In this paper, we offer an alternative to class-based studies of saving behavior by using individual-level ledger records from accounts opened in 1830 in the Limehouse Savings Bank, London. Our analysis suggests that such banks served a valid financial purpose for a much wider constituency of savers than the targeted “industrious poor.” True gaming of the system by the middle classes appears to be relatively limited, and instead depositors were using accounts for a variety of means and motivations. We suggest that the contemporary consternation around class was misplaced and that we can better understand and predict depositor behaviors through analysis of transaction data.

When the ticker tape was first invented in the 1860s, it promised a revolution in financial markets. Pricing information was now no longer solely the domain of the trading floor but was relayed continuously and simultaneously to ticker tapes long distances away from the stock exchange. Both nineteenth-century financiers, and the modern scholars who study them, have been enamored with the ticker tape and how it changed the way financial markets were perceived and experienced. However, a focus on how nineteenth-century financiers read and responded to the ticker tape has missed the real reordering of power that the ticker helped usher in. This article argues that between the 1860s and 1890s the London Stock Exchange and the Exchange Telegraph Company powerfully centralized their control over the distribution and transmission of financial information through the mundane infrastructures that underpinned the ticker tape system. Seeming technicalities, like the placement of batteries, the construction of electrical circuits, and the laying of wires and cables, were leveraged by these institutions to create a ticker tape system that distributed financial information unequally to financiers and investors throughout Britain. By the end of the nineteenth century, social and political questions about who should have access to financial information and markets, and on what terms, became helplessly intertwined with the mundane technicalities of the material infrastructures of modern finance.

This article challenges current interpretations of the rise of the Eurodollar market. It argues that rather than being the exclusive innovation of British banks, the Eurodollar market had also Italian origins. Foreign-currency lending in Italy in the 1950s was characterized by competitive behavior. I explain the accumulation of Eurodollar deposits by Italian banks as resulting from the fact that nonresident foreign-currency deposits were not subject to reserve requirements. Furthermore, I discuss the attitudes of the Bank of Italy regarding the financing of foreign-currency credits with nonresident dollar deposits (Eurodollars) and compare the Eurocurrency liabilities of Italian banks vis-à-vis those of the City of London. The comparison facilitates an approximate estimation of the size of the Eurocurrency market in the late 1950s and, even more importantly, a recalibration of the view that the City of London was the dominant Eurodollar player from the outset.

Over the past two decades, the Japanese apparel industry has lost its competitiveness after experiencing a period of fast growth from the postwar years to the early 1990s. In international literature in social sciences, most scholars offer ethnic-based explanations of fashion in Japan, stressing some specificities such as street fashion or star designers in Paris. This article, however, argues that such views are biased and cannot explain the current lack of competitiveness of the Japanese apparel industry. Using the concept of the “fashion system” and following a business history-oriented approach, we offer a new interpretation of the emergence of Western clothing and fashion in Japan during the second part of the twentieth century. This interpretation demonstrates that the characteristics of the Japanese fashion system lie in a focus on the issues of production and technology, both of which led both to an extreme segmentation of the domestic market and to weaker brands.

This paper looks at the position of CEOs in Dutch listed companies in the context of institutional change. Following up on discussions on Varieties of Capitalism and the contrasts between coordinated and liberal market economies, we explore the position of the CEO in the Netherlands in the second half of the twentieth century. On the basis of our database of Dutch CEOs, as well as an analysis of articles and published interviews, we show that the move toward a more liberal market economy had a clear impact on the position of CEOs and on the way their role was perceived. This paper highlights the importance of studying leaders in their historical context, with implications for the selection of future CEOs as they face increasing pressure on issues such as inequality and climate change.

In emerging economies, economic development and pro-social policies are closely entwined. Multinational corporations have presented a positive image of their economic and social activities to investors and society to justify exploiting countries’ natural resources. This study examines the Arabian American Oil Company’s (Aramco) pro-social/corporate social responsibility programs in employment, housing, and healthcare from 1932 to 1974. These programs did not stem from a philanthropic rationale but were necessary to enable Aramco to create the infrastructure to find, extract, and control the oil assets. Hierarchical control was institutionalized through racism and discrimination in employment, housing, and health regulations. However, Aramco adopted impression management strategies to present a positive image of itself as a socially responsible company contributing to the economic and social development of Saudi Arabia. We analyze management statements in company reports and internal documents to identify and categorize the application of these impression management techniques up to when the Saudi government took a controlling stake in Aramco.

Since the mid-1970s, the U.S. commodity futures exchanges have increasingly been the focus of tight government regulation, which resulted in strong control by a specific agency: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. In Europe, the regulation of futures diverged from the U.S. model. No regulation at the communitarian level was implemented; at the national level, the United Kingdom emerged as a model of self-regulation of commodity markets. This article explores the historical causes behind this lack of regulation in Europe, placing it in the context of global commodity trading and arguing that the European regulation of futures trading was reshaped by a dialogue established between the European Commission and big players of commodity futures trading in the City of London. Since the mid-1960s, the City of London has become a pivotal global market venue for commodity futures, which has increasingly attracted players from abroad, thanks to its financial integrity and self-regulatory model. Both established London merchants and emerging players in the global trade of financial products cooperated to stave off any attempt at regulating the London futures exchanges. The inference here is that those attempts were instrumental in setting the conditions leading to the regulatory fragmentation that still characterizes futures trading in the global market.

