In the early 2000s, California-based Guayakí popularized the caffeinated drink, yerba mate, among young people and creative types. With revenues of $100 million, Guayakí dominates the U.S. market where it is synonymous with yerba mate. This essay explores how Guayakí transformed a foreign product with deep local meaning, widespread popularity, and a long history in southern South America from a shared beverage and social practice into a healthy energy drink. Typically, localization entails multinational companies and local consumers adapting and giving new meanings to an exotic foreign product or brand. In contrast, local entrepreneurs radically changed yerba mate while preserving part of its narrative. Guayakí promotes product authenticity based on a narrative of South American Indigenous origins, stimulating qualities, and health benefits that fits with superfoods, while a narrative of green capitalism promotes brand authenticity. But that was not enough to popularize yerba mate. The product had to be adapted to consumer taste preferences and values that challenge the foundational ideas of superfoods and green capitalism. As a result of consumer input acquired through grassroots marketing, Guayakí transformed a shared infusion into something closer to a soft drink—a pre-prepared, individual-sized beverage served in a single-use bottle or can with flavoring and sugar levels tailored to U.S. consumers. The essay exposes the role of local entrepreneurs and consumers in shaping product development and localization. It complicates our understanding of product authenticity and brand authenticity while exposing the limitations of green capitalism, ethical consumerism, and activist entrepreneurship.

Recently, there has been increasing academic interest in the historical foundations of the pornography business. However, these studies tend to focus on individual national contexts rather than exploring the transnational relationships that exist, or have existed, between these countries. This article considers how a transnational approach can further understandings of entrepreneurship in the pornography business. It suggests the need for an interdisciplinary framework to examine transnational enterprise in the pornography business, combining ideas from enterprise alongside criminology and economic geography to frame the enterprise history of the Netherlands-based company Your Choice. Based in Amsterdam, but run by British entrepreneurs, Your Choice’s activities can be dated back to the 1970s, specializing in the transnational distribution of hardcore pornographic films to customers in Britain, where the sale of such material is legally problematic. Drawing on ethnohistorical research, which includes primary interviews, workplace observation, and archival and doctrinal research, I use Your Choice as a case study to show how transnational entrepreneurship in the pornography business can create opportunities as well as help to manipulate restrictive laws and regulations. I also suggest that negotiating such legalities carries risk, as does the need to respond and adapt to ongoing shifts in the market.

The thesis applies a political economy approach to the study of how institutions and geography explain the development of a commodity chain. Focusing on the Brazilian Amazon from 1870 to 1910, the analysis develops a new theoretical framework constructed by combining standard trade models with institutions and economic geography. There are two levels of analysis: interactions among and within different nodes of the commodity chain. A quantitative-driven analysis from macroeconomic data supports inferences from microeconomic behavior. The thesis provides new information on rubber prices and exports, trader ledgers, estate accounts, newspapers, traveler accounts, and official documents.

The research develops a demand- and supply-side analysis of the history of rubber, from tappers to manufacturers. It features the main rubber manufacturing countries, Britain and the U.S.A., and shows how competition prevailed along the chain, translating into a struggle for rubber supply. Rubber was not a homogeneous product. Due to a combination of quantity and quality, the Brazilian Amazon possessed significant market power, market power that shaped the rubber chain. In this light, the thesis investigates how the Brazilian rubber supply chain was organized and how agents profited from its monopolistic position. It also shows that taxation increased the regional welfare and allowed the government to support two related activities: telegraphs and shipping.

The thesis proves that violence and coercion were not necessary features of rubber production, as argued by much of the literature. Through a game theoretic approach, the thesis demonstrates conditions under which production could have occurred without exploitation. In a context of high price inelasticity of demand and rising prices, production was driven by market forces. Inelasticity of demand was indeed one of the main features of the rubber boom. It shaped production, bargaining power between different nodes of the chain and competition within them, defining the distribution of profits along the rubber chain.

This article uses a lawsuit between British engineers and Dominican merchants over a sugar estate mortgage to examine how transnational capital networks functioned at the local level during a moment of transition in the late nineteenth-century global economy. When Dominican courts ruled against the engineers, the firm unsuccessfully sought diplomatic intervention, raising questions on the one hand about the incremental construction of Dominican sovereignty and on the other about the links between diplomatic and business networks on the ground. It is situated within calls for new approaches to the history of the Dominican Republic that utilize international archives and focus on corporate bodies, both in local and Pan-Caribbean contexts.

This article examines the Detroit Housewives League (DHL) in the 1930s and 1940s, concentrating on DHL members’ actions as businesswomen. Past narratives have framed the DHL as an extension of the black women’s club movement or as part of the women-driven consumer movements of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly highlighting the organization’s philosophies on black women’s purchasing power. I argue that entrepreneurial DHL women brought prior business knowledge to their organizing and were significant business experts and leaders. By conducting business research, forging community networks, and, significantly, establishing commercial colleges and other forms of business education in the city, DHL members’ work was vital for the black business community as a whole and for women entrepreneurs in particular. In reframing the DHL as an organization established by black entrepreneurial women, I suggest scholars should reevaluate black women’s contributions to other forms of activism in order to recover additional histories of black women’s entrepreneurship and business leadership.

