Research into the organization of the firm typically contrasts family businesses with impersonal corporate structures, and kinship ties among corporate elites are often associated with inefficiency and corruption. This analysis of over 14,000 equity investors and executive officers finds that familial networks were embedded in early corporations, not just among directors but also among small shareholders in the firm. Related investing was especially prominent among women and other relatively disadvantaged groups. Personal ties in newer, riskier enterprises encouraged capital mobilization in emerging ventures and persistence in shareholding, and related investing was significantly associated with lower risk of corporate bank failures. The results support a more positive view of family networks in business organizations and in overall economic development.

What effect does political instability in the form of a potential secession from a political union have on business formation? Using newly collected data on business creation, we show that entrepreneurial activity in Ireland in the late nineteenth century was much lower than Scotland, and this divergence fluctuated over time. Several factors may have contributed to this, but we argue that political uncertainty about the prospect of a devolved government in Ireland played a role. The effects were most acute in the North of Ireland, the region that was most concerned by potential changes.

Retracing closely the events of the life of George Frederic, king of the Miskitu (in present-day Honduras and Nicaragua) between 1816 and 1824, this article describes how this Miskitu actor sought to set up, by hiring British agents, the concrete realization of a Central American commercial and political independence project—understood here as a utopia. Although his project ended in failure, the actions of this little-known Miskitu king had repercussions in the Caribbean and beyond, even in the heart of the City of London. Concentrating on a marginal actor seldom considered by historians reveals how particular American Indigenous peoples sought to actively position themselves in the important commercial and political transformations affecting the Atlantic World in the first decades of the nineteenth century.

Business history is expanding to include a greater plurality of contexts, with the study of Chinese business representing a key area of growth. However, despite efforts to bring China into the fold, much of Chinese business history remains stubbornly distal to the discipline. One reason is that business historians have not yet reconciled with the field's unique origins and intellectual tradition. This article develops a revisionist historiography of Chinese business history that retraces the field's development from its Cold War roots to the present day, showing how it has been shaped by the particular questions and concerns of “area studies.” It then goes on to explore five recent areas of novel inquiry, namely: the study of indigenous business institutions, business and semi-colonial context, business at the periphery of empire, business during socialist transition, and business under Chinese socialism. Through this mapping of past and present trajectories, the article aims to provide greater coherence to the burgeoning field and shows how, by taking Chinese business history seriously, we are afforded a unique opportunity to reimagine the future of business history as a whole.

As companies became larger and shareholders more numerous in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain, the conventional wisdom is that the free-rider problem inhibited active shareholder participation. Discontented shareholders could sell in the market, but it was long before the takeover bid mechanism facilitated the removal of underperforming incumbent boards. We show, using a sample of fifty cases in the period from 1888 to 1940, that UK shareholders overcame the free-rider problem by using committees of investigation on a sufficiently large scale to present a credible threat to board malfeasance. Although there was more to corporate performance than corporate governance, this aspect of good governance plausibly contributed to London's precocity in divorcing ownership from control in domestic companies up to World War II.

This article addresses the question of how standards were determined and disseminated in an era before the formation of agreed upon standards or the existence of governing bodies, by examining the case of nineteenth-century Brazil. It argues that the experience in Brazil was similar to that of other nations: individuals engaged in mathematical, scientific, engineering, and statistical organizations created networks of professional societies, intertwined with international diplomacy and domestic legislators, to promote the adoption of the metric system. It analyzes the process from idea to advocacy culminating in national implementation on the eve of the 1875 International Convention of the Meter, to which Brazil was signatory.

This article studies the evolution of business in Mexico from the Revolution (1910–1920) to the early 1980s, a period when the state played a major role in the economy and undertook nationalistic policies. It explores the development of distinctive features that characterize business in Latin America: the importance of family-owned diversified business groups and immigrants, the prominence of illegal business, the central role of the entrepreneur, and the greater need to forge ties with government agents for company success. We argue that while some of these features had existed earlier, during this era they took the form that has prevailed until the present day.

