In Depression-era South Georgia, truck farmers experimenting with onion planting found that their crop emerged unusually sweet, due to the region's climate and particular soil content. But what gave Vidalia onions a unique flavor—their low sulfur and high water content—also rendered them nearly impossible to market, as the vegetable spoiled much quicker than regular onions. In their seventy-year quest to overcome the onion's natural limitations, Georgia growers would transform their formerly insular region into a hub of global supermarket capitalism. As onion acreage skyrocketed with the advent of controlled atmosphere storage, growers recruited thousands of Latin American workers. Then, when storage techniques proved imperfect, industry leaders contracted with growers across Central and South America to produce sweet onions for sale during Georgia's off-season. In striking contrast to the Vidalia onion's branding as a “down-home” southern crop, the vegetable's history reveals the contradictions in our modern food system.

The history of insurance has been characterized in most countries by the coexistence of a wide range of organizational forms. The reasons for this plethora of vehicles remain unclear, as does the impact of this diversity on the development of insurance around the world. Drawing on the latest research, this paper examines, first, the different functions of the state in relation to insurance in a wide range of national markets from the early modern period to the present century; second, the path-dependent effects that determined the historical distribution of public and private forms of insurance; and third, the relation between public and private insurance and its impact on market development.

What is it to wear a uniform? Some occupations involve enforced adoption of a uniform, the police and armed services most obviously. Yet other occupations—such as management consultants—adopt styles or codes of dress that, while not enforced, have a currency and coherence such that we might think of them as a tacit uniform. Why—and to what effect—do some occupational groups voluntarily adopt tacit dress codes? This essay will explore those questions in relation to depictions of English traveling salesmen from the start of the nineteenth century to the eve of World War II. Representations of English traveling salesmen (“commercial travelers” in British parlance, the usage that will be adopted hereafter) frequently highlighted their physical appearance and in particular their modes of dress, showing remarkable continuity, certainly across the greater part of the period covered here.

Today, in the aftermath of the subprime crisis, there is a foreboding sense that it is too easy for Americans to borrow. Living beyond our means on our cards and our mortgages, Americans borrowed at an unsustainable pace, and what put us here, the logic goes, was the unfortunate collision of lenders' greed and borrower's cupidity. Yet free-for-all borrowing defined another moment's economy as well, but without the ill consequences: the postwar period. After World War II, cheap credit underpinned the suburban prosperity, through government-insured loans, auto financing, and even department store Charga-Plates.

The first two articles in this issue of Enterprise & Society shed new light on the performance of the postwar Italian economy, an intriguing paradox for economic and business historians. Italy has been notorious for its political instability, inflation, massive public debt, and clientelism. Its political and economic institutions are often derided and labeled dysfunctional. Yet, in historical perspective, the country has frequently performed better than its more stable and “efficient” European neighbors and other developed economies. Between 1950 and 1973, for example, Italy’s Gross National Product grew at 6.8 percent per annum and its Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita at a rate of 4.8 percent (matching Germany and second only to Japan). Even more remarkably, since 1973 its GDP, manufacturing output, exports, and productivity have all grown faster than that of any other major European economy.

The Good Consumer offers a historical account of consumer credit reporting in the United States, from its nineteenth-century antecedents in commercial credit reporting through its professionalization and transformation into a key communication infrastructure during the first half of the twentieth century. While describing the technical and institutional development of the modern credit bureau, The Good Consumer draws special attention to one of the most consequential effects of credit reporting: the invention of financial identity. Formalized systems of credit evaluation produced their own categories of social reality and fostered new forms of economic objectification. The title refers to the “goodness” of credit consumers in several contexts: as prompt paying customers, trustworthy and morally upright citizens, profitable target markets, and collectively as a vital force behind the growth of the twentiethcentury American economy.

At the turn of the twentieth century, American and Chinese millers were locked in a fiercely contested battle for control of China’s flour market. Imported American flour had dominated Chinese urban markets since the early 1880s, but the founding of a modern native milling industry in 1900 had initiated a commercial war that pitted the great flour corporations of the Pacific Coast against the independent mill owners near Shanghai. Although the anti-American boycott of 1905 had boosted sales for Chinese mills and sparked growth in the native industry, the period between 1905 and 1909 severely tested the ability of the young industry to survive foreign competition. A high silver/gold rate, low transpacific shipping rates, and bumper wheat harvests in the Pacific Northwest lowered the relative cost and enhanced the market appeal of American flour to Chinese brokers. Conversely, severe flooding in China’s wheat-producing regions forced curtailment or even cessation of production for some native mills. Facing catastrophic reductions in their wheat supplies and markets saturated with American flour, Chinese millers devised alternative business strategies and implemented collaborative measures to ensure the solvency of their mills.

