Working from a database of over 1,700 printed circulars, this article explores the significance of the commercial innovations that took place during the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth. Studying the chronology of the introduction of printed circulars and their use in mercantile practices, we demonstrate that commercial innovation can be interpreted as the mobilization of new tools and old practices to solve the traditional problems of long-distance trade, in a context where circulars were used to communicate information on trade houses, to search for new commercial partners, and to display one's socioprofessional identity.

As Great Britain expanded its economic sphere at the turn of the century, what was the nature of the relationship between the imperial government and private firms seeking profits within the free trade empire? Was there a “well-planned and consistent program directed from the top,” or was the government's so-called “high policy” toward business actually the result “of ad hoc compromises among various departmental heads” buried three and four levels deep in the Colonial Office? The experience of the Tanjong Pagar Dock Co. of Singapore suggests that the opportunities for British firms to exploit the resources of British controlled territories could be seriously circumscribed by the “arbitrary paternalism” of “crusading bureaucrats.”

The distinguishing aspect of business in modern times, particularly in the United States, is that it has permeated the entire fabric of civilization. Historical interpretations of this circumstance have been in sharp conflict and have tended toward extremes. The wave of national self-criticism of the early twentieth century focused attention on the shortcomings of business, ignoring its constructive aspects. On the other hand, the modern revisionist school of historians, depicting the businessman not as a “robber baron” but as an “architect of material greatness,” has been prone to stress ends ahead of means and to overlook the deeper implications of the businessman's role in society as a whole. True perspective is not afforded by either of these opposing academic positions, nor is it likely to be gained by further blind amassing of facts-in-isolation on the part of business historians. A general theory of business evolution is needed — one that neither praises nor blames the businessman but seeks to locate him in the larger context of human experience.

Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the eighteenth-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic Christiania Glasmagasin. The investors in the company, many of them among Norway's “founding fathers,” were individually responsible for its losses and it operated, remarkably, at an annual loss for nearly five decades. The article asks why, beyond the anticipation of a royal import ban on foreign glass, private investors might have continued to accept such losses. It focuses on tensions between cameralist and liberal ideologies in the creation of an important national industry, and on older (and perhaps more sustainable) ways of thinking about profitability.