Before banks rose to dominate credit markets, ordinary people raised credit themselves or through alternative intermediaries. However, obtaining a comprehensive overview of the size and functioning of the non-bank segments within the credit market has been a great challenge for historians. Notarial deeds are widely available, but typically shed light on the borrowing of relatively well-to-do members of society. Probate inventories and insolvency records do provide insight into the modest loans of ordinary people, but only haphazardly and not for the overall stock of loans. This article exploits an exogenous shock, the Discipline Act introduced in the Netherlands in 1856, which forced lenders to record all unredeemed loans they had provided to a particular group of borrowers: seafarers. The c.14,000 loans that were recorded, in combination with several additional sources, provide a unique insight into the overall size, composition and functioning of a particular segment of the non-bank credit market.

This article examines key barriers to business sustainability discussed at a multidisciplinary conference held at the Harvard Business School in 2018. Drawing on perspectives from both the historical and business literatures, speakers debated the historical success of and future opportunities for voluntary business actions to advance sustainability. Roadblocks include misaligned incentives, missing institutions, inertia of economic systems, and the concept of sustainability itself. Overcoming these roadblocks will require systematic interventions and alternative normative concepts.

In the late 1970s, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) unveiled the bubble policy as a central part of Jimmy Carter's plan to reform environmental regulations that many believed had grown too proscriptive and too costly for American industry. Since the EPA's formation, regulators had dictated method and means for reducing air pollution. The bubble returned the prerogative to business. But despite bipartisan support, the bubble never took off. Drawing on EPA records and interviews, this article shows how skeptical regulators intentionally made the bubble unwieldy, driving away businesses wary of uncertainty. Though Ronald Reagan's election seemed to lift the bubble's fortunes, his undiscerning assault on the administrative state ironically deflated the EPA's development of a viable alternative to the proscriptive model.

In 1989, Edgar Woolard began his tenure as chief executive of the chemical giant DuPont by calling for a new “corporate environmentalism.” DuPont has changed dramatically since then to become more environmentally sustainable, but the company still has a poor record in some areas. The sustainability push also had mixed financial consequences. Though eco-efficiencies saved DuPont billions of dollars, the effort to create more sustainable engines of corporate growth failed to meet Wall Street expectations. The DuPont story offers important insights into the difficulties of greening an established industrial enterprise.

This article focuses on chemical retailers Jack and Charles Colbert to, first, show the externalization processes linked to the greening of U.S. industry through stricter consumer and environmental protection regulations and, second, illustrate the limitations of nationally framed environmentalism targeting businesses in a global market. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Colberts traded chemicals that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had banned for use in the United States. They exported them legally to countries where the material was still a permitted commodity—primarily in the global South. Rare interview material illustrates how the exporters justified their unequal business deals by misappropriating the meaning of recycling.