This article traces the patterns of sugar consumption in seventeenth-century New England, from port to countryside, and the way in which economic exchange between New England and Barbados shaped the development of both regions. It deepens understanding of the rise of slavery-based tropical commodity production and consumption in the Atlantic world and examines the ways in which the emergence of capitalism and global imperialism was connected to the primacy of sugar as one of the most widely distributed early modern commodities.

Recent debates on the economic history of the United States and other regions have revisited the question of the extent to which slavery and other forms of labor coercion contributed to the development of economic and political institutions. This article aims to bring Africa into this global debate, examining the contributions of slavery and coercion to periods of economic growth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the coercion of labor in a variety of forms was a key part of African political economy, and thus when presented with opportunities for growth, elites turned first to the expansion of coerced labor. However, while labor coercion could help facilitate short-run growth, it also made the transition to sustained growth more difficult.

This article examines the growth of the waste and recycling sector in Sweden since the 1970s and seeks to identify the conditions for market growth and underlying business dynamics. The article identifies a slow growth pattern at aggregate level in the 1970s, while a major shift toward higher growth rates took place only in the mid-1990s. Resembling the findings of existing studies of German and US industry counterparts, Swedish recycling companies grew larger in the 1970s and more knowledge-intensive from the 1980s. Our study concludes that the growth of the Swedish recycling industry has been driven not only by government policies addressing household waste but even more so by large manufacturing firms that have increasingly demanded more complex recycling services over time.

Using evidence from 25,250 records of vessels entering and clearing the rivers of the Chesapeake Bay, this article demonstrates that intercolonial trading captains and crews significantly reduced the number of days their vessels spent in port in Virginia between 1698 and 1766. This contraction reflected a quantifying ethos in shipping that emerged during the early age of sail as the result of mutually reinforcing legal requirements and management practices. Responding to these productivity pressures, captains embraced practices that limited sailors’ freedom and turned to enslaved sailors to guarantee their maritime labor force. Embracing unfreedom aided captains to realize the dispatch goals that helped guarantee their investors’ returns.

This article analyzes the accounting treatment of sales and purchasing at the Fengshengtai Company (丰盛泰号), a salt trader from Shanxi Province. We find evidence of “dualled entry” bookkeeping in that all transactions were recorded twice. Crucially, each set of dualled entries was recorded in two distinct accounts. For example, cash transactions were recorded in a “cash flowing account” as well as a specialized flowing account. We thus argue that, in light of clues from other records, a system of indigenous Chinese double-entry bookkeeping may well have been developed at Fengshengtai and other Shanxi merchants. Our study is based on Fengshengtai's surviving account books, a collection of primary sources spanning 1854 to 1881, that have recently become available to scholars.

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.

This article identifies new pathways for integrating African perspectives into debates about the historical relationship between slavery and capitalism. It focuses extensively on the work of African historian Joseph C. Miller (1939–2019), whose concept of “ethno political economics” combined ethnographic and quantitative data and offered a new perspective on Atlantic World history. Building on theorizations of early twentieth-century scholars W.E.B. Du Bois, C.L.R. James, Eric Williams, and others, Miller's analysis foregrounded the simultaneously local and global processes of credit expansion, commercialization, and labor exploitation as foundational to the consolidation of early modern capitalism.

This paper builds on a body of multi-disciplinary literature to analyze and compare the emergence of the prêt-à-porter industry in France and the ready-to-wear industry in Italy from their founding to their growth stages in the mid-twentieth century. The comparison demonstrates the significant impact that the French Chambre Syndicale de la Couture, des Confectionneurs et des Tailleurs pour Dame, and the National Chamber of Italian Fashion had on the trajectories of the fashion industry for each country. The article focuses on foundational entrepreneurs within the industry such as Giovanni Battista Giorgini, Jean Patou, Coco Chanel, Christian Dior, and others. It analyzes how these chambers supported the emergence of differentiated firms within the fashion industry, and how the industry responded to the business conditions in the international economy of the post-World War II period through the global recession of the 1970s.

This article details how and why officials in the United States and the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland developed policies and initiatives to promote US capital investments. It analyzes these policies in the context of decolonization, white minority rule, and the Cold War in Africa. It further shows how US business interests, especially in the mining industry, increased their investments and influenced policy. Drawing from Zimbabwean archives, it argues that these competing priorities produced inconsistent results that tended to support US imperialism and hinder nationalist movements in British Central Africa.

