This article investigates innovation and knowledge circulation in the North Staffordshire Potteries during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It evaluates new empirical evidence of formal and informal patterns of knowledge creation and dissemination in order to highlight tensions between forms of open knowledge sharing and the private appropriation of returns to innovative activity. By presenting new patent data, it shows that formal protection was not a widespread strategy in the industry. It uses patent specifications to determine what types of knowledge were, and could be, patented in the district, and by whom. A range of sources are used to demonstrate evidence of innovation and knowledge appropriation outside of the patent system. The article identifies distinct types of knowledge in the industry and shows how differences in these led to a range of strategies employed by potters, with the role of secrecy highlighted as a particularly prevalent and effective strategy.

Historians are increasingly using networks as an analytical framework. However, recent research has stressed the inherent problems with networks, including networking institutions. Historians therefore have to consider why and in what ways actors do, or did, engage with networks. This article posits a novel interdisciplinary methodology by bringing together regression analysis, visual analytics, and history to analyze actors’ relationships with an institution rather than with one another. This methodology, illustrated by the case study of the Liverpool African Committee, from 1750 to 1810, demonstrates that actors’ relationships with an institution may be affective or instrumental, reflecting different relationships with and uses of the network. Moreover, actors’ relationships with an institution are not static and change over time. The methodology and case study presented in this article suggest a reassessment of the understanding of metropolitan business networking institutions to reflect the complexity of their use.

Today, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones. Issuing identity documents is commonly perceived as a task for state authorities, but in Swedish society banks have played a dominant role as identificators. The first contribution of this article is that it explains this unique emergence of bank identity and traces the historical roots of a financial identification society to the mid-1960s. Banks started issuing standardized identity cards as a complement to the new system of paying salaries and wages by direct deposit to checking accounts, and these cards eventually became quasi-official identity documents. The Swedish story thus contrasts the scholarship on identification and state control. By treating identity as both a socio-cultural category and a materialization of a technology of control, I argue that the formalization of official identity documents for everyday use was intertwined with the creation of new financial identities. The introduction and general distribution of ID cards were parts of a process whereby wage earners became financial consumers, and the banks transformed themselves into retail companies. My second contribution therefore relates to the scholarly narrative on the financialization of everyday life since the 1980s. While the mass move to financial identification in Sweden, highlighted in this article, certainly fits the content of this narrative, it questions its chronology.

Much of international business literature has dealt with the costs of engaging in business abroad. Recently, several authors have called into question the basic assumptions of the “liability of foreignness” argument. They plead for a more nuanced look at nationality beyond the dichotomy of foreign vis-à-vis local firms and raise doubts about the assumption that more distance necessarily translates into higher costs. This article adds to this criticism with a historical analysis of German multinational enterprises in preindependence India. The case proves (1) the relevance of specific nationalities, (2) the importance of conflicting host and home country attitudes for understanding multinationals’ strategy, and (3) the possibility of spillover effects across national borders. Expanding on existing theory, the article makes a point in showing how malleable and contextual associations with nationality are, thus making a thorough historical analysis of commercial, political, and cultural links between host and home country indispensable.

Executive education programs offered by business schools became a global phenomenon for developing top managers in the 1960s. These programs were established in more than 40 countries in Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America in less than two decades. This article explores the phenomenon in three different Latin American contexts: Central America, Peru, and Colombia. In all these cases, initiatives led to successful executive programs, which contributed to the growth of business schools that gradually achieved high international reputation. By studying the way that various U.S. actors interacted differently with local actors in the three cases, the article contributes to three discussions within business history: the history of Americanization, management education, and the alternative business history of emerging markets.

In this article I explore the powerful sense of regional solidarity that accompanied the rise of Silicon Valley. From the early years of Stanford University, the university's leaders saw its mission as service to the West and shaped the school accordingly. At the same time, the perceived exploitation of the West at the hands of eastern interests fueled booster-like attempts to build self-sufficient indigenous local industry. Thus, regionalism helped align Stanford's interests with those of the area's high-tech firms for the first fifty years of Silicon Valley's development. The distinctive regional ethos of the West during the first half of the twentieth century is an ingredient of Silicon Valley's already prepared environment, an ingredient that would-be replicators ignore at their peril.

