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.

For Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in Scale and Scope, “the British story provides a counterpoint, an antitheses, to the American experience.” Chandler shows that fewer of the largest firms appeared in Britain. British companies preferred to retain family or family-like control and management; he terms this “personal capitalism.” Firms were reluctant to recruit professional managers, and if they did so, they did not like them to have received much formal education. There were no business schools in the pre-1945 U.K. These personal capitalists on the whole preferred personal income to making the 3-pronged investments in manufacturing, marketing and management in the capitalintensive industries of the Second Industrial Revolution. The more complex the technical and managerial skills required in an industry, the worse these personal capitalists performed and the greater the missed opportunities. For Chandler, Britain stands as a warning of the unpleasant consequences of not adopting managerial capitalism.

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.

In contrast to older views of the passive role of London houses in the American trade, the active influence of a leading English merchant on the business decision-making of his colonial counterparts emerges from this case study.

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.

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.

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.

The voyage of a small ocean-going trading vessel, of a type known as a snow, provides a window into the world of wartime commerce in the late colonial period. In March 1760, the snow Recovery, which was owned by a consortium of North American and Irish businessmen, traveled from New York City to Belfast, Ireland, and from there to the tiny Dutch island of Curaçao. From Curaçao, the snow sailed north to the Bay of Monte Cristi in Spanish Santo Domingo, where it loaded French sugar and coffee, mostly purchased through Spanish intermediaries, for sale at the German port of Hamburg. Upon leaving the bay for a brief stopover in New York, the Recovery was seized by a British warship and carried to Jamaica for condemnation in the court of vice-admiralty. This trading venture tells us much about mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic markets, their fluidity, adaptability, and responsiveness to change, as well as their integration into a single system of production, commerce, and finance.

The success of Balfour, Guthrie and Company in mobilizing British and American capital for productive investment contributed importantly to the economic development of the Pacific-coast region of the United States. The changing economic patterns of that region emerge through Professor Rothstein's analysis of the firm and its managers' actions and responses, from which a broader understanding of the problems and direction of foreign investment in the American West is possible.

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.

In the manner of the Creole tradesmen of Louisiana, whose lagniappe to their patrons is legendary, the Editors offer a similar bonus to readers of the Review. Instead of trifling presents added to a purchase, however, our lagniappe will be documents illustrative of the evolution of business enterprise. It is hoped thus to provide a wider availability of the raw materials of business history to teachers and researchers.

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.

Banians acted as intermediaries for European merchants in Bengal. They were highly influential in the eighteenth century but their importance waned thereafter. This article reexamines their role in the nineteenth century and argues that their importance persisted but evolved in response to changes in the Bengal economy and issues of contracting and governance. It shows that the banians remained a nexus between the local and global economies, facilitating a bidirectional transfer of knowledge. They enabled the development of innovative Indian business forms and contributed to the emergence of a diverse ecology of organizational forms and ownership in Bengal at the end of the nineteenth century.