The Italian Clothing Industry Association (AIIA) was the first employers’ association founded to protect the interests of the nascent Italian ready-to-wear industry. According to the literature on the subject, there were three factors that allowed business interest associations (BIAs) to operate effectively at a meso-organizational level: their internal organizational structure, the activities of bureaucratic support of companies and lobbying in defense of entrepreneurs’ interests, as well as the ability to adapt to the more general context in which they worked. Based on a detailed empirical analysis, this article examines what the AIIA accomplished in each of these three areas. There are two objectives: (1) analyzing the circumstances that led the AIIA to fail in its purposes of representing the Italian ready-to-wear industry, and (2) investigating, in a typical creative industry, the hidden costs in terms of competitiveness of BIAs’ planning efforts and their consequences for the creation of an efficient and internationally competitive fashion system.

From a European perspective, what sets apart the Swedish return to the gold standard at prewar parity in 1924 is not only that it occurred before that of every other nation, including the United Kingdom, but also that it could be made by politicians without interference from the central bank. Against this background, it is argued that this decision may be related to the combined impact of two political positions that affected policy making in a crucial way. In a domestic policy context in which minority governments needed support from other parties to realize their political ambitions, the Social Democrats and Conservatives both developed separate positions in favor of an early return of the gold standard during the first part of the 1920s. Because these parties together formed a majority in both chambers of Parliament, a stable political support for a return of the gold standard could thereby emerge.

This article examines the Detroit Housewives League (DHL) in the 1930s and 1940s, concentrating on DHL members’ actions as businesswomen. Past narratives have framed the DHL as an extension of the black women’s club movement or as part of the women-driven consumer movements of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly highlighting the organization’s philosophies on black women’s purchasing power. I argue that entrepreneurial DHL women brought prior business knowledge to their organizing and were significant business experts and leaders. By conducting business research, forging community networks, and, significantly, establishing commercial colleges and other forms of business education in the city, DHL members’ work was vital for the black business community as a whole and for women entrepreneurs in particular. In reframing the DHL as an organization established by black entrepreneurial women, I suggest scholars should reevaluate black women’s contributions to other forms of activism in order to recover additional histories of black women’s entrepreneurship and business leadership.

This article details the ways in which the executives of Du Pont used the chemical company’s 150th-anniversary festivities in 1952 and its associated sponsored media as an opportunity to explicitly link the history of the company with the history of the nation. This was an attempt to legitimatize the company’s existence and its ultraconservative worldview, espouse free trade, and fight antitrust litigation. This article explores the conflation of private and public history in Du Pont-sponsored anniversary materials to illustrate how corporate public relations meant for private corporate consumption reverberated into a shared American public culture.

In 2008 Professor Eric Godelier published a provocative essay in which he concluded that a positive dialogue between business historians and both management scientists and business management practitioners was possible. While the divide between these camps was not trivial, he nevertheless wrote that current events and scholarship was bringing them together, at least as he could observe these trends in the context of emerging French scholarship. In this current review, my own conclusion is the opposite. Management scholarship, in fact, continues to move away from the “soft” approach of the historian and more towards the “rigorous” and quantitatively biased methodology of the management sciences. My essay reviews the background of this development in terms of American business practice and scholarship, as it seeks to demonstrate how the evolution of management training in the United States brought us to the current state of affairs where “hard” drives out soft in almost every encounter. However, while I conclude that this is indeed the current reality, I do not imply any endorsement of this outcome. Rather, I end with a hope that some forms of rapprochement might be possible-yet with an acknowledgement that we will have no definitive answers to this question anytime soon.

Last year, Will Hausman gave us a splendid overview of business history's development for his presidential address. Despite his modesty, he treated us to a review of the parallels between his career and the field's progress, which owes much to his dedication to the Business History Conference (BHC) and its various constituencies. What we have within the BHC now, thanks to Will and many others, are multiple opportunities for exciting interactions based on ideas. As we share, exchange, and rearrange our ideas, they grow, as do our pleasure in and appreciation for them. The BHC offers us a wonderful arena for advancing the life of our minds—while advancing our ideas.

Galambos and Amatori applaud this discourse over entrepreneurship but contend that the multiplier is not a metaphor. They acknowledge Wadhwani’s insightful analyses and look forward to further fruitful discussions focused on innovation, capitalism’s major strength. They briefly argue for scalar evaluations rather than binary evaluations of innovation and the socio-economic problems they inevitably create.

This study aims at enhancing our understanding of how industrial conditions affect the choice of a firm's ownership structure. The Providence/Attleboro area was a center of jewelry production during the nineteenth century. Because of the differentiated nature of the product, the Providence/Attleboro jewelers needed to promote their products among the wholesalers in distant markets. These geographical and industrial conditions motivated the entrepreneurs to organize partnerships for ameliorating informational asymmetries and for mobilizing the capital required to achieve economies of scale in sales and production.

This text is the author’s reply to reactions to “Managing Communist Enterprises” from three colleagues, Lee Vinsel, Natalya Vinokurova, and Pál Germuska. It includes reflections on his work process in researching capitalist and noncapitalist firms and sectors and the practical and theoretical bases for that work. In the course of replying to particular suggestions and critiques, the rejoinder also offers some considerations about the current and future course of business history as a discipline.

