British general incorporation law granted companies an extraordinary degree of contractual freedom. It provided companies with a default set of articles of association, but incorporators were free to reject any or all of the provisions and write their own rules instead. We study the uses to which incorporators put this flexibility by examining the articles of association filed by three random samples of companies from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, as well as by a sample of companies whose securities traded publicly. Contrary to the literature, we find that most companies, regardless of size or whether their securities traded on the market, wrote articles that shifted power from shareholders to directors. We find, moreover, that there was little pressure from the government, shareholders, or the market to adopt more shareholder-friendly governance rules.

This article considers the international retailing activities of Tiffany of New York between 1837 and 1914. Using data from the company archive alongside other sources, the findings indicate that five factors were determinants of sustainable international retailing: a centralized organizational structure, a stable ownership structure, existing international engagement, a strong brand identity, and a relevant international retail format. Placing Tiffany's activities in its wider commercial and consumer context, the findings illustrate the organizational changes and asset combination required to support the development of early international retail operations. The article contributes to theoretical understanding of the dynamics of retail internationalization.

Someone could go a long way toward telling the story of my life through its magazines: the Highlights my parents gave me, determined that my small self should be as entertained and enlightened as possible; my grandparents’ neatly collected Readers’ Digests, which I eagerly read until learning my freshman year in college that they were hopelessly bourgeois; the New Yorkers I loved and displayed in my graduate student apartment, the Vanity Fairs I loved and hid under the bed. Magazines tell the story of who I was supposed to be and who I wanted to be. Or perhaps they don't; how much of what the magazines meant to me is visible in the historical record? I didn't purchase all that I read, after all, nor did I read all that I purchased. A magazine I loved one year might embarrass me the next, and then find its way back into favor, my subscription all the while remaining unchanged. Magazines, in short, are both perplexing and promising subjects of analysis, with the question of how they create communities of readers posing perhaps the most promising and perplexing question of all.

In 1861, the North and South went to war for the West. Although that statement may seem oversimplified and extreme, it goes to the heart of the matter: Southerners wanted to spread slavery into the new western territories, and Northerners had used their clout in the electoral college to elect Abraham Lincoln, whose party had committed itself to stopping the growth of the peculiar institution. The rest of that story is well known, but the same cannot be said for how the West shaped the war and how the war shaped the West.

The 1976/1977 crisis was the most severe in Spanish history, but the losses associated with the 2008 crisis are huge. This paper compares these two great banking crises and identifies the main parallels and differences between them. Is the current crisis as severe as that of 1976? What is the impact on the banking and financial sectors? We show that the 1976 crisis is being surpassed by the 2008 crisis in terms of the decline in GDP, industrial production and unemployment, and that these two events have had at least a similar impact in terms of output gap and output loss. Finally, the financial impact measured by different financial indicators confirms the greater severity of the 2008 crisis.

The early history of Silicon Valley is incomplete unless it is framed within the context of American foreign policy. The Federal Telegraph Company, the region's first major high-technology firm, received its first contract from the U.S. Navy in 1913. Its subsequent success relied not only on navy contracts but also on State Department support and access to Bureau of Standards technology. The company's contributions to America's military-industrial complex began a pattern that would fuel the region's development and growth for more than a half century.