The casinos came to town in May 1978 after state residents passed a referendum allowing them into Atlantic City in 1976. They arrived into a landscape of decay and depression. Atlantic City was a very bleak place to live in the 1970s, having never broken away from its summer resort economy. There was little economic hope or opportunity outside the three summer months and the city never recovered its status as a premiere ocean resort in the early twentieth century. The situation in Atlantic City was such that the city's primary hospital barely covered expenses and a new medical centre it opened on the ‘mainland’ barely survived its first year of operation in 1976. Atlantic City was also in the midst of a steep population decline that would lower its population by almost 50 per cent in twenty years, to about 41,000 in 1980 from over 60,000 in 1960.

By 1976, the famous Boardwalk had become a platform for observing the city's decay. Garbage and debris littered the city and the once glorious hotels were barely surviving. Boarding houses and blocks bereft of human activity greeted visitors, including the early casino visionaries. Amidst the crumbling city of the era, the nation's racial and class tensions played out as urban blacks from around the mid-Atlantic flowed into the city on summer weekend bus trips. This alarmed city leaders who were trying hard to make the city once again attractive to middle-class white visitors. Steel Pier owner George Hamid Sr, for example, sought to discourage black day-tripping ‘shoobies’ (they packed their necessaries in shoeboxes), by re-creating his uptown Steel Pier as a quasi-Disneyland with an aquarium, petting zoo, even an ice skating rink operable in the summer. After all, how many ‘shoobies’ were ice skaters?

Long-time resident Barbara Devlin recalled the slow-paced, summer-resort atmosphere of the pre-casino years after the resort's glory era in the early twentieth century:

The nickel industry traces its origins back to the 1820s. During the following decades consumption grew at a steady rate, albeit from a very low base. In the latter part of the nineteenth century nickel gained more industrial prominence as it was found that steel alloys containing nickel had superior qualities for armour, weapons and several types of electrical machinery.

In 1875 nickel mining commenced in the French colony New Caledonia and in the late 1880s around Sudbury in Ontario, Canada. For almost a century these two areas were the world's main sources for nickel ore. Older nickel producers, such as the numerous small Norwegian nickel works were mostly driven out of business. The leading nickel producers established a cartel in 1896. It proved very successful and came to dominate the nickel industry for more than seventy years.

The development of the industry and the market structure was examined in O. W. Main's classic book The Canadian Nickel Industry: A Study in Market Control and Public Policy from 1955. For several decades Main's book remained the sole academic analysis on the nickel industry. It was only in the 1990s that accomplished historians such as Gordon Boyce, Matt Bray and Angus Gilbert made further investigations into the oligopolistic nature of the nickel industry.

By 1914 the industry was dominated by three leading companies, the US-owned International Nickel Company (INCO), the British-owned Mond Nickel and the French Le Nickel.

Born in Budapest in 1905, William John Fellner was a colleague of Robert Triffin and like Triffin a mutual friend of John and Marina von Neumann. Marina von Neumann would later recommend Fellner to a seat on the US President's Council of Economic Advisers. Like Fritz Machlup, Fellner inherited a family business and in the same industry: paper. Like Machlup, he was a cartel director. Both Machlup and Fellner were Jewish (although Fellner was raised as a Lutheran). The archives reveal that the Machlup's firm in Austria had been confiscated by the Nazis. The Nazis would reach out to Machlup while he was in Buffalo, his first US assignment, requiring a full accounting of his assets. There is nothing in the published work of Machlup or Fellner to suggest how they felt about this period. Nevertheless, the archives are full of letters Machlup sent to get family members and friends out of Austria. The Fellner letters at the Hoover Institution (other than the letters exchanged with Machlup and Triffin) have not been foldered, so it remains to be seen whether he found himself playing a similar role for family and friends in Hungary.

Fellner earned his doctorate in economics from the University of Berlin in 1929, joined the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley in 1939, and became a US citizen in 1944. Fellner left Berkeley for Yale University, becoming a professor of economics there in 1952 and retiring in 1973. In 1970, he began his association with the American Enterprise Institute as an Adjunct Scholar.

This chapter analyses the impacts of Falconbridge's acquisition of the Kristiansand refinery. What were the effects of foreign ownership? We will shortly review how production developed. The main questions however are how the subsidiary was organized and run, its autonomy and how Falconbridge managed its relationship to its host country. These questions are linked. As observed by Geoffrey Jones, the success of multinationals often rest their ability to integrate with local business and political networks and to tap local networks of innovation. This chapter addresses five main issues which were important at Falconbridge's affiliate in Kristiansand: knowledge development and innovation, labour relations, taxation, environmental considerations and supply of hydropower.

