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.

As an important business figure in the development of the West, Micajah Williams' career well illustrates the interlocking character of public and private economic interests during the early nineteenth century. This article suggests comparable functions of entrepreneurs such as Williams in public-works agencies and profit-oriented firms, and argues that the state canal enterprises served to recruit and train a significant number of western business leaders.

Signs of improvement in the early twentieth-century Brazilian economy enabled a process of urban renewal. One of the most visible features of Brazilian urban modernization was street and house lighting, as well as electricity for tramways and industry. Conflicts between the Canadian company Light and the Brazilian firm CBEE over the supply of urban electricity to Brazil's main economic centers—Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador—mirror the contradictions in the country's capitalist formation during the first decades of the twentieth century. From an emerging market view, and through political debates, this article addresses the development of electric utilities in major Brazilian cities.

The prosperity of an industrial enterprise depends upon its ability to adapt continuously to the evolving market for its goods. This paper considers the consequences of one kind of industrial strategy — vertical integration — when the relevant market is strongly influenced by fashion.

Once upon a time, in the 1950s, Alfred Chandler was a student of history, doing what most young, untenured assistant professors of history do. He was applying for a grant. His aim was to conduct research on the 1927 reorganization of the Standard Oil Corporation of New Jersey for a chapter in a forthcoming book that was to become Strategy and Structure.

The study of business history should not be restricted to investigating the development of internal administration in specific firms. The history of business is indivisibly linked to the history of mankind, and business historians should aim at understanding the interplay between the actions of individual companies and changes in the total society. This topic can be illuminated by studying a group of firms in the same industry, by studying business in a certain region, or by relating business policies and methods to such characteristics of the population as the American willingness to work hard in pursuit of a higher standard of consumption.

Recent debates on the economic history of the United States and other regions have revisited the question of the extent to which slavery and other forms of labor coercion contributed to the development of economic and political institutions. This article aims to bring Africa into this global debate, examining the contributions of slavery and coercion to periods of economic growth during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It argues that the coercion of labor in a variety of forms was a key part of African political economy, and thus when presented with opportunities for growth, elites turned first to the expansion of coerced labor. However, while labor coercion could help facilitate short-run growth, it also made the transition to sustained growth more difficult.

During the 1970s, governments increasingly expressed concerns about the loss of revenue through the use of tax havens by both individuals and corporations. This article explores a covert international working group (the Group of Four) set up between France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States in 1969 in response to such concerns. At regular meetings, officials exchanged information gathered by their respective tax authorities in auditing multinational companies. In the 1980s, under increasing pressure from governments in a now much more hostile climate to tax authorities, the Group’s work shifted away from multinationals and toward more general, technical questions. The history of the Group of Four illustrates the importance of the 1960s and 1970s as a period for regulating economic actors and the impact of broader circumstances on the success or failure of anti-tax avoidance measures.

The current scholarly consensus argues that business failure results from the misalignment of a company's strategy and its environment. The case of Western Union, however, suggests that a third element—momentum—is also part of the explanation for companies' failures. The weight of historically accumulated systems, skills, and workers constrains the speed with which managers can adapt their strategy to the environment. Momentum stood in the way of Western Union's attempt to place itself at the center of the growing world of computer communications systems.

In the manner of the Creole tradesmen of Louisiana, whose lagniappe to their patrons is legendary, the Editor offers a similar bonus to readers of the Review. Instead of trifling presents added to a purchase, however, our lagniappe will he notes and documents illustrative of the evolution of business enterprise.

Neither cash sale nor barter were adequate means for bringing a growing number of high-priced durable goods to the American consumer. The employment of installment credit facilitated the growth of a mass market for such products and provides an example of the utilization of an old commercial technique for a new purpose.

Perhaps no American novel has cut businessmen so unremittingly as Sinclair Lewis' Babbitt. Yet at the time of its appearance in 1922 reactions were surprisingly mixed. As an introduction to the persistence of “Babbittry” in the United States — in. life as in the lexicon of invective — the passions aroused during the first decade of “George Babbitt's” life bear review.

Mobilization for World War I carried the United States government into an unprecedented role in the American economy. Entire industries came under the regulation, if not outright control, of new federal boards and bureaucracies. Although this was a vast departure from American tradition, it was naturally justified by the exigencies of global warfare. Platinum was hardly a well-known commodity, but it was indeed a strategic metal that came into increasing demand as burgeoning military needs overwhelmed consumer uses. The result was that platinum gradually came under federal controls. Domestic supplies were limited, however, and as the war continued, worried federal officials looked abroad for additional sources in case of a prolonged conflict, a turn of events that subtly carried them far beyond the ken of domestic regulation. In this article professors Lael and Killen look in detail at the development of platinum controls. Aside from presenting a case study in the evolving relations between business, government, and international politics, they offer new insights into the philosophical assumptions and managerial skills of those who ostensibly masterminded the American economy during World War I.

Professor Livesay describes the prevailing marketing patterns in the various branches of the iron manufacturing industry in the United States before the Civil War. Iron products, like most antebellum manufactured goods, were distributed by independent merchants who played a dominant role in many aspects of economic life. The coming of integrated rail mills, however, foreshadowed the merchants' eventual decline later in the nineteenth century.

Robert Skidelsky, a historian whose fame for his monumental biography of John Maynard Keynes is well deserved, here provides us with a brilliant, well-informed history of macroeconomics stretching from the “British recoinage debates” of the 1690s to today. Money and Government was prompted by the 2008 financial crisis. It is an attempt, Skidelsky tells us, to answer the question that Queen Elizabeth II posed to a group of economists at the London School of Economics in October 2008: “Why did no one see it coming?” Not surprisingly, to skip to the bottom line, Skidelsky believes that macroeconomics reached its apogee with Keynes and that it has been more or less downhill from there. The 2008 financial crisis could have been predicted, and ameliorated after it occurred if not prevented, if macroeconomists had remained loyal to Keynes.

One of the most durable theories explaining the remarkable rise of German industry in the generation before World War I was that of the critical role of the Kreditbanken, the great commercial and investment banks of which the Deutsche Bank was the most prominent. Recently, however, historians have begun to question the power of the banks, and even to suggest that they were a drag on German economic development. In this brief study of how Georg Siemens, of the Deutsche Bank, kept the peace between the two leading German electrical equipment manufacturers, Professor Neuburger shows that the crucial factors were not merely the financial strength or weakness of the Bank, but also the diplomatic skill with which its leaders navigated the rapidly shifting currents of the era.

The purpose of this study is to trace the disposition of stockholder securities and to estimate the losses incurred by investors as a result of the collapse of Samuel Insull's utility complex.

In the economic affairs of Britain the mid-nineteenth ccntury was the age of the relatively small and independent employer, conscious of a long-established prowess which had been surpassed nowhere in the world and in the conduct of the affairs of his works but little affected by the embryonic factory legislation and the feeble trade unionism of the time. Equally the large combine with its tendency towards standardization of conditions had still to come. Lord of all he surveyed, the employer's views on conditions of work are a good index of what actually was.