It is my pleasure to introduce Volume 25, No. 2 of Enterprise and Society. In this issue, we are pleased to present a special section on “Corporate Responses to Racial Unrest,” guest-edited by Michael Thate and Tyesha Maddox. The section commences with a scene-setting introduction from the guest editors, followed by three papers. The first is from Keith Hollingsworth on the aftermath of the Atlanta race riot of 1906, followed by Mattie Webb on an exercise in the art of the possible, waging the battle against Apartheid in South African workplaces. This section is rounded off by Sethulego Matebesi’s exploration of responses to civil society mobilization among South African mining companies. Taken together, these four essays break important new ground and indicate promising lines of future research.

Welcome to Volume 25 of Enterprise and Society. In this first issue, we are delighted to present a new symposium on “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety,” built around a lead article of that name by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele. This challenging new essay is followed by three comments—“Concealing Martial Violence,” by Brittany Farr, “Capitalism Indivisible,” by Katie Moore, and “How to Define (or Not to Define) the New History of Capitalism,” by Sharon Murphy—with a final response from Lindsay. We want to thank Lindsay for initiating this challenging new symposium and the other three authors for their thought-provoking commentaries.

The year 2020 set into motion a perfect storm that would lead to the global panic ignited by the murder of George Floyd in late May of that year. The COVID-19 virus impacted billions of people around the world. With many forced to shelter in place at home, some Americans for the first time (and an exhaustingly innumerable time for others) observed up close the inequality apparent in American policing. On average, Black Americans are 2.9 times more likely to be shot and killed by the police, with very few officers held accountable and prosecuted for these deaths.1 One cannot make sense of this special section on Corporate Responses to Racial Unrest without an examination of this fact and the events leading up to Floyd’s murder. Statistically speaking, however, the year 2020 did not signal anything unusual. In that year, according to Statistica.com, U.S. police killed 1,020 people. Fatalities had been rising steadily from 981 in 2017 to 983 in 2018 and 999 in 2019. 2 It is not immediately apparent how best to interpret these numbers. What justifies police use of deadly force, and in turn, what is an acceptable rate of police killings per year? Or is this even a productive line of thought? The effectiveness of police power in the United States has been a standing debate since the foundations of American government.3 And the nature of inequality marked by race within policing has been demonstrated countless times in the literature.4 Reforming the phenomenon of “policing” in the United States, however, though simple to call for, is complicated to enact—not least owing to the “blue wall of silence” that protects police officers from the consequences of misconduct and the near-term spikes in crime and expenses that the very communities who are most disadvantaged by current policing practices are forced to bear.

Since the new history of capitalism (NHOC) trend received national publicity in 2013, American historians have enthusiastically pursued the complexities and varieties of capitalism, producing a body of scholarship that offers a plethora of capitalism-modifying adjectives yet leaves capitalism undefined. “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” asks how historians developed these varieties and interpretations, and whether any gaps or limitations remain. To answer these questions, the essay begins with a survey of the many histories of capitalism, from the first use of the term, to America’s first business histories in the early twentieth century, to world systems theory, and up to the NHOC. It then makes the case for continued attempts at redefinition and specification by offering a new variety.

This new variety, martial capitalism, has its roots in the early national and antebellum eras and influenced the evolution of capitalism in the United States. It is a system of political economy in which concealed military power, rather than abstract market forces, serves as an invisible (“invisible,” at least, to those not subjected to it) hand and bestows economic opportunity upon some individuals. Under this system, government officials and private citizens coercively acquired resources, knowledge, territory, and “free trade” agreements in the service of aggressive economic opportunism. Steady military conflict, along with scattered and localized violence, intersected with honor, a mainstay in early American politics and culture, to engender a set of masculinized economic relations that shaped both the what/where and the how of capitalism in the United States.

This address calls on historians and other social scientists to delve deeper into the nature of human imagination and its role in business. Interpreting a business plan written by my father prior to his death, I draw attention to the opportunity to use such sources to study the formation and consequences of “entrepreneurial imaginaries.” By this term, I mean the situated and embodied process by which human beings imagine desirable future ventures. Drawing on insights from neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology, I explore how recognizing the embodied nature of human imagination can deepen our understandings of how our subjects (a) imagine their ventures, (b) imagine themselves, and (c) imagine the moral worth of their venture in society. I conclude by highlighting why some of the sources and methods used by business historians may be particularly well suited for studying imagination and its relationship to entrepreneurship and change.