The revocation of the Royal African Company's (RAC) monopoly in 1698 inaugurated a transformation of the transatlantic slave trade. While the RAC's exit from the slave trade has received scholarly attention, little is known about the company's response to the loss of its trading privileges. Not only did the end of the company's monopoly increase competition, but the unprecedented numbers of private traders who entered the trade exacerbated the company's principal-agent problems on the West African coast. To analyze the company's behavior in the post-monopoly period, we exploit a series of 292 instruction letters that the RAC issued to its slave-ship captains between 1685 and 1706, coding each individual command in the letters. Our database reveals two new insights into the company's response to its upended competitive landscape. First, the RAC showed a remarkable degree of organizational flexibility, reacting to a heightened principal-agent problem. Second, its response was facilitated by the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade, which gave the company a monitoring mechanism by virtue of the slave-ship captains who continually sailed to the West African coast.

This article assesses the “business of development” in the post-colonial age, when bilateral and multilateral aid regimes offered businesses new opportunities. It uses the case study of Britain and the European Economic Community (EEC), from Britain's accession to the EEC in 1973 to the early 1980s, to demonstrate that the British government viewed multilateral aid instruments, in particular the European Development Fund (EDF), as offering commercial opportunities for British firms. Based on records of the EEC, business associations, and the French and British states, the article analyzes business-state relationships between national governments, corporations, and supranational institutions. As the UK government tried to redirect EEC aid toward places where its firms had the most to gain, it met the opposition of other member states and European institutions as well as the disinterest of its own businesses.

The archival record of the transatlantic slave trade poses a methodological challenge to researchers who wish to center the lives of enslaved people in their scholarship. In more recent years, such archival scrutiny has evolved into its own vibrant field of inquiry concerning the politics of the archive. This article contributes to this burgeoning field by studying the pharmaceutical dimensions of the British slave trade and examining the underexplored relationship between captivity and drugs that articulated across the Atlantic world. By performing three different readings of a slave ship drug invoice—as a textual artifact, epistemic argument, and narrative of loss—I argue that the drug invoice stimulates new illness narratives of captive Africans in the historiography of the British slave trade.

This article examines how and why renowned Republican-era Chinese firms raised debt capital to finance their businesses by accepting savings deposits from ordinary people instead of borrowing from financial institutions. The article argues that in the absence of a powerful unitary state and centralized financial institutions, Chinese firms innovated sophisticated, decentralized financial instruments capable of amassing large quantities of capital from a broad host of depositors without the involvement of financial intermediaries. Savings deposits not only provided these firms with a cheaper and more flexible source of debt capital than that on offer from banks but also they fueled the Chinese economy by creating a sizable credit supply, a phenomenon that Chinese business and financial history scholarship focusing on the role of indigenous and modern banks has hitherto largely neglected.

This article examines debates over banking regulation in Germany that culminated in the 1934 Reich Banking Law. Existing accounts have traced its origins to the 1931 banking crisis or the 1933 Nazi seizure of power. Yet, rather than the outcome of a single financial or political crisis, banking regulation was the product of longer-term discussions on national security, legal rationale, and financial globalization. Prior to World War I, officials expressed concerns over Germany's dependence on foreign capital, while later efforts to improve liquidity in the banking sector continued in the 1920s. The construction of a regulatory policy thus arose from a series of investigations into how to protect the German economy from foreign crises, thereby reflecting the interdependence of politics and finance.

During the 1970s, governments increasingly expressed concerns about the loss of revenue through the use of tax havens by both individuals and corporations. This article explores a covert international working group (the Group of Four) set up between France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1969 in response to such concerns. At regular meetings, officials exchanged information gathered by their respective tax authorities in auditing multinational companies. In the 1980s, under increasing pressure from governments in a now much more hostile climate to tax authorities, the Group’s work shifted away from multinationals and toward more general, technical questions. The history of the Group of Four illustrates the importance of the 1960s and 1970s as a period for regulating economic actors and the impact of broader circumstances on the success or failure of anti-tax avoidance measures.