During the 1930s, the British government in Palestine introduced new regulation for the country’s banking sector. This regulation brought about a sharp decline in the number of banks and consolidated the large banks’ position in the country. Contrary to prior accounts of the subject, which view the regulation as a welcome governmental response to an unstable banking sector, in this article I argue that the main forces behind the regulation were the British Barclays Bank (Dominion, Colonial, and Overseas) and the Zionist Anglo-Palestine Bank. Based on governmental reports and internal banking correspondence, I show how, despite the opposition of local credit institutions, these two large banks successfully pushed for regulations that benefited them at the expense of their smaller competitors. The regulation of Palestine’s banking sector is therefore a case study of regulatory capture in the context of the British Empire.

The Depression housing crisis caused enormous distress, with social, economic and political implications. The roles and experiences of some major players are well established. Tenants were evicted. National statistics on foreclosures show that many property owners lost their homes. Lending institutions went under. Municipalities struggled when property tax receipts fell. The federal government stepped in, establishing new programs and agencies, with long-term consequences.

Other parts of the story have been neglected. Many borrowers surrendered their properties voluntarily, rather than await foreclosure. As vacancies rose and rents fell, landlords, many owning only one or two properties and/or renting part of their own homes, struggled. Neglected sources show they defaulted at a higher rate than homeowners. Among lenders, private individuals held more mortgages than any type of institution. Relying on investment income, many had a hard time. Both landlords and private lenders made concessions to avoid having to evict or foreclose, mitigating the effects of the Depression on tenants and borrowers. Sources exist to document local variations in the role of landlords and private lenders. These can give us a fuller picture of the Depression, one that still has relevance today.

Conventional viewpoints on global branding for design-focused consumer goods presuppose national identities as a given and prerequisite to market expansion, the key examples being Danish design furniture, Swiss watches, and Parisian fashion. Through the case study of Royal Selangor—a Malaysian family firm specializing in manufacturing pewter tableware and gifts—this study analyzes how businesses in former colonies adapt their branding strategies to transitioning ideas on national identities and economic development in the postcolonial era by drawing upon cosmopolitan worldviews of malleable identities and utilizing ties with former colonizers to gain cultural capital domestically and abroad. This study engages with theoretical frameworks of business history, organizational studies, and nationalism to explore how companies in developing countries in Southeast Asia that are also former colonies interact with colonial histories and participate in postcolonial nation-building through branding and entrepreneurship.

The Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company, successful in western Canada, struggled to replicate its business model in Quebec in the 1930s. The absence of financial responsibility law in Quebec, which made purchasing automobile insurance nearly compulsory for drivers, created a unique opportunity. Wawanesa could insure taxis and fleets in a market where uninsured drivers were the norm. To accommodate this change, it became a direct writer in Quebec. The company also loosened its previously rigid management style to allow branch managers to make regionally appropriate decisions. Insurance companies that fled Quebec in the 1940s would struggle to compete upon their return, because Wawanesa became a market leader. The introduction of financial responsibility law in the province in 1961 would grow the company in the years that followed. As historians work to understand the importance of regional and legislative change to the insurance industry, this story provides a snapshot of a single company in a single market.

Foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in China, especially during the nineteenth century, have attracted less interest from historians than Chinese firms and expatriate merchant houses. However, in this period, MNEs shaped advertising in Shenbao, China’s most vital modern Chinese-language newspaper. Through our examination of the advertisements they placed during the newspaper’s first phase of publication, 1872–1889, we argue that MNEs were more significant to the history of business in China than heretofore recognized. We contend that they influenced Chinese print media advertising by pioneering product differentiation and branding in this newspaper. They did so, we suggest, because this approach to marketing, which differed from those used by most other foreign and Chinese domestic advertisers, provided a competitive advantage to overcome their liability of foreignness, and was facilitated by their global reach in the form of knowledge flows from offshore bases to onshore branches.

This article analyzes a single bankruptcy case—Hancock v Halliday (1742–1752)—as it was litigated in the Court of Chancery across a ten-year period. By incorporating local sources, the work attempts to move away from assumptions surrounding the “implicit contract” of family, and to provide a more nuanced analysis of “family strategies” in action. I argue that business historians—looking at networks—and economic and social historians—analyzing the use and implementation of credit—should continue to explore the divisions within families, which will help to reemphasize the role of women within business transactions and the wider credit-based economy. Ultimately, this article makes a significant contribution to the burgeoning scholarship on the negative aspects of familial networks of credit and debt, demonstrating how the complex and multifaceted nature of family indebtedness has been overlooked, and misunderstood, in the existing literature.

