The government in British-ruled India established cooperative banks to compete with private moneylenders in the rural credit market. State officials expected greater competition to increase the supply of low-cost credit, thereby expanding investment potential for the rural poor. Cooperatives did increase credit supply but captured a small share of the credit market and reported net losses throughout the late colonial and early postcolonial period. The article asks why this experiment did not succeed and offers two explanations. First, low savings restricted the role of social capital and mutual supervision as methods of financial regulation in the cooperative sector. Second, a political-economic ideology that privileged equity over efficiency made for weak administrative regulation.

Despite the importance of service-sector activities, both to women and to the U.S. economy, services have not figured prominently in business history. A consideration of the usefulness of this subject to business history is followed by a case study of household services in the nineteenth century, showing their social and economic value and the ways in which they exemplified the integral relations between women's work and business.

Many products—from consumer electronics to children's toys—bear the CE mark, the symbol of conformity to the “essential requirements” of European standards. This article traces the development of CE marking from its origins in the European Community's (EC) efforts to relaunch the Single European Market in the mid-1980s to its full implementation in the mid-1990s across the European Economic Area (EEA). It focuses in particular on the reforms made to the “New Approach to Technical Harmonization” and the “Global Approach to Testing and Certification” and examines the ways business groups responded to the creation of common systems for assessing conformité européenne. This history offers an expansive view of regional market integration and a new perspective on the dynamic between companies and regulators in the European business environment.

The production of jewelry offers a lens through which to examine the nature of creativity in a capitalist economy. The fashioning of decorative goods for wider sections of society in the second half of the nineteenth century allowed manufacturers to expand the size of their businesses, but only by sustaining strong connections with consumers and keeping track of buyers' changing desires. The outcomes of decisions affecting their enterprises were determined by the degree to which producers understood what their customers wanted. Entrepreneurial activity was critical to the formation of strategies for coping with the problem of scarce or imperfect information and limited market power. These strategies induced a process of creative destruction, whereby old ways of making things changed, and technology, labor, skills, and capital were recombined.

The conventional distinctions between “practical” and “scientific” research and development can be misleading. The experience of Thomas Midgley, Jr., at the General Motors Corporation in the three decades before World War II, and especially his critical role in the development of “antiknock” gasoline additives, freon refrigerant, and synthetic rubber, illustrate this fact. Dr. Leslie demonstrates that the management of corporate research and development, especially as that management affects uniquely talented individuals whose interests do not necessarily reflect the immediate needs of the company as seen by management, is basic to success. To solve such problems as they arose, Charles F. Kettering, himself a sympathetic scientist as well as distinguished inventor, worked closely with chief executive Alfred P. Sloan, whose genius for solving managerial problems matched the scientific genius of the most brilliant men in the General Motors laboratories.

Only recently have business historians turned their attention to the motor transportation industry. Interest in this “new” and obviously important field is well served by an historical analysis of major industry-wide trends. Too often the historian and the businessman alike work without benefit of such perspective. The evolution of the motor transportation industry is here divided into four major chronological divisions, with some summary observations about post-World War II conditions. Major emphasis is laid upon the different developmental patterns exhibited by various motor carrier classifications, upon the competitive interreaction of rail and motor transport interests, and upon the far-reaching effect of state and federal regulation. The history of the motor transportation revolution yields information of value about railroad developments and provides a background for understanding basic twentieth-century trends in commodity distribution.

The Kirin Brewery Company is a large, long-established, and successful firm in a traditional, “old economy” sector in Japan. Nevertheless, in the early 1980s it entered the “new economy” business of biopharmaceuticals, based on advances in scientific techniques at the time and prospects for the bio-technology industry in the future. This essay explains why Kirin entered this field and how it developed the necessary competences. The development of these new competences was in no small part owing to entrepreneurial alertness and opportunity recognition by individuals in various functions of the firm. As such, the case illustrates the presence in the large modern corporation of the individual entrepreneur, a figure whose existence and role is often downplayed or simply omitted in nominalist treatments of entrepreneurship, which depict innovation as a somewhat mechanistic endeavor, absent any element of entrepreneurial behavior.

This article analyzes the investments in both manufacturing units and sales subsidiaries by German chemical companies in the United Kingdom prior to 1914. It extends the findings in the existing literature on the subject, as sales subsidiaries have not so far been investigated. In particular, the article focuses on the motives underlying these investments. By building sales subsidiaries, German companies hoped to improve their control over foreign distribution activities and to promote their own brand names. As for the creation of manufacturing outlets, the motives of the companies differed before and after the reform of the British patent law in 1907. Prior to patent law reform, branch plants were set up due to transport cost considerations, resource orientation, or the pursuit of monopoly. Further reasons included restrictions on the use of proprietary technology in the home country and capacity constraints in the home factory. It was only after 1907 that manufacturing units were established to safeguard the companies' British patents. Consequently, the traditionally held notion that it was solely the patent law of 1907 which sparked off German FDI in the British chemical industry needs to be modified.

