This article examines perceptions and practices of habitual usury, a crimeconsisting of lending above the legal rate of interest on multiple occasions, inearly nineteenth-century France using descriptions of usury trials found in thepopular legal periodical the Gazette des Tribunaux. Followingthe French Revolution, French law legitimized lending at interest in principle,but punished ‘habitual usurers’ who ‘made aprofession’ from lending above the legal limit. The decades that followedwitnessed striking growth in banking, joint-stock companies and other financialinstitutions. Highlighting the connections between cultural constructions of theusurer and the actual processes deemed usurious, this article seeks tounderstand a paradox: that usury was deemed omnipresent in French society yet itwas rarely prosecuted. By examining how habitual usury was defined andprosecuted in French courtrooms, this article shows how habitual usurers bothvalidated and undermined stereotypical notions of predatory lending behaviorfound in popular culture of the time. Habitual usury trials also reveal theactual practices that allowed those excluded from formal financial networks toparticipate in the growth of capitalist relations. This article argues that thenineteenth-century obsession with the usurer can be explained by the crucialrole played by usurious practices in the credit economy of the period. As such,prosecution of usury tended to focus on the character of the usury rather thanthe actual practice of illegal lending. This article suggests that byoccasionally prosecuting particularly egregious ‘immoral’moneylenders, the legal system and journals like the Gazette desTribunaux worked to keep credit accessible to the‘underbanked’.

Drawing on corporate materials from the Banque de France, this article reveals a fact that is rarely raised in the study of foreign investment in France: among American investment in France, there are many cases in which French companies took the initiative in seeking American investment. Not all French companies were hostile to U.S. enterprises, even during the upsurge of French anti-Americanism, and the French Fifth Republic's restrictive policies toward American investment were not as rigorous as they might have appeared. Their major objective was to increase French competitiveness.

British electrical manufacturing provides important insights into international business history and demonstrates the key role of cross-border networks and agreements in its emergence. This article analyzes the factors that shaped phases in the industry's development and international operations. In doing so, the article reappraises electrical manufacturing's early decades in Britain; it shows how a changing political landscape transformed the strategies and ownership of firms, and reevaluates the industry's restructuring during World War I and its immediate aftermath. Further, the article questions accounts of British electrical manufacturing's failure in the 1920s and discusses the return to strategies of cross-border networks and agreements. Finally, it considers the lessons of British electrical manufacturing's emergence and subsequent consolidation, weighing the influences of firm-level, national, and international factors.

We examine a classic “wheel of retailing” episode: the abandonment of the five-and-dime pricing formula by American variety chains. The variety chains switched from a conventional product lifecycle, focusing on cost reduction through standardization, to a reverse path up the “service cost–unit value” continuum. We show that, rather than reflecting deteriorating managerial acumen, this shift was a response to the continued imperative for growth following retail format saturation. Firm-specific (rather than format-specific) competitive advantages were too weak for any chain to be confident it could win a within-format price war, making interformat competition through raising price points more attractive.

By now many of you have heard about, considered reading (if not deterred by its 762-page girth), and even dipped into Robert Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth. This tome well deserves the attention that it has received for addressing a burning issue today: economic stagnation and its origins. Taking the long view with both summary statistics of trends in growth between 1870 and the present, but also with an amazing variety of graphs and charts detailing patterns of growth in a wide variety of industries, Gordon chronicles the impact of the second and third industrializations. His oft-repeated argument is simple, that growth was revolutionary in the history of humanity in the century after 1870, resulting from the effects of the second industrialization (launched by electricity and the internal combustion engine especially), and raising living standards in profound but unrepeatable ways. Though he finds the 1920s to 1970 to be most dramatic in growth rates (especially resulting from technology and innovation measured by total factor productivity [TFP]—accounting for growth outside resource inputs), after 1970 that productivity was barely a third of the previous century despite the digitalization of the third industrialization, which contributes only 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP). This lag is especially evident since 2004 with no reasonable prospects for reversal, and the decline in the rate of growth has been accompanied by increasing income inequality with demographic lags and other “headwinds” further threatening growth. The argument is predominately based on technological change, though Gordon recognizes the role of government and even unions (in raising wages) and less often business innovation in advancing growth. Much of the book's reception has been shaped by economists and economic historians addressing this bold claim, and it has been compared with Thomas Piketty's even more ambitious work on the trend toward inequality.

Rogue trading has been a persistent feature of international financial markets over the past thirty years, but there is remarkably little historical treatment of this phenomenon. To begin to fill this gap, evidence from company and official archives is used to expose the anatomy of a rogue trading scandal at Lloyds Bank International in 1974. The rush to internationalize, the conflict between rules and norms, and the failure of internal and external checks all contributed to the largest single loss of any British bank to that time. The analysis highlights the dangers of inconsistent norms and rules even when personal financial gain is not the main motive for fraud, and shows the important links between operational and market risk. This scandal had an important role in alerting the Bank of England and U.K. Treasury to gaps in prudential supervision at the end of the Bretton Woods pegged exchange-rate system.