Professor Yoshino traces the evolution of direct investment in overseas manufacturing by Japanese enterprises in the postwar era. Much of that expansion is of very recent origin, and the prospects are for the spread of considerably more Japanese investment abroad in the future.

British investors, whose support was of importance to American railroad development, fluctuated between enthusiasm and dismay. Low investment per mile, the performance of certain blue chip carriers, and the native growth potential all stimulated the vital flow of foreign capital. Rate wars, overcapitalization, stock price fluctuations, imprudent reorganizations, and low business morality had an inhibiting effect. In most cases American investments offered little opportunity to exert control. By the late 1890's, British investors had largely outgrown their enchantment with the American railroad bonanza.

The taxonomy and utility of early American checks are suggested by Dr. Redlich and an example of their use by the customers of Stephen Girard's Bank, 1812–1834, is supplied by Mr. Christman. Readers are encouraged to comment on or supplement this first attempt at the history of an important business instrument.

An industry may fail to adopt or to extend new technology for many reasons other than lack of entrepreneurial vision. In the following article, Professor Newell considers the halting and incomplete diffusion of mechanization and continuous-process technology in the salmon-canning industry of the Pacific Northwest. She shows that the fragile and cyclical character of the natural resource, the labor system employed, and the remote and isolated locations of individual production units all affected cannery operators' decisions about technology adoption, and that the persistence of manual labor reflected rational, not reactionary, business choices.

The steel industry has been criticized for unnecessarily provoking the lengthy 1959 strike that allowed steel imports to penetrate the United States market. The industry demanded from the union the revision of a collective bargaining clause that protected local working practices. Historians have viewed the clause as inconsequential and the industry's demand for revision unnecessary. This article explores the US Steel Corporation's history of cost reductions and modernization during the 1950s in relation to this contract clause. It argues that the corporation's 1959 bargaining stance, although tactically flawed, made strategic sense given US Steel's decision to cut costs through crew reductions and incremental technological changes at its older mills.

Some later observers, impressed perhaps by rapid progress of the art after 1900, showed disdain for nineteenth-century methods. Five principal factors, however, produced a steady evolution and made accounting an element of importance in the nineteenth-century American business world.

Focusing on the Caigo Fleet Iron Company and its local competitors in Britain's Northeast, this article examines one company's response to changes in the steelmaking environment. By providing data at the firm level, the article is able to highlight specific contributing factors that are often invisible when scholars discuss Britain's industrial decline in the aggregate.

Successful technological change in countries outside the northern Atlantic during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries depended on entrepreneurial skills, not inventive expertise. In this examination of the Owens automatic glass-bottle-blowing machine in Mexico between 1905 and 1912, innovation is seen to have occurred within a broad context of incipient social and economic modernization. Although the obstacles encountered by technology importers and innovators were both substantial and stubbornly persistent, in this case, they turned out to be malleable.

We analyze how Hollywood films from 1928 to 2016 represented business within a broad historical and business context. We argue that the films actively contributed to audiences’ sensemaking processes and to how different groups perceived the role of business in society. We advance the idea that films provided cultural blueprints to be used by viewers for their own understanding, identification, and practices in relation to business in its historical context, particularly during periods of uncertainty, crisis, and instability when many films addressed deeper societal concerns about the role of business.

In recent years, business historians have expressed increasing interest in the development and evolution of corporate cultures. This study carries forward this body of scholarship by exploring a fundamental point of tension in the construction of corporate cultures—the meaning and demands of salaried employment. In a period in which the workings of corporations were uncertain and rapidly evolving, leaders sought to define the meaning and duties of corporate employment in varied but always expansive terms. Corporations wanted employees to act like limited partners, or stakeholders. Whatever the specific tasks of their jobs, the ideal employee was expected to be salesperson, ambassador to the community, and political activist on die firm's behalf. This article probes the ways in which leaders of emerging corporations in Los Angeles struggled to persuade salaried employees to act with such a sense of ownership in the firm.

In the following article, Professor Derickson examines the motivation for and the results of employee medical screening of workers in a midwestern mining community. He argues that, contrary to the goals of the associative state as envisioned by Herbert Hoover and others, government and mine operator efforts to determine the extent of respiratory disease among mine workers in the Tri-State were neither impelled by a concern for workers' welfare nor conducive to the amelioration of their problems.

