During and after World War I, British businessmen made major inroads in political, administrative, and policymaking circles. In so doing, they forged a nexus of power, the business-state, that aligned the interests of big business with the state’s imperial aspirations. Well before the widespread acceptance of the concept of the national economy, there was a common understanding in London that what was good for British business, especially industry, was good for the economic health of the country and empire. The result was that after World War I, the state aggressively helped British commercial interests.

How knowledge is created, accessed, stored and disseminated has become a major focus of study when assessing the success or failure of industrial clusters. Marshall (1890; 225) initiated this debate when he noted: ‘The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air’. In the edited collection by Wilson, Corker and Lane (2022), emphasis has been placed on the links between knowledge, knowledge flows and how innovation systems evolve and adapt. This paper builds on their work examining how tacit and codified knowledge is created and disseminated across a cluster. Bathelt et al (2004) have demonstrated how successful clusters build effective ‘global pipelines’ to access knowledge generated elsewhere, prompting us to think how a business history analysis can incorporate these concepts and how these processes have worked in practice. The paper analyses two English clusters and the processes involved in the formation of a common body of knowledge, a ‘knowledge-cum-industrial zeitgeist’ which explains the cluster’s performance. Specifically, it proposes a model that links internally-generated knowledge and ‘global pipelines’ that clusters develop to tap into externally-generated knowledge, which through effective feedback into the ‘local buzz’ results in further innovation and strengthens the cluster’s competitive advantage.

This article reinterprets Asian industrialization during the Cold War through the lens of a forgotten commodity: the South Korean wig. Wigs were critical to Asia’s “miraculous” economic growth—a US$1 billion industry in 1970, as well as the number two export in South Korea and number four in Hong Kong at the height of export-oriented industrialization. The article makes a methodological argument, suggesting that we see industrialization differently when we “follow” a commodity transnationally—from the heads of rural South Koreans to the hands of Seoul factory workers to the shoulder bags of Korean American peddlers to the heads of African American women—and when we integrate bottom-up and top-down views of the commodity’s “life.” Only by taking this global perspective can we see how U.S. imperialism shaped the ways people and things moved across borders and oceans and how Cold War commodities were haunted by the lives of the people who touched them.

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.