The Alcoa Building (1953) and Fiberglas Tower (1969) exemplify “architecture parlante”, literally buildings that speak of their function and meaning. They said—in steel, aluminum and (fiber)glass—this is who we are; this is what we do; this is how we do it. They provided prestige, visibility, and a sense of collective identity. Alcoa and Owens-Corning intended their signature buildings as larger than life advertisements for their signature products. The executives who commissioned them also expected the buildings themselves to reflect, and reinforce, new management styles. In the early 1990s, Alcoa and Owen-Corning commissioned new headquarters buildings that reflected a new management style thought to be appropirate for an emerging era of the flat organization and the ‘networked corporation’. Like their predecessors, these buildings sent an unmistakable message about management priorities. The buildings – outside and in – helped bring the organization, and the organizational chart, to life, both symbolically and pragmatically. Read carefully, a signature building can be a revealing corporate memoir.

Why is there no SEAT Barcelona? Barcelona is a well-named place brand, but SEAT consciously has disassociated itself from its geographic origins. This seems rather strange decision if one takes into account the increasing importance of the place-of-origin effect in automotive industry. This article describes how SEAT has constructed its Spanish identity and hidden its Catalan-Barcelona origins, and discusses SEAT’s own growing “denationalization” because of the acquisition by Volkswagen Group by using banal nationalism to gain the loyalty of the country’s nationalist consumers and to fashion a corporate image in line with Spain’s Marca España, or national brand. Through this decision, SEAT has lost the opportunity to associate itself with Marca Barcelona, a successful urban brand.

Amidst other major changes to the food system, America witnessed an extensive transformation of marketing within the postwar era. Specifically, the concept of convenience quickly became a favorite of corporations across the food chain. However, despite the favorable market conditions and an outwardly receptive customer base, companies quickly found that they needed to negotiate with public perceptions of food, cultural ideals, and social realities. Using primarily corporate sources, this paper explores the development and use of convenience by food marketers. It investigates how processors sought to exploit postwar tensions between labor and gender. The project also examines how companies grappled with customer expectations of product quality. Ultimately, companies that successfully leveraged their ability to offer quick, quality meals further embedded themselves into consumer choices and lifestyles. By cultivating and marketing a specific message, corporations used convenience to make themselves appear indispensable to living and eating well in the postwar era.

E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. is one of the world’s largest chemical corporations, and its operations are of interest to business historians. This article explores the early history of the firm within the context of early republic political economy in order to show how it came to a place of prominence in the American gunpowder market by the early 1820s. The article utilizes the archival and printed records of DuPont, associated firms, government correspondence, and early War Department and trade statistics to show how the company, unlike other powder mills of that time, had access to both large reserves of foreign capital and the halls of power in the federal government. These resources helped DuPont become a principal supplier of gunpowder to the army, the navy, and a major exporter during the War of 1812 era.

This article documents the emergence, evolution, and acceptance of mortgage-backed securities (MBS) by bond investors in the United States between 1968 and 1987. Drawing on an analysis of trade publications, securities prospectuses, and business press, I argue that MBS issuers’ eventual success at convincing bond investors to accept their products is especially remarkable given that bond investors had rejected most types of MBS issued between 1970 and 1983. My analysis suggests that the acceptance of MBS as bonds was an outcome of two approaches employed by the MBS issuers: (1) changing the attributes of their products to make them more bond-like, and (2) changing the meaning of the bond category by opening its boundaries to products that incorporated mortgage features. These two approaches to changing investors’ beliefs to promote innovation acceptance may undergird the diffusion processes for other financial innovations. Understanding the process of innovation acceptance may be especially important because market participants have short memories. Forgetting the assumptions made during innovation–acceptance processes can bring unanticipated consequences of innovation adoption, such as financial crises.

