This article contributes to scholarship on business history and gender in twentieth-century energy transitions. It examines Canadian electric power utility marketing plans and materials, newspaper and magazine accounts, and oral history interview records. Utilities initially sought to sell power as capital and labor rationality, mirroring industrial ideals of producing more with fewer resources. As those labor savings were realized, they increasingly sold power as a means to perform new organizational and emotional jobs of creating a more intimate, happier, and child-centered family life. In doing so, they redefined social life, from family-as-labor unit to family-as-leisure unit, while also redefining leisure-as-labor for women. Women in utility marketing materials, as observed in subsequent time-use studies, eventually saw fewer hours of housework and family care, although offset by increasing leisure jobs. Mobilizing social groups to advance an electrification agenda, utilities sold this new labor as an extension of energy service work in homes, public spaces, and leisure facilities.

This article begins by examining the historiography of Shanxi piaohao and asking how modernist financial discourse gradually took shape over the past century. It then counters the persistent modernist discourse and its anachronistic application to the history of piaohao and the north Chinese interior from two aspects. First, how piaohao managed to build an empire-wide financial network and facilitated flows of capital and goods during the nineteenth century. Second, how family-centered capitalist and non-capitalist histories countered piaohao's unrealized path to modern Western-style banking. This article challenges the perceived universalism of the Western European economy and adopts a Braudelian emphasis on an essential feature of the history of capitalism in a global context—that is, capitalism's unlimited flexibility and capacity for change and adaptation, as seen throughout the history of the Shanxi merchants and piaohao firms, not confined to the singular future of transformation into modern Western-style banks.

China's cattle trade before 1949 is effectively invisible to historians. With no geographic center, few dominant firms, and little government oversight, cattle trade left behind no clear archive of sources, leaving scholars to the mercy of conjecture and episodic evidence. Combining insights from business and social history, we focused our attention on trade intermediation as the key to understanding the operations of a diffuse trade system. In the absence of a top–down archive, we composited hundreds of local sources on intermediation in cattle trade and remotely interviewed 80 former brokers. These sources revealed large numbers of individuated trade routes, which we break into three types: persistent supply, specialized demand, and resource circulation. Each type of trade called for distinct forms of intermediation with relatively little overlap between specialized networks. This recreation of China's cattle trade reveals a sophisticated market for animal labor that calls into question the direct causal link between imperialist resource extraction and rural immiseration, and suggests the utility of applying tools and perspectives of social history to other sorts of decentered commercial systems.

This article analyses the structure and changes of large companies based on a new database of the 200 largest non-financial firms operating from 1913 to 1971 in Argentina. The main contribution of the research consists of the elaboration of the rankings of the 200 largest companies according to their paid-up capital between 1913 and 1971 and the construction of a database of large companies based on homogeneous sources and criteria. The study identifies the long-lasting presence of family-based diversified business groups and foreign multinationals from the first global period to the end of Import Substitution Industrialisation. It also shows that the presence of foreign companies among the 200 largest firms is higher than that identified in other countries. The study constitutes the first comprehensive research into big business in Argentina until the 1970s and a first attempt to identify the life cycles of the largest companies in Argentina.

Every organization of the world economy has been unstable. Each system is necessarily composed of trade-offs. Opportunities emerge, and disappointments abound. Nothing lasts; nothing is finished; and nothing is perfect.

In the 1990s, three Scandinavian news media companies, Bonnier, Kinnevik, and Schibsted, internationalized their newspapers. Despite doing this during the same period, competing in the same industry and institutional environment, being exposed to the same opportunities by the opening of the Eastern European markets, and all belonging to a smaller language area, they differed in their internationalization models as well as in their outcomes. Despite initial successes, Bonnier and Kinnevik eventually discontinued their newspapers in the new markets, in many cases following significant losses, while Schibsted fared better. The main explanation for using different internationalization models was differences in business models, basically striving to do business internationally in a similar way as domestically. That is, they did not choose a specific internationalization model but sought to simply expand their business models internationally. Consequently, this article finds that when researching internationalization, more focus should be placed on business models.

The Czech Republic often has been cited as an example of successful economic transformation. The available literature has primarily focused on changes in the macroeconomic environment, although the actions of economic agents at the microeconomic level have emerged as the crucial factor explaining this success. Based on 101 oral history interviews, this article offers the firsthand experiences, frustrations, challenges, and human dimensions of doing business at that time and shows that the road from socialism to the market economy was a bumpy one. Our approach fills major information voids, and thus offers a unique opportunity for business historians to avoid slipping into the incomplete view of the world presented by written literature and archives.

The revocation of the Royal African Company's (RAC) monopoly in 1698 inaugurated a transformation of the transatlantic slave trade. While the RAC's exit from the slave trade has received scholarly attention, little is known about the company's response to the loss of its trading privileges. Not only did the end of the company's monopoly increase competition, but the unprecedented numbers of private traders who entered the trade exacerbated the company's principal-agent problems on the West African coast. To analyze the company's behavior in the post-monopoly period, we exploit a series of 292 instruction letters that the RAC issued to its slave-ship captains between 1685 and 1706, coding each individual command in the letters. Our database reveals two new insights into the company's response to its upended competitive landscape. First, the RAC showed a remarkable degree of organizational flexibility, reacting to a heightened principal-agent problem. Second, its response was facilitated by the infrastructure of the transatlantic slave trade, which gave the company a monitoring mechanism by virtue of the slave-ship captains who continually sailed to the West African coast.

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.

Much thought has been accorded to the evolving nature of business history. It is only relatively recently, however, that attempts have been made to articulate methodological issues in a more epistemologically explicit and reflexive fashion. This article contributes to this burgeoning agenda by examining the methodology underpinning an intensive archival study of the British interwar management movement (1918–1939), a major force in British management education between the wars. We explicate the methodology employed and question what this material tells us about the interwar management movement, in terms of its determination to modernize management, encourage openness between firms, and extend a new spirit of partnership. We show that the interwar management movement was characterized by organized cooperation and methodological openness. Our main contribution is to demonstrate that interpretations themselves can become entrenched and prone to inertia, inviting us to revisit these periodically and, if appropriate, recast them.

This article proposes to see the history of the international law on foreign investment as about the promotion of investor rights as much as the resistance to investor obligations. The argument is that the divide between investment protection and the responsibility of foreign investors is one of the most significant features of international investment law. The article shows that the different treatment of rights and obligations is grounded in the same business project and legal imagination. Maintaining this divide has never been easy, as this model faced resistance, particularly from Latin America, trade unions and human rights activists. The analysis concludes by noting that academics can contribute to reimagining the international law on foreign investment by bringing investment treaty law and business and human rights closer. This shift is already happening.