In the late nineteenth century, American shipyards started building modern metal ships, a sector dominated by the British. But, they faced a challenge: a shortage of domestic workers with the skills to fabricate large metal ships. Using census of population data, this article describes how one important U.S. shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding, overcame the shortage of skilled domestic workers to assemble an effective labor force. The results show that skilled immigrants, mainly from Britain, played an important role in the shipyard's early life while, over time, native workers were trained to fill skilled occupations.

Legislation that required the registration of firms’ anticompetitive agreements (cartel registers) to reveal, and sometimes regulate, anticompetitive behavior was relatively common in many nations before 1975. Examining the introduction of these registers in sixteen mostly OECD countries between 1920 and 2000 reveals which industries and sectors appeared to minimize successfully the impact of the legislation in their jurisdiction. We find considerable variation, but in most countries, the agriculture and export sectors were especially successful in avoiding or delaying the application of a register in their areas of interest.

By the start of the twentieth century, the two organizational forms most used by Dutch banks to raise capital through the dispersal of their ownership were the cooperative association and the public company. Share ownership in cooperatives was typically restricted to customers, while companies permitted outside investors. Neither organizational form dictated specific shareholder liability arrangements. New specialist banks targeting small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) combined these two organizational forms and flexible liability rules to create hybrid forms. I find those that took the public company form were more likely to suffer distress during the Dutch financial crisis of the 1920s. Liability arrangements for shareholders, by contrast, had a negligible impact on these banks’ resilience.

Multinationals experienced significant legitimacy challenges in less-developed countries between 1945 and 1970. Corporate responses to these challenges cover three distinct periods. Unsuccessful postwar attempts focusing on colonial welfare concerns were followed by pragmatic endeavors intended to repair corporate reputations by Africanizing senior management. By the 1960s, this had become a common approach to legitimization. The challenges of Africanizing ethnocentric multinationals led to organizational changes: internationally diversified multinationals were better able to decentralize subsidiary management, while the late 1960s saw regionally focused multinationals absorbed by more diversified multinationals. Organizational survival was directly linked to legitimacy advantages derived from Africanization.

This article examines the nuances and complexities of business-government relations in the British paper-pulp industry between 1950 and 1980 through the prism of interactions between Wiggins, Teape & Co., a paper company, and various U.K. government departments in the postwar period. It highlights the complexity of business-government and interdepartmental relations and tensions, set against the global and domestic paper industry competition and the United Kingdom's international economic position. Long-standing industry underinvestment and interdepartmental tensions in government are identified as principal contributors to the failing competitiveness of the industry and of British businesses more generally in the twentieth century.

Late in the spring of 1349, Petrarch, famous for his lyrical cries for peace on the Italian peninsula, wrote the priors of Florence urging the city to war. Two of the poet's dearest friends had been attacked while passing through the mountainous terrain controlled by the rural Ubaldini clan, renegade Ghibellines who menaced crucial trade routes between Florence and Bologna and were taking advantage of Florence's vulnerability in the wake of the 1348 outbreak of the Black Plague. The two campaigns that Florence launched against the Ubaldini, one in 1349 and one in 1350, although little known (overshadowed by the plague on one side and, less so, by the 1351–1353 Florentine war with Milan on the other), are better documented than any contemporary war and, as such, serve as the perfect material for William Caferro's new book, Petrarch's War, whose declared subject is “contradiction” and whose method, ultimately, is the subjection of received ideas and fashionable methods to interrogation in the face of the experience of rigorous and self-conscious archival research (p. 1). “Archives are subversive,” Caferro says, and this is, in many ways, a subversive book (p. 13). Resolutely revisionist and sometimes demandingly démodé—in an age of “big data” and global history and “usable” history—Caferro embraces the problematic and the anomalous, the short term and the small scale. Together with his impressive and prizewinning 2006 book, John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy, Petrarch's War secures Caferro's place as one of the most important economic historians working today.