There is general consensus that tax havens have long played a major role in the evolution of the capitalist system on a global scale. There is also no doubt that Switzerland is one of the first, if not the first, tax haven to have emerged, as well as one of the most important in the world. However, knowledge and understanding of the history, particularly the distant past, of tax havens remains lacking, despite the considerable volume of literature devoted to them. Therefore, this article attempts to make two innovative contributions. The first is an attempt to explain the emergence of the Swiss tax haven, by analyzing the processes and factors whose intertwining led to its emergence. It thus improves the general understanding of the genesis of tax havens at an international level. The second contribution is to show that already on the eve of World War I, the Swiss Confederation possessed the necessary characteristics for a tax haven.

This article examines the evolution of the video game industry in Britain from its start in 1978. The industry originated with passionate hobbyists and amateurs who benefited from the national broadcaster's campaign to expand computer literacy. Unlike the regional clustering of the industry in the United States and Japan, the British industry was dispersed geographically, consisting of mini-clusters with porous boundaries. During the 2000s, the fragmented British industry was largely acquired by U.S. and Japanese multinational companies and became part of global value chains, but the development of mobile gaming and digital distribution provided opportunities for a new generation of start-ups to emerge in Britain.

This article examines the aftermath of the 1897 Riksbank Act in Swedish banking. The act placed banks with unlimited liability and those with limited liability on equal footing, removing the note-issuing privileges of the former. We consider whether changes in risk preferences occurred subsequent to the act, or whether extended liability was a sufficient deterrent. We conclude that when legal differences were removed, lower transaction costs for unlimited liability banks (ULBs) spurred aggressive competition, reflected in narrower interest spreads relative to limited liability banks (LLBs). ULBs also took on greater leverage and held less liquidity, which supports the Coasean interpretation that the shareholder liability regime mattered little. After 1897, ULB shareholders continued to receive higher dividends, enjoyed substantially superior returns on equity, and maintained an array of corporate governance controls to shield themselves against their additional risk.

The government in British-ruled India established cooperative banks to compete with private moneylenders in the rural credit market. State officials expected greater competition to increase the supply of low-cost credit, thereby expanding investment potential for the rural poor. Cooperatives did increase credit supply but captured a small share of the credit market and reported net losses throughout the late colonial and early postcolonial period. The article asks why this experiment did not succeed and offers two explanations. First, low savings restricted the role of social capital and mutual supervision as methods of financial regulation in the cooperative sector. Second, a political-economic ideology that privileged equity over efficiency made for weak administrative regulation.

This article examines the history of the Royal Dutch Shell scenarios, from the first horizon scan exercise in 1967. It proposes that forward-looking scenarios were integrated in planning at Shell as tools for managing uncertainty in global time and space relations of oil after 1967. Specifically, the article proposes that Shell strategically used the scenarios to respond to arguments, emanating both from OPEC and from the Club of Rome, of oil as a limited resource. Shell used the scenarios to create images of a future oil market dominated by innovation, creativity, and sustainable solutions.

This article examines the relationship between international commercial banks and military regimes in South America. The focus is on how military regimes in the Southern Cone of Latin America and Brazil in the 1970s became heavily dependent on foreign capital provided by international banks based in Britain and France. It makes use of previously unavailable archival evidence to examine the interactions between international banks and South American governments, showing how these interactions intensified once military rule was established. It shows that international capital was used for a wide variety of purposes, including arms imports. When global banks cut loans once the debt crisis erupted in 1982, they aggravated the economic crisis but also fostered democratic change.

Multinational enterprises faced new political risks after World War II in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. The risks were particularly high in Asia between 1945 and 1970. Although the relevant literature has focused essentially on organizational innovation and strategic choices in explaining how firms dealt with these new political risks, this article explores the informal roles that governments of small, neutral countries played in supporting their multinationals abroad. Looking at the case of Nestlé in Asia, the article argues that the backing of the Swiss federal authorities was crucial for the company to overcome various kinds of risks and ensure a long-term presence in the region.

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.