Foreign direct investment entered into the Ottoman Empire to support and develop foreign trade. Europeans who wanted to sell their manufactured products and acquire raw materials were instrumental in the construction of trade-related infrastructure in this country. Therefore, the first French investments, like those of other countries, were made for constructing railways and ports. The growth of raw material production in primary commodities, finally led to an increase in the number of foreign service companies such as banks and insurance providers that served these transport and production facilities. The initial motivations of French investors were mainly economic as they tried to find new markets and secure a viable share in these markets before their international competitors. Motives gradually became political as the opinion about the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire got stronger by the end of the nineteenth century. The French government assisted its investors in obtaining important concessions for investments in Anatolia, the Balkans, and the Arab provinces of the Empire.

Nondiscrimination was the bedrock of U.S. transport regulation for nearly a century. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the federal government's first major regulatory initiative, barred “unreasonable discrimination” in rates and service to keep railroads from aiding one businesses or community over another. As regulation developed, similar obligations were imposed on ship lines, truck lines, and air carriers. Most freight transportation companies were forced to operate as “common carriers,” publishing a rate applicable to each commodity and applying that rate to every shipment. Equal treatment of all customers, based strictly on posted prices and terms of service, was widely considered essential to keeping the transportation market “fair.”

This comment attempts, first and foremost, to place Phil Scranton’s article within the overall trajectory of his career as a writer and historian. A common theme of that career has been complicating—or, as this comment puts it, “mucking up”—existing historical narratives. Finally, this comment suggests that Scranton’s role as complicator sometimes gives too little guidance for how his thoughts connect to existing literature, and it puts forward some possible avenues for future exploration that spring from Scranton’s examination of communist enterprise.

After more than a century of political and economic integration, Southern Ireland exited the United Kingdom in 1922. By identifying the leading business firms of the era and the political and religious allegiances of their owners, this paper explores the perspective of the Southern Irish business establishment on the issues involved. While the mass of the population was Catholic and by 1918 favored secession, the business elite is shown to have been predominantly Protestant and strongly supportive of continued integration. Business elite perceptions of the consequences of exiting the United Kingdom are explored, and post-independence economic and business developments assessed in light of the concerns expressed at the time. The paper also charts the post-independence fate of the leading former unionist firms and the erosion and eventual disappearance of the sectarian divisions then prevalent in Irish business life.

This article explores how “bank-wreckers, defaulters, and embezzlers” were popularly perceived during Gilded Age and Progressive Era America, and how they contributed to a broader concern over the safety of deposits and helped drive efforts to achieve greater financial security. Their actions, often described as “wrecking,” referred to instances in which a banking institution was damaged or destroyed due to the embezzlement or general misappropriation of depositor funds by bank officials or employees. Wrecking occurred inside and outside of the era’s major banking panics, and attracted popular and critical attention over this period, especially between the 1880s and the early 1910s. It is argued that this phenomenon resonated within the popular imagination, which was reflected, reinforced, and even instilled through the media, and that this helped sustain doubts on the reliability of the nation’s banks and bankers. This article shows how notions of class, character, and gender influenced how people thought about the problem: wrecking demonstrated that respectability could be illusory and that men of the era could be tempted to “get rich quick” through dubious means. Some of the major attempts to resolve the problem are also discussed to highlight how efforts to prevent wrecking relate to the period’s general push to bolster economic stability. Ultimately, the article shows how seemingly disparate events can aggregate into a larger problem, which can in turn motivate solutions and reforms.

This article investigates the development of the Spanish–Italian mercury cartel from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s. Previous literature has singled out the cartel as one of the most robust international cartels of the twentieth century, but as this article shows, the cartel broke down toward the end of the 1940s, and although briefly reestablished in 1954, it quickly dissolved again. Building on access to original source material from archives in Spain, Italy, the United States, and United Kingdom, we investigate the underlying reasons why the cartel broke down, and how and why it was eventually reestablished. Because both the main Italian and the Spanish mercury producers were state-owned, this article pays special attention to the influence of the political relations between Spain and Italy on the development of the cartel. The study of the mercury cartel is used as a prism to investigate the point where industry strategies meet government strategies. This article thus contributes to two major strands of literature, both to the business history literature on international cartels in the post-1945 world and to the diplomatic history literature on the intricate relationship between Spain and Italy in the early phase of the Cold War.

