The professional institutions of loss adjusting in Australasia were shaped by a range of postcolonial developments, including adhesion to the British badge of organizational prestige, the Royal Charter. The aim of this paper is to explore how a single exogenous shock to the institution of loss adjusting in Australia enhanced a sense of national identity, altering the future of those institutions. Our conclusions are based on over sixty interviews with loss adjusters in three countries and the archives of several Australasian loss adjusting institutions dating back to the late 1800s. Archival material included correspondence, meeting minutes, various memorandum, newspaper clippings, membership lists, criteria for barriers to entry, records of lobbying efforts, disciplinary actions, and educational material. Reus-Smit (2002, 2017), Bell (2009), and Rae (2017) have developed the understanding of the role collective cultural and national identities play in institutionalism, whereas Suddaby et al. (2007, 2011) have contributed to the theory of field-level institutional change. Building on the literature of Suddaby et al., this paper appraises how a single historic natural event triggered normative changes impacting the institution of loss adjusting in the region.

In this paper, we offer an alternative to class-based studies of saving behavior by using individual-level ledger records from accounts opened in 1830 in the Limehouse Savings Bank, London. Our analysis suggests that such banks served a valid financial purpose for a much wider constituency of savers than the targeted “industrious poor.” True gaming of the system by the middle classes appears to be relatively limited, and instead depositors were using accounts for a variety of means and motivations. We suggest that the contemporary consternation around class was misplaced and that we can better understand and predict depositor behaviors through analysis of transaction data.

This article discusses the role of employers and their organizations in promoting or hindering social insurance schemes and, ultimately, the welfare state. Unlike most studies that center on countries in periods of democracy, this research focuses on the role of employers, and specifically employers’ mutuals, in the development of the industrial accident scheme during the Franco dictatorship in Spain. The institutional elimination of the class struggle, by repressing the working class and prohibiting class-based unions, led to an evolution of the industrial accident scheme and employers’ liabilities that revolved around the interrelationship between employers and the state. While employers tried to keep control of the management and low cost of the insurance, the state maintained significant bureaucratic intervention and increased auditing and control. The democratic period that began in 1977 prolonged the structure fostered during the Franco regime and enhanced the power of the mutuals in managing this insurance.

The Victorian City of London’s financial center expanded and renewed its building infrastructure virtually unimpeded by considerations of urban preservation, conservation, or public opinion. The next phase of massive rebuilding, during the long post-1945 boom, appeared likely to follow the same pattern. However, by the mid-1960s, the freedom of City office owner-occupiers and developers to do as they wished with their buildings had become substantially constrained by rising conservationist sentiment. This paper explores this process through the history of the design, building, and eventual aborted demolition of Gibson Hall, the Bishopsgate headquarters of National Provincial Bank for over a century. This paper charts the life of Gibson Hall, in particular its conception, design, and, ultimately, its attempted redevelopment. We also consider the long-term consequences of the rebalancing between economic and conservation objectives for the nature of British urban redevelopment and the adoption of a “throwaway” business headquarters style—to remove any risk of popular support for preservation.

The boundaries of Business History, as a discipline, are constantly revisited. There have been contradictory views on the nature of our field for many decades, and they still exist today, reformulated by new generations and interest groups. As if these differences were not enough, there are also substantial disparities on when and how the subject has evolved worldwide. The discipline has expanded to new geographies recently, and several signals point to a more multicultural business history setting. However, some critical aspects still need to be addressed. How can we reinterpret and overcome the perpetuation of some hierarchies in our field? What are possible key insights from embracing an even more inclusive, global, and pluralistic vision of business history? My proposition is that these issues can be reinvigorated as part of a broader epistemological debate on humanistic and social sciences. This brief article considers possible alternatives for embracing even more diversity and complexity in our field from a Latin American perspective.

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.

This article examines the history of mining in British Southeast Asia during the early twentieth century. In particular, it focuses on the histories of the Burma Corporation and the Duff Development Company, which were located in British-occupied Burma and Malaya, respectively. It argues that despite being represented as “rogue” corporate ventures in areas under “indirect” colonial rule, the contrasting fates of each company—one successful, one not—reveal how foreign-owned businesses operating in the empire became increasingly beholden to British colonial state regulations during this period, marking a shift in policy from the “company-state” model that operated in prior centuries. The histories of these two firms ultimately demonstrate the continued significance of business in the making of empire during the late colonial period, bridging the divide between the age of company rule and the turn toward state-sponsored “development” that would occur in the mid-twentieth century.

The question of the role of the state in the creation of competitive clusters and innovation systems has drawn increased attention in recent years. Drawing on Mariana Mazzucato’s concept of “the entrepreneurial state,” this article investigates the role of the public sector in the development of the Danish robotics cluster, a world-leading cluster for production of industrial robots that has developed after the closing of Maersk’s shipyard in the city of Odense. In what ways did public programs and actors contribute to the development of this cluster? In what ways did public programs facilitate entrepreneurs, and when did they function as agents or perhaps even risk-takers? To answer these questions, this article tracks three layers of public agency: the local, the national, and the European. This article concludes that there were crucial initiatives at all three levels and that these initiatives were not coordinated, but nevertheless connected by a certain zeitgeist—the idea of public institutions taking responsibility for the competitiveness of private companies, an idea that blossomed in the period of high globalization from the late 1980s to the 2000s. In other words, what united the efforts of the public sector was not any master plan but an underlying thought collective that made the workings of “the entrepreneurial state” flexible and fit for the unpredictable nature of innovation. Thus, this article argues that industrial policy did not wither away in the age of neoliberalism but changed its form in an increasing complexity of state-market relations.

