There is an on-going debate among scholars from various disciplines about economic institutions and their impact on economic development. The case of the Amsterdam Chamber of Insurance is relevant to this discussion and in particular to the part that focuses on the nature and development of contract enforcement mechanisms. Marine insurance was introduced in Amsterdam in the mid-sixteenth century and soon the insurance industry developed into a prospering business. Its development was of great importance to the expansion of long-distance trade as it reduced the financial consequences of risks inherent to maritime trade. However, the new industry with its complex contracts was prone to misunderstandings, fraud and deception, creating the need for an independent, specialised court. The Chamber of Insurance was established as a generalised court, rather than a particularised court as was the case in cities that preceded Amsterdam’s trade dominance. Why did the Amsterdam municipality choose to set up this court and what were the implications? A recently discovered Statute Book of the Chamber gives insight into why the Chamber was established, how it functioned within the setting of Europe’s dominant trade centre and how it has affected the development of similar courts in the Netherlands.

In early December 1923 in Memphis, Tennessee, Minnie Geddings Cox sat in a hastily arranged board meeting across from Heman Perry, clear now that the man she had believed her advocate was most assuredly her adversary. Cox and Perry, a man Forbes magazine would describe in 1924 as the richest Negro in the world, spent nearly a year maneuvering a merger to join her company, Mississippi Life Insurance Company, the third largest black-owned life insurance company in the United States, with his Standard Life of Atlanta, which ranked second.1 They shared a vision to create the largest black-owned life insurance company in the United States—or so Cox thought.

“Wishful Thinking” discusses the origins of retail premium schemes in America. An entirely new marketing strategy that began appearing in the early 1850s, giving away free things with purchases helped fuel the consumer revolution of the 19th century by inducing people to buy things they did not necessarily want or need. The article focuses on the three most prevalent forms of premiums – gift distributions, prize packages, and gift book establishments – and draws on scholarship from various fields, including advertising and marketing history and economic anthropology. In addition to describing various premium schemes and linking them to nascent consumerism, the article posits why they might have been so successful, despite the fact that many were clearly fraudulent.

It is difficult to consider debt as having a history, because it seems like debt might be, as one popular historian of money in 1917 described it, a “semi-slavery . . . [which] existed before the dawn of history, and it exists to-day.” People, in a certain sense, have always lent money to one another: to a wayward brother, across a saloon bar, to a coworker. But even by 1917, as that popular history was written in the midst of world war, the ancient personal relationship of personal debt was changing into a modern impersonal one. My dissertation is about how what we call personal debt, that is debt incurred by individuals and not by businesses, went from being owed to other people to being owed to institutions, and what this has meant at the largest level about American capitalism.

This article addresses two questions: Why do firms centralize, and what determines the success and failure of technology transfers? First, it argues that centralization decreases the costs of technology transfers, especially if knowledge is tacit, by reducing transaction costs. Second, it argues that an important factor for the success of a technology transfer is the capacity of a firm to mitigate agency problems. The English East India Company (EEIC) is mostly studied as a trading body. This article analyzes the company’s attempt to become a producer of raw silk in Bengal. In order to improve the quality of Bengal raw silk and thus increase the silk’s trading potential, it decided to apply Piedmontese reeling technologies that relied on a centralized system of production, which significantly decreased the transmission costs of the technology transfer and was thus the key for its success. However, because the EEIC’s management system involved in silk manufacturing was not innovated, the transfer’s effectiveness was diminished.

This article addresses the issue of the uses of the multidivisional form in the French context at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Comparing two case studies, Danone and Hachette, it sheds light on specific experiences in two different industries, the food and the book industry, respectively, in order to contribute to the debate over the Chandlerian paradigm. These two cases show that the implementation of the M-form in European companies can neither be reduced to the necessary diffusion of a universal structure nor to managerial fashion. At first a matter of redistributing the power between the shareholders and the management, the M-form led to hybrid organizations with characteristics heavily dependent on intensive internal negotiations. These findings emphasize the potential diversity of the implementation of the M-form and of the relations between management and shareholders. Far from being linear, company trajectories then heavily depend on partial compromises.

The footwear industry in southern Europe has faced several periods of strong crisis since the 1970s. This paper analyzes these crises and the resilience strategy developed by the sector in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, the major producing countries. Although many common features are observed in the three countries, both in the chronology and the nature of the crises and in the measures to overcome the difficulties, significant differences in the characteristics of the industry and the behavior of the companies are also appreciated. These differences have determined the degree of resilience of the sector in each country.

The nineteenth-century growth of the London Stock Exchange and the development of the market for stocks and shares are familiar topics of study. This article provides an alternative perspective on them by decentering the London Stock Exchange and focusing instead on the activities of “outside stockbrokers”—those who operated outside the Stock Exchange and its rules. Often regarded as peripheral, these brokers were in fact instrumental in promoting investment and speculation to a mass market. The article examines their innovative methods, and seeks to explain why they were so successful, despite persistent—and sometimes justifiable—accusations of fraud. It suggests how perspectives from the history of consumer society provide fresh insights into the market for financial products. And it underlines the importance of looking outside formal markets by arguing that focusing on “fringe” markets can help scholars to rethink boundaries, relations, and practices in the history of capitalism.

