This article examines the origins and development of oil futures trading in the United States to demonstrate the important role that energy concerns played in the financialization of the U.S. economy in the 1970s and 1980s. The article contextualizes the emergence of oil futures contracts by narrating the longer history of U.S. futures markets and financialization. It also explores the halting development of oil futures contracts, and analyzes the three kinds of legitimating narratives that accompanied oil futures trading: reason, the primacy of price, and power. As a whole, the article argues that energy crisis discourse contributed significantly to the financialization of the U.S. economy by framing futures markets as the only viable solution to the energy crisis. The much-celebrated oil futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange supported and marked the emergent power of financial thinking as the United States entered a neoliberal era.

Multinationals experienced a great growth after the European postwar boom. Factors in the 1970s included increasing competition from the United States, the emerging European market, as well as ongoing economic crises and changes in the international economy. The articles analyzes three case studies of Western European chemical companies—Hoechst, Akzo, and Rhône-Poulenc—to show the consequences of structural changes on management and the workforce. This article argues that (1) domestic export-oriented supplement investments lost importance, and the domestic workforce had a harder time meeting qualification requirements; (2) organizational changes incorporated divisional competitive elements into a company’s organization of work; and (3) managers had to learn to respect national path dependencies and specific skills of the local workforce. Furthermore, it illustrates the developments of the workforce in Europe and abroad and stresses the importance of nationality within the management of multinationals.

This article investigates the dynamics that characterized the top fashion industry companies in Italy and Spain in the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first thirteen years of the new millennium. The first section describes the sources and the methodology adopted. The second compares the features and transformations of the largest firms in the industry. The third focuses on these companies in 2013. The fourth discusses our findings, focusing on the impact that globalization and a possible “advantage of backwardness” had on the emergence of Italy and Spain as trendsetters.

From 1948 to 1960, an executive secretary at the National Association of Manufacturers (NAM) attempted to persuade NAM leaders to commission an “objective” history of the organization. The project never came to fruition, but the story reveals a fundamental split within the NAM between its professional staff and its conservative leadership over the organization’s mission. It thus offers a unique perspective on the NAM not as a powerful lobby, but as a contested workplace with its own fraught dynamics, which, in turn, reveals a more progressive image of the 1950s-era NAM than historians have typically recognized.

This paper assesses how Westerners depicted Chinese entrepreneurship in the late Qing period. The paper, which is based on a range of primary sources in English, Portuguese, and French, shows that Western views of Chinese entrepreneurs were highly diverse and that while some contemporary authors viewed Chinese entrepreneurship through an Orientalist lens, others rejected this paradigm by stressing that Chinese people, or at least some subsets of the Han Chinese population, were extremely entrepreneurial. Another group of authors modified the Orientalist stereotype of Chinese stagnation by suggesting that Chinese businesspeople were capable of the lower entrepreneurial functions (e.g., simple arbitrage) but not the higher branches of entrepreneurship, which involved innovation and creative destruction. These entrepreneurial functions were, ethnocentrically, regarded as the domain of Westerners. The paper may extend our understanding about how the past still affects our current perception of Chinese entrepreneurship. It also develops our understanding of the cultural histories of entrepreneurship and Sino-Western business.

This article traces the history of General Motors’ first black director, Leon Sullivan, and his involvement with the Sullivan Principles, a corporate code of conduct for U.S. companies doing business in Apartheid South Africa. Building on and furthering the postwar civil rights and anti-colonial struggles, the international anti-apartheid movement brought together students, union workers, and religious leaders in an effort to draw attention to the horrors of Apartheid in South Africa. Whereas many left-leaning activists advocated sanctions and divestment, others, Sullivan among them, helped lead the way in drafting an alternative strategy for American business, one focused on corporate-sponsored black empowerment. Moving beyond both narrow criticisms of Sullivan as a “sellout” and corporate propaganda touting the benefits of the Sullivan Principles, this work draws on corporate and “movement” records to reveal the complex negotiations between white and black executives as they worked to situate themselves in relation to anti-racist movements in the Unites States and South Africa. In doing so, it furthermore reveals the links between modern corporate social responsibility and the fight for Black Power within the corporation.

Insurance on slaves, a financial spin-off effect of the slave trade, is not yet completely understood. This article investigates the development of the conditions of this kind of insurance in the Dutch Republic, Europe’s most important insurance sector before 1780. By analyzing various historical insurance documents from the period 1720–1780, it reveals that slave life insurance conditions became increasingly specific and standardized due to developments in general marine insurance and insurance debates on bloodily oppressed slave insurrections. This article shows how enslaved Africans indirectly influenced the insurance conditions by protesting, while insurers might have financially motivated the murder of enslaved Africans who attempted to escape. These findings provide insights into how Dutch insurers dealt with insuring humans with agency as commodities without agency and how slavery and the financial world in the eighteenth century were connected.

The London Assurance (LA) was incorporated in 1720, marking a significant innovation in the marine insurance industry. Contemporaries anticipated joint-stock firms such as the LA would rapidly outcompete private underwriters, yet this outcome did not occur. The success of the private underwriters has been ascribed to their organizational form. This paper reassesses these explanations and finds that, rather than an a priori worse business model, various corporate governance challenges limited the LA’s capacity to compete. This provides a more complete explanation for the relative failure of the joint-stock marine insurance companies and has implications for understanding the evolution of the corporate form in the eighteenth century.