This article examines the collusion between the only two major banks to operate in British West Africa for most of the colonial period after 1916, Barclays and the Bank of British West Africa. The companies' records reveal that the alliance was more far-reaching than has previously been shown, escalating to include not only comprehensive price-fixing but also restrictions on the products offered. The article considers the reactions of African and European customers and the colonial governments, and analyzes the motives that sustained the collusion for so long and the political circumstances that permitted it. The arrangement was partly a defensive response to a perception that the market was too small for full rivalry, but there was a rent-seeking element too. Finally, the article explores the implications of the bank alliance for the broader economies, reflecting on the relation between the security that the banks achieved through their agreements and their very cautious lending policies.

The purpose of this special issue is to explore the relationship of gender in several national contexts to the service industriesbusinesses that provide benefit to others or produce items or infrastructure that support others. Several questions have guided our overall purpose. What do we learn about business history generally, and the service sector specifically, by taking gender into account? Is what we learn the same in different national contexts? If not, why not? We hope that the answers suggested in the essays will stimulate dialogue on both national case studies and comparative themes and will illuminate transnational patterns and perspectives in the history of women, gender, and business.

Over the course of the twentieth century, entrepreneurs developed a number of successful global brands in consumer-goods industries. However, few independent brands survived the merger waves of the 1980s. To address the question of why so few independent brands survived, this paper examines successful brands in industries that rely principally on advertising for competitive success. Successful consumer-goods brands in several industries and countries are compared in order to highlight innovative strategies pursued by brand managers. The analyzed brands are mainly owned by Europeans, although a few examples of American and Japanese brands are covered as well.

Between 1973 and 2002, three of Australia's largest multinational companies exited from postcolonial Fiji and Papua New Guinea. Although neither host government wished the companies to leave, the tensions that arose during the course of decolonization made their departure inevitable. Prior to independence, conflicts between Fijians and Indians and decisions about grants of land and mineral rights to foreign firms had been mediated by colonial administrators. After independence, these contentious issues were resolved through domestic political processes. Ultimately, the companies were unable to overcome the limitations of their shared administrative heritage, based on nationalistic chauvinism, that desensitized them to the importance of race relations and communal rights to land within their host countries.

The concept of path dependence is used to compare the evolution of the organizational forms of two groups of transportation and warehousing firms, the Dutch vemen and the Antwerp naties, that operated in seaports between c.1500 and 1900 and beyond. Their adoption of cooperative forms reflected the corporative guild creed that prevailed in early modern European cities. After 1815, when their businesses were no longer regulated by local governments, the vemen and naties remained locked into the cooperative form of governance that had prevailed for so long. This organizational form gradually adapted to changing circumstances, but its egalitarian structure remained intact until the late nineteenth century (vemen), and even into the twentieth century (naties). The two groups of firms’ organizational forms evolved differently under the impact of the legacy of the early modern period and the weight of their own later distinctive experiences.

Although free-standing companies helped facilitate international capital flows in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, their ability to operate effectively over the long run in a global economy has been questioned. This essay looks at one free-standing company, the Penang Sugar Estates, Ltd., in British Malaya to assess its managerial performance and strategies for transferring information. Through diversification, subcontracting, reorganization, and increased tolerance for local knowledge, the firm surmounted the information asymmetries that gave trouble during its early decades and increased profits. The Malayan sugar industry benefited from its imperial location, which brought significant advantages.

This study traces the origins of the twentieth-century Greek shipping tycoons and their global business to the nineteenth-century Greek diaspora traders. It examines the distinct characteristics of a diaspora firm, which can be treated partially as a multinational or “free standing firm” with distinctive features. Based in the main European financial centers, diaspora traders were international operators who developed ethnic-religious networks with their own unofficial international market, enabling them to operate independently of the countries or states in which they were established. The Vagliano house is a prime example of a diaspora trading house that transformed itself into a major shipping and ship-management firm, paving the way for the global success of twentieth-century Greek-owned shipping. The Vagliano network integrated the Greek shipping sector into the international shipping production system by creating an institutional framework based on trust that minimized transaction costs and entrepreneurial risk and provided information flow.