We contribute to the argument for a “new” business history employing a quantitative approach. We illustrate opportunities for new perspectives from this approach using a novel microlevel longitudinal database comprising 131 variables for 1,419 cooperative creameries in Denmark for the period 1898–1945, which we also document and make available to the scholarly community. We present a number of applications of the data, including investigating regional productivity differences, expenditure on fire insurance, and survivorship and reporting biases.

In this essay, I turn to the example of the 1919 Elaine Massacre—the deadliest incident of anti-Black violence in U.S. history—in order to better understand how its economically motivated, state-sanctioned, and brutally indiscriminate violence were nearly erased from history. I find that white journalists, military officials, as well as the Governor of Arkansas himself, drew upon long-standing race-based fears in their characterizations of what took place in Elaine. In so doing, they were able to simultaneously glorify and obfuscate the anti-Black violence, as well as further protect the property and economic interests of the white residents who had putatively been “under threat.” The scale of the violence in Elaine and the near totality of its erasure from the official record make the Elaine Massacre a chilling example of what Lindsay Schakenbach Regele has described as “martial capitalism”: the use of concealed military violence to wrest economic resources away from marginalized communities and toward their white counterparts.

After the murder of George Floyd, businesses across the United States stepped up with pledges and commitments to lessen systematic racism, reflecting a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR). But are these actions really concerned with social uplift? Or a form of woke-washing? This was not the first time corporate America reacted to racial upheaval and violence. In this paper, the author examines the reaction of the Atlanta business community to the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. At that time, Atlanta’s business elite effectively usurped municipal and state authority to manage the aftermath of the horrific events. They were determined to protect the reputation of Atlanta as progressive and a place of relative racial harmony. How do we consider their actions in the context of CSR and woke-washing? The businesses sought mainly to protect their economic future rather than truly uplifting society or improving racial relations. Still, their actions impacted Atlanta positively for many decades to come, leading to better outcomes during the Civil Rights era and beyond.

My comment highlights the key contributions and promising directions for future research of Lindsay Schakenbach Regale’s essay in this volume. While in agreement with Schakenbach Regele’s call for more specificity for different times and places, I argue that we also ought to be able to answer the question of what makes a variety of capitalism, well, capitalist. To do that, we need to delimit the theoretical and historical bounds of capitalism itself.

The Wiehahn Commission, a government body that proposed a multipronged 1979 South African labor reform, accelerated the corporate recognition of Black trade unions in apartheid era South Africa. Gradually implemented over the course of two years, the reforms complemented international workplace codes and the burgeoning reformist push for ethically sound business practices in the workplace. Although U.S. multinational firms in South Africa did not initially voice support for Black trade unions, in the aftermath of Soweto, many were faced with cascading internal and external pressures to negotiate with these emerging unions. By incorporating the Sullivan Principles, a U.S. code for ethical business conduct, into the broader scholarship on the South African trade union movement and the late apartheid era Wiehahn Commission reforms, this article examines how corporate reforms landed in South Africa, probing the business response to worker demands. South African workers were not merely passive recipients of workplace reform, but rather active participants, shaping the form and direction of U.S. and South African policy.

During the 1970s, religious activists were heavily involved in national and international campaigns against multinationals and urged firms to adapt their behavior to align with Christian ethics. This article analyzes the strategies of Nestlé in addressing religious activism at three levels: national, international, and organizational. The analysis examines Nestlé’s collaboration with other Swiss and European multinationals and high-ranking church representatives in establishing dialogue platforms that sought to improve mutual understanding and promote tolerance for global capitalism. Nestlé also contributed to the creation of guidelines for the main churches in Switzerland that were aimed at their partial depoliticization. When Nestlé’s executives faced religious shareholder activists during its shareholders’ annual general meetings, they chose to engage with them to avoid their radicalization, although most of their demands ultimately remained unanswered. Overall, Nestlé contributed to the reorientation of religious discussions to small-scale ethical problems and business self-regulation rather than to substantial reforms of the capitalist economic system.

Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s essay “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” attempts to provide more structure to the field known as the new history of capitalism (NHOC) by defining martial capitalism as a new variant. In contrast, this essay asserts that the lack of definitional precision within the NHOC is not a bug, but rather one of its key features. To define capitalism would be to delimit where it was and was not present historically. If part of the argument of the NHOC is that capitalism pervaded—indeed infected—all aspects of American life, then defining the term would be self-defeating. In the end, martial capitalism suffers from the same shortcomings of the NHOC more generally, in that it places all “warlike activities” of the state under the undefined umbrella of something vaguely called “capitalism.”