We use the tools of transaction cost politics (TCP) developed from transaction cost economics and economic analysis, to analyze the business relationship building between the Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC), the largest and most successful foreign bank in China, and the Chinese government between 1949 and 1978. We demonstrate the value of the TCP-based approach to evaluating the specialized governance structure of commitment built on mutual dependency. In particular, we identify several transaction attributes that give rise to hazards: transaction uncertainty, the role of the government in the economy, and the strength of the supporting coalition. Our analysis also confirms that commitment built on the mutual dependency between the international company and the local authorities and between the international company's home country authorities and the local authorities did reduce the company's transaction costs by guarding against the local authorities' opportunism.

In 1927 the National Association of Life Underwriters collaborated with Professor Solomon Huebner of the University of Pennsylvania to found the American College of Life Underwriters, an institution devoted to establishing and maintaining professional standards for the nation’s life insurance salesmen. Their work sheds light on the new politics of expertise and associations that emerged in the 1920s. While many historians have portrayed the period’s experts as purveyors of new, technical knowledge and apolitical agents of an inevitable modernity, Huebner in fact brought little real knowledge of insurance to his work. Instead, he introduced the industry’s prevailing ideology of public service into his classroom, and it informed his professionalization project as well. The professor worked as a campaigner for professionalism, attempting to persuade life insurance salesmen, industry executives, and the American public to accept the notion that salesmen could become professionals. Ultimately, Huebner’s career shows how a Progressive expert worked directly with a trade association representing a disorganized industry. But instead of merely seeking to build new capacity for economic planning and stabilization, Huebner and the association boldly positioned their industry as a voluntary and private means of providing Americans with basic social welfare benefits and paved the way for the growth of the modern financial services industry.

Beginning in the 1870s and 1880s, many British companies relied on transnational business networks and global associations. However, the tensions produced by World War I created an environment in which consumers, journalists, and politicians actively promoted economic protectionism and consumer nationalism through various Buy British movements. Entrepreneurs under scrutiny took a variety of approaches to manage this hostile environment and avoid the financial, political, and cultural ramifications of suddenly having their and their family members’ valid citizenship questioned and outright attacked in the public sphere. During the war, neutral, passive, or absent patriotism drew suspicion. Any suspicions about loyalty could spark an avalanche of attacks, with each one being exponentially more difficult to defend as fear built in people’s minds. Citizenship was more than a legal matter; it was a layered set of dynamic activities and enterprises in which corporate actions became tied to expression of loyalty. People were judged by their cultural behavior, political associations, legal citizenship, and business decisions. I argue that some firms reacted by defining themselves, their products, and their services as “British,” erasing their “foreignness” as a defense against attacks on their citizenship and loyalty.

This article evaluates efforts to standardize quantities in the London coal trade c1830, and traces the end of the public measurement system first introduced in the fourteenth century. Increasing traffic in coal, reduction of taxes on the commodity, inefficient public meters, etc., contributed to the demise of public measurements. This outcome was the result of extensive negotiations between merchants, the various levels of state bureaucracy, and the parliament. Switching measurement standards was difficult, if not costly, to coordinate. Abolishing public measurements and switching from volume to weight measurements was part of the efforts to strengthen governance along the commodity chain, secure property rights by making quantities predictable and alter a mechanism that powerful merchants considered had become inappropriate.

Sociologist of science Sheila Jasanoff tells us that “A master narrative is a compelling and frequently repeated story about the way the world works that takes hold of our imaginations and shapes the ways in which we perceive reality, as well as our possibilities for collective action.” The asbestos litigation master narrative, versions of which are available on hundreds of plaintiff-firm websites, has been spectacularly successful in generating billions of dollars in revenue for plaintiffs, attorneys, and expert witnesses since 1973.2 As of December 31, 2009, the US District Court E.D. Pa. MDL 875 (Multi-District asbestos Litigation) docket included 42,076 cases “consisting of 2,337,692 individual claims (all diseases).”

The management of innovative work in high-technology fields has been a “hot” topic in recent years. In fields such as innovation management, product development, organization design, corporate strategy, economic sociology, organizational economics, engineering management, and knowledge management, scholars have examined subjects ranging from the sociology of creativity to the boundaries of firms in networked industries. They have remarked on the implications of contingent work, outsourcing, globalization, and the demise of the one-company career in studies concerned with issues from regional and national competitiveness to the evolution of labor markets and the social contract. Authors of articles and books published by the popular business press have trumpeted “nimble” and “virtual” organizational forms required by unprecedented conditions, and authors of scholarly essays have addressed the management of relentless change, the option-based valuation of interfirm networks, and knowledge in relation to organizational boundaries.

Like so many of the fields that have flourished in history departments in recent years, business history has an uneasy relationship with political history. When business history first emerged in the United States as a separate field in the 1920s, its founders stressed the importance of lavishing on business records the same reverence that political historians accorded the personal papers of lawmakers. Only in this way, business historians assumed, would it be possible to convince other historians of the centrality of business leaders—and, more broadly, of economic institutions—to the making of the nation.