This article explores the development of the Safari Rally in the context of intertwined trends in mobility, sports, and consumerism at local, global and intermediate levels. The first section briefly presents the Safari Rally. The second section discusses the significance and development of the sport of rallying in the context of global automobility and changes in the motor industry, highlighting in particular the professionalisation of sport and the forces driving it. The third section analyses why the Safari became relevant to so many stakeholders in Africa and across the globe, and how these shaped its development from its colonial origins through decolonisation and beyond. Highlighting the factors accounting for the rise, and decline, of the Safari as a sporting event of global significance contributes to understanding how mobility, sports, and consumerism were interlinked across continents in the second half of the 20th century.

The sources formally documenting how tax policy evolves fail to capture many of the complexities inherent in such processes. Insights into such approaches would guide other tax administrations in navigating tax policy change in an international domain. This paper examines the historical background to the introduction of the Irish 12.5 percent corporate tax rate in 2003 in the face of the European Union’s (EU) dissatisfaction with the existing regime. A low corporate tax rate has long been seen as a critical element of the country’s industrial development strategy. Employing an oral history method to identify the perspectives and objectives of those involved in the policymaking process, we provide a case study of how one tax administration resolved what was seen as a particularly significant public policy dilemma.

Department stores have served as significant commercial and cultural institutions, transforming retail systems, consumption patterns, and people’s tastes in many countries since the late 1840s, when the first department store emerged in Paris. However, the adaptation of their business models and influence varied depending on social contexts. This article examines Japanese department stores from the 1900s to the 1930s, focusing on the role of restaurants within these establishments. Department store restaurants not only redefined the customer experience through innovative food services but also played a crucial role in reshaping the business itself. Central to this transformation were the waitresses, often referred to as “restaurant girls,” whose emotional labor became integral to the department store’s operations. Their work introduced the incorporation of personality into business management, highlighting how the performance of personality—both gendered and productive—was leveraged in the modern commercial world.

Interregional and global economic connections continued to grow in the eighteenth century, but we know less about consuls’ impact on commodity chains that were stretched thin across large distances. Using a microhistorical approach, we look at the activities of a Swedish consul in Cadiz, Hans Jacob Gahn, who supplied large amounts of copper sheets to the Spanish navy. It was Gahn’s position as an official representative, not merely his networks in Spain and Sweden, that was crucial for winning and executing the contract: his consular post enabled him to leverage his social, political, and financial capital to drastically alter trade flows for the years he held the contract. As contractors, consuls had a significant economic function for both their sending and receiving states.

Through analyzing the compensation accounts and stock ledgers in the Bank of England Archive, this article explores how British firms—especially those in the City of London—profited from the unique business opportunity that arose through the payment of slavery compensation in 1835. It uses a new dataset with 18,930 observations to establish that a cohort of 27 “compensation agents” handled as intermediaries approximately two-thirds of the transactions associated with £5 million paid in compensation as government stock (3.5% Reduced Annuities) to slave owners in Barbados, Mauritius, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Virgin Islands. The article argues that this demonstrates how the City’s financial capacity, infrastructure, and business community were significant in delivering the efficient payment of compensation. It also underscores the need to understand the slavery compensation process as contemporaries did; as an important moment in the history of the City and its financial markets.

This article examines the development of offshore commercial and financial services in tax havens between 1955-1979. The geographic locus of this paper is the Caribbean region, mainly focusing on the island tax havens that had been part of the British empire prior to decolonization. The article examines the relationship between the development of tax havens and decolonisation, and explores questions of international capital movement, the institutional structure of tax havens, the development of banking and commercial services in tax havens, and other offshore business activities. The article presents new data on international capital investment and capital movement, and provides empirical evidence in relation to the structure and function of businesses located in tax havens. This evidence is used to engage with emerging debates with reference to the history of tax havens: specifically, the nature of capital movement and the importance of beneficial ownership rights, and the relationship between the (re)location of business to tax havens and the mitigation of political risk and instability. We demonstrate that the development of tax havens in this period was a consequence of substantial innovation by business and finance to create advantageous environmental conditions in relation to taxation and governance. This was supported by an isomorphic process that spread similarly favourable regimes of law and regulation between different tax havens, as well as the development of a range of supportive commercial and financial services. We conclude by discussing the implications for future research on this topic.

