Drawing on a newly constructed database, this paper examines for the first time the 100 largest industrial enterprises in Turkey over a period of four decades, from 1970 to 2010. As in several other late-industrializing countries, Turkey transitioned from an autarchic to a liberalized and internationalized economy after the 1980s. Our findings show a marked change in large enterprises from a balanced composition of stand-alone family businesses, affiliates of diversified family business groups (FBGs), and state-owned enterprises toward a new configuration dominated by FBG affiliates and, to a lesser degree, foreign-owned firms. This result underlines the central role of the politico-economic and societal context in which the largest enterprises have developed. Furthermore, it demonstrates not only the persistence but also the proliferation of FBGs within a more liberalized and internationalized economic environment. We attribute the expanding prevalence of FBGs and their affiliates despite pro-market reforms to a combination of factors: the new business opportunities created by liberalization and privatization, the internal capabilities of FBGs, and the preferential treatment afforded to entrepreneurs with close ties to the incumbent government.

This article examines how Norway, a hydropower-rich oil and gas producer, has sought to diversify its energy production since the late 1990s. It explores how and why leading Norwegian oil companies have attempted to redeploy into offshore wind, and how this redeployment has been shaped by political developments and sectoral interests. Through a four-part historical analysis, the article pays particular attention to the motives and interests of key stakeholders within the so-called oil–industrial complex, which encompasses both industrial and political actors, including employer and labor organizations. By integrating corporate and political perspectives, the article explains Norway’s attempt to transform from an “oil nation” to a “wind power nation” despite growing awareness of poor profitability and challenging conditions for offshore wind.

By April 1942, Japan had cut off almost all US supplies of natural rubber, a key raw material for which the country had effectively no domestic sourcing. The resulting shortage aggravated downward pressure on manufacturing productivity and seriously jeopardized military capability. The risks that this would happen, widely foreseen, could have been mitigated by more or earlier stockpiling, subsidization of domestic plant-based sources of latex, or development of a synthetic rubber industry. At the time of Pearl Harbor, each route had been pursued in a limited fashion or not at all. This paper explores why, highlighting the outsized role played by businessman/politician Jesse Jones, as well as the multiple channels through which the rubber famine adversely affected the country’s wartime economy. This history starkly illuminates a policy dilemma still with us: How much “insurance” should a country carry when it depends heavily on interruptible foreign sourcing of a strategic input?

Recovering Senator Robert Owen’s role in creating the Federal Reserve System, this article reclaims the original vision of the Federal Reserve as an institution in which state democratic power checked private expertise. Populist-minded Southern farmers and country bankers embraced the Reserve as a politically palatable vehicle to ease credit, protect against bank runs, and ensure seasonal liquidity. However, the perception of a “populist Federal Reserve” eroded with the onset of the 1920 postwar recession and the ensuing agricultural depression. We show that Federal Reserve officials prioritized combating inflation and made several decisions between 1920 and 1921 that aggravated the agricultural crisis by artificially contracting rural credit access, alienating farmers and country bankers from “their” central bank. This estrangement was further compounded by Reserve failures during the Great Depression, which encouraged Southern farmers and their representatives to re-embrace old populist nostrums that would become centerpieces of the New Deal.

For some sixty years, the dominant narrative of the financial crisis of 1931 and Great Depression has been one of failure of central banks to cooperate and act as lenders of last resort. This historical narrative has become dominant and led to a marginalization of understanding the Great Depression as a result of an inherent instability of capitalism. Rather than arguing that one or the other of these narratives is true, in this article I examine how contemporary actors made retrospective sense of the European financial crisis of 1931 and how they used that history to shape lessons for uncertain futures. My approach is based on the concepts of sensemaking and narrative emplotment under radical uncertainty. The article shows that most contemporaneous actors were positive in their assessment of central banks and that they focused mostly on short-term capital flows and the interconnectedness of the financial system as well as structural issues going back to the Versailles Treaty in making sense of the crisis.