There was an interlude when enchantment with Dollar Diplomacy overcame the reluctance of Washington to become involved in Near East politics. The Chester project, however, was defeated by German imperialism, lack of popular support for business ambitions abroad, and vacillation by the promoters themselves. The time for effective alliance between the State Department and American businessmen was not yet at hand.

A heal tithing office or bishop's storehouse was found in every Mormon settlement of the Mountain West during the nineteenth century. Besides functioning as collector of revenue for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the tithing house played a major role in the economic life of the community. It served as communal receiving and disbursing agency, warehouse, weighing station, livestock corral, general store, telegraph office, employment exchange and social security bureau. These functions carried it into banking, the fixing of official prices, and bulk selling. Thus the history of this institution shows, in a much different setting, counterparts of many procedures and problems open regarded as distinctly modern.

Professor Simonson casts the recent history of the American airframe industry against the Schumpeterian concept of “creative destruction” in this study of business response to technological change.

One of the most durable stereotypes of recent American history is that of the 1920s as “a conservative Republican interlude between the progressive Democratic administrations of Wilson and Roosevelt.” An important feature of this stereotype is the “Mellon plan” for tax reform. Professor Murray demonstrates that there was remarkable unanimity among Republicans and Democrats on the policy issues addressed by the “Mellon plan,” and finds continuity, rather than contrast, between the tax plans of the Wilson, Harding, and Coolidge administrations. As Secretaries of the Treasury came and went between 1918 and 1921, staff assistants cultivated the plan which Mellon later adopted.

Chicago's traction king was a master of corruption and financial legerdemain, but his contempt for public opinion proved at last to be his undoing. Out of such flamboyant transgressions great reform movements grew, and the character of all big business operators was made suspect.

By early 1933 President Roosevelt's advisors concluded that the United States Government would have to play a direct role in the Cuban economy. That nation, economically dependent upon the North American sugar market and politically dependent through the Platt amendment that gave the United States the right to intervene in its internal affairs, was economically prostrate and on the verge of civil war. The United States proceeded to abandon both the free trade and protectionist doctrines that had divided the President's advisors for a program that structurally integrated United States-Cuban trade and employed federal funds to support cooperative Cuban leaders. All of this, Professor Benjamin believes, foreshadowed the massive foreign trade and lending programs so common to American foreign policy after World War II.

In the decades before World War II, U.S. antitrust law was anything but settled. Considerable pressure for antitrust revision came from the states. A perhaps unlikely leader, Edna Gleason, organized California's retail pharmacists and coordinated trade networks to monitor and enforce Resale Price Maintenance (RPM) contracts, a system of price-fixing, then known as “fair trade.” Progressive jurists, including Louis Brandeis and institutional economist E. R. A. Seligman, supported RPM as a protection to independent proprietors. The breakdown of legal and economic consensus regarding what constituted “unfair competition” allowed businesspeople to act as intermediaries between heterodox economic thought and contested antitrust law, ultimately tailoring federal policy to accommodate state regulations.

While it lost some five million dollars operating in Mexico between 1824 and 1849, the British Real del Monte Company conducted its business without major interruption from the political turbulence that characterized the new nation. In this article, Professor Randall shows how the company finessed most of the political risk that it potentially faced by keeping administrative distance between itself and the ever-changing central governments and by conducting political relations at the local level as community relations. Despite business rivalries with mine owners, labor-management conflict, and incidents of individual and institutional friction, the English firm and the Mexican town of Real del Monte generally maintained positive community relations. Accommodation as much as conflict accompanied foreign penetration into newly independent Mexico.

Where are the Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Fords of recent Japanese history? Their absence may be explained by a lack of scholarly attention to the areas of entrepreneurship, business organization, and managerial practices. Professors Rosovsky and Yamamura review the historiography of Japan's industrialization and place the five articles in this special issue within the context of recent work in business and economic history.

In 1947 and 1949 statutory monopolies were established over the export of all major agricultural products from British West Africa. This device was justified chiefly on the ground that it would serve to stabilize the incomes of the peasant producers. This justification is not supported either by economic analysis or by history. The statutory monopolies seem rather to have emerged from a confluence of events and opinions in the preceding decade: the widespread belief that middlemen are socially unproductive, the search by the members of a trade association for some way to restrict competition and safeguard their profits, the formation of export control boards as a wartime measure and the resultant creation of influential administrative positions, the predilection of the administrators for tidiness, the recent emphasis on compulsory saving as an instrument for development of backward areas and the opinion that socialization of peasant saving would contribute to that development.

The tangled purposes of national economic policy in the early decades of the twentieth century are highlighted in Professor Braisted's analysis of an episode which pledged officers and secrets of the U.S. Navy to the advancement of American business in the Far East.