The rapid development of the Chinese economy over the past several decades has stimulated new interest in the institutions, practices, and social formations that supported the development of business in China before the intensification of pressure from Western traders to conform to “modern” practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article aims to provide a foundation for understanding merchant practice as it developed during the important years of market expansion during the last Chinese dynasty and to dispel some of the enduring myths about the Chinese merchant, his relationship to family, community, and the state, and the ideological constraints on his activities. To that end I examine several aspects of late imperial merchant culture, beginning with the everyday practices that allowed business to flourish in the Qing, turning next to the large social formations through which long-distance merchants in particular identified and pursued their interests, and ending with some preliminary thoughts on the impact of the laissez-faire policies of the last dynasty and their implications for post-Imperial China.

Narratives of flexible specialization as an alternative to mass production are largely absent from the industrial history of twentieth-century Britain. In this article, I challenge the notion that we should relegate small firms and industrial districts to a marginal place in the historiography of this period. Drawing from a range of sources, I explore the history of Birmingham's jewelry makers to show how they adapted the traditional productive system of the district to respond in a dynamic way to the challenges of rapid product market differentiation. As jewelry increasingly became a commodity for mass consumption, the firms in the Birmingham district used a combination of specialty and mass production as a strategy to both satisfy and create demand.

In this article, the authors interrogate legal and economic history to analyze the process by which the Chicago School of Antitrust emerged in the 1950s and became dominant in the United States. They show that the extent to which economic objectives and theoretical views shaped the inception of antitrust law. After establishing the minor influence of economics in the promulgation of U.S. competition law, they highlight U.S. economists’ caution toward antitrust until the Second New Deal and analyze the process by which the Chicago School developed a general and coherent framework for competition policy. They rely mainly on the seminal and programmatic work of Director and Levi (1956) and trace how this theoretical paradigm became collective—that is, the “economization” process in U.S. antitrust. Finally, the authors discuss the implications and possible pitfalls of such a conversion to economics-led antitrust enforcement.

This article examines the “state of the art” and the current debates on the subject of women entrepreneurs, presenting some preliminary observations and hypotheses regarding the role of business-women in Italian economic development. Reasons for the new historiographic interest in female entrepreneurship are identified, and the primary methodological difficulties encountered in its historical study—starting with establishing the definition and the statistical parameters of the woman entrepreneur and discussing her social and juridical “invisibility”—are summarized. Finally, suggestions are made about possible directions for research on key historical trends important in shaping female entrepreneurial abilities in the Italian context.

On January 31, 1957, about five weeks before the Gold Coast gained political independence from Britain, the country's first Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah inaugurated the opening of Kingsway, Accra, the country's largest department store. Owned and operated by the United Africa Company (UAC), a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch multinational Unilever, Kingsway Stores were well known throughout British West Africa as a chain of urban retail outlets. Although Kingsway Stores originally targeted the needs of European colonials and their families, they increasingly attracted elite and emerging middle-class African shoppers. Equipped with an elevator, a modern car park, and three floors of retail space, the new state-of-the-art Kingsway building would be the first of its kind in all of West Africa. Invited to give the inaugural speech at the store's grand opening, Nkrumah stated: “It is idle to pretend that the people of the Gold Coast . . . [have] always been on the friendliest terms with such a mighty financial power as Unilever. But . . . my government like myself and the people of the Gold Coast, does prefer the devil it knows to the devil it does not know.”

A substantial literature documents the importance of trademarks and brands to business success. How does this relationship change when we enlarge our focus from individual firms to industries and nations? This articles examines the dominance of Danish bacon in Britain between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that this supremacy required state intervention and cooperation between government and producers to underpin high and consistent levels of quality throughout the supply chain, both of which were necessary to ensure the successful marketing of “Danish” bacon. In Britain, by contrast, state intervention to increase bacon production was only partially successful because it was undermined by a nineteenth-century legacy of uncoordination and deregulation. Such weaknesses affected the supply of appropriate pigs and the production of bacon that was uniform in quality, and ultimately negated the efforts of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to promote a “British” bacon brand.