The discussion of these topics relates to a larger debate on how multinational companies conduct their business when going abroad. To what extent do these companies follow their national styles of doing business and to what extent do they adapt to host country circumstances? To what extent do the subsidiaries have any independent room to manoeuvre? As mentioned in the introduction, these issues have been discussed by several authors, including Edwards, Perlmutter, Storli, Whitley and Wubs. However, with the exception of Storli, none of them have examined how this worked out in the interwar era. As multinationals had to cope with increasing economic nationalism and prejudice against foreign ownership it probably became ever more important to adapt to host countries.

This book is about attempts in Brazil to use its endowment of minerals as a tool for creating wealth and the evolution of the economic role of the Brazilian state. These topics are surprisingly intertwined. The focus is on political economy, rather than the extraction of minerals from the ground, because political economy impeded extraction. Substantive change in the political-economic institutions related to mineral extraction initiated Brazil's emergence as an industrial economy and as a global powerhouse in supplying iron ore in the second half of the twentieth century. These outcomes occurred nearly four and a half centuries after the first attempts of Europeans to realize wealth from the land's minerals. As one result of this process, the Brazilian state became the nation's largest industrial producer and commercial agent, as well as one of the world's prime examples of state-capitalism.

The questions framing this study are: How did political-economic institutions shape efforts to exploit mineral resources within Brazil, and reciprocally, how did these efforts shape political-economic institutions? The interactions between the rules and practices governing property, business enterprise, capital markets and the state reveal themselves to be as important to mineral development as the structure of the individual institutions and as important as the presence of minerals.

When Falconbridge acquired the Kristiansand refinery in 1929 the plant had been in existence for nineteen years. Falconbridge took over most of its staff, its technological prowess and its company culture. As we shall see in the coming chapters, the development under Falconbridge's ownership was to a large degree influenced by what had happened in the eventful years of 1910–24.

Back in 1910 Kristiansands Nikkelraffineringsverk (KNR) set up business in Kolsdalen right outside the city centre. KNR was based on cutting-edge technology, invented in the United States by the industry insider Victor Hybinette. As the Norwegian nickel deposits were rather limited, Hybinette and his co-investors were determined to use the nickel-refining technology and patents abroad. This was no easy task in the vertically integrated and oligopolistic nickel industry, but the First World War offered KNR possibilities for vertical integration and expansion overseas. The subsequent investments in the Canadian nickel producer BANC were the largest Norwegian FDI ever. However, due to very questionable business ethics, mismanagement and costly delays because of wartime conditions everything was lost.

KNR's road to bankruptcy was such a tormented and highly publicized process that it made it close to impossible to re-establish and refinance a strong Norwegian-owned nickel company. This paved the way for Falconbridge's later acquisition of the Kristiansand refinery.

Norwegian Nickel, International Competition and Cartelization

In Norway, nickel production began in the late 1840s. When production peaked in the mid-1870s there were around forty mines and seven smelting plants in operation.

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Antwerp had lost virtually all of its sixteenth-century splendour as a mercantile centre in the developing world economy. The closure of the Scheldt by the Dutch had thwarted international commercial activities, and the passage from Spanish to Austrian rule had further closed off privileged participation in the Spanish colonial trade. The urban luxury industries that had flourished in the seventeenth century under impulse of the counter-reformation had dwindled in the early eighteenth century in the face of declining domestic demand, greater protectionism in neighbouring countries and increased imports. Those merchant families who had remained in Antwerp had undergone a process of gentrification and almost completely retreated from active commercial activities. Their extensive family fortunes were invested in public loans, company shares and foreign undertakings rather than in direct commercial or industrial investments. In the second half of the eighteenth century, a few such families engaged in setting up capital-intensive industries in Antwerp, such as sugar-refining and cotton-printing, but they remained the exception. The dominant trend was an expansion of low-wage, labour-intensive textile industries on a putting-out basis, producing relatively cheap goods for a mainly domestic market. The most successful branches, such as lace manufacture and the production of mixed fabrics, were those that could most directly exploit the reservoir of cheap child and female labour which the impoverished Antwerp workers provided in ample quantity. The expansion of low-wage textile production further increased the social polarization characterized by a small but extremely wealthy upper class and a very large poor population. By 1796 only 14 per cent of the city's population could be considered wealthy, while only another 21 per cent could rely on some form of independent resources alongside income from labour. In turn, no less than two-thirds of the population consisted of poor and propertyless labourers and servants.