That the United States stands almost alone among nations in its failure to adopt the metric system has long been blamed on conservative, reactionary forces. This paper argues against this interpretation, which passes for conventional wisdom in both academic and popular circles. It instead contends that attacks on the metric system in the late nineteenth and twentieth century originated with progressive engineers, entrepreneurs, and industrialists who had taken the lead in setting the nation's first industrial standards. Far from being backward-looking reactionaries, they enjoyed reputations as cutting-edge leaders in the development of the machine-tool industry, the railroads, and the metal-working industries. Many of them pioneered new methods of management that privileged rationality, efficiency, and systemic approaches; indeed, they strongly influenced the development of what became known as scientific management. These individuals deftly advanced their cause through the nation's political institutions, thwarting the metric cause.

Chartered companies were important tools of European colonialism, but also institutions with a political agenda of their own. In this study, we focus upon one key chartered company, the British South Africa Company, in particular the ending of its charter in 1923/24, in order to study the business diplomacy strategies employed by the company. We show how the company during the period under study moved from a reactive and defensive diplomacy strategy concerning its charter, to a proactive and transformative strategy. In this way, the company managed to renegotiate the terms under which it operated so that it eventually came to accept and even embrace the ending of chartered rule, rather than to oppose it.

The Japanese match industry is an early case of an industry that changed global market dynamics by building international competitiveness through combining low-cost and low-price strategies with product differentiation. This differentiation was achieved through the registration of trademarks for all matches exported, total quality control, and strong investments in graphic design to adapt brands and their imagery to different host markets and cultures. This study shows how trademark data provides alternative and complementary angles on particular economic phenomena—in this case, on how industries and countries build global competitiveness despite being technologically less developed.

Much thought has been accorded to the evolving nature of business history. It is only relatively recently, however, that attempts have been made to articulate methodological issues in a more epistemologically explicit and reflexive fashion. This article contributes to this burgeoning agenda by examining the methodology underpinning an intensive archival study of the British interwar management movement (1918–1939), a major force in British management education between the wars. We explicate the methodology employed and question what this material tells us about the interwar management movement, in terms of its determination to modernize management, encourage openness between firms, and extend a new spirit of partnership. We show that the interwar management movement was characterized by organized cooperation and methodological openness. Our main contribution is to demonstrate that interpretations themselves can become entrenched and prone to inertia, inviting us to revisit these periodically and, if appropriate, recast them.

Many products—from consumer electronics to children's toys—bear the CE mark, the symbol of conformity to the “essential requirements” of European standards. This article traces the development of CE marking from its origins in the European Community's (EC) efforts to relaunch the Single European Market in the mid-1980s to its full implementation in the mid-1990s across the European Economic Area (EEA). It focuses in particular on the reforms made to the “New Approach to Technical Harmonization” and the “Global Approach to Testing and Certification” and examines the ways business groups responded to the creation of common systems for assessing conformité européenne. This history offers an expansive view of regional market integration and a new perspective on the dynamic between companies and regulators in the European business environment.

The history of Plan Calcul―France's first information technology program, launched by de Gaulle's government in 1966―has been well described in the literature; however, few studies investigate the arsenal system of the program in depth. Drawing from Plan Calcul's archives, this article is the first to demonstrate that, in the context of de Gaulle's Cold War foreign policy, the French government, initially aiming to avoid an arsenal system, still became the program's funding supplier, entrepreneur, and client. Plan Calcul aimed to establish an industrial-type operation but was ultimately reduced to a state information technology arsenal program.

The article analyzes recent trends in the business history of Russia and its interrelations with mainstream business history. The authors explore the extent to which the business history of Russia can contribute to the development of the discipline. To do so, they use an “alternative business history” framework. They argue that Russian business history is a disciplinary hybrid. As such, it can reasonably be considered as an interesting testing ground for business history, which seems to be searching for a new identity among history, economics, and organizational and managerial studies. In addition, Russian business history still has considerable potential for providing new voices and stories and for contributing to international debates and a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between enterprise, state, and society.