The lengthy dispute about the role of big business in Hitler's Third Reich has generally portrayed business leaders either as instigators or as victims. The experience of Norton Company, an American multinational in Germany between 1933 and 1945, fits neither role. In this article, Professor Cheape demonstrates that Norton's German and American managers acted as outsiders compelled to play a part for their firm's long–run self–interest. As a result, Norton executives variously cooperated with, ignored, or violated Nazi policies, presenting a richer and more complex pattern of behavior than is usually pictured.

While events of major significance for banking occurred on the national scene in the populist and progressive years, noteworthy changes also materialized on the state level. Like their brethren elsewhere in the country, California bankers struggled through their organizations with such problems as how to achieve “sound banking,” how to influence the political process in their state, and how to give banking more of the trappings of professionalism.

Early American life insurers found themselves facing the problem of asymmetric information, as they needed to rely on applicants themselves to provide truthful, complete answers to a standard set of questions. In an attempt to repersonalize the relationship between their boards of directors and the individual applicants, firms selected highly respected local citizens to act as their agents. These agents were expected to evaluate the appearance of candidates, unearth evidence of unhealthy family histories or questionable habits, and attest to the respectability of people writing testimonial letters on an applicant's behalf. In short, the initial purpose of the agency system was not to actively solicit customers, but rather to recreate the glass-bowl mentality associated with small towns or city neighborhoods.

To facilitate fruitful conceptualization and research in business history among scholars throughout the world, the Review herewith inaugurates a series of reports by our International Correspondents. These reports will supplement the American activities regularly recorded in our pages. It is our hope that comparative studies of common problems and the exchange of data and ideas will thus be encouraged.

During its early years, entrepreneurs in the Italian film industry maintained a complicated relation with the state. The arrangements between the joint-stock company Società Anonima Stefano Pittaluga and the Italian government in the interwar period were typical. Initially, Italian banks financed productions, despite the difficulties entailed in assessing a film's potential profitability. Following the rise of Benito Mussolini, the state invested in the industry, viewing it as a means of building nationalism and shaping the country's culture. While the deal was disastrous for the quality of the films, it nevertheless enabled filmmakers to gain technical experience and acquire production facilities that they were later able to put to better use.

Canadian lines that were spreading out over what would become the Province of Ontario looked forward, in the years before the American Civil War, to becoming important east-west carriers between the rapidly growing American cities of the eastern seaboard and the still-new cities of the American Midwest. Canada's small population and undeveloped industry would force her railroads to rely heavily on traffic going from one American city to another. Lines like the Grand Trunk and the Great Western struggled desperately therefore, to avoid American financial control. With the help of British capital, they succeeded. But America's contribution to Canadian railroading ran much deeper than money. Dominating the skilled engineers and experienced construction contractors who came from south of the border was more difficult for Canadian directors to manage. In the end, however, it was the early failure of top Canadian management to bury their rivalries, ignore their English creditors, emulate Americans like Vanderbilt, Thomson, and Garrett, and consolidate into an integrated line between New England, the Middle Atlantic seaboard, and the Midwest that doomed their railroads to becoming, as one Canadian put it, “side streets to the trade thoroughfare.”

Contrary to their traditional image as institutions operated exclusively for “frugal workers,” mutual savings banks in New York were also a haven for the savings of many middle and upper class persons, whose accounts comprised a substantial proportion of the banks' funds. Thus these intermediaries presumably improved the efficiency of the savings and investment process, allowing middle class people to allocate their resources between fixed and liquid assets better than would otherwise have been possible.

Rarely does a relatively unknown professor of economics publish a book that sells more than 200,000 copies in a few months. When critics accuse the same economist of being normative, political, of manipulating data, of misunderstanding basic economic theory, and of wanting to impoverish everyone, surely it must be because he is on to something. Other commentators, perhaps a bit prematurely, are claiming that his book is the economics book that will define twenty-first-century debate.

In the late 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled the bubble policy as a central part of Jimmy Carter's plan to reform environmental regulations that many believed had grown too proscriptive and too costly for American industry. Since the EPA's formation, regulators had dictated method and means for reducing air pollution. The bubble returned the prerogative to business. But despite bipartisan support, the bubble never took off. Drawing on EPA records and interviews, this article shows how skeptical regulators intentionally made the bubble unwieldy, driving away businesses wary of uncertainty. Though Ronald Reagan's election seemed to lift the bubble's fortunes, his undiscerning assault on the administrative state ironically deflated the EPA's development of a viable alternative to the proscriptive model.

General Motors (GM) became the world's dominant automaker in the 1920s and 1930s thanks in part to a dynamic, centralized public relations operation. The intended audience of this marketing included GM's own overseas employees. As the company opened new plants in foreign countries, it used media such as General Motors World, an employee newspaper, to communicate that it understood the needs of different foreign consumers and to advocate against protectionist economic policies that hindered its ability to sell cars. The messages of General Motors World shaped global perceptions of GM's corporate structure and brand, and were a core element of the automaker's overseas activity.

One of the most neglected aspects of the celebrated Teapot Dome investigation is the reaction of businessmen in general to these events. This article analyzes the views of the business community to Teapot Dome and reveals how various business interests reacted to the episode.

Nowhere was the postwar growth of multinational corporations more dramatic than in the petroleum industry. The major oil companies of the western nations were soon banded together in a complex of joint exploration, producing, refining, and marketing organizations. But efforts to advance criminal prosecution of the American companies under the antitrust laws soon ran head-on into overriding considerations of national security. The hardening of the Cold War, complicated by internal political weaknesses in Iran, persuaded both President Truman and President Eisenhower to soft-pedal litigation. In the end, criminal prosecution of joint production enterprises became civil suits against marketing and pricing agreements, which were settled by consent decree. This, according to Professor Kaufman, amounted to attacking “the tail but not the head or body of the energy tiger.”

The House of Brown was a major international banking firm during the nineteenth century. The leading banking houses such as Baring Brothers and the Browns facilitated the flow of goods throughout the world by providing a range of services vital to international commerce. Mr. Perkins examines the manner in which the firm did business in a large American port on the eve of the Civil War.