Firms use a variety of strategies to limit competition that would otherwise erode profits. Firms innovate, creating new technologies, new markets, and new firms. Innovations allow them to distinguish their products or lower their costs and thus maintain profits. Their ability to innovate depends on the existence of social institutions that allow them to amass the resources—labor, capital, and information—necessary to compete successfully. Firms also maintain profits by manipulating the political process to maintain preferred access to markets, technology and resources. Finally, firms take actions to limit competition directly. Waves of consolidation, justified by an assumption of the inevitability of increasing firm size, have limited competition and entrepreneurship. Cartels and other forms of collusion, sometimes thought to have disappeared from US markets after the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, are still active in a wide variety of national and international markets.

Numerous historians of deindustrialization argue that industries went into decline because established manufacturers moved production to cheaper locales to escape unions and high wages. A different pattern of decline occurred in the New England cotton textile industry, where downsizing began in the 1920s. Rather than fleeing their home area to build facilities elsewhere, most New England manufacturers were driven out of business by lower-cost competitors in the American South. Southerners founded, managed, and financed a heavy majority of the textile companies in their region. Although some New England firms did set up Southern plants, this was a defensive reaction to changing market realities. New competitors have brought about deindustrialization in other core U.S. industries. Recognizing this trend is important for a full understanding of the political economy of modern capitalism.

Hail insurance in Britain emerged as a product by and for farming communities, expanding as wheat production rose in the mid-nineteenth century before declining in the latter decades of the century amidst wide-scale conversion from arable to livestock farming. Drawing on detailed research conducted in the remaining archives of the three major hail insurers in this period, we demonstrate the challenges of establishing a new insurance product for farmers. We argue that to make hail insurance effective, the insurance company’s central office collated and circulated information, rules, and paperwork to enable it to govern farmers, agents, and valuers at a distance. Such networks were fragile and required continual maintenance, whether to enhance reputation, manage farmers’ requests for new products, enforce rules, or tinker with rates in response to perceived risks and competitive pressures. Conceptualizing this emerging insurance business as a fragile network is a useful device demonstrating that paperwork, the governing of actors, and personal rivalries are as important as broader economic changes in explaining the development of a novel insurance product in this period.

This article describes the evolution of IBM's effort to manage its relationships with the U.S. government from the time that Thomas Watson, Jr. became CEO. While the Watson family controlled the firm, the family members served as the main bridges between IBM and the government. This personalized approach began to give way in the 1960s, as the intensity and scope of pressure from the firm's political environment grew beyond the capability of any individual to handle. During the 1970s and 1980s, IBM constructed a managerial hierarchy, with a newly opened Washington office at its center, which could gather more detailed intelligence and execute more sophisticated political strategies. The firm's crisis in the early 1990s provoked a second major restructuring of the interface, as IBM became more of a Washington “special interest.” Yet, some traces of the Watson imprint remained, even in the Gerstner era. Tracing IBM's evolution helps us to understand better the broader interactions between U.S. firms and their environments in this period. These interactions entailed adaptation by firms to environmental change but also efforts by firms to exert control over external forces, including public policy.

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.

In recent years, there has been a notable increase in the amount of scholarship on the history of shareholding in Britain. One area that still remains relatively unexplored, however, is the problematic issue of how British investors actually went about the process of choosing their respective investments. The purpose of this article is to make a start at redressing this gap by using the (perceived) sharepushing crime wave that swept across Britain during the interwar period as a prism through which to evaluate the behavior of Britain’s shareholding population at this time. Ultimately, what it suggests is that, while the interwar British investors may well have had far more potential sources of advice and information open to them than their nineteenth-century forebears, this did not necessarily mean that they were any better informed about the workings of the British securities market.

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 Manchester Chamber of Commerce established the Manchester Testing House in 1895, and introduced uniform yarn contracting rules in 1897. The chamber made these institutional “innovations” to deal with the nefarious practice of “short-reeling.” This case study explains how and why merchants were crucial to undoing weaknesses in domestic —and to some extent foreign—legislation to overcome this fraudulent activity. We argue that the Testing House and uniform contract were tantamount to developing a quasi-legal system such that private standards established through cooperative agreements had legal sanction. Our study shows how institutions evolved to improve governance along the supply chain for this highly specialized export-orientated industry. This article contributes to the growing literature on historical markets, institutions, and standards. Based on extensive archival sources, we show how specific and complementary commercial institutions developed within grounded notions of governance rather than abstracted spaces of market exchange.

The London House of Rothschild depended on Brazil to maintain its reputation. This became a problem in the 1890s, when the Brazilian government almost defaulted on its sovereign debt after a change of regime had made politics unstable and economic policy unorthodox. This article shows how the relationship between the bank and the state developed to the point that Rothschilds was forced to rescue its client. Exposure enabled Brazil to implement policies designed to defend the regime at the expense of payment capacity without defaulting. The debt crisis ended only after the political situation stabilized toward the close of the century, when the bank pressured the government to tighten economic policy.

In this article, we explore how reformers, manufacturers, and traders perceived British food consumers and the significance of those perceptions in debates about food quality and regulation. By considering basic commodities, our analysis extends a literature on consumption that is otherwise derived primarily from the study of luxury commodities, and it identifies conflicting images of the interests, competence, and concerns of early twentieth-century consumers. We find that discussions of appropriate policy involved competing interpretations of modernity and its implications for food consumers, and these discussions anticipated later twentieth-century debates.

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.

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.

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.

By the mid-twentieth century in the United Kingdom, musical instrument manufacturing had become an increasingly mechanized activity. Craft skills had been displaced in many areas, yet remained a vital source of competitive advantage in local and international markets and were particularly valued by professional musicians. This article examines the contrasting experiences of two British musical instrument manufacturers, tracing the unfolding relationship between their pursuit of entrepreneurial opportunities and capability development. Boosey & Hawkes, a large, well-established manufacturing and publishing company, was an early pioneer, while Paxman Bros., a small musical retailer, transformed itself into one of the world’s most respected specialist manufacturers. The narrative probes the factors that shaped decision making in these companies as they developed a series of design innovations for one of the more complex brass instruments: the French horn. It draws on relevant theoretical insights to examine how a dynamic interaction between opportunity and capability, coupled with unanticipated contingencies, contributed to divergent outcomes for each company.

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.

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 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.

This is a case study of the U.S. pharmaceutical producer, Merck & Co. By 1940 this was one of the leading pharmaceutical producers in the United States, and the company went on to become one of the global industry leaders after World War II. It was founded in 1891 as the U.S. subsidiary of a much larger German pharmaceutical company, E. Merck of Darmstadt. The existing understanding of Merck & Co.’s history emphasizes how it was reacquired by the American branch of the Merck family after wartime sequestration, and from then onward it pursued a path of development separate from its former parent. This article revisits that history of the company and shows how the two Mercks began to cooperate and share technology and manufacturing know-how during the 1930s, something that was particularly to the advantage of Merck & Co.