In response to an invitation from the editor of Enterprise & Society, last year David Sicilia and I put out a call for papers for a special issue of the journal that would focus on gender and business history. The call elicited twenty-five submissions, an impressive array of scholarship from authors who addressed the subject from a range of theoretical and disciplinary approaches. From these submissions, we chose the four articles that appear in this volume and three others that will be published in the next issue of Enterprise & Society (June 2001). We made our final selections on the basis of thematic, national, and organizational representativeness and on the ways in which the articles complemented each other and revealed aspects of the “state of the field.” Let me thank the more than fifty referees who generously read and commented anonymously on the original submissions. I enjoyed working with them, with the authors, and with David in this communal endeavor.

Westinghouse Electric opened a new research laboratory near the company’s main factory in East Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 1916. Located in the suburban borough of Forest Hills, the laboratory was set up to provide scientific knowledge for the older materials testing and product development laboratories at the factory. Unlike its industrial counterparts, however, the Forest Hills laboratory was dominated by a strong engineering research tradition that disrupted efforts undertaken in the 1920s and again in the 1930s to build and sustain a diversified fundamental research program. Whereas Eastman Kodak, DuPont, AT&T, and General Electric had successfully integrated fundamental research into their corporate laboratories, the Forest Hills laboratory remained the site of recurring tensions between two cultures of innovation—one based on fundamental science, the other on engineering research. Although such tensions often resulted in competing research strategies, managerial conflicts, and mismatched corporate priorities, the long-standing culture of engineering research contributed far more to Westinghouse’s strategic growth than even the most advanced fundamental research. More generally, the interactions between the cultures of engineering and science that characterize the early history of industrial research at Westinghouse highlight the evolving and sometimes conflicting patterns of technological innovation and organizational change in American industry before World War II.

This article examines the case of U.S. corporate environmentalism as a dramatic instance of issue management over four decades. Drawing on administrative and trade publications, archival sources, and personal interviews, the article tracks the gradual adoption of issue management and strategic planning techniques by the environmental public relations industry, demonstrating the increasingly powerful role of PR in influencing environmental policy making in the United States. By tracing its origins in the realm of environmental issues, the article argues that issue management became, over a forty-year period, a key strategy to define, limit, and control the concept of the environment in American society. The issue management tactics deployed by public relations actors to counter environmental activism and regulation offer a paradigmatic example from which to derive critical insights about the twin evolution of American social movements and the public relations industry.

In the nineteenth century, firms operating in the Anglo-Indian tea trade were organized using a variety of ownership forms, including partnership, joint-stock, and a combination of the two, known as the managing agency. Faced with both an increasing need for fixed capital and high agency costs caused by the distance between owners and managers, the firms adapted and increasingly adopted the hybrid managing agency model to overcome these problems. Using new data from Calcutta and Bengal Commercial Registers and detailed case studies of the Assam Company and Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., this article demonstrates that British entrepreneurs did not see the choice of ownership as a dichotomy or firm boundaries as fixed, but instead drew innovatively on the strengths of different forms of ownership to compete and grow successfully.

The reasons why photographic illustration was generally avoided by American print advertisers before 1913, even though halftone technology had made such illustration economically advantageous, have not been adequately explored. This article explains that art directors initially avoided the medium because of its slavish dependence on material reality. Photography offered too much detail; it seemed incapable of the abstraction or idealization necessary for “capitalist realism.” The change in this outlook can be dated from the work of Lejaren à Hiller, who, borrowing fine art aesthetics and techniques from pictorialist photography, established the medium as suitable for the complex visual and narrative strategies required by the social tableaux advertising of the period.