Despite the importance of service-sector activities, both to women and to the U.S. economy, services have not figured prominently in business history. A consideration of the usefulness of this subject to business history is followed by a case study of household services in the nineteenth century, showing their social and economic value and the ways in which they exemplified the integral relations between women's work and business.

The twentieth-century history of the Swedish welfare state and public-service sector is critical to understanding the changing role of women in Sweden, as the expansion of the country's service production, beginning in the 1960s, has been mainly the result of wel-fare-state policies. Yet women's self-employment and wage work in the service industry has been neglected as an economic factor in both traditional economic and business history accounts and in historical studies of gender. Some suggestions are made for future explorations of the Swedish service sector as it operates in the shadow of the welfare state.

Although Norway's information-technology (IT) industry has never been an international success, it has been a critical factor in the country's economy over the past thirty years. Several IT companies came close to reaching a global scale, but escalating costs finally prevented them from doing so. In addition, the IT firms became sidetracked by the domestic sales opportunities that accompanied the expansion of the Norwegian oil sector, as they chose to design specialized products for national markets instead of targeting the international market-place. Although their decision resulted in organizational continuity, the firms themselves have experienced turbulence, bankruptcy, and change, making the development of the sector a messy and problematic affair.

This article examines how the human-relations managerial techniques of the 1950s prepared large companies for the mandated racial integration required by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) after 1964. Drawing from management's “howto” publications, as well as archival materials from the Lukens Steel Company and the Du Pont Corporation, the article expands on recent work that has emphasized the importance of internal labor markets, training programs, and managerial policies in determining the shape and pace of integration.

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.

Business historians have failed to recognize British women's participation in business. Beginning in the eighteenth century, English women overcame a range of socially constructed constraints to assume a more important role in financial and entrepreneurial activi-ties than has been hitherto acknowledged. Women's apparent affinity with the service sector in employment, self-employment, and business enterprise has encouraged a limited view of their activities, relegating them to a separate, female sphere, rather than viewing them as part of the masculine world of rational profit maximization. Several approaches drawing upon social and cultural ideas are proposed to rectify the prevailing blindness toward issues of gender. The eclectic methodological underpinning of British business history offers some hope that the topic of gender can soon be incorporated into the discipline.

The computer-services and software industry used to be conveniently divided into three main sectors: mass-market software vendors, enterprise software vendors, and computer services. The three sectors were distinct, because personal computers, corporate mainframes, and online computer networks operated in relative isolation. The arrival of the Internet effectively connected everything, facilitating the entry of mass-market vendors into enterprise software and of both mass-market and enterprise software vendors into computer services. As the turbulence of the first decade of the Internet era subsides, a gradual transition from traditional software products to “Web services” is taking place.

This paper builds on recent conceptual work about associations that is drawn from the new institutional economics. It uses evidence from New Zealand wool broking to indicate the circumstances in which industry associations can operate effectively and in the broader public interest. Through their strong associative capacity and effective specialization of function, wool-broking industry associations developed flexible routines for managing wool auctions, mediated disputes, mitigated opportunism, addressed major market disruptions, and served as a communication channel with government. External pressures and monitoring from other business interests, governments, and a competitive wool market constrained rent-seeking behavior, preventing members from benefiting at the expense of others.

Structural changes during the past two centuries shaped Spanish women's economic activity in firms, family businesses, and self-employment, reflecting women's adaptation to a social system that assigned gender-specific roles and rights. In response to the discriminatory effects of labor segregation, Spain's female workers specialized in the service-sector jobs that were available to them. Until the twentieth century, Spanish women's business initiatives in this sector were mainly in domestic service, retail distribution, and social services. During the 1900s, the cumulative impact of rapid industrialization, the growth of service industries, legal reform, and the shift to a democratic system in Spain during the 1970s paved the way for women to enter public and private firms as professionals. As a result, more women became self-employed or helped to run family businesses related to tourism, the hotel and restaurant industries, design, fashion, and the arts.