Business history for three generations has focused almost exclusively on capitalist firms, their managers, and their relations with markets, states, and rivals. However, enterprises on all scales also operated within communist nations “building socialism” in the wake of World War II. This article represents a first-phase exploration of business practices in three Central European states as Stalinism gave way to cycles of reform and retrenchment in the 1960s. Focusing chiefly on industrial initiatives, the study asks: How did socialist enterprises work and change across the first postwar generation, given their distinctive principles and political/economic contexts, and implicitly, what contrasts with capitalist activities are worth considering.

This article traces the uneven development of English cheese-making from its early commercialization to the eventual triumph of the “cheese factory.” The narrative shows how contemporary actors initiated and adapted to changes in technology, distribution, consumption, and regulation. It indicates that artisanal practices have both borrowed from and become integrated with industrial logics and strategies, exemplifying a process that Charles F. Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin termed the “recombinablility and interpenetration” of different forms of economic organization [World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production in Western Industrialization (Cambridge, U.K., 1997), 2–3]. International comparisons are introduced to clarify the reasons for England’s halting and idiosyncratic transition to industrial-scale cheese-making.

This article provides an analysis of the impact of the abolition of individual resale price maintenance (irpm) in 1964 on the relationships between retailers and suppliers and, wider, on defining features of the UK economic structure. It describes the role of irpm prior to 1964 in a complex competitive environment that existed across a range of goods and services. A key feature of this environment was the influence manufacturers had over retail margins and pricing. It shows how the 1964 Resale Price Act both unraveled this system and provided the legal prerequisite of today’s dominance by large retailers, as oligopolists and oligopsonists. The study delineates how a different set of business relationships came to dominate the retailing sector: in place of retailing as a manufacturer’s marketing strategy, conditions of supply were determined by the business strategies of multiple retailers. Retailing was further characterized by mutual dependencies among multiple retailers, commercial property investors, and the financial sector. In tracking this shift in business relationships, a historical analogy suggests itself that the Act has parallels with the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, for both changed the balance of economic power between two key business sectors in Britain.

A growing body of research in economics and in business and economic history has shown the key role of bankruptcy and insolvency law on business organization, firms’ governance, and entrepreneurial choices. Most research, however, has focused on the formal aspects of laws, and still little is known on how various systems worked in practices. This paper fills this gap in the literature analyzing the functioning of bankruptcy procedures in four main European economies (Italy, France, England, and Germany) between ca.1880 and 1914. Using an original data set and descriptive statistics on length, organization, and return of procedures, the paper shows how the aim of attracting debtors was more successful in the less regulated English system, but how the protection of creditors’ rights was more efficiently pursued in France and Germany. Italy appears as the absolute worst performer.

By the end of World War I successive merger waves had produced an oligopolistic, tightly cartelized, English banking system, which was widely viewed as having restricted lending to small-medium-sized firms—the famous 'Macmillan Gap' in industrial finance. We explore the reasons behind the failure of market entry to bridge this gap. The clearing banks are shown to have acted as 'jealous monopolists', obstructing the activities of the Credit for Industry Ltd (CFI), the only significant firm established to breach the gap (rather than narrow its upper limit). By poaching many clients it had vetted and approved, the banks blocked CFI's growth, deterring further market entry, and thus, preserving their monopoly position.

The 1960s proved to be a crucial decade for the emergent Italian fashion industry. In these pages, we seek to demonstrate that in Italy, an evolution of demand took place, structurally different from the Fifties, causing fundamental changes which impacted upon supply. This was a decisive change in the path which led Italy to complete the establishment of an authentic fashion system.

