This article examines the aftermath of the 1897 Riksbank Act in Swedish banking. The act placed banks with unlimited liability and those with limited liability on equal footing, removing the note-issuing privileges of the former. We consider whether changes in risk preferences occurred subsequent to the act, or whether extended liability was a sufficient deterrent. We conclude that when legal differences were removed, lower transaction costs for unlimited liability banks (ULBs) spurred aggressive competition, reflected in narrower interest spreads relative to limited liability banks (LLBs). ULBs also took on greater leverage and held less liquidity, which supports the Coasean interpretation that the shareholder liability regime mattered little. After 1897, ULB shareholders continued to receive higher dividends, enjoyed substantially superior returns on equity, and maintained an array of corporate governance controls to shield themselves against their additional risk.

Based on Italian and foreign archival sources, this study shows how Italy's active assistance to its industrial apparatus soon included the newly born aircraft industry, including the Caproni Group. However, after World War II the Group went bankrupt along with most aircraft manufacturers. The suspension of aircraft development, the preference for importing allied (American and British) aircraft for civil airlines, and the denial of international assistance were the ensuing political and economic costs of defeat. In the end, Italy nationalized what was left of its aviation firms. Also, nationalization was consistent with its industrial history and represented the only way to help this sector survive.

This article examines the evolution of Indian pharmaceutical manufacturer Cipla toward producing drugs that met the quality standards of European and U.S. regulators. It employs new research in both Cipla's corporate archives and a wide range of oral histories. The article argues that, along with a long-standing corporate culture of self-reliance rooted in nationalism starting from the company's inception in 1935, major factors in Cipla's strategy from the 1960s through the early 2000s included the early adoption and continued use of quality-control technology, along with efforts to create global goodwill for affordable high-quality generic drugs during the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the early 2000s.

Now considered a quintessential Hong Kong household food product, Vitasoy won the approval of local consumers only in the post–World War II period as its producer capitalized on the discourse of modern nutritional science, leveraged technological breakthroughs, and positioned the soy beverage to respond to a growing clientele experiencing economic growth and lifestyle transformation. In the emerging market and sociocultural conditions of postwar Hong Kong, Vitasoy's producer created a local beverage that articulated for the city a modernity that originated in a Chinese national discourse but then blossomed into a celebration of the lifestyle that economic progress enabled.

This article examines the relationship between international commercial banks and military regimes in South America. The focus is on how military regimes in the Southern Cone of Latin America and Brazil in the 1970s became heavily dependent on foreign capital provided by international banks based in Britain and France. It makes use of previously unavailable archival evidence to examine the interactions between international banks and South American governments, showing how these interactions intensified once military rule was established. It shows that international capital was used for a wide variety of purposes, including arms imports. When global banks cut loans once the debt crisis erupted in 1982, they aggravated the economic crisis but also fostered democratic change.

A long-standing, and deeply controversial, question in constitutional law is whether or not the Constitution's protections for “persons” and “people” extend to corporations. Law professor Adam Winkler's We the Corporations chronicles the most important legal battles launched by corporations to “win their constitutional rights,” by which he means both civil rights against discriminatory state action and civil liberties enshrined in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution (p. xvii). Today, we think of the former as the right to be free from unequal treatment, often protected by statutory laws, and the latter as liberties that affect the ability to live one's life fully, such as the freedom of religion, speech, or association. The vim in Winkler's argument is that the court blurred this distinction when it applied liberty rights to nonprofit corporations and then, through a series of twentieth-century rulings, corporations were able to advance greater claims to liberty rights. Ultimately, those liberty rights have been employed to strike down significant bipartisan regulations, such as campaign finance laws, which were intended to advance democratic participation in the political process. At its core, this book asks, to what extent do “we the people” rule corporations and to what extent do they rule us?