Economic and geographic centralization are typically seen as critical components of the industrialization of food during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The development of the fresh- and processed-tomato industries during this period offers an important counterexample to this dominant narrative. Between the late nineteenth century and World War II, the most salient characteristic of both fresh- and processed-tomato production was economic and geographic decentralization. This article argues that the emergence of sites of tomato production and processing in virtually every region of the country played a vital role in fulfilling the long-standing quest for year-round access to both fresh and processed tomatoes.

The Selfridge Collection of Medici manuscripts at Harvard Business School's Baker Library is the largest collection of Renaissance Florentine account books outside Italy. This collection documents both the business and personal economic activities of one branch of the Medici family through six generations, extending from the early fifteenth century through the end of the sixteenth century. It would be difficult to find, even in Florence, another family whose economic activities are so well documented over such a long span of time, a period we know as the Renaissance. This patrimony of family documents was sold by the Medici heirs through an auction at Christie's of London in 1918; and in 1927 the buyer, H. Gordon Selfridge, deposited the ledgers at the Harvard School of Business Administration. Around one hundred ledgers arrived at Harvard at that time, but one item in the Christie's inventory was missing. In 2007, I found this missing item in the catalogue of a Munich antiquarian book dealer, but it had already been sold to a private collector in Germany. When informed of its importance for the Harvard collection, the new owner of the ledger kindly permitted Laura Linard, director of Historical Collections at Baker Library, to have it microfilmed; and so finally, after eighty years, the missing item has returned, at least in a photographic version, to its original home, thereby completing the Selfridge Collection. This event could be the occasion for a reevaluation of a major collection of business documents too long ignored by historians.

IBM Finland, a small national subsidiary, was at once a Finnish business and an interface to much larger networks of technological innovation and knowledge sharing. We contextualize its development within a nested set of institutions and identities: IBM's Nordic operations, its European business, and its World Trade Corporation. Its development was profoundly shaped by Finland's unique geopolitical position during the Cold War. IBM's internal structures anticipated and paralleled those of the European Union, with mechanisms for international cooperation, for the creation of transnational identities, and for the resolution and regulation of disputes between national subsidiaries.

While researchers have pointed to numerous methods of expanding state capacity in the Progressive Era, the literature has overlooked the creation of nominally private companies relying on implicit government guarantees, later known as government-sponsored enterprises. This article explains the novelty and structure of the nation's first such enterprises, the Federal Land Banks, and describes how their design embodied several fragilities that contributed to their collapse and bailout in 1932. The article then demonstrates why, despite these problems, the land banks became the model for subsequent enterprises and financial reforms.

This article examines how the film industry influenced prevailing gender and skin color stereotypes in India during the first four decades after Independence in 1947. It shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India, shared Hollywood's privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and its preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency. The influence of film content was especially significant in India as audiences often lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information. It was left to parallel, and often regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media. As conventional archival sources for this history are lacking, the article employs new evidence from oral histories of producers and actors.

At the close of the Napoleonic era, the banking business of France except in one respect had not advanced much over what it had been in 1789. At that time it had been dominated by Protestant Swiss, the best known of whom was Necker. Some of them like the Mallets, Delesserts, and Thélussons, descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Geneva and other places and in a later generation returned to France as Swiss. The business of these bankers consisted in lending their own funds and those entrusted to their care to worthy applicants for loans, probably merchants as well as noblemen. They administered fortunes for their owners, which is especially true of the court bankers who were charged with the financial affairs of the king and his family. In addition, like all eighteenth-century bankers they had a flourishing business in bills of exchange, including the accepting of drafts of bankers and merchants in other cities and countries. Necker is said to have organized these bankers and their foreign correspondents so as to provide by a system of short-term drafts the funds for French participation in our Revolutionary War.

