Global maritime business networks channeled the flows of people and goods for modern production and consumption societies. The principal instrument for constructing and sustaining these networks was the business trip. In the course of their travels, shipping-company and trading-company executives founded new commercial networks, established new routes and services, inspected agents, gathered business intelligence, and promoted new contacts and connections. These trips relied on a business culture that combined cosmopolitanism with national preferences and competitiveness with gentlemanly codes. Personal relationships remained fundamental to the networking process, despite a bureaucratization of business structures. An examination of the business trips of Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and German maritime firms reveals the centrality of global networks in modern economies, shows how such networks were constructed and maintained, and argues that face-to-face relationships continued to characterize business life deep into the twentieth century.

During the Civil War era, when the U.S. explosives industry was already dominated by a handful of firms, the leading manufacturers of black powder tried repeatedly–with mixed success–to fix prices in commercial and military markets. Their surviving correspondence reveals some of the dynamics of oligopolistic collusion and competition. In commercial markets, price-fixing by leading explosives makers was undermined not only by competition from small powder manufacturers but also by rivalry among their own selling agents. The same agency problems that made price-fixing more difficult, however, may have actually made it easier for manufacturers to sustain the social foundations of cooperation by allowing them to blame the failures of their agreements on forces outside their control. Maintaining cooperative relations over the long run proved useful to manufacturers in wartime military markets, in which price agreements were easier to sustain. But during the Civil War, the leading powder producers found that even successful collusion in the military supply business did not guarantee high profits, because government bureaus could prove to be demanding consumers.

Nineteenth-century newspapers, exchanges, and governments relied heavily for their daily information upon an alliance of four international telegraph services: Havas (Paris), Reuters (London), Wolff's (Berlin), and the Associated Press (New York). The connections of the wire services to financial and official circles bred suspicions that they offered privileged information and suppressed or inserted reports on behalf of special interests. Corporate and official records reveal the wire services’ reliance upon the subsidies, information, and telegraph facilities of firms and governments. As a result, world news coverage was, if not “poisoned” at the source, at least dammed up, filtered, channeled, or watered down.

In the early twentieth century, companies relied on advertising to inform international audiences about their products and services, just as they do today. The J. Walter Thompson Company, a New York–based advertising agency, entered the global stage early, and by 1928 Thompson advertisements had appeared in twenty-six languages in over forty countries. Reaching international audiences and expanding their tastes required an understanding of local cultures and the ways in which they conducted their businesses, and advertisers often had to act as mediators for their clients. The J. Walter Thompson Company's efforts in Argentina provide an excellent case study of how both “local” and “global” messages of consumption were understood–and often misinterpreted–when they were transmitted to other countries from the United States.

An economic enterprise faces two, related, problems: effectively managing its activities and communicating to outsiders that it is, in fact, well run. The credit cooperative movement that grew up in Germany in the second half of the nineteenth century had to wrestle with both. These cooperatives thrived, in part, because they adopted strategies first to obtain and then to harness the information they needed about the communities in which they were located, giving them an advantage over other lenders. Particularly effective was the tactic of using local people as managers, which helped to cement their ties with the community. Yet because few, if any, locals had banking experience and most were not even familiar with basic accounting methods, the managers created internal management problems, intensifying outside suspicion of the cooperatives as banking enterprises. The methods the cooperatives developed to overcome these problems drew on a combination of local initiative and regional assistance that was typical of the movement as a whole. The movement's ability to train its own talent suggests that it had a broader impact than has been captured by statistics on its membership or financial assets.

American frozen foods were originally considered a luxury product; the industry did not develop a mass market until the late 1940s. Only a few years after achieving mass-market sales, however, frozen-food producers tried to segment the market in order to increase profits. This change was partly the result of internal factors, such as technological developments and interfirm competition. The new marketing strategy also hinged on industry executives' shifting conception of the ideal consumer. Frozen-food marketers of the early 1950s envisioned themselves as providing the good life at a low cost to “average” Americans. When profits slowed in the late 1950s, they designed a variety of new products for groups according to their race, age, and class.