Interest in the question is two-fold. The formalization of relations between players in the Italian fashion industry using systematic logic facilitated the positioning of the made in Italy brand at the pinnacle of the world market: understanding the underlying mechanism of this process is useful for the identification of the characteristics of an Italian model, distinct from those of other countries which make up the history of the fashion industry. Analyses of the reference settings and development methods of the Italian fashion system can represent a further key to understanding the characteristics and the context in which the social transformation of post-war Italy took place.

This article is a study in the strength of shared strategic beliefs amongst leading British clearing bankers in the years following World War II and how those common beliefs may have inhibited potential for market growth. The subject of the study is the performance of large British deposit bankswith respect to the financing of industry. This behavior has long been criticized by economic historians as suboptimal and, depending on the commentator, has been presented variously as evidence of entrepreneurial failure, the gentrification of the City, social schism amongst the economic and social elite, the political influence of City institutions, the external orientation of capital markets, or institutional sclerosis. However, in earlier studies we have offered a rational economic explanation of the banks' behavior and practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The past decade's rapid expansion of a global market for organic food has set powerful economic and political forces in motion. The most important dividing line is whether organic food production should be an alternative to or a niche within a capitalist mode of production. To explore this conflict the article analyzes the formation of a market for eco-labeled milk in Sweden. The analysis draws on three aspects: the strategy of agri-business, the role of eco-labeling, and the importance of inter-organizational dynamics. Based on archival studies, daily press, and interviews, three processes are emphasized: the formative years of the alternative movement in the 1970s, the founding of an independent eco-label (KRAV) in the 1980s, and a discursive shift from alternative visions to organic branding in the early 1990s following the entry of agri-business.

Between 1950 and 2010, the British co-operative movement faced a series of commercial, structural, and corporate governance crises. Having pioneered many of the features of modern large-scale retailing since its origins in the mid-nineteenth century, from the 1950s the Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) and the retail cooperative societies it served experienced plummeting market share, continued internecine rivalries, and increasing marginalization. In the early twenty-first century, however, co-operatives improved their market share and experienced a “Renaissance” in commercial fortunes despite continued fierce competition in food retailing. As yet there has been little exploration of the nature of this turnaround and the ways in which the once-foundering co-operative business model was re-engineered.

Drawing on new research into the CWS (renamed The Co-operative Group in 2001), this article provides a historical analysis of the movement’s decline and revival. As the article details, from the 1950s significant efforts were made to reform CWS and the movement as a whole. However, co-operatives were slow to adapt to the changing business environment, hampered by dysfunctional organizational dynamics that constrained structural change and limited efforts to compete with private retail multiples. Following an unsuccessful takeover bid for CWS in 1997, co-operative opinion coalesced around the need for change. In the final section, the authors analyze the factors underpinning the “Renaissance,” focusing on both organizational innovations and the reassertion of core values and principles on which co-operation had been built. This provides a fascinating illustration of how a business can respond effectively to internal and external challenges, yet retain its fundamental character.

Early twentieth-century advertising discourses on the archetypal boy consumer promoted a masculinized ideal of consumption that broke decisively from the stereotype of the emotion-driven female shopper. Boys were lauded as rational, informed buyers who prized technological innovation and influenced parents and peers. While touting boys' ample consumer appetites, promoters of the boy consumer also depicted boys' interest in advertised goods as worthy of entrepreneurial-minded self-improvers. The ideal of the boy consumer thus harmonized the potentially hedonistic ethos of consumerism with older ideals of productivity and industriousness. New ideologies of manhood that valorized enthusiasm, loyalty, and salesmanship confirmed the boy consumer's manly vitality.

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.

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.

Unlike several of my colleagues whose retrospective essays are included in this special section, I did not have a personal relationship with Alfred DuPont Chandler, though during the 1980s he did invite me to present a discussion of my first book Proprietary Capitalism at his Harvard business history seminar. I also met Dr. Chandler frequently at Business History Conference meetings, where I found him ever-gracious, indifferent to criticism, and supportive of diverse projects whether allied with or tangential to his own. Thus here I offer some reflections on our discipline and its current situation, taking Chandler's publications as a point of departure.