The antimonopoly critique of big business that flourished in the United States during the 1880s is a neglected chapter in the history of American reform. In this essay, a revised version of Richard R. John's 2011 Business History Conference presidential address, John shows how this critique found expression in a gallery of influential cartoons that ran in the New York City–based satirical magazines Puck and Judge. Among the topics that the cartoonists featured was the manipulation of the nation's financial markets by financier Jay Gould.

This essay examines the implications of rapid technological and economic change, or what economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” for the urban environment. Taking the Chicago River Harbor as a case study, it argues that industrial capitalism was marked by fundamental spatial and environmental contradictions that resulted in the frequent destruction and reinvention of urban landscapes. The essay shows how transformations in the Great Lakes shipping industry and the rise of the steel industry rendered Chicago River Harbor infrastructure obsolete. That obsolescence, in turn, sparked a public debate over whether the port should be retrofitted or if the river should be harnessed for different uses. So many stakeholders—streetcar companies, commuters, City Beautiful advocates, and sanitary engineers—had conflicting ideas about the use of the river that it was practically impossible to retrofit the port. The resulting decline of industrial freight traffic on the Chicago River enabled urban planner Daniel Burnham to reinvent the riverfront as a site of leisure and consumption.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, international observers praised the stability of Canada's banks. When financial institutions in the United States and the United Kingdom collapsed, Canada did not experience any bank failures. The World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report rated Canada's banking system as the most sound in the world. Historically, bank failures have been quite rare in Canada. Some authors argue that the stabilizing features of Canada's financial system were established in the first five years after the creation of the Canadian nation-state in 1867. This paper will examine the making of the Canadian banking law in 1871, an event widely regarded as a crucial turning point in Canadian financial history.

In December 1890, when Samuel Iseman stopped in Sumter, South Carolina, he hoped to turn his luck around. The traveling grocery salesman's trip so far had not gone well. Rain had delayed his train by two hours. When Iseman finally arrived, he had time to “drum” up business with only one retailer before drying off and retiring for the evening. The next day was no better; his expense money was dangerously low. He dunned two area merchants for payment on their accounts, eager to refill his coffers, but received only the runaround for his efforts. He checked in on groceryman (and postmaster) Moses W. Harrell in nearby Timmonsville, who made good his account, with one exception. The grocer took issue with a recent delivery of hams that had come from Iseman's Charleston wholesale fi rm, 120 miles south. Harrell complained to Iseman that the hams were of poor quality and that he had sold only two or three. Harrell asked for a refund. The traveling man felt badly that the grocer had taken the meat because Iseman had talked them up. When the hams failed to satisfy, both the salesman's word and the confidence he had earned from Harrell were on the line.

Labor Makes the News examines newspaper coverage of organized labor during the burst of union activity that began in the early 1930s. For activists and sympathizers, it was an article of faith that newspapers were deliberately unfair. However, publishers and their employees responded to the labor movement with great diversity, in part because publishers recognized that many readers were union members. For reporters, covering labor tested the boundary between personal and political interests and the professional ideal of neutrality on news pages. While publicly condemning the press, labor officials used newspapers to establish their legitimacy and wage war against enemies. Examining the treatment of organized labor provides a window for viewing the interplay among the sociopolitical, economic, and occupational goals of the publisher, the editorial worker, and the labor leader.

Why did subcontracting remain, well until the end of the nineteenth century, a viable way to organize metropolitan manufacturing? This article addresses historically and theoretically the reasons for the permanence of subcontracting as a viable alternative to centralized forms of production in London. It also questions the literature that equates the decline of subcontracting with the rise of sweating and argues for a reinterpretation of traditional explanations that saw the “sweater” as a central figure in the “degeneration” of the metropolitan productive system. The article concludes by proposing a reinterpretation of the “decline of subcontracting” and argues that the logic of flexibility of subcontracting was challenged by the increasing power of London wholesalers and retailers and the demands of fin-de-siècle mass consumption.

Firms use a variety of strategies to limit competition that would otherwise erode profits. Firms innovate, creating new technologies, new markets, and new firms. Innovations allow them to distinguish their products or lower their costs and thus maintain profits. Their ability to innovate depends on the existence of social institutions that allow them to amass the resources—labor, capital, and information—necessary to compete successfully. Firms also maintain profits by manipulating the political process to maintain preferred access to markets, technology and resources. Finally, firms take actions to limit competition directly. Waves of consolidation, justified by an assumption of the inevitability of increasing firm size, have limited competition and entrepreneurship. Cartels and other forms of collusion, sometimes thought to have disappeared from US markets after the adoption of the Sherman Antitrust Act in 1890, are still active in a wide variety of national and international markets.