Though often controversial, British investment has long played an important role in American economic development. But one sector where British capital has found a home is agriculture, where such investment has taken many forms in many places. In this essay Professor McFarlane looks at various land investments that Britons made in the North Central states, particularly Nebraska, during the last decades of the nineteenth and the first decades of the twentieth century, a time when there was a general agricultural boom in the cornhusker state, albeit one sandwiched around various business contractions. In his remarks McFarlane not only examines British strategies of investment but also quantifies its extent and its longterm return. To a degree his conclusions dispel some of the concerns and controversies that attended the flow of British capital into western lands.

This paper sketches the formation and expansion of a Scottish company engaged in the Indian trade, and follows its attempts to formulate policies to meet the changing demands of an overseas market known only through long delayed and often conflicting reports from abroad.

Although Britain's electrification started with considerable technological and market advantages, it proceeded remarkably slowly and hesitantly. Using share-price data, this study investigates the conventional explanations for this disappointing outcome: notably, perverse regulation and competition from entrenched gas-light providers. It finds that these oft-cited factors had an imperceptible impact on the course of the British electrical industry's turbulent market launch in 1882. However, we show that, owing to the fledgling electrical industry's need for incessant experimentation, short-sighted, self-serving decisions by the management of the early British industry's most prominent firm squandered a well-funded start, with long-lasting adverse consequences.

This article traces the economic factors in the decline of the railroad commuter business and examines the recent public-policy issues. The author is extremely skeptical of the rebirth of railroad commutation under any institutional arrangements and predicts further decline and possibly eventual extinction.

By the 1930s, the American Locomotive Company (ALCo) and the Electromotive Company (EMC) controlled the diesel locomotive industry. Although ALCo enjoyed sound financial status, decades of experience in steam locomotive production, and close ties with its customers, it quickly lost ground to the newly established EMC. Electromotive's founder, Harold Hamilton, emphasized the importance of marketing, including post-sales support services, and his strategy helped Electromotive to surpass ALCo's diesel locomotive production by 1935. ALCo continued to neglect its marketing capabilities, and remained a poor second to Electromotive until it ceased production altogether in 1969. ALCo failed in large part because it could not modify its corporate culture, which was superbly equipped for steam locomotive production but ill-suited to the diesel locomotive industry.

Recent studies of the progressive era by Gabriel Kolko and Robert Wiebe have proven that much reform legislation was supported by many of the interests against which the bills were ostensibly written. Professor Caine shows that, in at least one important state, railroads fought reform bitterly, accepting the principle of regulation only when conservative administration of the Railroad Regulation Act of 1905 offered them unexpected protection from progressive reformers.

The widespread advent of money-back guarantees and one-price policies were symptomatic of a major transition in merchandising history. As trade grew and retail stores multiplied, standardization of terms and practices became apparent. Before 1864 Champaign-Urbana merchants had made little progress in developing a policy of standard prices. The postwar years brought increasing competition at the retail level, and the use of the money-back guarantee spread. When this practice became widespread, a one-price-to-all policy became essential. Some old-time merchants continued to haggle with customers, and barter trade in country produce created complications, but by the early 1870's the integration of one-price policies and money-back guarantees had been generally accomplished and the way paved for the advent of mass distribution.

Concluding his sophisticated analysis of the Pennsylvania Railroad's organizational structure (cf. BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW, Summer, 1961), the anonymous reporter for the RAILROAD GAZETTE described in a supplementary article, reproduced here following Professor Jenks' interpretative comments, the decentralized management of the Pennsylvania's western divisions.

The movement for nation-wide association among businessmen was echoed at the local level as well. This study of why and how a “grass roots” association developed suggests that the causative forces included not only material benefits but also a desire for status.

“All books are dead in twenty-five years,” Mr. Justice Holmes wrote to Sir Frederick Pollock. An example of Holmes’ mastery of the art of over-statement, the dictum has its notable exceptions, as even a relatively young discipline such as economic and business history reveals. Professors Scheiber and Salsbury make the case for the permanent impact of one such exception. At the Editor's discretion, communications like the following may be published in the future about other milestones.