Business history forces historians and economists to take a wider view of individuals' actions as economic agents. The risk-managing strategies of Lord Londonderry (also known as “the Money Pitt”) during the financial boom and bust of the South Sea Bubble illustrate this theme well. He dealt in staggering sums for the time but hedged his bets along at least three dimensions: the pecuniary, the personal, and the political. His skills, however, remain unappreciated because he could not manage the ultimate uncertainty always present in human affairs—when will fate bring down the final curtain on one's partners, family and friends, patrons, or one's own person?

The battle for dominance of the global aviation marketplace after 1945 was largely an Anglo-American competition, yet to date historians have overlooked the important role diplomacy played in shaping its outcome. Divisions over the proper regulation of strategically vital aircraft and aviation technology seriously impeded aircraft manufacturers, British producers especially. This article traces the impact of Anglo-American diplomacy upon British aviation manufacturers during the first half of the Cold War, from 1946 until the Sino-American rapprochement of the early 1970s. It explores three periods in particular: the initial postwar years, highlighted by disputed British jet engine sales to the Soviet Union; the early 1950s, when British jetliner exports seemed a genuine strategic threat in Washington; and the early 1960s, when Whitehall authorized covert transfers of American-licensed aviation equipment to complete the first British aircraft sales to the People’s Republic of China. These examples demonstrate not only the effect of strategic balancing by governments on the marketplace, but also diplomacy’s impact on business.

This article presents a balance of the most significant research carried out in Spain on the public policies and business strategies that guided the implementation of different forms of forced labor under Francoism, during both the war and the dictatorship. It deals with the logic and economic impact of this type of punishment, attending to two main aspects. In the first place, the legal organization of forced labor is explained, and emphasis is placed on the role it played in mitigating the shortage of labor power in some sectors. In the second place, the article analyses the profit margins produced by this kind of labor in comparison with free labor, related to productivity levels. In this respect, important differences can be appreciated between work during the war and in the postwar period, as well as between work depending on the army and that of private companies.

Despite significant developments in understanding the role of women in early-modern business, more is needed to fully understand women’s impact on eighteenth-century trading networks. Further, much less is known about the role of wider family members, especially children, in the eighteenth-century Atlantic economy. The formal documentation that is privileged in business histories does not tell the whole story, and it frequently represents mercantile activity as a pursuit dominated by a patriarch at the center of a trading network. This article explores eighteenth-century familial commercial networks through extensive use of the personal family correspondence of three merchant families who lived and traded within different locales of the northern Atlantic: Hugh Hall, a merchant and vice judge of the admiralty in Barbados; the Black family, who were wine merchants in Bordeaux; and Joseph Symson, a mercer and shopkeeper from Kendal, England. This article will show that women appear as autonomous players with the power and ability to make informed and independent decisions that directed the business interests of their families. Moreover, it includes an assessment of the ways in which merchants cultivated the expertise of their extended families to enhance their commercial networks and advance their business pursuits. Focusing on children who supported or enhanced the prosperity of the family firm, this article emphasizes that their participation was intentional, not incidental. This article asks questions about the emotional consequences of such activity—which have rarely been considered in any detail—as well as the financial benefit of operating in this manner.

We examine the Scotch Whisky Association’s (SWA) role in protecting “Scotch whisky” between c. 1945 and c. 1990. Using new archival evidence, we demonstrate that the SWA intensively lobbied the UK government to achieve coordination between domestic and European regulations governing Scotch whisky and whisky. The SWA’s nonmarket activities were consonant with some trade associations but in other respects they were atypical. The SWA extended its activities to supranational bodies and engaged in extensive domestic and foreign litigation. The key message from this article is that the SWA built the world-renowned appellation “Scotch whisky” even though this marque was not registered as an appellation until the late twentieth century.

Using the career of director William Wyler as a case study, the article argues that by standardizing creative professions such as acting and directing during the 1920s and 1930s, the Hollywood studio system was responsible for turning creativity into a modern form of labor. I make this claim by highlighting three main themes. First, the article draws attention to the operation behind cultural industries, as opposed to the content they produce, a topic that remains understudied. Second, it traces the historical development of “directing” as a profession. Looking at how this pivotal role changed since the early days of the industry, I argue there was a structural rationale behind practices of managerial control as well as those enabling creative autonomy. Third, focusing on Wyler’s career, the article fleshes out how this dual rationale functioned day to day and how it pushed creative employees like Wyler to develop a particular professional way of being.

In his Farewell Address, President Eisenhower warned that the military-industrial complex (MIC) threatened to dominate American research, crowding out commercial innovation. Ironically, a number of analysts point to spin-off benefits of the 1950s' military effort as a crucial source of American high-tech competitiveness, often citing the key example of the relationship between military jet aircraft and the Boeing's 707. But the huge military investment in jet aviation had both benefits and costs for the commercial industry. This article compares the development of the Boeing 707 and its relationship to military projects like the KC-135 tanker to the contemporary development of commercial jet aircraft by other companies that were also integral parts of the military-industrial complex (MIC), including Douglas Aircraft and its commercial DC-8 and Convair and its commercial 880 and 990. Using evidence from archives, interviews with retired company executives, contemporary trade press, and academic studies, the article concludes that membership in the MIC did not offer firms a leg up in commercial markets. President Eisenhower was generally right about the costs of the military effort, but military spending remained low enough to allow commercial industry to thrive in parallel to the defense industry.

