Decarbonization has been identified as necessary to preventing catastrophic climate change, creating a dilemma for the global oil industry. This article examines the industry's reaction to this dilemma and focuses on its historical response to market and governmental regulatory pressure. The article argues that differing national climate policies provoked some oil companies to develop proactive decarbonization strategies. However, the continued growth of fossil fuel demand, the industry's vested interests, and the voluntary nature of climate governance have resulted in the industry taking very little meaningful action to achieve decarbonization.

This special issue is concerned with new approaches in business history to exploration of the role of business in both creating and addressing the mounting environmental crisis that has become apparent over the last half century. Two decades have passed since Business History Review published a pioneering special issue on business and the natural environment. The guest editors of that issue, Christine Rosen and Christopher Sellers, called for an “ecocultural approach” to business history and noted that strikingly little attention had been given to the issue of business and the natural environment in the field.

The past decade has seen a resurgence of interest in understanding Indian business history. A number of business history books have been published in the academic and nonacademic press. Special issues on India have appeared in leading field journals, more management schools in India and outside are engaging with the field, internship and fellowship opportunities have been initiated, and business archives have sprung up. This article documents these recent trends, examines the emerging scholarship, and identifies gaps that need to be addressed in the future.

Adam Tooze's Crashed is arguably the first historical narrative of the financial crisis. It is an ambitious account of the crisis and its global economic, financial, political, and geopolitical causes and implications. Crashed is organized chronologically in four parts—the “Gathering Storm,” “The Global Crisis,” “Eurozone,” and “Aftershocks”—and focuses more on the macrolevel structures, processes, and decisions than on the microlevel and the people suffering from the crisis. Except, that is, in aggregate numbers and a few empathic comments such as this: “As house prices fell, equity dwindled, and the hardest hit slid into negative equity. Families scrambled to slash spending and pay down credit card and other short-term debt. The result was a smothering recession in consumer demand” (p. 143).

Before the Panic of 1907 the large New York City banks were able to maintain the call loan market's liquidity during panics, but the rise in outside lending by trust companies and interior banks in the decade leading up the panic weakened the influence of the large banks. Creating a reliable source of liquidity and reserves external to the financial market like a central bank became obvious after the panic. In the call loan market, like the REPO market in 2008, lack of information on the identity of lenders and volume of the market hindered attempts to stop panic-related depositor withdrawals. Our new estimates of who was participating in the call loan market reveal that it did not contract after 1907; while the trust companies became less important, the New York national banks and outside lenders more than made up the difference.

This article explores the process of the formalisation of the Swedish financial market, through an analysis of commercial bank lending in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The analysis shows that the incorporation of Swedish business around the turn of the century led to a shift from lending primarily backed by name security to an increased use of mortgage and shares as collateral – after the severe stock market crash in 1920/1 mortgage lending surpassed lending against shares as collateral. We interpret this change as an important part of the formalisation process of the financial system, as it standardised the valuation process and allowed creditors to exit on a secondary market. Our statistical testing points to increased financial wealth and liquidity represented by the broad money supply, plus population growth and urbanisation, as important forces behind this formalisation.