The question this article seeks to address relates to the strategies deployed by the chemical firms Solvay & Co. and Gevaert N.V.—two multinationals operating in a highly innovative sector and depending on Belgium's national system of innovation—by taking advantage from the research capabilities located in the surrounding academic landscape. The two companies adopted different methods to capture the knowledge produced in university laboratories, which corresponded best to the kind of research they wished to explore. It will be argued that, instead of conforming to any previous blueprint for linear innovation, industrialists and academics have sought to overcome their conflicting interests and cultural divergence by bringing out mutual opportunities that eventually led to unexpected forms of utilitarian cooperation. In the long run, informal linkages and social networks helped shaping the patterns of increasingly coordinated and elaborated procedures of innovation.

Nondiscrimination was the bedrock of U.S. transport regulation for nearly a century. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the federal government's first major regulatory initiative, barred “unreasonable discrimination” in rates and service to keep railroads from aiding one businesses or community over another. As regulation developed, similar obligations were imposed on ship lines, truck lines, and air carriers. Most freight transportation companies were forced to operate as “common carriers,” publishing a rate applicable to each commodity and applying that rate to every shipment. Equal treatment of all customers, based strictly on posted prices and terms of service, was widely considered essential to keeping the transportation market “fair.”

Longstanding debates among academic historians about the role of the narrative and the need (or not) for relevance are not likely to end any time soon. Business historians have been relatively unreflective about such matters, at least compared with, say, labor or women’s historians, who regularly sprinkle their journals with historiographic reassessments. Perhaps this is because there was little on the theoretical end of the scale in business history to sustain earnest debate prior to the publication of Alfred Chandler’s first masterwork, Strategy and Structure, scarcely more than a generation ago. Still, it was Allan Nevins—the journalist cum Columbia University history professor whose prodigious writings included several elegant business biographies—who memorably satirized the history academy with “Dr. Dry-as-Dust,” a crusty purveyor of densely ponderous prose for like-minded scholarly elites.

This article investigates the development of the Spanish–Italian mercury cartel from the end of World War II to the mid-1950s. Previous literature has singled out the cartel as one of the most robust international cartels of the twentieth century, but as this article shows, the cartel broke down toward the end of the 1940s, and although briefly reestablished in 1954, it quickly dissolved again. Building on access to original source material from archives in Spain, Italy, the United States, and United Kingdom, we investigate the underlying reasons why the cartel broke down, and how and why it was eventually reestablished. Because both the main Italian and the Spanish mercury producers were state-owned, this article pays special attention to the influence of the political relations between Spain and Italy on the development of the cartel. The study of the mercury cartel is used as a prism to investigate the point where industry strategies meet government strategies. This article thus contributes to two major strands of literature, both to the business history literature on international cartels in the post-1945 world and to the diplomatic history literature on the intricate relationship between Spain and Italy in the early phase of the Cold War.

This article explores how “bank-wreckers, defaulters, and embezzlers” were popularly perceived during Gilded Age and Progressive Era America, and how they contributed to a broader concern over the safety of deposits and helped drive efforts to achieve greater financial security. Their actions, often described as “wrecking,” referred to instances in which a banking institution was damaged or destroyed due to the embezzlement or general misappropriation of depositor funds by bank officials or employees. Wrecking occurred inside and outside of the era’s major banking panics, and attracted popular and critical attention over this period, especially between the 1880s and the early 1910s. It is argued that this phenomenon resonated within the popular imagination, which was reflected, reinforced, and even instilled through the media, and that this helped sustain doubts on the reliability of the nation’s banks and bankers. This article shows how notions of class, character, and gender influenced how people thought about the problem: wrecking demonstrated that respectability could be illusory and that men of the era could be tempted to “get rich quick” through dubious means. Some of the major attempts to resolve the problem are also discussed to highlight how efforts to prevent wrecking relate to the period’s general push to bolster economic stability. Ultimately, the article shows how seemingly disparate events can aggregate into a larger problem, which can in turn motivate solutions and reforms.

This comment attempts, first and foremost, to place Phil Scranton’s article within the overall trajectory of his career as a writer and historian. A common theme of that career has been complicating—or, as this comment puts it, “mucking up”—existing historical narratives. Finally, this comment suggests that Scranton’s role as complicator sometimes gives too little guidance for how his thoughts connect to existing literature, and it puts forward some possible avenues for future exploration that spring from Scranton’s examination of communist enterprise.

This article on cotton sales in India considers the market information that was gathered mid-nineteenth century by commission agents in Bombay and by personal observations of Glasgow Turkey red entrepreneur John Matheson. The article includes an account of the rise and demise of Turkey red cotton printing in Scotland; and explores the variety of piece sizes, patterns, colors, and packaging that was necessary for sales in India. It also reveals seasonal changes in demand and an appetite for novelty patterns. What did Matheson, his contemporaries, and his agents understand about their Indian markets and consider their limited ability to shape consumer taste? The article concludes that despite the existence of much relevant information conveyed from India, there was a blindness to the realities of India’s complex textile industry and dress cultures, which had implications for product development in Britain.

Once, long ago, I was teaching business and economic history at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Alas,my academic career was stalled in the early 1960s. A distinguished Yale professor had kept the revised manuscript of my dissertation sitting on his desk for a year without reading it or submitting a report to the press. Meanwhile, I had just learned that editors do not want to publish fifty-page academic articles. I was having a wonderful time teaching the talented students at Rice, but it was not at all clear that I was not soon going to be looking for a different job and maybe a different profession.