Who managed large corporations during the first half century of their emergence? How did modernizing firms navigate periods of rapid technological change such as those that swept the U.S. economy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries? What role did engineers play in the management of large corporations? This paper draws on an original database of tens of thousands of mining and metallurgical engineers who graduated from universities during this period, examining patterns in their employment records, job descriptions, and career trajectories, matching our data on individual engineers with a linked database of mining and metallurgical corporations. We trace two distinct phases in engineers’ managerial role that corresponded to periods of rapid technological change and technological quiescence in the industry. We argue that explaining the rise of the modern corporation and the historical dynamics of corporate management requires a better understanding of technical expertise in management.

After more than a century of political and economic integration, Southern Ireland exited the United Kingdom in 1922. By identifying the leading business firms of the era and the political and religious allegiances of their owners, this paper explores the perspective of the Southern Irish business establishment on the issues involved. While the mass of the population was Catholic and by 1918 favored secession, the business elite is shown to have been predominantly Protestant and strongly supportive of continued integration. Business elite perceptions of the consequences of exiting the United Kingdom are explored, and post-independence economic and business developments assessed in light of the concerns expressed at the time. The paper also charts the post-independence fate of the leading former unionist firms and the erosion and eventual disappearance of the sectarian divisions then prevalent in Irish business life.

This paper examines the Africanization of human resources in East Africa during the latter part of the twentieth century. Focusing on the case of the East African Airways Corporation (EAAC) and later Kenya Airways, we analyze the long-term development of staffing policy in these companies and the impact of the changing political and managerial environment (colonial rule, joint ownership by three independent states, Kenyan state-owned enterprise, private enterprise with foreign ownership). This research shows that post-independence Africanization was hampered by a lack of specific local expertise. The EAAC solved this difficulty by cooperating with foreign organizations that provided adequate training for African pilots, engineers, and managers. However, indigenization was also used in a less meritocratic way and promoted clientelism.

This article uses trade directories and notifications in the London Gazette to reconstruct the Potteries industrial district at the firm level for 1781 to 1851, a dynamic period of growth for a knowledge-intensive industry. It cuts across the organizational spectrum of the district in terms of the scale and scope of firms traditionally examined by including both the larger lead-firms and the smaller firms for which limited or no business records survive. It addresses difficulties associated with analysis of early clusters before the late nineteenth century. Directories offer a consistent series of records that, when cross-referenced with the Gazette and local newspapers, allow for detailed examination of firm behavior and the structure of the district during a formative growth period. Analysis highlights patterns of cooperative competition in an industry in which tacit knowledge played a crucial role as a source of competitive advantage, raises questions for future research, and provides an empirical base on which to consider further investigation of the trees that made up the forest.

Capitalist ideas of productivity became central to medicine under slavery. They shaped how physicians treated enslaved patients, crafted a scientific basis for medicine, and conceived of themselves as professionals. Between the late-eighteenth-century and the mid-nineteenth-century, white male physicians in Louisiana and Cuba distinguished themselves from other healers: first, by aligning with Spanish colonialism, and then, by making themselves essential to a new form of plantation management that used clock-time discipline, hierarchical divisions of labor, and complex accounting systems. These technologies helped planters track the hours and days each enslaved person spent working, eating, sleeping, birthing, suffering from sickness and injuries, and recovering. This in turn enabled precise interpretations of enslaved health in terms of productivity, which was primarily measured in work time and the number of commodities produced. Physicians, who were seeking a rigorous intellectual foundation for medical knowledge production, latched onto planter methods of calculating and controlling enslaved health. One of those methods was what planters and physicians called “sick time,” which was an allotment of time away from work intended to manage illness enough for enslaved people to return to work. However, as physicians used plantation management to cast an air of scientific accuracy over their knowledge, enslaved people reconfigured their own medical practices to make themselves less visible and countable. Fugitive practices involving trees, animals, and natural springs helped enslaved people to heal by taking their own forms of sick time.

