The “historical alternatives” approach calls for research into the role of national institutions and public policies in the resilience or decline of industrial districts. Policies in support of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) were launched in various Western economies in the second half of the twentieth century. This article focuses on the paradigmatic Italian case and investigates the importance of government subsidies for SMEs on firms located in a southern and a northeastern district, between 1971 and 1991. This discussion deepens our understanding of the role of national policies in the reemergence of industrial districts in the decades of the Second Industrial Divide. It also indicates the importance of firms’ utilization of subsidies and their ecosystem as complementary to the policy's effectiveness.

Regulating environmental outcomes without stipulating the technologies to accomplish them is a characteristically American form of governmental intervention. This approach aims to encourage industry to address public-policy concerns while minimizing interference in its affairs. However, California's zero-emission-vehicle mandate of 1990 implied the development of specific technologies with highly disruptive sociotechnical effects. The most practical zero-emission vehicle of the day was the all-battery electric vehicle, a technology characterized by the temporal mismatch of its components. Batteries have shorter life-spans than electric motors, a durability dilemma that rewards battery-making. In response, General Motors and Toyota devised strategies to mitigate this risk that involved mediating the technology of the Ovonic Battery Company.

Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practices used by Medici entrepreneurs were first theorized by Giovanni Botero and others as what would become an “Italian model” in political economy, a model that had a profoundly wide-ranging impact, and that puts the lie to the commonplace in the history of ideas that the Italian Renaissance, so precocious in other fields, was silent on the topic of political economy.

German corporations are characterized as having been adaptable in the face of numerous traumatizing events during the twentieth century. This article explores how firms adapted their accounting information systems during the hyperinflation of the 1920s. It suggests that responses to the crisis focused on system elements identified as key to continuing operations. Initially, firms amended selling and purchasing arrangements, modified financial reporting, and shifted managerial reporting to nonmonetary information. As inflation accelerated, human resources were diverted to maintaining critical functions, especially those related to remunerating labor. While some elements of accounting systems fell into disrepair, there were also examples of innovation.

This article discusses the complex issues behind the relation between national and global economic histories and the challenges of a comparative approach. On examining different national approaches (Italian and English) to the management of the early modern maritime sector, it will argue that this comparison allows a privileged view into different varieties of capitalism, highlighting fundamental differences in attitudes toward wage labor and risk management that still influence different approaches to economic activities today.

Leaders of business schools and other educational institutions have enjoyed decades of stability. Today, we confront a set of systemic global challenges, including a pandemic, severe economic weakness, heightened inequality, racial injustice, and a climate emergency. Taken together, these challenges redefine the environment in which we operate—and offer us an opportunity to reimagine our organizations. We can learn about how to deal with this level of upheaval by studying how leading U.S. business schools responded to World War II. All shrank as students and faculty were drafted, most innovated in fairly traditional ways while still maintaining existing activities alongside of war-time innovations, and some pushed forward long-standing institutional change. One school choose a different path, shutting all peacetime programs as it fully committed not only to helping win a global war but, just as importantly, to forging a lasting peace—the long-term economic prosperity that followed the war. The lessons we can draw from academic leaders from nearly eighty years ago are apt today.

This article critiques the application of Karl Polanyi's port of trade model to the development of Livorno, which has often been ascribed to commercial brokerage across cultural, political, and ecological frontiers. Livorno's neutrality during times of war and its position in the corsair and privateering economies would appear to support just such an interpretation of Livorno's growth. Nevertheless, while such interstitial roles were real, by the 1640s they were subordinate to the larger currents of regional and long-distance trade. Livorno's development is better explained with reference to the rise of commodity markets as entrepôts for managing far-flung distribution networks. The Tuscan port's rapid rise should be understood as an integral phenomenon of early modern capitalism, more akin to places such as London or Amsterdam than to the ports of trade studied by Polanyi.

Mark Peterson's The City-State of Boston is a formidable work of history—prodigiously researched, lucidly written, immense in scope, and yet scrupulously detailed. A meticulous history of New England over more than two centuries, the book argues that Boston and its hinterland emerged as a city-state, a “self-governing republic” that was committed first and foremost to its own regional autonomy (p. 6). Rather than as a British colonial outpost or the birthplace of the American Revolution—the site of a nationalist struggle for independence—the book recovers Boston's long-lost tradition as a “polity in its own right,” a fervently independent hub of Atlantic trade whose true identity placed it in tension with the overtures of both the British Empire and, later, the American nation-state (p. 631).

Steve Jobs was the most charismatic businessperson in the modern era. When he died, on October 5, 2011, Apple was inundated with condolence messages from all over the United States and from around the world. These notes were sent not only to Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California, but to Apple retail stores. The stores posted them on their windows. In addition, bouquets of flowers were brought to the stores. Think of this—flowers in front of hundreds of stores in dozens of countries because of Jobs's death. No one knows how many notes were received at Apple and in the stores. According to the “Remembering Steve” page on Apple.com, “Over a million people from all over the world have shared their memories, thoughts, and feelings about Steve.” As he was dying, people made a pilgrimage to his home in Palo Alto. His daughter has written that “a few people he didn’t know came to the doors wanting to see him … , wandering into the garden. … A stranger in a sari begged to talk with him. A man came in through the gate and said he had flown in from Bulgaria just to see my father.” After Jobs's death, California governor Jerry Brown declared October 16 to be “Steve Jobs Day.” The president of United States and the First Lady, Barack and Michelle Obama, posted a condolence note. Nothing remotely like this outpouring had ever taken place on the occasion of the death of an American CEO.

From the 1940s to the 1970s, the commercial revolution of the Middle Ages was a historiographical concept with considerable traction. This article revisits the literature that brought about and engaged with that concept, with specific reference to Florence. In so doing, it draws attention to the place once held by business history in the study of Europe's takeoff. It also discusses the preliminary results of an ongoing project on limited partnerships in early modern Tuscany, which reaffirms the relevance of business history for understanding preindustrial economies but steers away from a teleological search for the origins of modern capitalism.

Voltaire's words about the London Royal Exchange, quoted by Francesca Trivellato in her important new book The Promise and Peril of Credit, represent pars pro toto a view of finance and trade—as peaceful, tolerant, antagonistic to the old segregations and brutalities of religion, and ultimately emancipatory—that entered the philosophical mainstream in the eighteenth century, that seems to at least partly form the foundations of liberal modernity, and that continues to shape the way we think about business and capitalism today (p. 139). Yet Voltaire himself was an anti-Semite who obsessed about the Jews and trafficked in old clichés about cunning Jewish merchants precisely in order to make his case for commerce as a vehicle of toleration. This and similar ironies or contradictions lie at the heart of Promise and Peril, which traces from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century what Trivellato calls a “legend,” because it is both patently false (we now know), and was once widespread, that Jews in the Middle Ages or Renaissance invented the bill of exchange (and sometimes also marine insurance).