Much of the history of Indian businesses and merchants outside the subcontinent has emphasized the role of specific trading groups that created and utilized ties with India. The rise of Trinidad’s Indian shopkeepers tells an alternative story: former labor migrants turned to commerce. Indentured labor formed the connection between India and Trinidad, an area outside traditional Indian merchant activity. Trinidad’s organic Indian business community arose owing to the absence of traditional trading groups in the immigrant population, the large distance from India, and the growth of the Indian population that in turn demanded services. Shopkeepers came disproportionately from upper castes, who possibly relied on their greater social status and new network ties in Trinidad. However, shopkeepers did not rise into the upper echelons of commerce. This break shows the limits of traditional Indian traders in establishing ties in the farthest reaches of the British Empire.

In the 1960s, the optimal size of integrated steel plants significantly increased, while small steel mills known as minimills were gaining ground in the sector. Based on the use of scrap and electricity, these small plants became an alternative technological model to blast furnace steelmaking. Among the major European steel nations, Italy and Spain stood out for the early adoption and significant participation of electric furnaces in total steel production. The article explains the factors that led to the proliferation of small independent steel mills and their subsequent transformation into minimills in these Mediterranean countries. The conclusion is that, despite the different institutional frameworks, the Italian and Spanish response to the steel shortage of the 1950s was similar. This led to the emergence of many small producers, which based their development on low installation costs. In Italy, these businesses leveraged the opportunities of the postwar economic miracle, had access to a favorable supply of raw materials due to the policy of the High Authority of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), and were able to resiliently face the restructuring process of the 1980s led by the Commission of the European Communities (EC). In Spain, they took advantage of strong state intervention.

This paper, building on new archival research and the social table method, presents comprehensive estimates of income inequality in Mexico in 1895, 1910, 1930 and 1940. Inequality grew from 1895 to 1910, driven by economic expansion within the context of an oligarchic economy. While real income increased for the lower classes during this period, the main beneficiaries were large landowners and entrepreneurs. In the revolutionary period from 1910 to 1930 inequality decreased especially as a result of land reforms, benefitting peasants at the expense of the large landowners. However, the economic structure of the country was not fundamentally changed, and in the 1930s inequality raised as incomes of peasants and those in the informal sector fell behind manufacturing and other high-earning sectors. The Mexican case shows the complex interaction of economics, demography and politics in determining economic inequality.

This article examines how consumer preferences towards silk fabrics changed in Catalonia over the course of the first sixty years of the 15th century. It argues that during the first half of the 15th century silk became a luxury fabric for the wealthiest households of Catalan urban society. This change was triggered by the crisis of Europe's most prestigious manufacturing centres of high-quality woollens. Moreover, this article also claims that the adoption of silk as Catalonia's newest luxury fabric entailed a transition from lighter and plain silks to more expensive and elaborate silk fabrics. Finally, it connects this sumptuary shift to the technological development of the Italian silk industry and its later diffusion in Europe.

This article examines small and medium-sized scrap and wastepaper enterprises in Finland. They operated in the margins of the nation’s industrial economy during the twentieth century but pioneered many of the business models and practices that, in the last few decades, have become crucial elements of the circular economy. We study why and how they tried to develop profitable business models, and why some succeeded while others failed. We give particular attention to the business environment where they operated and argue that legislation, values, purchasing cartels, and other outside factors had a crucial impact on their profitability. We base our analysis partly on published company histories and other earlier research and partly on interviews and the extensive and usually open collections of business archives. Those sources provide us with the often-lacking inside view of small and medium-sized enterprises in the circular economy business and show how determined these companies were to defend their interests.

In this paper, we present the foundations and results for a new rent database on mining land in Chile (1940–2017), which takes into account not only the surplus profits of the sector, but also the different mechanisms in which this land is appropriated by other social actors. The results are weighted in relation to the whole national economy, which is why an original time series of the general rate of profits and its components, surplus-value and total advance capital, is also provided. In this paper, we posit a methodological foundation based on Marx's developments and a critical review of the existing statistics and previous measures. The results are original as they are the first long-run time series of mining land rent which considers the main appropriation mechanisms by different social actors. In turn, it shows that previous studies underestimate the weight of mining land rent in the Chilean economy, particularly when the prices of copper are rising. In addition, the results make it possible to pose new questions regarding the development of the national specificity considered. As a result of this new evidence, we indicate specific determinations of the different political cycles in Chilean national life, showing the historical persistency of mining land rent beyond changes in its appropriation forms and, therefore, stepping outside of the import substitution industrialization and neoliberalism dichotomy, which dominates the long-run economic historiography in this country.

The objective of this article is to explain the characteristics of the agri-food exporting boom experienced by the Latin American countries between 1994 and 2019 and its determining factors. In so doing, we analyse the evolution of exports, their composition by product, the principal origins and destinations, the importance of regional trade agreements and the behaviour of export prices. Furthermore, a series of gravity models are estimated, using the agri-food exports of nineteen Latin American countries to their 186 main trading partners between 1994 and 2019. These models are estimated for total agri-food exports and for their breakdown into three product groups. Among the main determinants identified, our results suggest that external demand and the proliferation of regional trade agreements were the primary reasons for this export boom. Finally, we evaluate these results within the context of the region's economic history.

This article examines Mahindra & Mohammed (now Mahindra & Mahindra) and the Muhammadi Steamship Company through a microhistory of late colonial Bombay. The paper reveals companies committed to the economic unity of India shortly before the anticolonial struggle culminated in the violent and chaotic Partition of British India in August 1947. In Bombay, the center of Indian industry and not typically associated with the Partition’s dislocations, economic partition was unanticipated even by economic actors closely allied with the Muslim League. The two firms examined here highlight the understudied impact of decolonization and the Partition of the sub-continent on Indian capitalism, and suggests that postcolonial territorial realities implied an economic rearticulation that has often been overlooked.