Welcome to Volume 25 of Enterprise and Society. In this first issue, we are delighted to present a new symposium on “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety,” built around a lead article of that name by Lindsay Schakenbach Regele. This challenging new essay is followed by three comments—“Concealing Martial Violence,” by Brittany Farr, “Capitalism Indivisible,” by Katie Moore, and “How to Define (or Not to Define) the New History of Capitalism,” by Sharon Murphy—with a final response from Lindsay. We want to thank Lindsay for initiating this challenging new symposium and the other three authors for their thought-provoking commentaries.
Aside from this symposium, this issue still manages to find room for eight full research articles that range from Rob Aitken’s consideration of discourses of risk in the globalization of life insurance to Simon Mollan’s meticulous dissection of a “Witch-Hunt in Washington.” In between, we have a strong cluster of articles focused on Asia. Yen Nie Yong explores how the Malaysian pewter company Royal Selangor crafted a postcolonial identity for itself. In “Banking on Women,” Jackie Wang reveals the history of the Shanghai Women’s Commercial and Savings Bank between 1924 and 1955, while Ghassan Moazzin details the origins of the Chinese electric lamp industry in nationalist lobbying through the 1920s and 1930s and Peter Gibson and Simon Ville explore the hidden early history of foreign multinationals in late nineteenth-century Shanghai. Elsewhere, Lewis Wade provides an enthralling account of female agency in maritime insurance in the French Atlantic world. Finally, in dialogue with an earlier publication, Margarita Serje’s “The Peruvian Amazon Co.: Credit and Debt in the Putumayo ‘Wild Rubber’ Business” (Vol. 22, No. 2), Stephen Walker applies a critical accounting lens to the same company and many of the same sources and events.
We are excited to get our twenty-fifth volume off to such a strong start and trust our readers will find much to enjoy in this issue.
