The articles in this issue reflect the journal's continued interest in the efforts of states and governments to shape domestic industries and firms—whether to pursue economic stability, support national research and manufacturing agendas, express regional cultural aspirations, or simply, and undemocratically, to accumulate wealth and power.
In their paper, Seán Kenny and Anders Ögren examine Sweden's efforts to effectively regulate, and bring balance to, its commercial banking sector by changing policies for unlimited liability banks in the late nineteenth century. Francesca Fauri looks at the Italian government's support, in the first half of the twentieth century, of the Caproni group—an aircraft syndicate that made bombers and transport planes—until its collapse in the wake of World War II. Muhammad H. Zaman and Tarun Khanna's article on Cipla, a major Indian pharmaceutical company, explores the evolution and realization of company's ambition to produce high quality drugs. John Wong's study of Vitasoy analyzes how the beverage producer was able to create and popularize a drink that became a symbol of the emerging middle class and a celebration of a prosperous lifestyle in post-World War II Hong Kong. Carlo Edoardo Altamura's study of Latin American dictators in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil reveals the way military regimes in the 1970s and early 1980s became heavily dependent on foreign capital provided by international banks based in Britain and France.
Finally, this issue includes a review essay, written by Laura Philips Sawyer, on Adam Winkler's We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights, a book that explores the impact of several landmark episodes in corporate legal history, and the process through which corporations fought to expand their legal protections under the Bill of Right and the Constitution.
