The history of slavery cannot be separated from the history of business in the United States, especially in the context of the relationship between public power and individual property rights. This essay suggests that the American devotion to “sacred” property rights stemsmore from the vulnerability of slaveholding elites than to a political heritage of protection for the “common man.”

Concentration in many industries has increased markedly in recent decades in the United States, although in Europe it has been stable or has even decreased. Where concentration has increased, the question arises as to how to measure the extent of competition (or the degree to which it is contestable) in a market in which there are relatively few competing firms, over the long term. This article explores competition in clearing banking in the UK from 1946 to 1971. This period is of interest in the context of industry concentration because clearing banking was relatively concentrated and, it has long been argued, uncompetitive. The article evaluates competition from four perspectives. First, it considers the competitiveness of London clearing banking from a quantitative perspective. Next, it evaluates competition through the lens of competition policy, particularly the extent to which monopoly, mergers, and restrictive trade practices existed in clearing banking. Third, the conclusions of the National Board for Prices and Incomes’ report into bank charges in 1967 are considered. Finally, it explores the extent to which the clearing banks were open to and embraced change, and were innovative, assuming that these qualities are more likely to be present when there is competition among banks. It questions key aspects of the dominant interpretation of clearing banking as uncompetitive and slow to innovate.

This comment, in response to Phil Scranton’s article, suggests that communist business practices differ from those adopted in the West along three dimensions: (1) the locus and degree of centralization of production decisions, (2) the mechanism for coordinating the producers’ actions, and (3) the use of state terror in shaping the workers’ and the managers’ incentives. My analysis focuses on the third dimension—state terror, which I define as workers and managers experiencing extreme penalties for failing to meet the state’s goals. I argue that business history and allied disciplines of management and economics would benefit from studying state terror as a management practice and outline several avenues for pursuing such research.

This article examines shoplifting from department stores and variety chain stores in interwar America and Britain. Patterns of shoplifting show strong similarities—with stores facing a predominantly female, and disproportionately affluent, army of amateur shoplifters, together with a much smaller corps of professional thieves. The incidence and characteristics of shoplifting are explored, together with the stores’ legal and other strategies to deter shoplifters. The article also examines why apparently prosperous women had the highest propensity to shoplift. Britain and the United States had strong commonalities in terms of open display retail formats, the methods used to deter shoplifters, and typical legal penalties. However, America had one critical difference—the much higher incidence of a type of store criminal who specialized in deliberately getting apprehended in order to sue the store for false arrest and, often, false imprisonment, slander, and a range of related charges. This reflected the higher damages typically awarded by U.S. courts compared with their British counterparts, inflated by local antagonism to retail corporations, together with a system—at least in some U.S. cities—whereby corrupt lawyers and judges connived in shoplifting acquittals that paved the way for lawsuits.

This article explores early twentieth-century debates about wine regulation in order to understand how emerging food standards could be mobilized in order to produce and protect value around particular geographical locales. Ohio and Missouri winemakers sought to protect their practices of “amelioration,” or the addition of sugar and water to acidic or foxy wines, by establishing the regulatory designation of “Ohio and Missouri Wine” as separate from “Wine.” In doing so, they turned food standards into a form of intellectual property mobilized to protect their practices and enhance the market value of Ohio and Missouri wines. Conversely, they argued that “universal” wine standards were unduly preferential to California wines. This compelling yet forgotten historical episode inverts the rationale behind geographical indications (a form of intellectual property designed to protect the intrinsic benefits of place) producing a unique argument for geographical protections based not on value but on lack.

Business confidence is a measure of optimism or pessimism that managers feel about the commercial prospects for their organizations. This paper uses later medieval high-value English credit data as a proxy gauge of merchants’ business confidence or uncertainty. It discusses whether mercantile restriction of credit during the fifteenth-century recession reflects uncertainty, whereby merchants became increasingly risk-averse and so reduced the amount of credit they extended to their customers. It discusses the chronological trends in English lending between 1353 and 1532. This paper examines medieval debt restructuring and argues that this might similarly reflect merchants’ commercial confidence or uncertainty. In contrasting two sample years (1375 and 1433), the paper seeks to identify the motivations and influences that lay behind medieval merchants’ business decisions more fully. It argues that merchants’ investment behavior was guided more by local commercial circumstances than it was by profound economic shocks, such as plague and bullion famine.

This article revisits the story of one the greatest financial frauds in history: Poyais. In the 1820s, Gregor MacGregor issued bonds for this alleged fictitious Central American state on the London capital market. Putting together scattered evidence reveals a complex, multifaceted experiment undertaken by a private adventurer hoping to politically and economically position himself in a changing world. Poyais was a failed project to establish a settlement on a territory granted by an Indigenous leader and financed through British capital markets. Studying a financial failure provides nuanced insights into the political and legal frameworks defining origination processes of early nineteenth-century foreign loans. Following MacGregor’s actions entails drawing a story with contours that extend well beyond the City of London, revealing a rich set of transatlantic actors and spaces not known to be traditionally linked to the London-based capital market. The story of Poyais constitutes a window into the early financial dynamics of private colonialism and how these contributed to British imperial expansion. The Poyais loan appears as constituting a financial endeavor born from the encounter of different “worlds,” with MacGregor mediating these together but ultimately failing to legally and politically guarantee their lasting encounter.