This article analyzes the ways that shopping center tenants deployed narratives to encourage government intervention in the Australian retail property sector during the 1980s. Tenants claimed that landlords were abusing their market power through a range of egregious and exploitative practices. Landlords responded with stories of their own, claiming that amateurish retailers were using isolated cases to make broad generalizations about the industry as a whole. Politicians retold retailers’ stories in Parliament, championed small business enterprise as a driver of economic growth, and produced retail leasing legislation aimed at protecting shopping center tenants. In the process, established conceptions of shopping centers were inverted. In the 1960s and 1970s they were seen as bastions of capitalist enterprise constructed by nation-building visionaries. Through stories, retailers captured the cultural legitimacy of entrepreneurship from their landlords, who were characterized as feudal barons blocking the free operation of markets they controlled. Exploring these developments offers new insights into the relational dynamics of preplanned retail environments, expands our understanding of postwar Australian retail history, and contributes to a growing historiography on the role of narrative in business history.

America’s entrepreneurial culture is important because it promotes the search for new opportunities for innovation. Here, the author traces that culture through two industrial revolutions and focuses on the growing tension between entrepreneurship and bureaucracy inside and outside of the nation’s twentieth-century firms. Business histories are explored using categories adapted from behavioral economics. Particular attention is devoted to some of the important exceptions that throw light upon the stereotypes of the static government agency and the slow-moving industrial firm. Still, the author concludes, following World War II the economy had to be pulled out of its bureaucratic doldrums by new science- and social science-based industries that invigorated the nation’s entrepreneurial culture and promoted a wave of significant biological and digital innovations. The article concludes with a glance at the future of the bureaucratic and entrepreneurial cultures.

This article explores the efforts of Dallas businessmen, especially the leadership of Texas Instruments (TI), to build a science and research sector to facilitate new types of capital accumulation for Dallas and North Texas in the 1960s. The creation of the Graduate Center of the Southwest (GRCSW), and its subsequent transformation into the public University of Texas at Dallas in 1969, offers new perspectives on science and research, urban growth strategies, and the relationship between business and government in the postwar Sunbelt. TI leaders envisioned the center as a way to become more competitive in the microelectronics industry and also to direct urban growth and, ultimately, create a city and region that better reflected the private, growth-oriented interests of the Dallas business community. However, when the center began to falter economically in the mid-1960s, TI leaders sought out the state to take it over and transform it into a science and technology graduate school branch of the University of Texas system (UT). The exchange, although mutually beneficial, demonstrates how powerful businesses coopted the resources of the state to further their own ends.

Most business histories of the nineteenth-century southern upcountry focus on the shift from a protocapitalist, yeoman-oriented antebellum period to the rapid commercialization and industrialization of the New South era. These studies generally argue for a sharp break in the economic leadership of the region either through the rise of a new business elite, or the reorientation of an agrarian regime. Through a study of Spartanburg, South Carolina, my work challenges this notion of a sharp break and instead finds a vibrant, town-based entrepreneurial elite in both the antebellum and postbellum periods. The revolution that occurred was in the nature of South Carolina's political economy. Spartanburg's entrepreneurs, who struggled to achieve their goals in the antebellum era, found new opportunities as a result of post-war political realignments and the racial politics of Reconstruction. This business history at the community level adds an important chapter to our understanding of the political economy of the Old and New Souths.

This article reflects on the contribution that oral history can make to business historians by examining the Australian advertising professionals’ experiences of working in Southeast Asia from the 1960s to the 1980s. Interviews with these advertising professionals examined the processes by which they entered the region as well as their experiences of working there. In addition to documenting information and insights that are altogether absent from official records, the interviews offer an opportunity to reflect on broader social, cultural, and economic contexts and the degree to which they impacted on interviewees’ actions. By illustrating the transmission of business cultures through advertising agency networks as well as their impact on global business, this article also demonstrates oral history’s capacity to connect personal experience with business history.