Dwight Eisenhower's farewell address continues to resonate, beyond this admirable special edition of Enterprise & Society. The term he employed to describe the influence of corporations and financial interests over national defense policy, the “military–industrial complex,” usefully summarized phenomenon of his time. It also depicts an ongoing and arguably even structural phenomenon within contemporary American society. Ike would therefore appear in retrospect one part keen observer, another prophet. As the articles in this forum collectively suggest, the ideas embedded within his now-famous phrase continue to frame contemporary scholarship fifty years after his final Oval Office speech, though with a far narrower lens than Ike envisioned, and with less dire societal results than he feared. The military–industrial complex is both more real, and less frightening, than he foretold. At least, so far.

Reconnecting Fligstein’s and Chandler’s models of long-term organizational change, this article challenges the idea that corporate financialization is alien to the Chandlerian enterprise. Based on the case of the French automotive firm Peugeot Société Anonyme (PSA), it shows that this historical transformation has been intrinsically linked to Chandlerian dynamics. The article first highlights the crucial role played by the French government and financial institutions in the establishment of large multidivisional companies in France. It then draws on PSA, public, and private archives, and an interview with a former financial executive to examine a decisive financial restructuring of the family business in 1965. In describing the challenges faced by the business in the 1960s, the article analyzes how the creation of a multilevel structure of holding companies was meant to deal with Chandlerian challenges while paving the way for the further financialization of the business.

This article uses the case of Oppel Electric Manufacturing Co. Ltd.—the most important Chinese manufacturer of light bulbs before 1937—to explore the early development of the Chinese electrical lamp industry. The article first explores the Chinese market for electrical lamps before the 1920s and shows how the market was dominated by imports and lamps locally manufactured by foreign firms. It then traces how Oppel was established in the 1920s and subsequently grew into a successful manufacturing business able to compete with foreign products. The article explores how the fact that government institutions were major purchasers of light bulbs allowed Oppel to engage in nationalist lobbying and thereby win government contracts. The article shows how the absence of Western-style intellectual property rights allowed Oppel to transfer technology cheaply, efficiently, and without needing to enter into Sino–foreign joint ventures. These discussions of nationalist lobbying and China’s intellectual property environment contribute to our understanding of China’s early industrialization, both in terms of the rapid industrial growth early twentieth century China saw and the leading role that Chinese firms played in this growth.

Who managed large corporations during the first half century of their emergence? How did modernizing firms navigate periods of rapid technological change such as those that swept the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What role did engineers play in the management of large corporations? This paper draws on an original database of tens of thousands of mining and metallurgical engineers who graduated from universities during this period, examining patterns in their employment records, job descriptions, and career trajectories, matching our data on individual engineers with a linked database of mining and metallurgical corporations. We trace two distinct phases in engineers’ managerial role that corresponded to periods of rapid technological change and technological quiescence in the industry. We argue that explaining the rise of the modern corporation and the historical dynamics of corporate management requires a better understanding of technical expertise in management.

Capitalist ideas of productivity became central to medicine under slavery. They shaped how physicians treated enslaved patients, crafted a scientific basis for medicine, and conceived of themselves as professionals. Between the late-eighteenth-century and the mid-nineteenth-century, white male physicians in Louisiana and Cuba distinguished themselves from other healers: first, by aligning with Spanish colonialism, and then, by making themselves essential to a new form of plantation management that used clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and complex accounting systems. These technologies helped planters track the hours and days each enslaved person spent working, eating, sleeping, birthing, suffering from sickness and injuries, and recovering. This in turn enabled precise interpretations of enslaved health in terms of productivity, which was primarily measured in work time and the number of commodities produced. Physicians, who were seeking a rigorous intellectual foundation for medical knowledge production, latched onto planter methods of calculating and controlling enslaved health. One of those methods was what planters and physicians called “sick time,” which was an allotment of time away from work intended to manage illness enough for enslaved people to return to work. However, as physicians used plantation management to cast an air of scientific accuracy over their knowledge, enslaved people reconfigured their own medical practices to make themselves less visible and countable. Fugitive practices involving trees, animals, and natural springs helped enslaved people to heal by taking their own forms of sick time.

