This study examines the careers of African American beauty culturists as they worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa between 1945 and 1965. Facing push back at home, African American beauty entrepreneurs frequently sought out international venues that were hospitable and receptive to black Americans in the years following World War II. By strategically using European sites that white Americans regarded as the birthplace of Western fashion and beauty, African American entrepreneurs in the fields of modeling, fashion design, and hair care were able to win accolades and advance their careers. In gaining support abroad, particularly in Europe, these beauty culturists capitalized on their international success to establish, legitimize, and promote their business ventures in the United States. After importing a positive reputation for themselves from Europe to the United States, African American beauty entrepreneurs then exported an image of themselves as the world's premier authorities on black beauty to people of color around the globe as they sold their products and marketed their expertise on the African continent itself. This essay demonstrates the important role that these black female beauty culturists played, both as businesspeople and as race leaders, in their generation's struggle to gain greater respect and opportunity for African Americans both at home and abroad. In doing so it places African American beauty culturists within the framework of transatlantic trade networks, the Black Freedom Movement, Pan-Africanism, and America's Cold War struggle.

This article examines how globalization shaped work and employment in the German shipbuilding industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Official documents show that, as a response to global competition, originally large and labor-intensive shipyards in the northwest of Germany evolved into lean and nimble high-technology companies across four decades. Oral history interviews with former migrant and nonmigrant staff of two leading shipyards reveal that this large-scale industry transformation is a hitherto hidden history of labor mobility, migration, and evolving dimensions of diversity in the workplace. Migration is a lens through which to understand how corporate responses to global developments led to persistent patterns of social exclusion and inequality between and within groups of workers with and without migrant backgrounds that have not been documented before, namely: social divisions, unequal access to vocational training and retraining programs, unequal career opportunities, unfair redundancies, and unequal impact of precarious work.

This article analyzes the ways that shopping center tenants deployed narratives to encourage government intervention in the Australian retail property sector during the 1980s. Tenants claimed that landlords were abusing their market power through a range of egregious and exploitative practices. Landlords responded with stories of their own, claiming that amateurish retailers were using isolated cases to make broad generalizations about the industry as a whole. Politicians retold retailers’ stories in Parliament, championed small business enterprise as a driver of economic growth, and produced retail leasing legislation aimed at protecting shopping center tenants. In the process, established conceptions of shopping centers were inverted. In the 1960s and 1970s they were seen as bastions of capitalist enterprise constructed by nation-building visionaries. Through stories, retailers captured the cultural legitimacy of entrepreneurship from their landlords, who were characterized as feudal barons blocking the free operation of markets they controlled. Exploring these developments offers new insights into the relational dynamics of preplanned retail environments, expands our understanding of postwar Australian retail history, and contributes to a growing historiography on the role of narrative in business history.

“Selling Paris” explores the cultural, economic, and spatial parameters of private construction in the French capital at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to the state-centered accounts that currently characterize our understanding of Paris as a capital of modernity, this project looks to private property owners, real estate brokers, and speculative developers, as well as the moral economy in which their projects took place, in order to understand the elaboration of the built landscape of the modern metropolis. I argue that new classes of market intermediaries—namely estate agents, market-oriented architects, and small-scale joint-stock firms—emerged in this period to build and market residential spaces, establishing apartments and buildings as merchandise and tenants as clients. Focusing on the activities of these commercial actors reveals the existence of a French culture of commerce centered on speculation and risk-taking, a business culture that profoundly affected the production of residential space during of one of the city's greatest periods of expansion. Thus, in contradistinction to scholarly accounts of both French entrepreneurialism and Parisian urban development, this project reconstructs the activities of a dynamic capitalist class whose uncoordinated projects were the main authors of the capital city's urban fabric. Tracing the manner in which housing and property operated as a commercial object during a crucial period of urbanization, moving between and among the economic activities of investment, speculation, production, and consumption, this project seeks to present a research agenda for both the cultural history of markets and the economic history of cities.

For 50 years, the American-Colombian Corporation owned the largest property in Colombia: the Lands of Loba. While the principal investors, men from Utah and later also Laurance and Nelson Rockefeller, dreamed of making a fortune from this tropical “fairyland,” none of their plans bore fruit and they eventually lost control to thousands of so-called squatters. To explain the failure of an American free-standing company, this article emphasizes misguided perceptions and a challenging external environment rather than managerial inexperience. Examining recycled notions of tropical abundance demonstrates how ideas of nature can influence investment decisions. Overlapping property rights and tension between possession and title complicated company efforts to raise capital. Local resistance and a fractured political landscape further limited its influence. Ultimately, the very scale of the property both generated delusions of grandeur and frustrated the company’s territorial control.

The Science of Difference examines life insurance companies' significant impact on the development of systems of human classification and discrimination in modern America. It pays closest attention to the tools employed by life insurance companies to enable and justify their discriminatory practices, tracing their evolution over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Companies used life tables to think about sectional difference prior to the civil war; they collected statistics to defend the propriety of racial discrimination; and they revolutionized risk by inventing the medical “impairment.” Drawing on company archives and personal papers, as well as a wide range of publications, the dissertation describes corporate research in the financial industry, argues for the importance of cultural factors in tracing business history, and shows how the industry built a national statistical community with tools designed to measure and price human difference.

