This paper uses the case study of Gordon & Gotch, media import/exporters, to explore how the transnational sale of British media contributed to a common cultural identity within the British World. Gordon & Gotch, founded as a media import firm in Australia in 1853, opened a London branch in 1866 which became independently owned and operated in 1890. This paper argues that the London and Australasian firms of Gordon & Gotch played an important and understudied role in tying Australia to Britain through lines of business that benefitted men in Melbourne and London, creating an “imagined community” of British readers that spanned oceans. The paper also explores how the divergent strategies of the London and Australasian Gordon & Gotches in the wake of the Second World War help us to understand the timeline of Australia’s cultural disentanglement with Britain. As new political economies developed in Britain and Australia, the London firm was forced to pivot to a European or more generally “global” strategy, while the Australian firm refocused its energies to domestic and American media. The consequence for Australian consumers was a reduced presence of British media and a greater preponderance of American, Australian, and locally printed multinational media in Australia. The long history of the British and Antipodean Gordon & Gotches reveals the contingency of British media saturation in Australia and the value of business historical approaches to studying change in cultural markets.

This article explores the growth of abortion-related businesses in New York State that emerged to encourage Canadian women to travel across the border to access care. Referral agencies and clinics advertised their services, publicized their fees, and competed with each other. Canadian women living near the border were used to crossing to access goods and services not available in their home market. Their practice of traveling to New York for abortions was shaped by their experiences as consumers. The media used the language of commerce to explain this phenomenon, describing those involved in referral agencies as entrepreneurs and businessmen, highlighting the profits being made and evaluating the services being offered.

This article documents how business lobbying groups, corporate leaders, and even some members of the Nixon administration drew on futurist discourse and rhetoric to defeat the Burke-Hartke bill, proposed legislation that would have imposed new taxes on multinational corporations. For several years, self-described futurologists had reconceptualized multinational corporations as ideal institutions for securing world peace and, more broadly, meeting society’s needs, thereby taking over some of the government’s functions. These ideas allowed business interests to invoke a utopian vision of the multinational corporation while working toward the more concrete goal of building a global economy defined by free trade and fending off unwanted regulation.

This article examines the nationwide campaign by financial reformers in the 1910s to convince businesses across the United States to abandon established commercial credit practices and use trade acceptances—the quintessential “real bill”—in their stead. The creation of the Federal Reserve System (Fed) and the outbreak of World War I offered a powerful coalition of campaigners the opportunity to forcefully argue that by capitalizing open account credit, trade acceptances fostered good business practices and stabilized the banking and financial systems. These campaigners relied on trade associations to disseminate, and the federal government to legitimize, their message. While some firms obliged, many businesses and banks criticized the campaigners’ arguments, casting trade acceptances as a means of financial centralization and as being contrary to the American culture of credit. Trade acceptances did not supplant promissory notes or trade in the open market and were rarely used by banks to access Fed liquidity. Instead, their legacy lies in their adoption by finance companies in the hope of securing financing for the distribution and mass consumption of consumer durables.

The phonograph presented American presidential aspirants with an opportunity to surmount eighteenth-century campaigning standards and meet the challenges of an expanding democracy and electorate. Thomas Edison’s invention—with its corresponding records—arguably was the first mechanical media technology to find its way into political campaigning on a mass scale. By 1908, canned, recorded speeches were poised to become a marketable alternative to soliciting ballots in person while also facilitating a candidate’s direct engagement with voters, thus enabling contenders and media firms like Edison’s National Phonograph Company to curate personas that were sold both commercially and at the polls. As a result, the phonograph’s practical role allowed the public to hear candidates directly and in their own words, marking an important but underrecognized step forward in the democratization of access to information (and the concomitant risk of manipulation and distortion that came along with it) that one finds in today’s social media.

After the murder of George Floyd, businesses across the United States stepped up with pledges and commitments to lessen systematic racism, reflecting a commitment to corporate social responsibility (CSR). But are these actions really concerned with social uplift? Or a form of woke-washing? This was not the first time corporate America reacted to racial upheaval and violence. In this paper, the author examines the reaction of the Atlanta business community to the 1906 Atlanta Race Riot. At that time, Atlanta’s business elite effectively usurped municipal and state authority to manage the aftermath of the horrific events. They were determined to protect the reputation of Atlanta as progressive and a place of relative racial harmony. How do we consider their actions in the context of CSR and woke-washing? The businesses sought mainly to protect their economic future rather than truly uplifting society or improving racial relations. Still, their actions impacted Atlanta positively for many decades to come, leading to better outcomes during the Civil Rights era and beyond.

I argue that life insurance and imperial meaning making are deeply implicated in each other. As life insurance expanded internationally in the nineteenth century, and as insurers became advocates of White settlement, they grappled with what actuarial science meant in the context of their orientalist conceptions of colonial populations. In particular, actuaries were concerned with tropical markets and the racialized/exceptionalized differences they perceived in those markets. To address these tensions, insurers attempted two strategies: (1) incorporating tropical rates as additional premiums designed to cover the “extra mortality” of tropical markets; and (2) advocating for social practices of “sanitary progress” related to public health and sanitation. These practices, framed in orientalist terms, were not adopted in any smooth manner but in fumbling and meandering ways as insurers tried to understand what kinds of lives tropical settlers might be and how those lives might be priced. They eventually liberalized life insurance rates for White settlers in tropical settings, but insurers then confronted questions on how newly socialized “native” lives might be rendered calculable. This story of tropical exposure in globalizing actuarial discourse reinforces the ways in which race and racialized/exceptionalized differences were at the core of life insurance and the calculative devices it assembled between 1852 and 1947.

Miami Beach was the nation’s premier winter resort between the 1930s and the 1950s. The city attracted a diverse crowd of visitors, some interested in a peaceful respite from the frigid north, others drawn by the drinking, dancing, and musical entertainment offered by its many bars and nightclubs. As part of an elaborate effort to sustain the city’s lively symbiotic urban leisure-services economy, the Miami Beach City Council addressed three types of market failures: chaotic competition, interproducer conflicts, and monopolistic business practices. This article demonstrates how these practices expressed a coherent vernacular philosophy of regulated capitalism arising from the city’s identity as a collective economic enterprise.

The nineteenth-century growth of the London Stock Exchange and the development of the market for stocks and shares are familiar topics of study. This article provides an alternative perspective on them by decentering the London Stock Exchange and focusing instead on the activities of “outside stockbrokers”—those who operated outside the Stock Exchange and its rules. Often regarded as peripheral, these brokers were in fact instrumental in promoting investment and speculation to a mass market. The article examines their innovative methods, and seeks to explain why they were so successful, despite persistent—and sometimes justifiable—accusations of fraud. It suggests how perspectives from the history of consumer society provide fresh insights into the market for financial products. And it underlines the importance of looking outside formal markets by arguing that focusing on “fringe” markets can help scholars to rethink boundaries, relations, and practices in the history of capitalism.