China’s reemergence among the world’s leading economic and political powers has been one of the most defining changes in the international order since the end of the Cold War. Underpinning China’s ascent were the economic reforms instituted across the late 1970s and early 1980s that opened its economy to foreign direct investments. Preceding these reforms were the ambitions entertained for China’s continental shelf, optimistically forecasting it as nothing less than “the world’s richest petroleum reservoir.” This article will attempt to link these phenomena by examining the economic readjustment in conjunction with the capital- and technology-intensive requirements of the offshore oil industry. It will explore how petroleum knowledge was diffused between Norway and China: notably, how Chinese reformers abandoned the Daqinigst doctrine of self-reliance in favor of a hybrid Norwegian model of petroleum governance. Even though exploration efforts proved disappointing, the episode had both long-term political and commercial ramifications. It was during this often-overlooked episode of Chinese, international, and indeed Norwegian petroleum history that Norway’s national oil company, Statoil, took its first steps outside the Norwegian continental shelf and inspired the formation of China’s own national offshore oil company, China National Offshore Oil Corporation.

This article uses trade directories and notifications in the London Gazette to reconstruct the Potteries industrial district at the firm level for 1781 to 1851, a dynamic period of growth for a knowledge-intensive industry. It cuts across the organizational spectrum of the district in terms of the scale and scope of firms traditionally examined by including both the larger lead-firms and the smaller firms for which limited or no business records survive. It addresses difficulties associated with analysis of early clusters before the late nineteenth century. Directories offer a consistent series of records that, when cross-referenced with the Gazette and local newspapers, allow for detailed examination of firm behavior and the structure of the district during a formative growth period. Analysis highlights patterns of cooperative competition in an industry in which tacit knowledge played a crucial role as a source of competitive advantage, raises questions for future research, and provides an empirical base on which to consider further investigation of the trees that made up the forest.

This article examines, from the viewpoint of a core group of Vermont milk producers, the period in the mid-1990s when organic dairy became mainstream. We look at the rise and subsequent takeover of one of the first organic milk-processing companies, The Organic Cow of Vermont, through the eyes of the farmers involved. In so doing, we provide needed perspective on the role of food producers working in industries subject to growth and consolidation. As producers of a commodity that grew out of the conventional system, organic dairy farmers faced unique choices that set them apart from other organic producers at that time. We demonstrate that the market for organic milk and dairy provided the opportunity for a new kind of farmer-processor relationship in which producers were supported through stable pay-prices and an intimate business relationship with processors. This article challenges the idea that the organic dairy industry was built by corporations trying to profit from booming consumer demand for organic foods and offers important contributions to debates surrounding the growth and conventionalization of organic food systems.

This paper examines the Africanization of human resources in East Africa during the latter part of the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of the East African Airways Corporation (EAAC) and later Kenya Airways, we analyze the long-term development of staffing policy in these companies and the impact of the changing political and managerial environment (colonial rule, joint ownership by three independent states, Kenyan state-owned enterprise, private enterprise with foreign ownership). This research shows that post-independence Africanization was hampered by a lack of specific local expertise. The EAAC solved this difficulty by cooperating with foreign organizations that provided adequate training for African pilots, engineers, and managers. However, indigenization was also used in a less meritocratic way and promoted clientelism.

This paper aims to trace the historical trajectory of management as a professional discipline in the post-independence period in India during the 1950s and 1960s. It tracks the discipline’s formative interests in the management of industrial labor, the views of its major proponents, and the processes through which the discipline sought generalized relevance within the postcolonial regime. It also discusses the intersection of managerial concerns with the globally emergent discourses on development and industrial reform and follows the eventual institutionalization of the discipline as an educational concern through the setting up of management schools. In doing so, the paper examines the modes and rationales through which managerialism established its own normative vocabulary and deployed it for assessing not just the objectives of industrial capital but also the newly consolidating postcolonial state and its developmental ambitions. This circulation of management ideas is analyzed by following the experiments that were conducted in the industrial enterprises of Ahmedabad by a group of textile industrialists, UN developmental pedagogues, and Ford Foundation consultants. Even when, in most cases, such studies on management did not succeed in achieving their ascribed goals, the paper demonstrates how managerialism maintained its relevance by parallelly turning its focus onto the postcolonial state and its developmental activities. Broadly, the paper argues that management in the mid-twentieth century functioned as a solution in search of a problem. It eventually acquired prominence by tautologically reading institutions and various aspects of the society as organizations that needed the prescription of management to resolve their operations.