The thesis applies a political economy approach to the study of how institutions and geography explain the development of a commodity chain. Focusing on the Brazilian Amazon from 1870 to 1910, the analysis develops a new theoretical framework constructed by combining standard trade models with institutions and economic geography. There are two levels of analysis: interactions among and within different nodes of the commodity chain. A quantitative-driven analysis from macroeconomic data supports inferences from microeconomic behavior. The thesis provides new information on rubber prices and exports, trader ledgers, estate accounts, newspapers, traveler accounts, and official documents.

The research develops a demand- and supply-side analysis of the history of rubber, from tappers to manufacturers. It features the main rubber manufacturing countries, Britain and the U.S.A., and shows how competition prevailed along the chain, translating into a struggle for rubber supply. Rubber was not a homogeneous product. Due to a combination of quantity and quality, the Brazilian Amazon possessed significant market power, market power that shaped the rubber chain. In this light, the thesis investigates how the Brazilian rubber supply chain was organized and how agents profited from its monopolistic position. It also shows that taxation increased the regional welfare and allowed the government to support two related activities: telegraphs and shipping.

The thesis proves that violence and coercion were not necessary features of rubber production, as argued by much of the literature. Through a game theoretic approach, the thesis demonstrates conditions under which production could have occurred without exploitation. In a context of high price inelasticity of demand and rising prices, production was driven by market forces. Inelasticity of demand was indeed one of the main features of the rubber boom. It shaped production, bargaining power between different nodes of the chain and competition within them, defining the distribution of profits along the rubber chain.

This article uses a lawsuit between British engineers and Dominican merchants over a sugar estate mortgage to examine how transnational capital networks functioned at the local level during a moment of transition in the late nineteenth-century global economy. When Dominican courts ruled against the engineers, the firm unsuccessfully sought diplomatic intervention, raising questions on the one hand about the incremental construction of Dominican sovereignty and on the other about the links between diplomatic and business networks on the ground. It is situated within calls for new approaches to the history of the Dominican Republic that utilize international archives and focus on corporate bodies, both in local and Pan-Caribbean contexts.

How knowledge is created, accessed, stored and disseminated has become a major focus of study when assessing the success or failure of industrial clusters. Marshall (1890; 225) initiated this debate when he noted: ‘The mysteries of the trade become no mysteries; but are as it were in the air’. In the edited collection by Wilson, Corker and Lane (2022), emphasis has been placed on the links between knowledge, knowledge flows and how innovation systems evolve and adapt. This paper builds on their work examining how tacit and codified knowledge is created and disseminated across a cluster. Bathelt et al (2004) have demonstrated how successful clusters build effective ‘global pipelines’ to access knowledge generated elsewhere, prompting us to think how a business history analysis can incorporate these concepts and how these processes have worked in practice. The paper analyses two English clusters and the processes involved in the formation of a common body of knowledge, a ‘knowledge-cum-industrial zeitgeist’ which explains the cluster’s performance. Specifically, it proposes a model that links internally-generated knowledge and ‘global pipelines’ that clusters develop to tap into externally-generated knowledge, which through effective feedback into the ‘local buzz’ results in further innovation and strengthens the cluster’s competitive advantage.

During and after World War I, British businessmen made major inroads in political, administrative, and policymaking circles. In so doing, they forged a nexus of power, the business-state, that aligned the interests of big business with the state’s imperial aspirations. Well before the widespread acceptance of the concept of the national economy, there was a common understanding in London that what was good for British business, especially industry, was good for the economic health of the country and empire. The result was that after World War I, the state aggressively helped British commercial interests.

This article presents an analysis of the operations of the Peruvian Amazon Company through an accounting lens. It is suggested that a focus on asset categories augments our knowledge of the company’s exploitation of the land and Indigenous peoples of Amazonia. In particular, the study explores the PAC’s questionable ownership of estates in the Putumayo, what its approach to valuing those estates implied about enslavement, how its treatment of “expenses of conquest” and the inclusion of armaments on the balance sheet indicated the forced subjugation of labor, and how the classification of rubber collectors and their Barbadian overseers as debtors further suggests the practice of debt peonage. Although the findings affirm the utilization of accounting as a facilitator of subjugation, it is shown that in the hands of humanitarians such as Roger Casement, accounting could also be deployed in the pursuit of emancipation.

This article reinterprets Asian industrialization during the Cold War through the lens of a forgotten commodity: the South Korean wig. Wigs were critical to Asia’s “miraculous” economic growth—a US$1 billion industry in 1970, as well as the number two export in South Korea and number four in Hong Kong at the height of export-oriented industrialization. The article makes a methodological argument, suggesting that we see industrialization differently when we “follow” a commodity transnationally—from the heads of rural South Koreans to the hands of Seoul factory workers to the shoulder bags of Korean American peddlers to the heads of African American women—and when we integrate bottom-up and top-down views of the commodity’s “life.” Only by taking this global perspective can we see how U.S. imperialism shaped the ways people and things moved across borders and oceans and how Cold War commodities were haunted by the lives of the people who touched them.