Business History articles from April 1993

Business History archives from April 1993

Gender and property rights: capital, kin, and owner influence in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sweden. (Nordic Business in the Long View: On Control and Strategy in Structural Change)
April 1, 1993... When we study the exciting history of the emergence of industrial capitalism, the rising hegemony of market economies, the construction of the firm as an economic entity, the rise of the bourgeoisie and its counterpart the working class, why is...

A career approach to entrepreneurship: the case of Thomas B. Thrige. (Nordic Business in the Long View: On Control and Strategy in Structural Change)
April 1, 1993... I On 1 January 1934, the Thomas B. Thrige Foundation was established. The assets consisted mainly of a factory producing electric motors, situated at Odense and personally owned by Thomas B. Thrige, and the dominating stocks in the factories...

Timing is all: on the roles of owners and managers in expanding and contracting corporate activities. (Nordic Business in the Long View: On Control and Strategy in Structural Change)
April 1, 1993... The conflict between those historians and philosophers who believe that change, economic or other, is caused by autonomous social forces and those who ascribe change to the actions of 'great men' has existed for quite some time. The extremes can...

Management of public enterprises: a special type of managerial capitalism? The Swedish case. (Nordic Business in the long View: On Control and Strategy in Structural Change)
April 1, 1993... In his fascinating book The Visible Hand, Alfred D. Chandler proposed that in North America the first modern enterprises were created to administer the operation of the new railroad and telegraph companies. Those companies became large-scale...

Those in power: on the role of owners in Swedish business. (Nordic Business in the Long View: On Control and Strategy in Structural Change)
April 1, 1993... In the 1980s increasing activity on the Swedish Stock Exchange meant more financial institutions as big owners of banks and companies; it produced mergers which altered structure in the Swedish economy; and caused a debate on the effects of owner...

Structures, managers and owners: the case of the post-war Swedish paint industry. (Nordic Business in the Long View: On Control and Strategy in Structural Change)
April 1, 1993... I In this article, the forces behind the structural change of the Swedish paint industry after 1945 will be discussed. The general and well-known background is the dramatic change of industrial structures in the 1970s and 1980s. This change...

Swedish managerial capitalism: did it ever become ascendant? (Nordic Business in the Long View: On Control and Strategy in Structural Change)
April 1, 1993... I Managerial capitalism, in the sense that it has been defined by Chandler, Marris, Daems and others, is a central concept in our understanding of the modern industrial society in which the bulk of strategic investment decisions are taken in...

Britain's Industrial Revolution.
April 1, 1993... Pat Hudson believes, somewhat unfashionably, that there was an Industrial Revolution. Although recent measurements suggest little economic growth in the short run, the activities of the period initiated a radical and longer term transformation of...

An American Quaker in the British Isles: The Travel Journals of Jabez Maud Fisher, 1775-1779.
April 1, 1993... Jabez Maud Fisher, the son of a successful merchant, was sent on a tour of the British Isles at the age of 25, as representative of his father's firm. He was instructed to settle accounts, renew existing business contacts, establish others which...

Gentlemen Capitalists: The Social and Political World of the Victorian Businessman.
April 1, 1993... 'A close biographical approach', Malchow contends, 'is the only way to penetrate effectively the interior of bourgeois culture'. The temptation is to add: 'Discuss'. The answer will depend in large part upon how the exercise is undertaken, and...

Economic Decline in Britain: The Shipbuilding Industry, 1890-1970.
April 1, 1993... This study of the shipbuilding industry is offered as a contribution to the wider debate on the causes of Britain's relative economic decline. Lorenz has considerable sympathy for the institutionalist approach of Elbaum and Lazonick, but argues...

The Development of the British Economy, 1914-1990.
April 1, 1993... Publication of the fourth edition of this well-established textbook has enabled Professor Pollard to extend its coverage to include the 1980s. The relevant chapter, appropriately entitled 'A New Departure in Economic Policy', presents an...

The Legacy of the Golden Age: The 1960s and their Economic Consequences.
April 1, 1993... For many post-war economists and politicians the 1960s were the decade of disillusionment, when the perception of relative economic decline intensified, when it became apparent that British governments were not in practice able to increase the...

Cork's Industrial Revolution, 1780-1880: Development or Decline?
April 1, 1993... The industrial history of nineteenth-century Ireland remains largely unwritten. The assumption that Irish industries declined during the nineteenth century has caused historians to look for more interesting topics. Not even the reasons for...

Grenzenloses Wachstum? Das rheinische Wirtschaftsburgertum und seine Industrialisierungsdebatte, 1814-1857.
April 1, 1993... Boch investigates how Rhenish businessmen thought about economic development between 1815 and mid-century. His major sources are newspapers and periodicals financed and often written by businessmen. Although rich in manufacturing and trade, the...

La France, la Belgique et l'organisation economique de l'Europe: 1918-1935.
April 1, 1993... Studies of European economic relations after the First World War tend to concern themselves principally with the big powers, leaving a small country like Belgium relatively neglected. This substantial and important thesis by Eric Bussiere,...

Traditionspflege in der Automobilindustrie.
April 1, 1993... This volume, the first of a new series to be published by the German Business History Society (Gesellschaft fur Unternehmensgeschichte) consists of a collection of papers presented during a four-day meeting on the history of the motor car...