The history of Indian management education is overwhelmingly focused on the period from the 1950s and 1960s onward. This article traces the hitherto underexplored history of how, from the 1860s until the 1950s, Indians thought about and implemented education and training for managers. In particular, it demonstrates how Indian nationalist politicians articulated the nation-building utility of managers and managerial training, and how business education became yoked to nationalists’ broader visions of India’s economic regeneration. Beginning in the early twentieth century, Indian nationalists championed commercial education, advocating its evolution out of its vocational roots into something more scientific and specialized for producing skilled indigenous managers. The precise evolution of Indian commercial education exercised long-term influences on postcolonial management programs. First, Indians established a tradition of surveying the latest pedagogical methods and institutional models from around the world and adapting them to Indian conditions. Second, Indian advocates of commercial education carved out an important role for the state, working on commercial education endeavors with British officials in the colonial era and, later on, placing management education within the ambit of centralized state planning. Management had a fundamentally political valence in India. For this reason, commercial and management education programs in India, unlike in the West, largely avoided questions about their legitimacy.

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.

The Czech Republic often has been cited as an example of successful economic transformation. The available literature has primarily focused on changes in the macroeconomic environment, although the actions of economic agents at the microeconomic level have emerged as the crucial factor explaining this success. Based on 101 oral history interviews, this article offers the firsthand experiences, frustrations, challenges, and human dimensions of doing business at that time and shows that the road from socialism to the market economy was a bumpy one. Our approach fills major information voids, and thus offers a unique opportunity for business historians to avoid slipping into the incomplete view of the world presented by written literature and archives.

The formation of the Shanghai Women’s Commercial and Savings Bank (1924–1955) uncovers the legacy of an institution founded by a group of elite women. Although the women’s bank had limited capital and a small business scope, it reflected the contributions of enterprising women to the financial field when Chinese women’s roles were evolving and feminist rhetoric appealed to women’s economic independence. This article brings the achievements of such Chinese women to the forefront, as key figures in the development and direction of the Shanghai Women’s Bank. By exploring the anxieties and endeavors of the Shanghai Women’s Bank and shifting the focus to the female figures involved in shaping the bank, this article argues that they, alongside their elite social network, contributed to the bank’s longevity and portrayal in the media landscape. Although emphasizing gender in its initial creation, the bank ultimately pursued similar business strategies to other banks with both men and women working behind-the-scenes to uphold the institution. Moreover, this article contributes to a more inclusive history of women and finance in order to illuminate the endeavors of Chinese women in Shanghai banking amongst its global counterparts.

The phonograph presented American presidential aspirants with an opportunity to surmount eighteenth-century campaigning standards and meet the challenges of an expanding democracy and electorate. Thomas Edison’s invention—with its corresponding records—arguably was the first mechanical media technology to find its way into political campaigning on a mass scale. By 1908, canned, recorded speeches were poised to become a marketable alternative to soliciting ballots in person while also facilitating a candidate’s direct engagement with voters, thus enabling contenders and media firms like Edison’s National Phonograph Company to curate personas that were sold both commercially and at the polls. As a result, the phonograph’s practical role allowed the public to hear candidates directly and in their own words, marking an important but underrecognized step forward in the democratization of access to information (and the concomitant risk of manipulation and distortion that came along with it) that one finds in today’s social media.

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.

This article offers the first extensive analysis of female agency in the marine insurance industry of early modern Europe. Drawing from a data set of more than four thousand insurance policies signed in the Royal Insurance Chamber in Paris between 1668 and 1672, the article studies the activities of Parisian women within the institution. These policies illustrate that women played a crucial role in the Chamber as underwriters, creditors, commission agents, and policyholders. Moreover, institutional papers and the records of the Parisian admiralty court reveal that women acted ably in defense of their interests when conflicts emerged, although there were limitations to their agency in the Chamber itself. In this way, the article challenges the long-standing perception that underwriting was an exclusively masculine activity in pre-modern Europe. Moreover, it sheds light on the role of women in supporting the maritime and colonial policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s eminent minister, thereby becoming underwriters of France’s early Atlantic Empire.

