The articles in this issue of Business History Review examine major themes of this journal, especially globalization, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Two articles, one by Marion Menzin and one by Hannah Knox Tucker, contribute to the journal’s recent focus on the global history of business, capitalism, and slavery, as featured in our summer 2023 special issue on that subject. Menzin’s article emphasizes the role of the demand for sugar in seventeenth-century New England in the history of the Caribbean sugar industry, which was based on enslaved labor. Tucker, in her article on intercolonial trading captains in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic, identifies an emergent “productivity ethos” that motivated captains to reduce the time their vessels spent in port and to turn to coerced forms of labor, including enslaved sailors.
Also, in this issue, Elisabetta Merlo and Valeria Pinchera compare the development of the French and Italian fashion industries in the mid-twentieth century, explaining the importance of trade associations and entrepreneurial activity to the emergence of the prêt-à-porter and ready-to-wear industries in each country. Finally, in his article, Michael Ng demonstrates how some Chinese businesses, in the early twentieth century, began to raise their own capital by offering savings deposits rather than relying on financial intermediaries, leading to regulatory problems.
The issue also contains a lengthy review essay by R. Bin Wong, who examines both volumes of The Cambridge Economic History of China. His review essay reflects on the state of scholarship on the economic history of China and the problem of connecting trends in pre-modern and modern economies.
