The ways in which business–government relations influenced postwar liberalism in the American encounter with the Middle East are examined through the use of group biography. The linked careers of five internationalist oilmen who helped to formulate Harry S. Truman's domestic and foreign policies are tracked during and after World War II. Partly through the efforts of these influential men, the Middle East's vast oil resources became an important component of controversies about the direction of the New Deal. One conclusion to emerge from the study is that instead of simply studying liberal ideals in order to understand the American impulse to reform the world, historians also need to consider how global factors intruded into domestic reform debates.

Master craftsmen played a critical role in launching the Industrial Revolution in America. In this case study of artisan entrepreneurship, Professor Kornblith analyzes the career of Jonas Chickering (1798–1853), the foremost American piano manufacturer before the emergence of the Steinways. By revolutionizing the way in which pianos were made, Chickering—with the help of others—turned a modest craft operation into a major industrial enterprise. Yet, Kornblith contends, he remained true to the craftsman's goal of artistic excellence and won the respect of his employees as well as of the public at large. By the force of his example, Chickering contributed to the acceptance of technological change within the trade and, more broadly, to the legitimation of industrial capitalism within American culture.

Canadian history has traditionally received relatively little study outside Canada itself, despite the fact that the Canadian past is a fascinating and rich story indeed, one which has generated an admirable body of historical literature. And, as those interested in the history of business and the historical interaction of business and society would expect, within Canadian historiography there has traditionally been relatively little emphasis on business history The publication of the present collection of essays has a twofold purpose – to increase, however modestly, non-Canadians' knowledge of Canadian history, and to extend the body of scholarly work devoted to Canadian business and economic history.

The disposition of the estate of the merchant A. T. Stewart, and the interplay of personalities, social mores, and the changing structure of merchandising in America provide the focus for this fascinating and neglected story.

Seville was the first and, for most of the sixteenth century, the only European community permitted to trade directly with the New World. That members of her nobility, who were traditionally aloof from trade, were intimately involved testifies to the wealth to be gained and its revolutionary economic and social effects.

This study reveals distinct cycles directly related to the major military conflicts of the twentieth century which had an important impact on the quantity and quality of British aircraft production. The author also suggests that these cycles may have relevance for other countries and other industries.

Jay Gould's image is stamped heavily upon the picture historians have drawn of the “Gilded Age” of American economic development. Our lack of knowledge of the man, and our meager efforts to understand him, account in large measure for the fatuous traditional interpretation of the era. Professor Klein explains how the work of recent historians has made the hackneyed view of both the man and his age obsolete. He reviews the constructive role that Gould played in the rise of modern America, and offers an explanation of why the man was singled out for extraordinary condemnation in his own time.

This timely account of the hunching of the Suez Canal project reveals both sides of the coin of innovation. It is, on the one hand, a study of the character and methods of one of the most famous innovators of the nineteenth century. Ferdinand DeLesseps was not a politician, a financier, an engineer, a promoter (in the common sense of the word), or a businessman. Yet he succeeded brilliantly in a venture requiring consummate mastery of all these professional fields. On the other hand is revealed the waterway itself — vital to one civilization, useless and neglected in another, and then of transcendent importance as world history marched on. Realization of the grand scheme envisaged by the Pharaohs came at last when economic and political factors momentarily aligned in a pattern of opportunity for a unique set of entrepreneurial qualifications.

Public accounting practice and the nature of the accounting profession itself has, in the years under consideration, been shaped by a series of external forces. The Great Depression stimulated codification and regulation of practice. Further refinements of auditing procedures were introduced in the wake of the McKesson & Robbins case. The basic question of who was authorized to practice received almost continuous attention, and was the subject of much legislation and some important legal action. World War II introduced new practices, added responsibilities, and certain difficulties. And finally, the emergence of a strong national organization provided the profession with a means for achieving internal consistency and the capacity for co-ordinated reaction to rapid external change.