The recent arrival of women on corporate boards has been extensively discussed in the literature. However, most of the studies focus on very recent times. This article analyzes the presence of women on the corporate boards of the largest firms in Switzerland across the past hundred years. It shows that until the beginning of the 1970s, the very few women sitting on the boardrooms belonged to the families owning the firms. Two main factors contributed then to the progressive opening of the corporate elites to women. First, the extending in 1971 of “universal suffrage” to women led to a feminization of the political elites, and women with a political profile entered the boardrooms of firms in the distribution and retailing sector. Second, the increasing globalization of the economy at the end of the twentieth century contributed to weaken the cohesion of the very male and Swiss corporate elite. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, however, the presence of women remained low in international comparison, and they were still hitting the “glass ceiling” regarding the top positions in the firm.

A growing number of historians have turned their attention to the past behavior of industrialists toward their waste. Many have argued that the price system and competition typically fostered a short-term outlook that rewarded pollution rather than encouraging “loop-closing,” a modern term that refers to the linkages between different industries in which the residual of one becomes the input of another. Others have identified precedents in this respect that are credited to Progressive Era reformers. Building on evidence that has, by and large, escaped the attention of the present generation of historical writers, this essay challenges both views by arguing that market institutions, which included both profit motive and property rights, actually resulted in the usage of industrial by-products. Although past industrial activities did create significant pollution problems, perhaps our ancestors should be given more credit than they generally are for the creativity and resourcefulness they displayed in profitably solving numerous environmental problems.

Trademark theory implicitly assumes that laws favoring the interests of the producer will inevitably serve the interests of the consumer. Such a claim justifies the way that trademark law privileges the voice of the producer in the marketplace. Historical work has tended to endorse this view, explaining the development of trademarks and trademark law in terms of the information needed for consumers in the modern marketplace. Taking both a historical and “informational” perspective, this essay argues that the producer’s and the consumer’s interests do not so easily align. It speculates that a less varnished history of the mark shows more of a struggle between producers, who seek to have their voice heard without dissent, and consumers, who often want to find alternative yet informed voices to endorse or qualify the information provided by the mark. This alternative view would help explain why, as the paper seeks to show, despite conventional evolutionary narratives, the history of trademarking in the United States is in fact far from linear.

Banking experienced large growth in colonial India along with a process of commercialization of agriculture. Yet, the rate of aggregate saving or investment remained low. This article is an attempt to resolve this paradox. It suggests that traditional forms of banking were helped by the formalization of indigenous negotiable instruments, but that transactions between bankers, merchants, and peasants were characterized by a limited use of legal instruments. The limited circulation of bills in this sphere is attributed, among other factors, to high seasonality in the demand for money. Seasonality-induced distortions in the organization of the money market made indigenous banking an unsuitable agent to promote saving and finance industrialization.

This article analyzes the structure of the Italian corporate network in the decade that followed the end of the “Golden Age” (1972–83), when the transition from the technological trajectory of the second to that of the third industrial revolution began. The article is based on a large dataset, Imita.db, which contains data on more than thirty-eight thousand Italian joint-stock companies and about three hundred thousand directors, and uses both network analysis and a prosopographic approach. The main result is that the interval considered was marked by a sharp decrease in the degree of cohesion of the Italian corporate network. In 1972, the system was very cohesive and state-owned enterprises were well represented within the most central firms. In 1983, the cohesion of the system had sharply diminished; state-owned enterprises had disappeared from the center and a new private center, hinged on Mediobanca, the only merchant bank operating in the country, had emerged.

This article discusses the interaction between directors and small shareholders who made up the majority of names on the share ledgers of many companies in both the UK and the USA. It is concerned with the period 1890–1965 and concentrates on the management/shareholder relationship in the context of the annual general meeting and shareholder activism. I argue that there were significant differences between shareholder activism in the UK and the USA, due to the difference in relative numbers of the shareholders themselves, to legal and geographic differences, to corporate culture, and to the earlier diffusion of shareholding in the UK compared to the USA. UK shareholders concentrated their interventions on management issues, as well as some social and labor matters. US shareholders, mostly through so-called ‘corporate gadflies’, concentrated their efforts on corporate governance issues, some of which were already enshrined in UK company law and practice.