French Enterprise and the Challenge of the British Water Industry.
April 1, 1993... In the late 1980s water became an industry of sustained concern to governments and the public, probably for the first time since the great Public Health Acts of the nineteenth century. In part the reasons were the same -- worries about the...

Europeans on Europe: Transnational Visions of a New Continent.
April 1, 1993... This is an interesting and probing book, and the more serious readers should not be discouraged by a certain air of gloss and insideness in which it is couched. The editors tell us that their purpose was to 'offer a transnational comparison of...

Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785-1841.
April 1, 1993... James R. Gibson is an economic historian of the north-west coast of North America. In this, his latest study, he looks at the region's fur trade, in particular sea otter skins, between 1785 and 1841. During this period the north-west fur trade...

Close Ties: Railways, Government, and the Board of Railway Commissioners, 1851-1933.
April 1, 1993... Good dissertations do not necessarily make good books. In this case, the book from the dissertation promises to be worthy and informative, rather than compelling and invigorating. Its aim, Cruikshank tells us, is to examine the history of railway...

The Samuel Gompers Papers, vol. 4: A National Labor Movement Takes Shape: 1895-98.
April 1, 1993... Samuel Gompers was a (and, for much of the time, the) major moderate figure in the American labour movement for nearly four decades from the late 1880s. This volume deals with the mid-1890s when Gompers, like the Lib-Lab old guard in the TUC and...

Power at Cost: Ontario Hydro and Rural Electrification, 1911-1958.
April 1, 1993... In her short stories, Alice Munro has described evocatively the dreariness, loneliness, and hardships of life in the back concessions of rural Ontario in the early twentieth century. Although it did not deter migration to the urban sector,...

Samuel Bronfman: The Life and Times of Seagram's Mr Sam.
April 1, 1993... Michael Marrus is not the first author to have attempted to interpret the complex character of Sam Bronfman, the creator of the Seagram whisky empire. That he has succeeded in producing quite the best account owes much to three factors: brilliant...

Masters to Managers; Historical and Comparative Perspectives on American Employers.
April 1, 1993... Business and labour historians have tended to neglect the role of employers as autonomous historical actors. In particular, they regularly treat the formation of employer labour policies as relatively unproblematic and mechanistically determined...

Inside the Business Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information.
April 1, 1993... This book is the proceedings of a Conference on Microeconomic History organised by the (US) National Bureau of Economic Research in October 1990. The objective of the conference is clearly explained in Peter Temin's very readable introduction. In...

Making Fast Food: From the Frying Pan into the Fryer.
April 1, 1993... This is a heady mix of sociology, social history and feminism, creatively crossing disciplinary boundaries and arguing with well-informed commitment. It is emphatically not a celebration of growth or entrepreneurial flair, but a systematic...

Family and State: The Formation of a Sino-Thai Tin-Mining Dynasty, 1797-1932.
April 1, 1993... This book is not so much an exercise in business history, as an analysis of the role of a single Sino-Thai 'lineage' in the economic and political development of Siam and Malaysia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking as its...

Financial Reporting in Japan: Regulation, Practice and Environment.
April 1, 1993... Over half this book is devoted to the economic, social, political and cultural environment in which the accounts of Japanese companies are prepared and published. The discussion introduces us to a wide range of secondary literature covering not...

Regulating Big Business: Antitrust in Great Britain and America, 1880-1990.
April 1, 1993... It has always been a puzzle why the American Sherman Act of 1890 so far predates the first British antitrust legislation -- the 1948 Monopolies Act. The relatively early American development of huge firm size and sophisticated managerial...

The Transfer of International Technology: Europe, Japan and the USA in the Twentieth Century.
April 1, 1993... Continuing the work of an earlier collection of essays covering the period up to 1914 edited by David Jeremy, this volume focuses on the crucial question of technology transfer in the twentieth century. Although each of the eight contributors...

Organising Business for War: Corporatist Economic Organisation during the Second World War.
April 1, 1993... This collection of papers had its origins in two conferences in 1987 and 1988 on the causes and consequences of the organisation of business interests during the Second World War. The framework of the book is international and comparative: Frans...

The Evolution of Retail Systems: c. 1800-1914.
April 1, 1993... Retailing is undoubtedly the Cinderella of business studies, both current and historical. As the book's co-editor, Gareth Shaw, states in his introductory chapter, at present this academic neglect shows little sign of being remedied. Hence, he...

International Cartels in History.
April 1, 1993... This is the eighteenth volume in the series arising from what have come to be known as the Fuji Conferences. These conferences have been sponsored from their inception by the Taniguchi Foundation, which possibly helps to account for the...

General Trading Companies: A Comparative and Historical Study.
April 1, 1993... The essays in this book emerged out of a project led by the United Nations University in Tokyo on 'Technology Transfer, Transformation and Development: The Japanese Experience'. Research between 1978 and 1982 by more than 120 specialists covered...

Atlas mondial des multinationales, vol. 2, Strategies des Multinationales.
April 1, 1993... This valuable and imaginative book examines the strategies of multinational firms past and present. The text is brief, not least because of the very extensive use of multi-coloured graphs, diagrams and -- especially -- maps, but it contains a...