“Selling Paris” explores the cultural, economic, and spatial parameters of private construction in the French capital at the turn of the twentieth century. In contrast to the state-centered accounts that currently characterize our understanding of Paris as a capital of modernity, this project looks to private property owners, real estate brokers, and speculative developers, as well as the moral economy in which their projects took place, in order to understand the elaboration of the built landscape of the modern metropolis. I argue that new classes of market intermediaries—namely estate agents, market-oriented architects, and small-scale joint-stock firms—emerged in this period to build and market residential spaces, establishing apartments and buildings as merchandise and tenants as clients. Focusing on the activities of these commercial actors reveals the existence of a French culture of commerce centered on speculation and risk-taking, a business culture that profoundly affected the production of residential space during of one of the city's greatest periods of expansion. Thus, in contradistinction to scholarly accounts of both French entrepreneurialism and Parisian urban development, this project reconstructs the activities of a dynamic capitalist class whose uncoordinated projects were the main authors of the capital city's urban fabric. Tracing the manner in which housing and property operated as a commercial object during a crucial period of urbanization, moving between and among the economic activities of investment, speculation, production, and consumption, this project seeks to present a research agenda for both the cultural history of markets and the economic history of cities.

This study examines the careers of African American beauty culturists as they worked in the United States, Europe, and Africa between 1945 and 1965. Facing push back at home, African American beauty entrepreneurs frequently sought out international venues that were hospitable and receptive to black Americans in the years following World War II. By strategically using European sites that white Americans regarded as the birthplace of Western fashion and beauty, African American entrepreneurs in the fields of modeling, fashion design, and hair care were able to win accolades and advance their careers. In gaining support abroad, particularly in Europe, these beauty culturists capitalized on their international success to establish, legitimize, and promote their business ventures in the United States. After importing a positive reputation for themselves from Europe to the United States, African American beauty entrepreneurs then exported an image of themselves as the world's premier authorities on black beauty to people of color around the globe as they sold their products and marketed their expertise on the African continent itself. This essay demonstrates the important role that these black female beauty culturists played, both as businesspeople and as race leaders, in their generation's struggle to gain greater respect and opportunity for African Americans both at home and abroad. In doing so it places African American beauty culturists within the framework of transatlantic trade networks, the Black Freedom Movement, Pan-Africanism, and America's Cold War struggle.

In February 1956, Ronald Prain–chairman of the Rhodesian Selection Trust group of mining companies, and a significant figure in postwar international business—was subpoenaed and appeared before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation of the U.S. Senate Committee of Government Operations as it sought to determine whether British international business was exporting copper to the Soviet Union. Following the seemingly contrived nature of the proceedings, and because of a hostile interrogation by Robert F. Kennedy, Prain was later to describe his appearance as a “witch-hunt”—a conscious reference to the political paranoia of the period. Using a microhistorical approach, this article examines how Prain understood and narrated his role in an event to which he was a minor actor, drawn into a larger narrative of the political and economic conflict of the Cold War. It evaluates the historical veracity of Prain’s testimony and discusses the limits of memoir and archival sources. It discusses the implications of the event to the historiography of international business, in particular with reference to debates about the “nationality of the company” and the decline of the “Free-Standing Company.” And by examining one personal experience in a wider context, the article also shows that the history of international business and its relationship to the politics of the Cold War should not be seen as remote, monolithic, impersonal, or abstract but as individually lived and suffused with emotion, memory, and personal meaning.

This essay examines the implications of rapid technological and economic change, or what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” for the urban environment. Taking the Chicago River Harbor as a case study, it argues that industrial capitalism was marked by fundamental spatial and environmental contradictions that resulted in the frequent destruction and reinvention of urban landscapes. The essay shows how transformations in the Great Lakes shipping industry and the rise of the steel industry rendered Chicago River Harbor infrastructure obsolete. That obsolescence, in turn, sparked a public debate over whether the port should be retrofitted or if the river should be harnessed for different uses. So many stakeholders—streetcar companies, commuters, City Beautiful advocates, and sanitary engineers—had conflicting ideas about the use of the river that it was practically impossible to retrofit the port. The resulting decline of industrial freight traffic on the Chicago River enabled urban planner Daniel Burnham to reinvent the riverfront as a site of leisure and consumption.