Galambos and Amatori applaud this discourse over entrepreneurship but contend that the multiplier is not a metaphor. They acknowledge Wadhwani’s insightful analyses and look forward to further fruitful discussions focused on innovation, capitalism’s major strength. They briefly argue for scalar evaluations rather than binary evaluations of innovation and the socio-economic problems they inevitably create.

In 2008 Professor Eric Godelier published a provocative essay in which he concluded that a positive dialogue between business historians and both management scientists and business management practitioners was possible. While the divide between these camps was not trivial, he nevertheless wrote that current events and scholarship was bringing them together, at least as he could observe these trends in the context of emerging French scholarship. In this current review, my own conclusion is the opposite. Management scholarship, in fact, continues to move away from the “soft” approach of the historian and more towards the “rigorous” and quantitatively biased methodology of the management sciences. My essay reviews the background of this development in terms of American business practice and scholarship, as it seeks to demonstrate how the evolution of management training in the United States brought us to the current state of affairs where “hard” drives out soft in almost every encounter. However, while I conclude that this is indeed the current reality, I do not imply any endorsement of this outcome. Rather, I end with a hope that some forms of rapprochement might be possible-yet with an acknowledgement that we will have no definitive answers to this question anytime soon.

This text is the author’s reply to reactions to “Managing Communist Enterprises” from three colleagues, Lee Vinsel, Natalya Vinokurova, and Pál Germuska. It includes reflections on his work process in researching capitalist and noncapitalist firms and sectors and the practical and theoretical bases for that work. In the course of replying to particular suggestions and critiques, the rejoinder also offers some considerations about the current and future course of business history as a discipline.

This paper assesses how Westerners depicted Chinese entrepreneurship in the late Qing period. The paper, which is based on a range of primary sources in English, Portuguese, and French, shows that Western views of Chinese entrepreneurs were highly diverse and that while some contemporary authors viewed Chinese entrepreneurship through an Orientalist lens, others rejected this paradigm by stressing that Chinese people, or at least some subsets of the Han Chinese population, were extremely entrepreneurial. Another group of authors modified the Orientalist stereotype of Chinese stagnation by suggesting that Chinese businesspeople were capable of the lower entrepreneurial functions (e.g., simple arbitrage) but not the higher branches of entrepreneurship, which involved innovation and creative destruction. These entrepreneurial functions were, ethnocentrically, regarded as the domain of Westerners. The paper may extend our understanding about how the past still affects our current perception of Chinese entrepreneurship. It also develops our understanding of the cultural histories of entrepreneurship and Sino-Western business.

Last year, Will Hausman gave us a splendid overview of business history's development for his presidential address. Despite his modesty, he treated us to a review of the parallels between his career and the field's progress, which owes much to his dedication to the Business History Conference (BHC) and its various constituencies. What we have within the BHC now, thanks to Will and many others, are multiple opportunities for exciting interactions based on ideas. As we share, exchange, and rearrange our ideas, they grow, as do our pleasure in and appreciation for them. The BHC offers us a wonderful arena for advancing the life of our minds—while advancing our ideas.

This study aims at enhancing our understanding of how industrial conditions affect the choice of a firm's ownership structure. The Providence/Attleboro area was a center of jewelry production during the nineteenth century. Because of the differentiated nature of the product, the Providence/Attleboro jewelers needed to promote their products among the wholesalers in distant markets. These geographical and industrial conditions motivated the entrepreneurs to organize partnerships for ameliorating informational asymmetries and for mobilizing the capital required to achieve economies of scale in sales and production.

This article details the ways in which the executives of Du Pont used the chemical company’s 150th-anniversary festivities in 1952 and its associated sponsored media as an opportunity to explicitly link the history of the company with the history of the nation. This was an attempt to legitimatize the company’s existence and its ultraconservative worldview, espouse free trade, and fight antitrust litigation. This article explores the conflation of private and public history in Du Pont-sponsored anniversary materials to illustrate how corporate public relations meant for private corporate consumption reverberated into a shared American public culture.

This article presents an analysis of the operations of the Peruvian Amazon Company through an accounting lens. It is suggested that a focus on asset categories augments our knowledge of the company’s exploitation of the land and Indigenous peoples of Amazonia. In particular, the study explores the PAC’s questionable ownership of estates in the Putumayo, what its approach to valuing those estates implied about enslavement, how its treatment of “expenses of conquest” and the inclusion of armaments on the balance sheet indicated the forced subjugation of labor, and how the classification of rubber collectors and their Barbadian overseers as debtors further suggests the practice of debt peonage. Although the findings affirm the utilization of accounting as a facilitator of subjugation, it is shown that in the hands of humanitarians such as Roger Casement, accounting could also be deployed in the pursuit of emancipation.