This issue of Business History Review includes several articles that examine core themes of the journal, including the effects of globalization on business strategy and on business–government relations. Michael Aldous's examination of the nineteenth-century economy of Bengal considers the role of intermediaries, both in enabling British mercantile interests but also, in the decades afterward, in connecting global and local businesses. Carlo Edoardo Altamura and Juan Flores Zendejas analyze how the strategy of international banks was shaped by their home governments in the debt crisis of the early 1980s. Looking at a similar time period, post–World War II through the 1980s, Thomas Buckley examines how a study of multinational businesses helps to better understand the nature of bargaining models.
Articles in this issue also explore the impact of business and business strategy on the environment. Jenny Andersson's essay on Royal Dutch Shell's scenario planning efforts describes the way scenarios were used as political expressions to suggest imagined future worlds that, through innovation, would overcome the natural limits of oil production. Michael Eisler considers how California's lower emission mandates in the 1990s for the automobile industry challenged companies to develop strategies for battery production to meet these new standards.
This issue also includes a new section of the journal, called “Perspectives.” This section will welcome broad, wide-ranging essays by leading scholars, from a variety of disciplines, including not only business and economic history, but also cultural, gender, and social history, business administration, economics, geography, law, political science, sociology, and regional studies. The “Perspectives” essays, which will run occasionally but not in every issue, will be featured in a separate section of the journal that will follow our refereed research articles.
Finally, historian Richard Tedlow surveys biographies of legendary business leader Steve Jobs.