In the half-century following the American Revolution, journalists and promoters of economic activities wrote paeans to the independence movement, celebrating its release of economic energies and anticipating that it would enable citizens to improve, produce, and consume more and thus sustain their virtuous republican character as a people. Writers predicted that imminent prosperity would result in the construction of mills, forges, and retail networks throughout the hinterlands; they envisioned boldly experimental internal improvements and expanding commerce under the independent auspices of the newly formed states and locales. Liberated Americans could look forward to blending certain kinds of regulatory protections and government encouragements, such as they had experienced under the rule of the empire, and to the aggressive pursuit of economic opportunities: creating new kinds of taxation and currency systems, expanding commerce to foreign ports, extending agriculture to the limits of available technologies and capital, and testing modest manufactures. For two generations following the Revolution, until at least the panic of 1819, many optimists were confirmed in their expectations of a bright future for the new nation's economy, and they embraced the risks involved in mobilizing tremendous amounts of human energy and capital because they believed that economic development would resolve foreign nations' doubts about the new republic and obliterate the crushing debts and dislocations of the revolutionary war.

Faced with a labor shortage at a crucial point in the industrialization of Japan, tradition-oriented businessmen reacted not by raising wages but by longing for the authority-ordered labor relations of the past. Given this situation, the Meiji government moved to improve working conditions through non-economic means. Professor Taira shows that the debate over proposed factory legislation, along with the coming-of-age of a new generation of entrepreneurs, produced a “conversion” to modern management among businessmen of the late-Meiji generation.

Over the last fifteen years, scholars have documented the rapid development of the U.S. financial system between the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the Civil War. To date, most of this work has concentrated on commercial banks and securities markets while neglecting the roles early marine, fire, life, and other insurers played in American financial and economic development. This article seeks to redress the balance by presenting new data on the number and authorized capitalizations of specially incorporated insurers in all states prior to 1861, by analyzing agency problems within the insurance industry, and by describing the economic roles fulfilled by those hitherto underappreciated corporate financial intermediaries.

Headquartered in the United States, the Singer Sewing Machine Co. did business all around the world in the early twentieth century. It regularly encountered wars, economic nationalism, and revolutions; in response, it normally created subsidiaries or gave in to expropriation. After the revolution in Mexico (1910–1920), Singer's marketing organization maintained normal operations and even prospered. The company succeeded, in part, by constantly associating the sewing machine with the idea of “modern” womanhood in Revolutionary Mexico. By revealing Singer's marketing strategies and focusing on gender, this article shows that multinational corporations and Latin American governments were not always at odds and could sometimes forge a profitable relationship.

Warren Buffett famously commented that the U.S. airline industry had made zero profit in its first nine decades. Subsequently, between the millennium and the Great Financial Crisis the airlines in total lost almost $60 billion. Yet no major airline was liquidated or taken over in those nine years. Financial support was repeatedly provided by GE, the conglomerate supplier of leasing finance, engines, and servicing. The article offers a historical perspective on the factors behind this relationship between GE and airlines. It outlines the benefits or costs to GE, airline shareholders, and passengers; the relevance of the model for other industries; and implications for different notions of efficiency.

Nearly sixty years have passed since the publication of A Concept of Agribusiness by John H. Davis and Ray A. Goldberg. The book, which circulated widely among agricultural policymakers, business leaders, and academic economists, cemented the neologism “agribusiness” in the English lexicon. By opening up a new discourse for understanding the political economy of agriculture, Davis and Goldberg introduced a potentially revolutionary strategy for exploring the workings of a food and fiber economy anchored by large corporations. After briefly exploring how the book was received (and often misunderstood) in its own time, this essay will consider whether recent historical work has effectively revived the crucial insights Davis and Goldberg offered more than half a century ago.

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.

Chambers of commerce were the main pressure groups serving as intermediaries between the business elite and the government in Great Britain and Brazil in the nineteenth century. The most important problem they faced in both nations was promoting a legal and institutional framework that would facilitate economic expansion. In both nations, the critical factors affecting this task were the need of the state for the expert advice that business pressure groups could offer, the traditional relationship between business and government, and especially the attitude of a historically dominant landed elite.

Chicago's large, diverse automotive industry specialized in truck, bus, and taxicab assembly, as well as automotive-parts manufacture, in the first decades of the twentieth century. From having just a handful of companies before World War I, by the mid 1920s Chicago grew to include more than 600 firms that were producing a wide assortment of automotiverelated products. This large, successful industry emerged out of two sets of advantages: First, Chicago's well-developed production factors—ranging from relatively advanced transportation and industrial facilities to a large labor force and an effective entrepreneurial business class—promoted industrial growth. Second, the automotive industry's production practices, elaborate division of labor, and intense set of interfirm relations encouraged metropolitan expansion. Even though the city's firms functioned both regionally and nationally, they were also deeply embedded within a local world of innovation, interaction, networks, financing, and servicing. Further adding to these advantages was Chicago's distinctive geography, which enabled a dense complex of linked, interrelated firms to flourish and contributed to the automotive industry's success before 1930.