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the social license to operate (SLO) are widespread global phenomena in mining-dependent countries. These self-regulated frameworks are used to ensure local ownership and as a response to conflict by mining companies. Over the past two decades, CSR in the mining industry has only been more prevalent in Africa and South Africa. Studies on CSR and SLO primarily focus on community perspectives. This paper interrogates how mining companies respond to civic social pressure by considering two cases that have experienced much conflict in South Africa. Based on eighteen in-depth interviews and an analysis of company and media reports, our case studies demonstrate that mining companies primarily use CSR and SLO to assert and maintain corporate control under the guise of promoting local ownership and sustainable mining. Such strategies provide temporary relief and gradually erode CSR and SLO’s legal and political imperatives.

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.

I very much appreciate that Brittany Farr, Katie Moore, and Sharon Murphy took the time to write thoughtful and constructive responses to my essay. Collectively, their work spans three centuries and covers law, money, race, violence, financial institutions, and the social experiences of economic processes, and they approached my proposal for a new variety of capitalism from a set of shared interest and expertise in the histories of economic life. They reach drastically different conclusions on the historiographical trend known as the new history of capitalism (NHOC) generally, and martial capitalism, specifically.

Despite its importance to gender inequality, household incomes, and labor markets, the reasons behind Britain being one of the last major Western nations to introduce equal pay have been relatively neglected. This article first examines the campaign for equal pay from the late Victorian era to its eventual introduction in 1970. Economists predicted that equal pay would produce substantial female unemployment, but policy makers correctly doubted this—as data collected from early adopters in West Europe and North America showed no significant rise in female unemployment. Female employment rose substantially during Britain’s equal pay implementation—while, in contrast to broadly static earnings differentials from 1950 to 1970, there was a significant reduction in the gender pay gap, followed by a longer-term trend of narrowing differentials. This article explores why equal pay expanded female employment, given the absence of any sudden rise in women workers productivity or substantial acceleration of structural change in favor of female-employing sectors. The article finds that equal pay compelled employers to reevaluate the real worth of female workers based on their substantial relative human capital growth since 1945. This had not hitherto been reflected in relative earnings, owing to barriers such as segmented labor markets, monopsonistic employers, and collective bargaining procedures that fossilized traditional gender pay differentials.

This study seeks to analyze the continuity and survival of the mining sector in one of the most long-lived mining districts in the world, and the socioeconomic externalities that arose over a period of 150 years. Its most characteristic element was the development of two diametrically opposed business models in the same space: one based on a system of very small-scale mines, which were highly labor-intensive with a low capitalization, and another that was implemented in the 1950s based on a large-scale model, which was intensive in capital but with lower profit margins. In both cases, the activity had a growing impact on the environment and little spillover effects on other economic activities. The process of environmental degradation culminated in the 1960s–1980s with the pollution of an extensive stretch of the Mediterranean coastline and the complete disappearance of Portmán Bay, in what was possibly the most important environmental disaster in the history of the Mediterranean Sea. The institutional framework in which this activity took place played a key role in all of this.

I argue that life insurance and imperial meaning making are deeply implicated in each other. As life insurance expanded internationally in the nineteenth century, and as insurers became advocates of White settlement, they grappled with what actuarial science meant in the context of their orientalist conceptions of colonial populations. In particular, actuaries were concerned with tropical markets and the racialized/exceptionalized differences they perceived in those markets. To address these tensions, insurers attempted two strategies: (1) incorporating tropical rates as additional premiums designed to cover the “extra mortality” of tropical markets; and (2) advocating for social practices of “sanitary progress” related to public health and sanitation. These practices, framed in orientalist terms, were not adopted in any smooth manner but in fumbling and meandering ways as insurers tried to understand what kinds of lives tropical settlers might be and how those lives might be priced. They eventually liberalized life insurance rates for White settlers in tropical settings, but insurers then confronted questions on how newly socialized “native” lives might be rendered calculable. This story of tropical exposure in globalizing actuarial discourse reinforces the ways in which race and racialized/exceptionalized differences were at the core of life insurance and the calculative devices it assembled between 1852 and 1947.