The articles in this issue of Business History Review concern main themes of the journal, including innovation and government-business relations. In “Related Investing: Family Networks, Gender, and Shareholding in Antebellum New England Corporations,” a study of the ownership structure of early Maine corporations, B. Zorina Khan shows how kinship ties drove all levels of investment—among men and women from both elite and ordinary families—by promoting the belief that “relational investing” mitigated risk. Teresa da Silva Lopes and Shin Tomita's article, “Trademarks as ‘Global Merchants of Skill’: The Dynamics of the Japanese Match Industry, 1860s–1930s,” analyzes how Japanese firms in the match industry successfully competed against larger, more integrated, firms through the manufacture and sale of low cost, low price, trademarked products.
In “The Rise and Fall of George Frederic Augustus II: The Central American, Caribbean, and Atlantic Life of a Miskitu King, 1805–1824,” Damian Clavel contributes to a growing literature on indigenous entrepreneurs. The article revisits, and reinterprets, conventional narratives of imperial transformation by exploring how an entrepreneurial ruler of the Miskitu people (in present-day Honduras and Nicaragua) cultivated commercial ties with Britain in an effort to gain financial advantages for his kingdom.
This issue's final two articles look at national and industrial strategies around two transformative technologies of the twentieth century. In “Plan Calcul: France's National Information Technology Ambition and Instrument of National Independence,” Laureen Kuo recounts France's failed attempt to counter American multinational corporations’ domination over Europe's information technology sector during the presidency of Charles de Gaulle. In “Why Do Unsuccessful Companies Survive? U.S. Airlines, Aircraft Leasing, and GE, 2000–2008,” authors Gishan Dissanaike, Ranadeva Jayasekera, and Geoff Meeks explore how GE's conglomerate business model allowed airlines to remain in business despite being consistently unprofitable.
This issue of BHR also includes a review essay by Naomi Lamoreaux on Jonathan Levy's Ages of American Capitalism: A History of the United States, which she finds to be “an impressive work of synthesis that everyone interested in American history should read.”
