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Editors’ Note

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 October 2025

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Editors’ Note
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© 2025 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

The articles in this issue contribute to major themes of the journal, including innovation and entrepreneurship. Maki Umemura, who specializes in international management and business history at Cardiff University, analyzes the history of the life sciences business in the Cambridge–Boston area. Her article, “Translating Emergent Technologies into Novel Therapeutics,” shows how the area’s network of firms, universities, hospitals, and venture capitalists capitalized on innovations in cell and gene therapies and became a center for novel therapeutics. Michael Hödl, a scholar at the Department of Economic and Social History at the University of Vienna, uses a newly compiled database of all firms operating in Vienna between 1900 and 1936 to examine the introduction of the private limited liability company (PLLC). His article, “Examining the Impact of Legal Innovations: A Case Study of the Private Limited Liability Company in Vienna,” reveals that the PLLC quickly replaced other legal forms. Richard Harris, an urban historian at McMaster University, looks at the vibrant role private individuals played in the mortgage industry, primarily loaning funds to serve lower-income households. “The Peculiar, Diverse, and Vital Business of Personal Mortgages” shows how these lenders proliferated in parts of the US and Canada but were curbed owing to policies that spurred the rise of more professional mortgage markets. Finally, Vladimir Maltsev, at the University of Glasgow, contributes to literature on business and the environment by studying the long-term sustainability of the Nivkh people’s bear-hunting enterprise. See “The Nivkh People’s Sustainable Bear Hunting Enterprise, Seventeenth to Twentieth Centuries.” The issue also includes two review essays. Joseph Slaughter, a historian at Wesleyan, reviews Kati Curts’s new book, Assembling Religion: The Ford Motor Company and the Transformation of Religion in America. Harvard Business School’s Sophus Reinert reviews Peter Hayes’s Profits & Persecution: German Big Business in the Nazi Economy and the Holocaust.