This article studies the rise and fall of commercial aviation in Iran, then known as Persia, between 1923 and 1932. Two airlines, the German Junkers Luftverkehr AG and Britain’s Imperial Airways, invested significant time and effort in developing air routes but eventually failed due to financial hardship and political intransigence. Exploring this erratic development, the article has two aims: first, to investigate the entangled history of two of the world’s oldest airlines and the challenges they navigated; and second, to assess the fraught relationship between state and business interests. The German and British airlines were rivals in Iran, but they became partly dependent on each other. Both airlines suffered from the global political dynamics of the interwar period while Junkers, in particular, also struggled financially. Meanwhile, the Iranian state had yet to decide whether to view the new technology with enthusiasm or concern. Its ambivalent and reluctant reaction had profound effects on the trajectories of Junkers and Imperial Airways. Assessing the capability of a nascent airline industry to develop viable business models outside of Europe, the article also serves as a case study revealing the headwinds airlines encountered in the earliest phase of commercial aviation.

In 1989, British Petroleum (BP) made the largest onshore investment in the company’s 72-year history in Scotland by expanding its Grangemouth petrochemical complex. Construction and operation were promised to generate between 1,200 and 1,500 jobs, but upon the project’s completion, over 1,000 industrial jobs were lost in the town, and employment never increased. This research explains this outcome by embedding it within a history of post-World War II deindustrialization and engaging with E.P. Thompson’s moral economy and the concept of “noxious deindustrialization”: expanding environmentally destructive capacity and shrinking industrial employment. It illuminates what the buildup and later transgression of moral economy promises looked like for a town experiencing rapid but fragile expansion on the back of petrochemicals, a modern, highly toxic, and land-intensive industry. Using oral history and archive study, the research establishes the presence of noxiousness in Grangemouth from the mid-twentieth century onward. Between 1951 and 1970, industrialization, urban expansion, and paternalistic corporate practices shaped customary notions that embedded the petrochemical sector into the community, justifying concerns about pollution, smells, and the industry’s intensive requirements on land. Between 1970 and 1989, the moral economy was transgressed as the planning system was dismantled and BP’s welfarist responsibility to Grangemouth lessened under economic liberalization. Amid growing environmental concerns globally, noxiousness became intolerable. Noxious deindustrialization accelerated with changes in energy prices, consolidation of private power, and discovery of North Sea oil, leading to company restructuring and job cuts in BP Chemicals. Consequently, the link between employment, population growth, and economic security broke down.

This article follows the early history of the Eastman Kodak Company, examining how the photographic company came to be led by experts in chemistry, who created manufacturing processes that were crucial to the mass manufacture of motion pictures. It argues that celluloid film, the substance necessary for motion pictures, was central to the evolution of Kodak into an industrial chemical company. Kodak’s work to manage the specific technological problems and risks created by this material was itself constitutive of the new industrial shape the firm took. In embracing an intraplant goal of purity of raw materials and finished goods, Kodak made it possible for cinema to become a mass medium, with moving images able to look the same way across time and space, over countless copies. Kodak’s transformation, however, was uneven, as the firm’s photosensitive emulsion continued to be made according to far more empirical, secretive, and artisanal procedures, developed by a photographer without a high school degree. These artisanal processes coexisted alongside a highly standardized plant regime, and both were required to make celluloid film. This history demonstrates one way in which broad cultural transformations of the early twentieth century were closely tied to material and practical transformations within industrial firms.