Nowadays, brands are inescapable. Economists and marketing experts trace this pervasive presence back to the 1980s when brands and branding seemed to promise new, crucial assets for both producers and consumers. Of course, brands existed much earlier, and although some authors claim that “brands are as old as known civilization,” most researchers accept that they burgeoned with the coming of large consumer-goods–oriented factories in the 1870s, generating the “first golden era for the modern brand mark” in the 1890s. The recent success of brands has stimulated historians' attention to product variety, advertisements, brand management, firms' and products' reputations, consumer loyalty, the significance of brands, and much more.

“Ensuring America's Health” demonstrates how public and private power intermingled to embed a specific organizational model—the insurance company model—into the health care system. The dissertation draws on government documents, trade association papers, company archives, and interviews with policymakers, insurance industry leaders, and physicians. In addition to exploring health care politics, it presents a detailed study of major trade associations and ground-level organizations, such as individual insurance companies and physician offices. This history reveals the degree to which policy debates and private sector organization have informed one another; exposes the factors driving US health care costs; and details the origins of the system's pseudo-corporate structure, which places insurance companies in a supervisory role over physicians and hospitals.

The relative importance of financial services in national economies varied over the course of the twentieth century. Rajan and Zingales note that “by most measures, countries were more financially developed in 1913 than in 1980 and only recently have they surpassed their 1913 levels” and that “indicators of financial development fell in all countries after 1929, reaching their nadir around 1980. Since then has been a revival of financial markets.” This revival of financial markets over the last thirty years has led to the study of “financialization” that is variously defined with differing uses, but here is understood as “the growing importance of financial markets as a source of profits in the economy.”

On the basis of articles in contemporary periodicals, literature, and company archives, this article explores the views of entrepreneurs and society about what constitutes the responsibility of entrepreneurs. From the mid-nineteenth century, we can trace discussions about how entrepreneurs should behave in their own company and toward society, but these ideas were far from constant over time. The changing views on the social responsibilities of entrepreneurs give us therefore important information about changes in the national business system. Though focused on the Dutch entrepreneurs in their relationship to Dutch society, the article includes the influence of ideas from abroad. International management literature abounded in the Netherlands, and multinational companies often picked up ideas from other countries. How companies and entrepreneurs defined their responsibilities depended to a large extent on the criticisms launched by the outside world. Entrepreneurs and company managers responded to concerns in the society of which they formed part, and the progressive ones among them, the true leaders, searched for ways of reconciling the requirements of their business with the demands of the society.

Accounting for Taste examines the history of the US Food and Drug Administration's regulation of markets through labels as a form of public–private infrastructure, built through the ceaseless work (and antagonisms) of public regulators, the food industry, and expert advisors. From public hearings on setting “standards of identity” for foods to rule making on informative labels like the Nutrition Facts panel, it links a narrow history of institutional change in food regulation to broader cultural anxieties of twentieth-century America, arguing that the recurrence to informative labels as a political solution reflects a transformation in not only scientific understandings of dietary risk but also cultural understandings about the responsibility of consumers. In describing this “informational turn” in food politics, the dissertation foregrounds the important role of intermediaries, specifically consumer and health experts, and intermediate spaces, such as labels, in the framing of political debates about the production and consumption of everyday goods.

In the early twentieth century, progressive employers tried to turn recalcitrant workers into cooperative partners with a menu of corporate welfare programs. One of those employers, Henry A. Dix, took a leap that few contemplated. In 1922 he announced a plan to give his profitable $1 million business to his employees. Dix became famous as “the man who gave his business to his employees.” His ownership transfer scheme sought to make the welfare of the workforce the raison d'etre of a modern shareholder-owned corporation. It raised the possibility of building a capitalist society quite different from the one that emerged in the twentieth century. This paper connects the Dix plan to an understudied employer-based movement for industrial democracy and examines cultural, gender, and class dimensions of the Dix transfer from conception through the company's demise decades later.

In this article, the process leading to decriminalization of pornography in Sweden in 1971 is analyzed. The interplay between the structural institutional level and company behavior is stressed, with an emphasis on business strategies. The article shows that the division between hard-core and soft-core pornographic magazines in Sweden was quite different than the development in the United Kingdom and the United States. It also shows how the business strategies used by hard-core pornographers challenged the obscenity legislation and regulation of national distribution, making them obsolete. Even though there was fierce competition between the pornography companies, producers formed joint alternative distribution channels crucial to the survival of the industry.