Chicago's large, diverse automotive industry specialized in truck, bus, and taxicab assembly, as well as automotive-parts manufacture, in the first decades of the twentieth century. From having just a handful of companies before World War I, by the mid 1920s Chicago grew to include more than 600 firms that were producing a wide assortment of automotiverelated products. This large, successful industry emerged out of two sets of advantages: First, Chicago's well-developed production factors—ranging from relatively advanced transportation and industrial facilities to a large labor force and an effective entrepreneurial business class—promoted industrial growth. Second, the automotive industry's production practices, elaborate division of labor, and intense set of interfirm relations encouraged metropolitan expansion. Even though the city's firms functioned both regionally and nationally, they were also deeply embedded within a local world of innovation, interaction, networks, financing, and servicing. Further adding to these advantages was Chicago's distinctive geography, which enabled a dense complex of linked, interrelated firms to flourish and contributed to the automotive industry's success before 1930.

Beginning in 1897, the American ceramics industry entered a period of stability and collaboration that emerged from an agreement by several leading firms to fix prices and discounts, exchange cost and price information, and begin close contractual relations with its workers' union, the National Brotherhood of Operative Potters. One issue, however, remained trouble-some: how to deal with occupational health issues in this disease-ridden trade. Should firms rely on state or private inspection? Should they be bound to one standard? Significantly, the companies and unions opted for private inspection systems that allowed them to maintain trade stability, even at the cost of health improvements. This arrangement remained in place until 1923, when federal antitrust actions shattered the trade association. Employers then faced a shift to state inspection and enacted a range of new schemes and private welfare plans to suit their designs.

After World War II, Weirton Steel remained a critical barrier to the unionization of the steel industry. Weirton kept unions at bay through a plan of high wages, welfare, and company unionism, which it combined with an authoritarian style of management. Forbidden from using intimidation by the federal courts, Weirton substituted a celebration of Americanism that associated freedom with limited government and an absence of unionism. Foreseeing a union drive in 1950, Weirton staged a pageant to dramatize its version of patriotism. The steelworkers countered with a competing version that stressed trade unionism as a way to give workers a democratic voice. This article reveals how postwar patriotic pageantry was rooted in the struggle between labor and capital.

In the years before World War II, New Zealand department stores became increasingly influenced by American ideas about salesmanship. This involved a shift away from British precepts about retailing, which discouraged initiative by sales-people and emphasized service. Stores that adopted American ideas were trying to become more competitive and began to appeal to working- and middle-class consumers. They imported the concept of “suggestion selling” and the idea of pushing complementary goods. New Zealand merchants modified American methods by relying on the use of manuals and bulletins to train salespeople and, unlike American stores, did not introduce commission payment schemes.

The sale of luxury goods during the 1930s represents an incongruous aspect of American business that has been largely ignored by historians. This essay focuses on the efforts of one manufacturer of high-quality, elegant glassware, A. H. Heisey & Company of Newark, Ohio, to survive the Great Depression. Heisey created successful new sales strategies and product designs to meet the changing tastes of its customers. Although difficult to gauge with precision, Heisey's business also benefited from the overlapping influence of several New Deal measures: the Beer–Wine Revenue Act, the National Recovery Act, and the National Housing Act. Paradoxically, Heisey was most hampered by President Roosevelt's adoption of fiscal restraint in 1937, a policy that the company's Republican executives strongly advocated.

Patterns of residential segregation in late-nineteenth-century southern cities had great influence on the type of African American business that developed. They also affected the relative stability of business enterprise. In neighborhoods with a higher degree of segregation, African American entrepreneurs were able to develop vital businesses that survived the worsening climate of race relations around the turn of the century.

Emmett Jay Scott was private secretary to Booker T. Washington and later became secretary treasurer of Howard University. He was involved in numerous business activities, ranging from the establishment of the National Negro Business League to the founding of an investment clearing-house, an insurance company, and an overseas trading firm. Scott also promoted the black township of Mound Bayou and backed African American entertainment enterprises. His business activities were largely unheralded, and the frustrations he encountered illustrate both the obstacles and the opportunities for black entrepreneurs in the first half of the twentieth century.