After reflecting on the thematic evolution of business history as a field over the past 50 years, this revised presidential address invites readers to consider the potential payoffs of expanding the contexts in which business historians work together on research projects, as well as with colleagues from cognate fields and with students. In addition to charting the steady growth in collaborative research among business historians since 2000, the essay also identifies areas that especially lend themselves to this mode of historical inquiry, including comparative or transnational analysis that requires detailed knowledge of multiple societies, the development of oral history projects, and the use of data science techniques. It concludes by exploring the advantages of incorporating interdisciplinary research teams into curricular structures, using the example of the Bass Connections program at Duke University.

This article examines the misrepresentation of American beef in the British market between c. 1890 and c. 1913. We examine the complaints voiced by British consumers, producers, and retailers and we discuss the response of the British government and the United States Department of Agriculture. A new dataset is employed to calculate the price premiums that could be earned from the misrepresentation of beef according to geographic origin. While considerable premiums could be earned by “passing-off” American beef as British in the 1890s, these premiums declined during the 1900s. Particular emphasis is placed on the inability of the British government to act unilaterally on meat marking. This article also considers origin as a means of distinguishing between categories of nonbranded goods. Yet “origin” has many dimensions. Not only does it indicate provenance, it sometimes signals quality associated with provenance while also serving as the basis for protectionist responses. This article therefore contributes to the broader debates surrounding origin marking as a commercial and legal phenomenon.

Unlike their national counterparts, international trade associations are a little-studied aspect of the global economic system. Much of the literature on trade associations has focused on rent-seeking behavior, although theories of transaction costs and social capital have been gaining influence. This article uses the early history of the International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Associations (IFMCSMA), still operating today as the International Textile Manufacturers’ Federation, to test different explanations for the formation and persistence of international trade associations. The IFMCSMA case illustrates the challenges of rent-seeking on an international scale, and highlights the importance of social ties in building cooperation. Firms and individuals used the IFMCSMA to pursue reforms across the cotton textile industry and enjoyed some success in collective negotiations with other actors and organizations.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a market in the personal debt of corporate and government employees was thriving in New York City and other major urban centers in the Northeastern andMidwestern United States. A set of shadowy entrepreneurs, colloquially known as “loan sharks,” offered short-term, high-rate advances that they called salary loans. Despite operating in violation of the law, primarily the prohibition against usury, the operations of these intermediaries had by 1912 reached an imposing scale. At least eighty-one such offices operated in Manhattan and Brooklyn alone, with millions of dollars in loans outstanding. Of these eighty-one offices, thirty-four belonged to interstate chains, the largest ofwhich stretched over sixtythree cities in the United States and Canada.

This article utilizes the local banknote circulation volumes of HSBC, the largest foreign bank in China, as a gauge with which to explore political stability and state-building during the Republican era (1912–1935). It will challenge the prevailing view that British banks faced little resistance in China through the 1920s–1930s, and expose new archival evidence on the perception of, and mobilization against, foreign banks.

Lifetime employment is one of the most conspicuous features of contemporary large Japanese corporations. The employment practices of merchant houses in the Edo period (1603–1868) are sometimes proposed as one origin of such lifetime commitment. Little attention has been paid, however, to the connections between long-term employment in the Edo period and its practice in the twentieth century. This article examines how Edo employment practices were adapted to the environment of the early twentieth century within a new context of modern educational institutions and the need for professional managers.

This study examines the Singer Sewing Machine Company’s strategies for selling family sewing machines on a global scale. In marketing the sewing machine, the American-headquartered Singer focused on ornamental embroidery or “fancy” sewing, defining home sewing as art, to distance the company and the appliance from negative perceptions of women’s garment work as industrial manufacturing. Singer created its Embroidery Department in the early 1890s in response to consumers’ sewing preferences. The department reflects how the home became a site where global capitalism was constructed and articulated. Singer’s Embroidery Department had representatives in many countries, coordinating expositions and other advertising. In the case of Singer in Spain and the United States, women who took part in the department’s work were an essential part of the corporate-integrated operation. This article examines the relationship between Singer’s corporate strategies and gender and culture in Spain and the United States.

This article examines the financialization of the U.S. economy in the late twentieth century, with a focus on the role of industrial firms in the transition. This article explores how American industrial leaders’ reactions to the economic shocks of the 1970s influenced the rise of finance in the United States. Specifically, this article analyzes how the restrictive postwar financial regime gave way to a new liberal one, often represented by two vital shifts in the 1970s: the resurgence of global finance and the turn to austerity. It also demonstrates how leading industrialists’ preferences toward particular financial policies gave rise to different coalitions that affected policy orientation. It contributes to the financialization literature by clarifying the distinctive role of industrialists in American financialization. Furthermore, by situating financialization in the broader socioeconomic context, this article highlights the intersections of two important changes in the history of U.S. capitalism: financialization and the disintegration of the New Deal regime.