In this note, Dr. Ville expands upon an analysis of the English coal trade in the eighteenth century made by William J. Hausman in the Winter 1977 issue of the Business History Review. Drawing upon the recently discovered papers of Michael Henley and Son, London shipowners between 1775 and 1830, Ville contends that Hausman underestimated both the underlying level of the trade's profitability and its highly volatile nature. Central to Ville's argument is his claim that the high degree of vertical integration in the coal trade pushed up profit levels. These high profits, Ville suggests, played an important role in British industrialization.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) became an important subject among business leaders during the post–World War II era. Business leaders often used the idea of CSR to explain actions they took to prevent additional government involvement in their industry. They argued that because they were behaving in a socially responsible manner, further federal programming was unnecessary. The cases of health insurance and home mortgages demonstrate how this political approach frequently required business leaders to alter their profitmaking strategies in order to substantiate their argument before the public. Thus, the history of corporate social responsibility is critical for understanding a hidden facet of American political development.

This article addresses the question of how standards were determined and disseminated in an era before the formation of agreed upon standards or the existence of governing bodies, by examining the case of nineteenth-century Brazil. It argues that the experience in Brazil was similar to that of other nations: individuals engaged in mathematical, scientific, engineering, and statistical organizations created networks of professional societies, intertwined with international diplomacy and domestic legislators, to promote the adoption of the metric system. It analyzes the process from idea to advocacy culminating in national implementation on the eve of the 1875 International Convention of the Meter, to which Brazil was signatory.

The relationship between capitalism and slavery has been contentious because, in the Atlantic economy, enslaved people functioned as commodities, as labor, and as assets. The transition away from the Atlantic slave-trading system across the nineteenth century affected the stakeholders in these economic functions differently. Compensated emancipation in Senegal provides an opportunity for thinking about the possibilities and limitations of compensation in facilitating capital's continuity. This article traces how individuals who had invested in enslaved labor managed the transition of emancipation and reinvested their compensation claims. It explores how the process of compensation addressed the problem of commercial debt in ways that allowed for a continuity of many of Senegal's urban business elite and their family firms through the end of the nineteenth century.

Scholars have long linked medieval and early modern public debts to the rise of capitalism. This article considers one prominent case study in the development of permanent public debt: late medieval Genoa. Previous scholarship has focused on financial speculation and markets for shares as central to how public debts functioned. However, by considering complementary types of sources, this article demonstrates that inheritance strategies and patrimonial considerations operated in dialogue with markets in the development of urban public debts, both in Genoa and elsewhere in Europe.

This article traces the emergence of the General Motors Corporation as a multinational enterprise under the leadership of James D. Mooney from 1922 to the outbreak of World War II. Mooney's unpublished paper “The Science of Industrial Organization” (1929) portrays GM's multidivisional organization's use of the line-staff concept in organizing overseas assembly plants. Here I compare General Motors with Ford Motor Company, which had first-mover advantages overseas, and examine how each company organized and managed their international operations. “Linking pins,” a social-science concept, illustrates how GM's organizational hierarchy achieved vertical coordination of effort. Economic depression and the prelude to World War II followed the expansionary 1920s, requiring GM and Ford to adjust to a changing environment. The article also covers Mooney's naïve attempts to use business for diplomacy in the years leading up to the war.

This article delves into the origins of the first national multi-sector employers' associations in Denmark and the United Kingdom to understand why some countries produce highly-centralized, unitary national business associations, which develop labor market coordination with unions and the state. In contrast, other countries conclude their experiment with coordination by ultimately falling back on laissez-faire liberalism. In particular, I explore how the structure of party competition works to augment or to diminish coordination among employers. I argue that the interplay of party politics in the policy-making process influenced the incentives of opposing parties to block the legislation sought by employers, informed the incentives of the business-oriented right parties to delegate policy-making authority to private business and labor organizations, and shaped the capacities of employers to get what they wanted from the state.

The work and ideas of Alfred D.Chandler Jr. have enriched the field of Japanese business history and our understanding of that nation's industrial development. Chandler's studies about the rise of the large, professionally managed, multidivisional firm in the United States highlight factors critical not only to the United States' capitalist system but also to Japan's. Indeed, large firms played a dominant role in Japan's economic takeoff in the late 1800s. As these companies grew, they were transformed into professionally managed corporations. Managers, operating in a clear hierarchical chain of command, built up huge companies, such as Nihon Denki (NEC), Toshiba, Mitsubishi Electric, Hitachi, Nippon Steel, Matsushita, and Toyota. In Japanese as in U.S. firms, the visible hand of management was critical to controlling the flow of work, from the input of raw materials to the production of finished goods.