Modern people are obsessed with money, but the practice of tipping a waiter or chambermaid is a counterbalance against money’s tendency to infect human relations. People who tip infect money back, with nonmonetary values. This article provides a general history of tips investing money and monetary exchange with ideals such as status, dignity, waste, care, and play, in certain parts of the United States, c. 1880–1929. It also offers a case study of railroad red caps’ tips in the five years following passage of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938; when tipping declined, it reduced red caps’ ability to invest their work with nonmonetary values.

The history of advertising’s global expansion has generally focused on the activities and experiences of American-based agencies. Within these conventional narratives, the “center” of advertising lies in New York. Deemed “peripheral,” markets such as Singapore scarcely feature. However, the transnational agencies operating in Singapore in the 1950s and 1960s challenge this narrative. By examining these agencies’ activities during this period, this article reveals that Singapore’s advertising industry has long been connected to global networks spanning Europe, Australia, Asia, and North America. Such connections not only offer an insight into the development of Singapore’s advertising industry, but they also cast broader questions about the degree to which historical interpretations of the growth of the global advertising industry have been informed by American perspectives.

This article aims to shed light on the early history of small-scale capital in Turkey. Turkey’s paradigm of development in the 1960s and 1970s, as in other belatedly industrializing countries, meant active state involvement, generally in favor of big capital. This emphasis on the large players has caused small capital’s influence on the era’s state policies to be largely overlooked. This article argues that small capital, popularized in the 1990s with the concept “Anatolian capital,” has deeper roots in Turkish economic and business history than formerly thought.

This article examines the growth and change of a southern California table grape firm, the George F. Johnston Company. Combining business, labor, and environmental history, it traces the company’s expansion from a semi-arid region just east of Los Angeles to the fully arid deserts of the Coachella and Imperial Valleys of California. The Johnston Company moved south and east into this more hostile environment to produce grapes out of the traditional season, beating the competition to market. In the process, it produced a racially stratified workforce and contributed to an ecological catastrophe. The Johnston case suggests that agricultural production pits capitalists in a triangular struggle over the moment of the harvest with nature and labor. This struggle is intensified by competitive dynamics that drive firms to expand or shift the timing of the productive process.

A substantial literature documents the importance of trademarks and brands to business success. How does this relationship change when we enlarge our focus from individual firms to industries and nations? This articles examines the dominance of Danish bacon in Britain between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that this supremacy required state intervention and cooperation between government and producers to underpin high and consistent levels of quality throughout the supply chain, both of which were necessary to ensure the successful marketing of “Danish” bacon. In Britain, by contrast, state intervention to increase bacon production was only partially successful because it was undermined by a nineteenth-century legacy of uncoordination and deregulation. Such weaknesses affected the supply of appropriate pigs and the production of bacon that was uniform in quality, and ultimately negated the efforts of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to promote a “British” bacon brand.