Since the 1990s, a new model for market control organized through tripartite standards regimes (TSR), has expanded globally and affected most market exchanges through standard-setting, accreditation, and certification. This article investigates business-consumer relations under this regime, with a specific focus on the functions of accreditation and certification. In our case study of Sweden, a new picture of consumer protection under late capitalism evolves. Seeing it as a form of neoliberalization, the article uncovers a transition between two regimes of control; from one built on a potential conflict between consumer and business interests, to one based on the assumption that business interests are beneficial for all parties. Although business interest was formulated as pleasing the consumer—or the “customer”—by both certification firms and the Swedish Accreditation Authority, in practice consumer interest as something worth protecting was made abstract in the era of the TSR.

Histories of semiconductor and computing technology in the United States have emphasized the supporting role of the U.S. state, especially the military, in answer to libertarian denials of state aid that are influential in Silicon Valley today. Somewhat implicit in that historiography, though, is the leading role of actors and organizations that blur any distinction between public and private. Some industries of this sort—telecommunications, aerospace, auto manufacturing—do figure in the historiography, but the class should be expanded further. One such industry—oil—has been exceptionally but almost invisibly influential in the development of computing and semiconductor manufacturing in the United States. Oil firms invested heavily in semiconductors and computing. There was also an “oil spillover” of personnel and technology from oil firms to computing and semiconductor manufacturing. Oil shows up in the biographies of many prominent individuals and organizations in the history of those technologies, from Fairchild Semiconductor to Edsger Dijkstra. These ties potentially hold important implications for the much-needed transition to a more sustainable energy regime.

This article uses trade directories and notifications in the London Gazette to reconstruct the Potteries industrial district at the firm level for 1781 to 1851, a dynamic period of growth for a knowledge-intensive industry. It cuts across the organizational spectrum of the district in terms of the scale and scope of firms traditionally examined by including both the larger lead-firms and the smaller firms for which limited or no business records survive. It addresses difficulties associated with analysis of early clusters before the late nineteenth century. Directories offer a consistent series of records that, when cross-referenced with the Gazette and local newspapers, allow for detailed examination of firm behavior and the structure of the district during a formative growth period. Analysis highlights patterns of cooperative competition in an industry in which tacit knowledge played a crucial role as a source of competitive advantage, raises questions for future research, and provides an empirical base on which to consider further investigation of the trees that made up the forest.

Since the mid-1970s, the U.S. commodity futures exchanges have increasingly been the focus of tight government regulation, which resulted in strong control by a specific agency: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In Europe, the regulation of futures diverged from the U.S. model. No regulation at the communitarian level was implemented; at the national level, the United Kingdom emerged as a model of self-regulation of commodity markets. This article explores the historical causes behind this lack of regulation in Europe, placing it in the context of global commodity trading and arguing that the European regulation of futures trading was reshaped by a dialogue established between the European Commission and big players of commodity futures trading in the City of London. Since the mid-1960s, the City of London has become a pivotal global market venue for commodity futures, which has increasingly attracted players from abroad, thanks to its financial integrity and self-regulatory model. Both established London merchants and emerging players in the global trade of financial products cooperated to stave off any attempt at regulating the London futures exchanges. The inference here is that those attempts were instrumental in setting the conditions leading to the regulatory fragmentation that still characterizes futures trading in the global market.

This article challenges current interpretations of the rise of the Eurodollar market. It argues that rather than being the exclusive innovation of British banks, the Eurodollar market had also Italian origins. Foreign-currency lending in Italy in the 1950s was characterized by competitive behavior. I explain the accumulation of Eurodollar deposits by Italian banks as resulting from the fact that nonresident foreign-currency deposits were not subject to reserve requirements. Furthermore, I discuss the attitudes of the Bank of Italy regarding the financing of foreign-currency credits with nonresident dollar deposits (Eurodollars) and compare the Eurocurrency liabilities of Italian banks vis-à-vis those of the City of London. The comparison facilitates an approximate estimation of the size of the Eurocurrency market in the late 1950s and, even more importantly, a recalibration of the view that the City of London was the dominant Eurodollar player from the outset.

