The articles in this issue of Business History Review contribute to major themes of the journal, especially business and government, entrepreneurship, and corporate governance. Robin Adams, Gareth Campbell, Christopher Coyle, and John Turner examine nineteenth-century company registration data in the UK to demonstrate how political instability inhibited business creation and investment in Ireland. These authors identify regional variation between the south of Ireland, where pro-Home Rule sentiment predominated, and the north, where fear about the Home Rule movement correlated with declines in business creation, stock prices, and investments. Klas Rönnbäck and Oskar Broberg explain how the British South Africa Company (BSAC) developed “proactive and transformative” strategies to navigate the transition to self-government in Southern Rhodesia between 1910 and 1924. BSAC management embraced the end of chartered rule and, in negotiations with the British Crown and local Legislative Councils in Southern Rhodesia, shed the company's administrative duties while gaining recognized property rights to its assets, leading it to become steadily profitable for the first time in its history. Alice Milor's article details how successive French governments on the far left and right of the political spectrum struggled to shield French automotive suppliers from Japanese competition and investment in the globalizing economy of the 1970s and 1980s. France's interventionist industrial planning strategies, though, proved unsuccessful and resulted in mergers, plant closures, and bankruptcies.
Janette Rutterford and Leslie Hannah analyze how British shareholders protected their interests and influenced corporate governance between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth century. Rutterford and Hannah utilize a sample of 50 UK companies to chart the rise and fall of shareholder protective committees called “Committees of Investigation,” which, they argue, gave voice to shareholder views and held sway over boards of directors. Finally, Mairi Maclean, Gareth Shaw, Charles Harvey, and Gary Stringer examine efforts by British business leaders, led by Seebohm Rowntree, to circulate management knowledge by promulgating the ideals of “organized cooperation, mutual service, and the free interchange of information” through lectures, Management Research Groups, and other planned events during the Great Depression.
The issue also contains two review essays. In the first, Hannah Knox Tucker examines three new books, by Esther Sahle, Edmond Smith, and Dane A. Morrison, on British and American merchants in the early modern period. She explains how, taken together, the books reveal the interrelated trends of global inequality, globalization, and xenophobia. In the second, Medha Kudaisya reviews Gita Piramal's book, Rahul Bajaj: An Extraordinary Life, a biographical portrait of the members of one of the largest family business groups in India that also serves as a story of leadership.
