This article examines in detail how John Maynard Keynes approached investing in the U.S. stock market on behalf of his Cambridge College after the 1929 Wall Street Crash. We exploit the considerable archival material documenting his portfolio holdings, his correspondence with investment advisors, and his two visits to the United States in the 1930s. While he displayed an enthusiasm for investing in common stocks, he was equally attracted to preferred stocks. His U.S. stock picks reflected his detailed analysis of company fundamentals and a pronounced value approach. Already in this period, therefore, it is possible to see the origins of some of the investment techniques adopted by professional investors in the latter half of the twentieth century.

The title of this edited volume is slightly misleading, as its various contributions explore the potential for more historical analysis in organization studies rather than addressing issues associated with time and organizing. Hopefully this will not distract from the important achievement of this volume—important especially for business historians—in further expanding and integrating business history into management and organization studies. The various contributions, elegantly tied together by R. Daniel Wadhwani and Marcelo Bucheli in their substantial introduction (which, by the way, presents a significant contribution in its own right), opens up new sets of questions, especially in terms of future methodological and theoretical developments in the field. This book also reflects the changing institutional location of business historians, who increasingly make their careers in business schools rather than history departments, especially in Europe, reopening old questions of history as a social science. There have been several calls to teach more history in business education, such as the Carnegie Foundation report (2011) that found undergraduate business education too narrow in focus and highlighted the need to integrate more liberal arts teaching into the curriculum. However, in the contemporary research-driven environment of business and management schools, historical understanding is unlikely to permeate the curriculum if historical analysis cannot first deliver significant theoretical contributions. This is the central theme around which this edited volume revolves, and it marks a milestone in this ongoing debate. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should add that even though I did not contribute to this volume, I have coauthored with several of its contributors and view this book as central to my current research practice.)

This study of the Swedish-based mining company Boliden examines the proactive strategies it adopted to deal with the potential for severe environmental problems associated with the establishment of its large copper smelter in the 1920s. The article demonstrates how international networks, personal experience, and knowledge transfer from the U.S. copper industry help to explain the importance given to environmental issues by the Swedish industrialists. It is suggested that the main explanation for the proactive stance of the Swedish managers is that they perceived excessive pollution as working against creating a profitable and sustainable business. This case provides compelling evidence that firms pursuing an agenda focused on earning profits can still deliver environmental innovation and value to the local community, compatible with the concept of creating shared value.

I reconstitute the spending obligations and revenue sources of colonial New Jersey's provincial government for the years 1704 through 1775 from primary sources using forensic accounting techniques. I identify and analyze the methods for raising revenue to meet normal peacetime and emergency wartime expenses. I calculate the provincial tax burdens imposed on New Jersey's citizens. I identify how Britain interfered with New Jersey's fiscal structure. I estimate what the revenues and tax burdens would have been without this interference. New Jersey paid for war expenses by issuing bills of credit, spreading the tax burden of redeeming these bills into the future. New Jersey paid its yearly administrative costs with current property taxes and with current interest earnings from loaning paper money. In the absence of British interference and wars, New Jersey could have driven tax burdens to zero by using interest earnings to pay for all its provincial administrative costs.

The essay examines Spain’s colonial legacy in the long-run development of Spanish America. It surveys the fiscal and constitutional outcomes of independence and assesses the relative burden imposed by colonialism. Constitutional asymmetries between revenue collecting and spending agents constrained de facto governments’ power to tax. Inherent disparities embedded in the colonial fiscal system worsened with vaguely defined representation for subjects and territories and vexed their aggregation into a modern representative polity. Governments with limited fiscal capacity failed to deliver public goods and to distribute the costs and benefits of independence equitably. Growing indirect taxes, debt and money creation allowed them to transfer the fiscal burden to other constituents or future generations. Taxpayers became aware of the asymmetry between private contributions and public goods and hence favoured a low but regressive taxation. Comparisons with trajectories in the metropolis and the United States are offered to qualify this legacy.

This article examines the mortgage credit market of Peru during the guano era and analyses the effects of the creation of mortgage banks on the allocation of credit. It shows that mortgage banks served as interregional intermediaries and facilitated access to long-term credit for large estate owners. However, banks did not broaden access to credit. As private lenders, mortgage banks loaned largely to Lima’s merchants and renters and to hacendados from the main coastal valleys.