During 1870–1914, business actors were concerned about the increasing uncertainty and occasional cheating in commercial relationships. In such situations, economic actors seek to improve the information they have, so as to benefit from strong comparative advantages over their competitors. This essay analyzes the acquisition and circulation of information and the actors and rules involved between 1870 and 1914, through a comparative approach (France and Italy). It considers individual trading firms, professional associations, information intermediating agencies, and state offices. We argue that these agencies (and therefore markets and institutions) acted much less as rivals than as complements in this era. Indeed, product information is different from information on the reputation of economic actors, the latter generating further distinctions between reputation for payment, respect of deadlines, and fidelity to the terms and objects of the contract. In turn, such kinds of situated micro-information differ from general statistics on market evolution and prices. We show that most economic actors were much more interested in the former (specifics) than in the latter kinds of information. To demonstrate this point, we compare the way traders, their associations, and private and state agencies intervened in the gathering, circulation, and interpretation of economic information in two countries, Italy and France, between 1870 and 1914. We argue that their opposite outcomes were not simply the result of different “mentalities” or attitudes to risk (as exogenously given), but rather can be traced to the different institutional settings and economic segmentation of the market for information in these two countries. In fact, unlike the Italian government, French ministries refused to provide their traders with micro-information on potential overseas correspondents and product characteristics. That is to say, “attitude to risk” and “animal spirits” are not exogenous and cannot be studied outside a given historical and institutional context.

Why do the United States and France, both capitalist economies that were dominated by private railways in the 19th and early 20th centuries, have very different transport systems today? After World War II France developed 200 mph high speed trains, while railways in the United States declined to near irrelevance. This paper argues that cross-national divergence was caused by private and public actions that structured capitalmarkets and controlled planning. In the United States private financial institutions used capital markets to shape rail development. In France, by way of contrast, the state directly intervened in financial markets and controlled planning. Both systems thrived until World War I. But, then, faced with growing competition from cars, buses and trucks and burdened by excessive debt, they declined towards bankruptcy. The Great Depression became a defining moment as a Socialist-dominated government in France nationalized railways while in the United States, President Roosevelt's New Deal failed to enact policies to ensure the competitive viability of rail in relation to motorized transport. Rarely used archival sources provide much of the evidence for this argument.

This article contributes to literature on the role of “firms” in the early modern English economy by exploring contracts for works between the Crown, the City of London, and large construction firms that built the Greenwich Hospital, City churches, and St. Paul’s Cathedral from 1670 to 1712. Primary sources show varying arrangements to pricing, mitigating risk, and securing finance occurred without the costs of intermediaries. Clients pushed financial and operating risks onto contractors through complex contracting systems that enabled and supported a number of coordination mechanisms in the market. The article argues that contracts rather than firms should be the unit of analysis for those wishing to examine productivity and changes in early modern business.

While co-operatives are traditionally associated with workers, consumers, and farmers, the business model, with its emphasis on democracy and community, has also been adopted by small business owners, the self-employed, and professionals. These business co-operatives are distinct phenomenon, because they primarily consist of independent organizational entities that are not co-operatives and are generally in direct competition with one another. They are unique in that they bring together separate organizations that seek to combat market threats while adopting a philosophy based on co-operative principles. This article begins with an overview of the Australian co-operative landscape. It then defines the concept of business co-operatives and then draws upon the Visual Atlas of Australian Co-operatives History Project, which has developed a large database of Australian co-operatives over time and space, to examine the development of business co-operatives in Australia. It looks at where business co-operatives formed in the economy, the motivation underlying their formation, their average life spans, and their relationships with the broader co-operative movement. The article highlights the value of business co-operatives in introducing the values of participatory democracy and working for the common good into unanticipated markets and reinforcing the co-operative movement.

This article investigates the dynamics that characterized the top fashion industry companies in Italy and Spain in the last three decades of the twentieth century and the first thirteen years of the new millennium. The first section describes the sources and the methodology adopted. The second compares the features and transformations of the largest firms in the industry. The third focuses on these companies in 2013. The fourth discusses our findings, focusing on the impact that globalization and a possible “advantage of backwardness” had on the emergence of Italy and Spain as trendsetters.

The half-century following the Civil War witnessed an epochal transformation in American telecommunications. In the 1870s, the telegraph network became a spawning ground for a remarkable spate of inventions that included the phonograph and the telephone, and around 1900 the telephone network became the first electrical communications medium that network providers intended to be accessible to the entire population. This transformation was a centerpiece of the still unprecedented burst of inventive activity that economic historians call the Second Industrial Revolution.