Recent work on white women in Jamaica has shown that they were active participants in Jamaica’s slave economy. This article adds to this recent literature through an innovative use of social network analysis (SNA) to examine the credit networks in which women operated in the thriving eighteenth-century British Atlantic town of Kingston, Jamaica. In particular, it uses closeness and centrality measures to quantify the distinctive role that white women had in local credit networks. These were different from those of men involved in transatlantic trade, but were vital in facilitating female access to credit enabling domestic retail trade. White female traders in particular facilitated female access to credit networks, acting as significant conduits of money and information in ways that were crucial to the local economy. Their connectedness within trade networks increased over time, despite their greater exposure than larger traders to economic shocks. We therefore demonstrate that white women were active protagonists in the developing economy of eighteenth-century Jamaica.

This article uses the case of Oppel Electric Manufacturing Co. Ltd.—the most important Chinese manufacturer of light bulbs before 1937—to explore the early development of the Chinese electrical lamp industry. The article first explores the Chinese market for electrical lamps before the 1920s and shows how the market was dominated by imports and lamps locally manufactured by foreign firms. It then traces how Oppel was established in the 1920s and subsequently grew into a successful manufacturing business able to compete with foreign products. The article explores how the fact that government institutions were major purchasers of light bulbs allowed Oppel to engage in nationalist lobbying and thereby win government contracts. The article shows how the absence of Western-style intellectual property rights allowed Oppel to transfer technology cheaply, efficiently, and without needing to enter into Sino–foreign joint ventures. These discussions of nationalist lobbying and China’s intellectual property environment contribute to our understanding of China’s early industrialization, both in terms of the rapid industrial growth early twentieth century China saw and the leading role that Chinese firms played in this growth.

This article aims to explain the considerable state ownership in listed companies in Norway (SOiN) at present. The extant literature has pointed to alleged national idiosyncrasies to explain this special feature of Norwegian capitalism. The main contribution of this article is a comparative perspective. It shows that most European countries have pursued selective protectionism (i.e., to secure national ownership in key companies). It also shows that financial capital was not crucial for selective protectionism. On this background, the article discusses why state ownership became the mode of selective protectionism in Norway. It argues that the main reason is that large private (often multinational) companies did not develop in the wake of the second Industrial Revolution. Another key reason is that a specific hybrid ownership model that was developed after 1945 became an available institutional solution for securing national ownership after 1990. A common ground and a compromise were found on this model, based both on trust and distrust toward the state: a trust in that the state could operate as a passive and private owner, and a corresponding distrust in the state as an active industrialist and owner.

Reconnecting Fligstein’s and Chandler’s models of long-term organizational change, this article challenges the idea that corporate financialization is alien to the Chandlerian enterprise. Based on the case of the French automotive firm Peugeot Société Anonyme (PSA), it shows that this historical transformation has been intrinsically linked to Chandlerian dynamics. The article first highlights the crucial role played by the French government and financial institutions in the establishment of large multidivisional companies in France. It then draws on PSA, public, and private archives, and an interview with a former financial executive to examine a decisive financial restructuring of the family business in 1965. In describing the challenges faced by the business in the 1960s, the article analyzes how the creation of a multilevel structure of holding companies was meant to deal with Chandlerian challenges while paving the way for the further financialization of the business.

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 article explores the early history of two American peanut companies: Planters and Tom’s. Both food manufacturers developed major commercial brands through the ownership of intellectual property. In this case, the sourcing of different peanut types figured into the marketing of salted peanuts. Through a legal dispute involving Tom’s patented retail bag, I examine how food packaging changed the way that peanuts were advertised, distributed, and consumed in the United States. The argument is made for an historical analysis of food brands that considers how intellectual property domains interacted with one another and with the material properties of food itself.

In the 1990s, three Scandinavian news media companies, Bonnier, Kinnevik, and Schibsted, internationalized their newspapers. Despite doing this during the same period, competing in the same industry and institutional environment, being exposed to the same opportunities by the opening of the Eastern European markets, and all belonging to a smaller language area, they differed in their internationalization models as well as in their outcomes. Despite initial successes, Bonnier and Kinnevik eventually discontinued their newspapers in the new markets, in many cases following significant losses, while Schibsted fared better. The main explanation for using different internationalization models was differences in business models, basically striving to do business internationally in a similar way as domestically. That is, they did not choose a specific internationalization model but sought to simply expand their business models internationally. Consequently, this article finds that when researching internationalization, more focus should be placed on business models.