Drawing from the literature strands of philanthropy, business, and history, this work explores the business, prosocial, and political activities of a prominent family in the Scotch whisky industry, with specific emphasis on two brothers’ philanthropy and its impact on a place—the city of Perth, Scotland. In our analysis, we tell the story of the second-generation owners of Dewar’s Scotch whisky company, brothers John Alexander and Tommy Dewar, and their journey of prosocial place-based service and giving. Consistent throughout are the themes of global success, family, local and national networks, and regional embeddedness, alongside the role of formal and informal giving. We offer an analysis of the prosocial activities that represent unexplored dimensions of business success, placing them in both spatial and temporal contexts. Within this is the story of a multigenerational family business’s international growth and success.

This article examines the role of state-owned firms in economic growth. While some scholars denigrate state firms, most analysts of East Asian development have noted their importance. To date, however, little work has been done on how state firms operate and how they have actually contributed to industrial development and economic growth. Looking closely at postwar Taiwan as a newly industrializing country and the case of Taiwan Machinery Manufacturing Corporation (TMMC), this article argues that state enterprises resolved coordination failures and provided manufacturing capacity to infant industries. Drawing on company archives and state records, I argue that TMMC helped drive growth through the provision of manufacturing machinery, equipment, parts, repairs, and upgrading. By supplying firms with the necessary technology and materials to modernize production and be competitive on the global market, I show how TMMC helped facilitate Taiwan’s economic miracle.

Exogenous shocks play a crucial role in cluster evolution and change. Yet the mechanisms and processes driving these changes have been relatively underexplored. Furthermore, cluster change studies have focused more on cooperative dynamics. The conflict dynamics in a cluster have received somewhat less attention. Therefore, the present study examines the impact of the exogenous shock on conflicts in a cluster. The Howrah foundry cluster in India constitutes the empirical context of this study. Our findings point to group-level conflict and fragmentation as crucial mechanisms of cluster change. The study further explores the role of rival associations in cluster governance. It shows that rival associations can lead to equitable distribution of opportunities in the cluster. The study also contributes to Indian business history literature. It sheds light on the growth dynamics of small-scale industries and indigenous entrepreneurship in the Howrah district of India. It further brings attention to relatively underexplored data sources in Indian business history.

Because nuclear power development entails massive initial investments in power plants, along with institutional innovations in regulation, law, and basic physical infrastructure, there are strong grounds to support the pervasiveness of the central state in the industry. Furthermore, considering the scale economies in reactor installation, standardization in design, and enhanced learning by doing, little scope remains for the consideration of decentralized business interests. This article argues that competition, in the sense of rivalry between firms, can nonetheless be a driving force behind the nuclear industry. To illustrate the point, we draw a comparative, eventful history of two Iberian nations, Portugal and Spain: Portugal has failed several attempts to introduce nuclear power, while Spain has become one of the largest nuclear power nations in Europe. A fine-grained analysis of the circumstances surrounding the nuclear history of both countries is presented, highlighting the key variables of business history and the role of the central state and political actors in economic policy.

The change in brand from British Railways to British Rail (BR) marked an important moment in the history of Britain’s railway. Running alongside BR’s modernization was a wider process of “professionalization” within the field of marketing. This paper explores how the wider professionalization of marketing impacted BR’s own marketing practices, showing that after 1965 BR opened its doors to new methods, means, and perhaps most importantly, specialists from outside the railway industry. Such marketing efforts helped to frame the railway in terms of individual travelers’ specific economic needs: by 1968 it had effectively segmented its passengers into demographic audiences, and by 1975, BR had a much better understanding of its markets. These individual economies were often highly gendered and saw only mixed success, but ultimately demonstrated an application of research, advertising, and promotion.

This article examines the role of the mass media in driving anticartel debates during a coal crisis in Germany in 1900. Threatening the fuel supplies of millions of people, the nationwide energy shortage marked the beginning of the anticartel movement, adding a decisive thrust to antimonopoly sentiment toward the cartelized Ruhr coal industry. While hitherto overlooked, this symbolic chapter of German antimonopoly history was profoundly shaped by daily newspapers, a medium that revolutionized public communication during this period. By cross-referencing newspaper articles with records of the coal industry, this paper investigates how newspapers raised public concern for the fuel shortage and thereby forged narratives blaming the coal industrialists as well as how the coal producers responded to the ever-intensifying public scrutiny. As such, this study would serve to identify the mass media as a key determinant in the broader history of cartels and cartel politics in the twentieth century.