This article is concerned with business strategies of political risk management during the twentieth century. It focuses especially on Beiersdorf, a pharmaceutical and skin care company in Germany. During World War I, the expropriation of its brands and trademarks revealed its vulnerability to political risk. Following the advent of the Nazi regime in 1933, the largely Jewish owned and managed company faced a uniquely challenging combination of home and host country political risk. This article reviews the company's responses to these adverse circumstances, challenging the prevailing literature that interprets so-called “cloaking” activities as one element of businesses' cooperation with the Nazis. We also depart from the previous literature in assessing the outcomes of the company's strategies after 1945 and examine the challenges and costs faced by the company in recovering the ownership of its brands. While the management of distance became much easier over the course of the twentieth century because of communications improvements, this article shows that the management of governments and political risk grew sharply.

Historians have become increasingly aware of how religion dovetailed with businessmen's goals of promoting free-enterprise ideologies and creating an anti-statist and anti-union political culture. But business expected more from religion; many employers believed that emphasizing spirituality could help them win community support and worker loyalty and avoid unions. When the electrical manufacturing industry began to move South after World War II, key employers had already witnessed the role that religion played in helping defeat the CIO's Southern Organizing Campaign. However, they balked at borrowing the overtly racist and reactionary evangelicalism that southern employers had effectively used. Instead, they looked for a more moderate religious model that would blend with their growing interest in human relations. They found it in Reverend George Heaton, an ordained Southern Baptist minister who had begun counseling employers during the 1930s. Heaton emphasized the sacred imperative driving good human relations and rejected the “fetish” of collective bargaining that he believed robbed individual freedom and the personal relationships that created harmonious workplace communities. As GE, Westinghouse, Magnavox, and Singer moved to the South, they all hired Heaton to be “minister” to their employees. This strategy had its limits, however, as this article will demonstrate using case studies of organizing drives in Rome, Georgia, and Greeneville, Tennessee. Nevertheless, Heaton was an important and understudied bridge between earlier paternalistic uses of religion and more modern Christian human relations.

This article analyzes the structure of the Italian corporate network in the decade that followed the end of the “Golden Age” (1972–83), when the transition from the technological trajectory of the second to that of the third industrial revolution began. The article is based on a large dataset, Imita.db, which contains data on more than thirty-eight thousand Italian joint-stock companies and about three hundred thousand directors, and uses both network analysis and a prosopographic approach. The main result is that the interval considered was marked by a sharp decrease in the degree of cohesion of the Italian corporate network. In 1972, the system was very cohesive and state-owned enterprises were well represented within the most central firms. In 1983, the cohesion of the system had sharply diminished; state-owned enterprises had disappeared from the center and a new private center, hinged on Mediobanca, the only merchant bank operating in the country, had emerged.

The dissertation offers a new perspective on the transformation American capitalism in the late nineteenth century, with an emphasis on the urban and political dimensions of that momentous process. With Boston as a focal point, it examines the consolidation of a North American market by looking at the conflict between two groups of businessmen: the city's elite business class, led by merchants, bankers, and financiers, who sought to prioritize the imperatives of an interconnected continental economy, and a lower-middle-class coalition of shopkeepers, small manufacturers, and skilled workers, who espoused robust metropolitan development based on an expanded public sector and the proliferation of proprietary businesses. The dissertation explores the rival political economic visions of the two groups and their clashes in urban politics. It analyzes the battles they waged over fundamental policy questions such as municipal finance, tax reform, metropolitan integration, and the uses of urban space, interpreting them as competing political efforts to define the contours of the modern American economy.

Cinemagoing in the Netherlands during the 1930s appears to have been much less intense than in the English-speaking world. To support this assertion we examine film attendance and diffusion in the Dutch market by recourse to a new large dataset, and contrast it with observations drawn from recent research on the Anglo-Saxon countries (United States, United Kingdom, and Australia). In setting down the economic principles behind the organisation of the film industry that best describe the Anglo-Saxon model, we show how the Dutch experience differed in scale, but not in type. To investigate the reasons for this, we examine the idea that film consumption in the Netherlands was constrained through the operation of informal institutional pressures. In particular, we investigate the influence that the vertical stratification of Dutch society into distinct religious and ideological strands may have had on the filmgoing appetites of the Dutch people. A further investigation looks at the combination of exhibitors and distributors into a single industry cartel and its impact upon prices and cinema building. The paper concludes that a complex mixture of cultural, economic, institutional, and social factors were at play, causing the Dutch people to be an outlier as far as film provision and consumption was concerned.