The formation of the Shanghai Women’s Commercial and Savings Bank (1924–1955) uncovers the legacy of an institution founded by a group of elite women. Although the women’s bank had limited capital and a small business scope, it reflected the contributions of enterprising women to the financial field when Chinese women’s roles were evolving and feminist rhetoric appealed to women’s economic independence. This article brings the achievements of such Chinese women to the forefront, as key figures in the development and direction of the Shanghai Women’s Bank. By exploring the anxieties and endeavors of the Shanghai Women’s Bank and shifting the focus to the female figures involved in shaping the bank, this article argues that they, alongside their elite social network, contributed to the bank’s longevity and portrayal in the media landscape. Although emphasizing gender in its initial creation, the bank ultimately pursued similar business strategies to other banks with both men and women working behind-the-scenes to uphold the institution. Moreover, this article contributes to a more inclusive history of women and finance in order to illuminate the endeavors of Chinese women in Shanghai banking amongst its global counterparts.

My dissertation traces the invention and development of a new form of banking, body banking. Today, the body bank as an institution that collects, stores, processes, and distributes a human body product is a taken-for-granted aspect of medicine in the United States. We donate to blood banks, we cherish sperm bank babies, and we contemplate many sorts of banks, including cord blood banks, gene banks, and egg banks. Such institutions have existed for the past century in the metaphorical shadow of financial banks, and like those better-studied banks have stirred considerable controversy. The driving question behind my dissertation is simply, why banks? How did we come to use “bank” to apply to bodies as well as to dollars? More intriguingly, what does this analogy show us and what is it hiding?

The diversity of paths to industrialization is illustrated by the example of the cabinet- and furniture-manufacturing industry in Ontario, Canada. Complex and unpredictable demand combined with smaller markets and lower incomes than those in the United States and the relative abundance of wood to limit mechanization and the size of enterprise in the Canadian industry. Small and unpowered workshops remained competitive throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, creating a distinctive industrial experience that reflects the unique interaction of local demand and supply.

This article uses a case study to illustrate the dynamics of firm structure and property rights in Brazil during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The St. John d´el Rey Mining Company was a British mining company in Brazil. Its experiences demonstrate that, property rights were not under-specified; they were over-specified and varying provisions for rights were mutually inconsistent. Precise laws protected capital investment to such an extent that dissolving partnerships became problematic. At the same time, inheritance laws mandated partible division of personal estates among heirs. The mining company's history demonstrates the opportunities for posthumously emerged heirs, essentially, to claim partnership rights.

This article takes criticisms of employment discrimination in the aftermath of the creation of workmen’s compensation legislation as a point of entry for arguing that compensation laws created new incentives for employment discrimination. Compensation laws turned the costs of employees’ workplace accidents into a risk that many employers sought to manage by screening job applicants in a manner analogous to how insurance companies screened policy applicants. While numerous critics blamed insurers for discrimination, I argue that the problem was lack of insurance. The less that companies pooled their compensation risks via insurance, the greater the incentives for employers to stop employing people they would have previously been willing to hire.

On May 29, 1945, Charles F. Calhoun, a vice president of the Permanente Metals Corporation (PMC), composed a telegram to his fellow company officers that celebrated a long-awaited triumph. “This is to confirm delivery to Tokyo, May 26th, during high wind, of large Permanente shipment by way Marion, Ohio, and B-29 express,” Calhoun began. “It is reported there was no loss of goods in transit but that considerable damage resulted from cargo being jettisoned within Tokyo city limits.” He could not resist adding, tongue firmly in cheek, “All ... claims of property damage will be forwarded to Permanente claims adjustment department.”

Labor Makes the News examines newspaper coverage of organized labor during the burst of union activity that began in the early 1930s. For activists and sympathizers, it was an article of faith that newspapers were deliberately unfair. However, publishers and their employees responded to the labor movement with great diversity, in part because publishers recognized that many readers were union members. For reporters, covering labor tested the boundary between personal and political interests and the professional ideal of neutrality on news pages. While publicly condemning the press, labor officials used newspapers to establish their legitimacy and wage war against enemies. Examining the treatment of organized labor provides a window for viewing the interplay among the sociopolitical, economic, and occupational goals of the publisher, the editorial worker, and the labor leader.

Historians have often looked to industrial capitalism to further our understanding of “time consciousness.” This article explores time consciousness through the experience of a railroad in pre-Civil War South Carolina. Examining the South Carolina Railroad allows us to examine how time consciousness operated in a region not associated with industrial capitalism, and also see how multiple times could function simultaneously. While clocks were important to railroad operations, companies also had to address an array of non-clock times. Moreover, companies were never fully in control of their own time, but were in constant conflict and negotiation with various groups in the community. While industrialization and factory labor remain important ways to understand time consciousness, looking beyond the factory walls can help historians make better use of the analytical power of time.

In this article, I describe the partial forward integration of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Boston breweries. I argue that both brewers and saloonkeepers used the fluid market in capital lending as a lever of power. An analysis of the minutes of three breweries and their loan records, covering more than ten years, reveals that saloonkeepers were often delinquent in repaying their annual loans and brewery owners only infrequently threatened to call the loans. Using the structure-conduct-performance paradigm, I suggest that the particular conditions in Boston (a limited number of saloon licenses and a geographical position that precluded long-distance shipping of beer) gave the saloonkeepers much greater leverage in the so-called “tied system.” Brewers used vertical restraints but, because of obligations to British owners, did not fully forward integrate by buying saloon property, as brewers did in the United Kingdom.

Detachable collars, essential to men’s appearance from the 1840s to the 1920s, have left a lasting legacy: the term ‘white collar’ and the “Arrow Man,” the centerpiece of Arrow collar advertisements from 1907 until 1931. The Arrow Man was the visual representation of the “New Man,” and Arrow collars were preserved in American culture through the lyrics of a 1934 Cole Porter song, “You’re the Top.” Both the Arrow collar and the Arrow Man derived from business decisions that reflected emerging and changing American consumer tastes and markets, an expanding middle class, and shifts in culture, especially in new ideal images of manliness that were less class-based, contributing to Americans’ impression that social distinctions were more blurred than in the past. The Arrow Man embodied in a single compelling image the resolution of social contradictions that persisted beneath the increased similarity of men of different backgrounds.

The 1960 establishment of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) represented a watershed to Norwegian consumer goods industry. Since the end of World War II domestic manufacturers had been thriving on a small but lucrative home market characterized by an unparalleled demand, effectively protected from foreign competition by strict import regulations and tariffs barriers. The onset of international free trade would dramatically change this market situation, allowing cheap foreign products access to the Norwegian market while at the same time offering export opportunities to an industry traditionally geared to the domestic market. Operating in an industry where appearance is anything but superficial, the crockery manufacturer Figgjo Fajanse realized that product design would be a crucial tool in the reorganization of its operations when adapting to this ‘brave, new world’ of international free trade. Devising a flexible basis for a rational product differentiation, Figgjo made severe cuts in an oversized product portfolio and developed a small range of new models that could accommodate a wide range of decorative patterns of highly different styles. This strategy required elaborate and creative negotiations on the part of the company's designers, creating a ‘third way’—a moderate modern design carved out in the space demarcated by the industrially rational, the commercially viable, and the aesthetically ethical.