In this article we use put-call parity to show that ambiguity about ownership played a role in medieval businessmen's efforts to circumvent the Catholic Church's usury restrictions. That ambiguity created fertile ground for a financial innovation, the triple contract, that allowed some merchants to accomplish a kind of regulatory arbitrage. We also show that medieval clerics and merchants appear to have had at least an intuitive grasp of put-call parity, and that this insight shaped the Catholic Church's approach to medieval business contracts, and usury, nearly five centuries before put-call parity was described in the scholarly literature.

More than forty years ago (in the autumn of 1974), Business History Review had a special issue on multinational enterprise (MNE). With two exceptions, the authors in this new special issue were not yet born or were toddlers when that issue was published. Whereas in 1974 relatively few individuals were writing on topics directly related to the history of multinational enterprise, in 2015 numerous authors are considering subjects that fall under this rubric. Still, by the mid-1970s the study of the history of multinationals was not virgin territory. Glenn Porter, then editor of Business History Review, wrote in a preface to the 1974 issue, “Most of the contributions here underscore the deep historical roots of multinational business and point to the importance of an awareness of the past in understanding the present.”

Barry Eichengreen's new book Hall of Mirrors is a detailed, excellent, and somewhat pessimistic comparison of the two most serious financial crises ever—their causes, development, and consequences. Readers well versed in the comprehensive literature on the Great Depression and the Great Recession in the United States and Europe will not find much information in Hall of Mirrors that is completely new, but most others will. What is new is the comparative approach: the detailed and analytically successful search for similarities and differences between the Great Depression and the Great Recession.

Headquartered in the United States, the Singer Sewing Machine Co. did business all around the world in the early twentieth century. It regularly encountered wars, economic nationalism, and revolutions; in response, it normally created subsidiaries or gave in to expropriation. After the revolution in Mexico (1910–1920), Singer's marketing organization maintained normal operations and even prospered. The company succeeded, in part, by constantly associating the sewing machine with the idea of “modern” womanhood in Revolutionary Mexico. By revealing Singer's marketing strategies and focusing on gender, this article shows that multinational corporations and Latin American governments were not always at odds and could sometimes forge a profitable relationship.