In 1900, a syndicate of investors used open market purchases and manipulative trading strategies to exploit an ongoing financial crisis at the Third Avenue Railroad Company and stealthily gain control of the company. The acquisition occurred during the first great merger wave in U.S. history and represented the street railway industry’s response to a new technology, namely electrification. The lax regulatory environment of the period allowed operators and insiders to profit handsomely and may have benefited consumers, but possibly harmed some minority shareholders. Our case study illuminates an unusual acquisition, when capital markets were less transparent.

When Harlequin Enterprises acquired British publisher Mills & Boon in 1972, the merged firm became the world’s dominant publisher of popular romance novels. Little is known, however, about the role that innovative marketing strategies played in the growth of these two romance publishing companies, especially their use of product sampling, direct mail, product standardization, and what was known at Mills & Boon as the “personal touch.” Through research in the Mills & Boon company archive at the University of Reading, the Grescoe Archive at the University of Calgary, as well as an analysis of company histories, trade publications, interviews, and marketing techniques, this study reveals how Harlequin and Mills & Boon took a different approach to product promotion than traditional publishers. Their innovation was to incorporate consumer goods marketing strategies, familiar to other industries, that disrupted and redefined standard practices of book publishers.

Corporations can be viewed as large information ecosystems, not more narrowly as corporate entities, and the author uses the example of IBM to defend this point. This essay illustrates issues and topics that can be studied to enhance understanding of corporate history, building on prior methods used by scholars. It builds on research the author performed in writing a history of IBM from the 1880s to the present.

This paper looks at the position of CEOs in Dutch listed companies in the context of institutional change. Following up on discussions on Varieties of Capitalism and the contrasts between coordinated and liberal market economies, we explore the position of the CEO in the Netherlands in the second half of the twentieth century. On the basis of our database of Dutch CEOs, as well as an analysis of articles and published interviews, we show that the move toward a more liberal market economy had a clear impact on the position of CEOs and on the way their role was perceived. This paper highlights the importance of studying leaders in their historical context, with implications for the selection of future CEOs as they face increasing pressure on issues such as inequality and climate change.

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.

Incorporated on the eve of the Panic of 1837, the Nesbitt Manufacturing Company of South Carolina owned and hired enslaved individuals to labor in their ironworks, but they also leveraged the market value of this enslaved property by exchanging them for shares of company stock and offering them as collateral in loan contracts. These slaveholders actively experimented with increasingly sophisticated financial tools and institutions in order to facilitate investment, market exchange, and profit maximization within the system of enslavement. Although historians have examined the role of enslaved labor in industrial concerns, they have largely ignored their role in the financing of these operations. Understanding the multiple ways that southerners were turning enslaved property into liquid, flexible financial assets is essential to understanding the depth and breadth of the system of enslavement. In doing so, we can move beyond questions of whether slavery was compatible with industrialization specifically and capitalism more broadly, to an understanding of how slavery and capitalism interacted to promote southern economic development in the antebellum period. At the same time, the experience of the Nesbitt Company reveals the limits of enslaved financing. The aftermath of the Panic of 1837 demonstrated that the market value of enslaved property was much more volatile than enslavers cared to admit. Although southerners could often endure this volatility in the case of enslaved laborers working on plantations or in factories, it made the financialization of slavery a much riskier endeavor for an emerging industrial regime.

Gordon Moore designed Moore’s Law as a multifunctional tool to drive process and product innovation, sell Fairchild’s and Intel’s microchips, and outcompete other semiconductor firms. Because Intel’s ability to stay on Moore’s Law depended upon other corporations developing materials and manufacturing equipment for exponential scaling, Moore and his closest associates heavily promoted Moore’s Law in the microelectronics community. They also established the national and international technology roadmaps for semiconductors in order to set the direction and cadence of innovation in microelectronics at the national and, later, global scales. Moore’s and his successors’ relentless pursuit of Moore’s Law and their deft management of the roadmaps significantly reinforced Intel’s competitiveness and helped it to dominate semiconductor technology and industry until the mid-2010s.

Cathay Pacific’s shifting shareholder base underscores the dynamic interactions between the state and the market in an ever-changing geopolitical landscape. Focusing on its later transformation from a British airline, this article explores how Cathay Pacific refashioned its shareholding to respond to the shifting political climate of Hong Kong. In the protracted process through which Britain yielded jurisdictional power of Hong Kong to the People’s Republic of China, Cathay Pacific responded preemptively, first by enhancing its local profile, and then by appealing to economic nationalism of the sovereign state poised to take charge. The privately owned airline fashioned its corporate nationality in a bid to negotiate with political forces that affected its business development. The case of Cathay Pacific demonstrates how, in the absence of warfare, companies still need to mitigate political risks in a fluid geopolitical setting. By modifying its shareholding, Cathay Pacific crafted its corporate nationality, which proved instrumental in allaying political risks and managing business relationship with the state. The airline’s strategy attests to its dexterity as well as the pliability of the notion of “corporate nationality,” winning management the “license to operate”—legitimacy and state sponsorship—during a period of swift geopolitical shifts.

During and after World War I, British businessmen made major inroads in political, administrative, and policymaking circles. In so doing, they forged a nexus of power, the business-state, that aligned the interests of big business with the state’s imperial aspirations. Well before the widespread acceptance of the concept of the national economy, there was a common understanding in London that what was good for British business, especially industry, was good for the economic health of the country and empire. The result was that after World War I, the state aggressively helped British commercial interests.