Existing census figures indicate that Antwerp's population remained relatively stable throughout the second half of the eighteenth century at a level of around 50,000 inhabitants.

Introduction and Research Background

It is commonly said that the Old Equitable of England (established 1762) was the first life assurance company that sold a modern life assurance product. However, if we examine life assurance from the demand side, we may reconsider this. It cannot in fact be claimed that the Old Equitable was a typical modern life assurance company, because its customers were richer than those of modern life assurance companies.

Victorian ideology that emphasized the responsibility of the master of the house for his surviving family had a great impact on the modernization of life assurance products in that it helped to popularize life assurance. Life assurance companies revised their sales channels, sales techniques and life products in the face of the demand for death indemnity from family breadwinners. In this context, therefore, not the Old Equitable but the Prudential (1848) best resembles a modern assurance company.

Most current studies of life assurance history have been written from the perspective of the insurers. By contrast, only a small number of studies examine the demands of the assured. This is unsurprising. The explanation lies in the fact that, while there is a comparatively large quantity of historical documents in insurance business archives, it remains difficult for historians to obtain information about policyholders.

In 1997 the organizers of the insurance history session at the World Economic History Congress in Madrid, Alain Plessis and André Straus, asked the participants ‘who bought insurance and for what?’

With growing trade and energy links between North-East Asia and the Gulf economies, some observers like Christopher Davidson have argued that a twenty-first century ‘Silk Road’ connecting the Middle East region with North-East Asia (among other world regions) augmented by popular perceptions of the so-called shift of gravity to Asia-Pacific economies has encouraged an eastward-looking shift among Gulf economies. For example, Davidson argues that the Gulf economies may be physically connected to North-East Asia by an ancient Karakoram Highway although this may be contested by local tribal stakeholders.

While the Silk Road may have been a main trading route for ancient empires, its long disuse may mean considerable efforts to revive it for contemporary transportation of modern goods, products, services and energy. Any revival has to overcome tremendous challenges of geopolitical, economic, security and infrastructural nature. While it has on some occasions been unified and stabilized by ancient empires to make them profitable routes, the contemporary array and variety of important stakeholders as well as the presence of global and regional economies and states in that region means it is challenging to achieve wide-ranging consensus on the (re?)utilization of this route. The complex situation in the Gulf region may be highlighted by the Gulf Research Center (GRC) which has illustrated the importance of the US's role in the Gulf, as well as India's presence that GRC argues is ‘more extensive than China's’ despite China's growing infrastructure projects in the region.

It is not unusual to come across the statement that women in the past were economically dependent on men. Men have been seen as producers while women and children have been defined as consumers. Therefore a widow or abandoned wife would logically be a person totally dependent on charity and poor relief. Irrespective of if women were the victims of patriarchal society and could not work, or women devoted themselves to the welfare of their family and would not work, the outcome would be the same. Because of lack of property and employment the loss of the breadwinner would spell disaster. While it might be understandable that nineteenth-century middle-class statisticians and census takers held such views, in retrospect they cannot be accepted without reservation. Jane Humphries has highlighted the issue that female input for communities during the industrialization period has largely been ignored. The acceptance of female dependency as a fact by modern research must be seen as problematical. Richard Wall has also demonstrated that the viewing poor relief as a sole income source for widows and other female household heads in nineteenth-century society is totally inaccurate.

Ignored, unrecorded and invisible is how Hill described the economic input of women in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. The situation did not necessarily improve over time.

The impetus for this research was to instigate a thorough examination of the historiographical survey and history of inter-regional ties between the Middle East and North-East Asia. It remains a work in progress, given the complexity of the topic and evolving interrelationships between the two regions. The text may also be used to study how energy inter-regionalism is studied, imagined and discussed in addition to implementation and exchange. In surveying the interregional literature between North-East Asia and the Middle East, several entities appear to be commonly mentioned, studied or researched. They included Japan and China, but India and particularly the US were indispensible in such discussions given their important and significant influence. In the history between the two regions, contemporary literature, particularly the recent ones, also highlight the non-energy aspect of the trade between the two regions.

The discussions may allude to the presence of inter-regional ties between the two regions. Surveying the literature, it appears the dominant feature discussed may be a definitional feature of a region's ties with one important or large economy/entity/state (e.g. India, Japan, US and China in this case). Given the lack of a macro-regional framework or a North-East Asian regional organization in dealing with the Middle East as a region, the dominant format of inter-regional ties appears to be the Middle East's region's relations with each individual large economy or state.