In the 1950s, part-time work gradually became an element of labor policy to activate women to participate in the labor market that could be transferred from one country to another. Support of part-time employment in the Dutch labor market, however, was initially not endorsed as a solution to the problem of low female labor force participation but was the outcome of a more complex set of deliberations, in which the moral economy of employers’ organizations conflicted with broader demands for increased productivity. The article contrasts the initial concerns of Dutch employers about increasing women’s labor force participation with the country’s later international role in advocating part-time work for married women on an international scale. The Netherlands thereby serves as a case study of how employers’ organizations instrumentalized part-time employment for their own moral economy based in the breadwinner ideology.

Recently, there has been increasing academic interest in the historical foundations of the pornography business. However, these studies tend to focus on individual national contexts rather than exploring the transnational relationships that exist, or have existed, between these countries. This article considers how a transnational approach can further understandings of entrepreneurship in the pornography business. It suggests the need for an interdisciplinary framework to examine transnational enterprise in the pornography business, combining ideas from enterprise alongside criminology and economic geography to frame the enterprise history of the Netherlands-based company Your Choice. Based in Amsterdam, but run by British entrepreneurs, Your Choice’s activities can be dated back to the 1970s, specializing in the transnational distribution of hardcore pornographic films to customers in Britain, where the sale of such material is legally problematic. Drawing on ethnohistorical research, which includes primary interviews, workplace observation, and archival and doctrinal research, I use Your Choice as a case study to show how transnational entrepreneurship in the pornography business can create opportunities as well as help to manipulate restrictive laws and regulations. I also suggest that negotiating such legalities carries risk, as does the need to respond and adapt to ongoing shifts in the market.

The literature on early modern credit markets emphasizes both the social embeddedness of credit relationships and the role of notaries. To enhance our understanding of how credit markets functioned in a “less-developed” economy, we investigate the local lending activities of a merchant-banker family that operated at the intersection of formal and informal credit. A combination of economic rationality and social motivations in lending decisions emerges. The credit network of this family firm provides a portrait of the social structure of the local community, where the central position of a few trusted notaries and members of the business and political elite highlights the prevalence of relationships of power and favor over impersonal market exchange. The predominance of informal credit reveals a preference for loans made outside of notarial circuits. Nonetheless, notaries were crucial in lending to borrowers of lower social status and with weak ties, thus helping the liquidity of these merchants to “trickle down” into local society.

At Corn Products Refining (CPR), stockholders so disagreed with one another that they threatened to undermine the merger itself. Its predecessor, Corn Products (1902–1906), nearly failed, and so might have CPR. For several years, from its organization in 1906 to perhaps 1915, CPR’s owners weighed paying dividends against funding factories. Because paying dividends chanced syphoning off sums needed for plants, this might cause facilities to deteriorate and workers to face threats like factory fires that often set off explosions. CPR President E. T. Bedford managed this test and strove to upgrade facilities, which, by design or not, helped improve safety. His efforts almost came to naught given CPR’s anticompetitive tactics, yet the court’s antitrust decision—although highly critical—inadvertently gave the merger the chance to enhance profits and safety.

Social network analysis is an increasingly common tool for historians seeking to understand the interrelations between individuals. A significant concern, however, is how we might measure changes within networks over time and between periods. Historians have favored examining the network as it stands at particular points in time. However, this approach fails to capture the instability within networks and does not incorporate the perceptions of contemporaries. One solution is to integrate network data into a time series that is built around conceptualizations of the “network memory.” In a case study on John Pinney’s late eighteenth-century Nevis–Bristol network, I use a two-year moving total to model the lingering nature of ephemeral interactions on the memories of those involved in the plantation trade. Using this historical social network analysis as the basis for an iterative approach to the primary material, I explore what being a part of this network meant for the enslaved people on Pinney’s plantation and for the women in his family. This article demonstrates the value of the approach and highlights the ways in which historians can use it to contribute to the historiography of early modern business networks.

“The Other Kitchen Debate” places the history of the microwave oven in the context of Cold War anxieties and gender politics. Discrepancies between Soviet and U.S. safety standards, Soviet deployment of microwave espionage, and the prospect of nuclear war triggered fears about the possible dangers of kitchen appliances powered by low-level radiation. During the 1970s and early 1980s, politicians, government regulators, industry representatives, advertisers, home economists, media, and consumers engaged in lively debates over oven safety and the merits of microwave cookery. By the late eighties and early nineties, as East–West tensions waned and record numbers of American women entered the paid labor force, American media perceived fewer distinctions between the hazards posed by electronic ovens and those presented by their conventional counterparts. New definitions of safety redefined microwave ovens as purely domestic appliances, leaving questions about the potential risks of nonionizing radiation unresolved.