This paper reconstructs the history of the reform of Britain’s company laws during the 1850s and makes three major arguments. First, the Law Amendment Society was the driving force for reform and organized the campaign for change. Second, the advancement of working-class interests and ideas of fairness were central to the conceptualization of these reforms and the course of their advocacy. Company law reform was broadly conceived to include the revision of the law of partnership, corporations, and cooperatives to create a level playing field in which smaller entrepreneurs could compete against established capitalists. Finally, central to this campaign was the institutional logic of “fair competition.” Socialists and liberals both used this logic, demonstrating how moral ideas can shape organizational change.

Multinationals experienced a great growth after the European postwar boom. Factors in the 1970s included increasing competition from the United States, the emerging European market, as well as ongoing economic crises and changes in the international economy. The articles analyzes three case studies of Western European chemical companies—Hoechst, Akzo, and Rhône-Poulenc—to show the consequences of structural changes on management and the workforce. This article argues that (1) domestic export-oriented supplement investments lost importance, and the domestic workforce had a harder time meeting qualification requirements; (2) organizational changes incorporated divisional competitive elements into a company’s organization of work; and (3) managers had to learn to respect national path dependencies and specific skills of the local workforce. Furthermore, it illustrates the developments of the workforce in Europe and abroad and stresses the importance of nationality within the management of multinationals.

I argue that life insurance and imperial meaning making are deeply implicated in each other. As life insurance expanded internationally in the nineteenth century, and as insurers became advocates of White settlement, they grappled with what actuarial science meant in the context of their orientalist conceptions of colonial populations. In particular, actuaries were concerned with tropical markets and the racialized/exceptionalized differences they perceived in those markets. To address these tensions, insurers attempted two strategies: (1) incorporating tropical rates as additional premiums designed to cover the “extra mortality” of tropical markets; and (2) advocating for social practices of “sanitary progress” related to public health and sanitation. These practices, framed in orientalist terms, were not adopted in any smooth manner but in fumbling and meandering ways as insurers tried to understand what kinds of lives tropical settlers might be and how those lives might be priced. They eventually liberalized life insurance rates for White settlers in tropical settings, but insurers then confronted questions on how newly socialized “native” lives might be rendered calculable. This story of tropical exposure in globalizing actuarial discourse reinforces the ways in which race and racialized/exceptionalized differences were at the core of life insurance and the calculative devices it assembled between 1852 and 1947.

The Czech Republic often has been cited as an example of successful economic transformation. The available literature has primarily focused on changes in the macroeconomic environment, although the actions of economic agents at the microeconomic level have emerged as the crucial factor explaining this success. Based on 101 oral history interviews, this article offers the firsthand experiences, frustrations, challenges, and human dimensions of doing business at that time and shows that the road from socialism to the market economy was a bumpy one. Our approach fills major information voids, and thus offers a unique opportunity for business historians to avoid slipping into the incomplete view of the world presented by written literature and archives.

This article explores the formation and early history of the American Institute of the City of New-York, which in the 1830s became the leading lobby association of “friends of industry” in the United States. More specifically, the article considers how the institute’s officers sought to overcome obstacles of collective mobilization that had plagued earlier pro-industry associations. Pre–Civil War interest groups is an understudied area, and historians typically depict the years following in the Compromise of 1833 as a period essentially devoid of pro-industry agitation. However, it was in precisely in these years that friends of industry for the first time managed to obtain the resources necessary for sustained mobilization. Key to the American Institute’s success, this article argues, was the development of annual manufacturing fairs, events that provided steady revenue, strengthened internal cohesion, attracted new members, facilitated coordination with like-minded groups, and provided opportunities to engage in popular politics in an ordered manner.

Between 1976 and 1994 the UK Government’s Welsh Development Agency made 2,304 loan and equity investments totaling £117.8 million. The agency aimed to address difficulties faced by firms in obtaining finance, and such intervention was justified by the market failure and spillover hypotheses. This article assesses the agency’s investment activities against both justifications. It finds that while some investments succeeded, the portfolio’s financial performance was poor, and the agency did not address widespread market failure. Evidence of spillover returns existed, but cannot be quantified accurately across the portfolio. The article argues that the agency’s two venture capital objectives, to assemble a profitable portfolio and to grow employment levels through boosting commercial activity, were incompatible within a poorly performing regional economy. Although spillovers can justify public venture capital in such economies, expectations as to financial performance should be realistic in the absence of an ecosystem that facilitates demand for capital.

Pharmaceutical Networks describes how American drug firms,biomedical researchers, physicians, and Congressional reformers shaped the research, regulatory, and policy environments for prescription drugs in the three decades after World War II. In these decades, pharmaceutical reformers in Congress sought to secure passage of legislation that would increase the government's control over drug development, distribution, and practice. They proposed these reforms as a way of curbing the high cost of prescription drugs and putting a break on the escalating health care costs. To defend itself against this reform movement, the American drug industry built alliances with research universities, medical schools, and professional medical societies by offering to the medical and academic communities solutions to their shared problems. These problems included a shortage of biomedical workers and the increasing authority of the government over medical practice.

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.