Recently, women’s presence on top boards of directors has significantly increased, challenging the long standing of male-led corporate elites. In light of the still-developing literature, this article provides a century-long examination of women’s entry into the Spanish corporate elite, offering several original contributions. In addition to its pioneering input into the country’s historiography, the work uses a holistic model to introduce a comparative European approach. Moreover, it empirically examines the significant yet previously unexplored impact of elite training institutions on the advancement of female directors as well as their arrival through a national holding company and their presence in leading publicly traded companies. Findings showed four distinct stages in their trajectory: discriminatory exclusion, during the first third of the twentieth century; exceptional inclusion, with early positions in their family-owned firms; gradual incorporation, with increased political representation and expanded academic access in the latter decades of the last century; and promotion, supported by twenty-first-century political strategies, while still revealing the handicap of women’s delayed entry into the corporate network.

This paper examines the population of corporate directors of Britain at the turn of the twentieth century. Over the period 1881-1911 the corporate form became the most common mode of business organisation for large businesses. As their number increased, the population of directors expanded and reflected an increasingly diversified corporate landscape. Based on a large-scale dataset, this paper analyses the characteristics and networks of this wider population of directors. The study goes beyond previous work, which has mainly focused on elite directors or prominent companies, and shows three key findings. First, the population of directors was very connected into a large network, complete isolation from this network was rare. Second, over 1881-1911 director interlocks with banks became less important for most sectors, while interlocks with other financial institutions such as trusts became increasingly important. Insurance companies stood out as the most connected sector spanning smaller local companies and larger international ones. Third, during the period studied there was a shift from director clusters that were mainly based on proximity, to those that were connected through industries.

Investment banks collaborated with health care entrepreneurs and managers in the 1990s to add a costly layer of investor-owned corporations to the US medical delivery system. In capitalizing and consolidating physician practices, publicly traded Physician Practice Management Companies (PPMCs) incorporated elements of the broader capitalist economy. Companies such as PhyCor, MedPartners, and FPA Medical Management turned to the equity and debt markets to generate shareholder profits and capital for acquisitions. Contemporary theories of financial economics reinforced their activities. PPMCs collapsed after shareholder lawsuits accused them of reporting false figures to the SEC and banks withdrew their credit. Physicians were both accomplices and victims in the process that made the medical delivery system less equitable, less effective, and more expensive. Although this experiment in medical capitalism failed, it widened the door for Wall Street to build new ways to profit from health care.

Turn-of-the-century America witnessed many forgotten risk-making experiments that probed the limits of insurability by stepping beyond the familiar fields of life, fire, and marine insurance. One attempted to underwrite firms’ lost profits during strikes.

The ensuing debates on strike insurance’s practicability revealed scientistic expectations of never-ending actuarial progress that united an otherwise-divided business community. Yet attempting to realize strike insurance quickly meant grappling with the limits of insurability. Labor strife’s fuzzy causality involving human agency forestalled the homogenous classification that underlay actuaries’ averaging. Thus, strike underwriters sidestepped actuarial ratemaking to offer uniform premiums to those deemed acceptable risks. This solution not only left them susceptible to adverse selection and moral hazard but also highlighted the limits of insurers’ ability to transform uncertainty into commoditized risk, more broadly.

Recognizing these limits has important historiographical implications. Based largely on studies of life insurance—the gold standard of insurability—the rise of financial risk management has claimed a central place in the history of American capitalism. This literature thus threatens to obscure the ongoing significance of unclassifiable, unquantifiable uncertainty. Uncovering forgotten risk-making projects like attempts to establish strike insurance, where Americans grappled with the limits of insurability, is thus a crucial corrective.