggest that the entity view of the corporation, or the view that the primary purpose of the corporation is to serve the common good, has a long history, and is currently remerging in ways that have the potential to help reform capitalism in powerful ways.