In February 1956, Ronald Prain–chairman of the Rhodesian Selection Trust group of mining companies, and a significant figure in postwar international business—was subpoenaed and appeared before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation of the U.S. Senate Committee of Government Operations as it sought to determine whether British international business was exporting copper to the Soviet Union. Following the seemingly contrived nature of the proceedings, and because of a hostile interrogation by Robert F. Kennedy, Prain was later to describe his appearance as a “witch-hunt”—a conscious reference to the political paranoia of the period. Using a microhistorical approach, this article examines how Prain understood and narrated his role in an event to which he was a minor actor, drawn into a larger narrative of the political and economic conflict of the Cold War. It evaluates the historical veracity of Prain’s testimony and discusses the limits of memoir and archival sources. It discusses the implications of the event to the historiography of international business, in particular with reference to debates about the “nationality of the company” and the decline of the “Free-Standing Company.” And by examining one personal experience in a wider context, the article also shows that the history of international business and its relationship to the politics of the Cold War should not be seen as remote, monolithic, impersonal, or abstract but as individually lived and suffused with emotion, memory, and personal meaning.

This article discusses a chapter of the interwar history of the Ford Motor Company in Europe rather neglected by historians, namely its unsuccessful attempt to erect a solid base of operations in Italy. Expansion onto the Italian market had been part of the post-WWI Ford's strategy of internationalization. It seemed to go well beyond the exploitation of an additional demand as its most interesting and promising aspect was the utilization of the Italian branch as a bridgehead into the Balkans, the East Mediterranean region, the Middle East, and North-East Africa. At the beginning this strategy turned out successful. But when in the late 1920s the Company tried to strenghten its position in the country—either setting up its own assembly plant or establishing a joint venture with an Italian firm—its attempt was blocked. To date scholars have focused exclusively on the political and economic barriers to entry erected by the fascist regime, urged by the powerful Fiat lobby. This was certainly the main cause. Yet, this study shows that on several occasions Ford hesitated and even hung back from acting. Therefor a few chances were missed: the most glamorous being an agreement with Fiat itself, so far ignored by historiography.

America’s entrepreneurial culture is important because it promotes the search for new opportunities for innovation. Here, the author traces that culture through two industrial revolutions and focuses on the growing tension between entrepreneurship and bureaucracy inside and outside of the nation’s twentieth-century firms. Business histories are explored using categories adapted from behavioral economics. Particular attention is devoted to some of the important exceptions that throw light upon the stereotypes of the static government agency and the slow-moving industrial firm. Still, the author concludes, following World War II the economy had to be pulled out of its bureaucratic doldrums by new science- and social science-based industries that invigorated the nation’s entrepreneurial culture and promoted a wave of significant biological and digital innovations. The article concludes with a glance at the future of the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial cultures.

This article explores the link between the history of small-firm associations and the development of Dutch financial infrastructure geared toward small firms. In particular, it tests Verdier’s thesis about the origins of state banking using an in-depth case study of the Dutch small-firm movement. This article shows that Dutch small-firm associations did not simply became politically relevant and use their power to lobby for state banking, but rather used the topic of insufficient access to credit to rally support, mobilize members, and obtain subsidies from the government. During this associational process, they had to navigate local contexts and power structures that, in turn, also shaped the financial system. State banking was initially not demanded by small firms, but arose as the result of failed experiments with subsidized banking infrastructure and a changing position of the government on how to intervene in the economy.

Disasters often prompt debates regarding public policy and lead to changes in safety regulations. With the deaths of 47 passengers and crew, the 1993 Sunset Limited tragedy focused public and governmental attention upon safety practices aboard uninspected towing vessels operated on US inland waterways. The event shaped the policy debate as the federal government imposed new safety regulations upon the towing industry and the dominant industry trade organization, the American Waterways Operators, adopted an industry-driven safety program. Subsequent tragedies revealed the inadequacies of the AWO’s Responsible Carrier Program and pushed industry stakeholders toward the creation of a formal US Coast Guard inspection regime for all uninspected towing vessels. Set within the context of steamboat safety regulations dating from 1838 and drawn from diverse primary sources, this article traces the evolution of safety coregulation aboard America’s uninspected towing vessels, explores the Coast Guard’s reluctance to establish a formal inspection regime for uninspected towing vessels, and highlights why self regulation without a form of strong government or third-party involvement is often unsuccessful.

This article describes how a French family, the Jeans, built and expanded its wealth in Central Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. It explains how this family, using a different strategy than other French businessmen who settled in that region, began in textiles and diversified into the financial and housing sectors. The article also explores whether the Mexican Revolution and the early agrarian reform programs affected their properties and/or economic activities. Finally, the article explains how a branch of this family linked into the most powerful media family in Mexico and persisted among the Mexican economic elite until today.