Business History articles from April 1994

Business History archives from April 1994

British business history: a review of the periodical literature for 1992.
April 1, 1994... The 1992 periodical literature, both specialist and general, has continued to provide historians with a wide range of insights into the evolution of British business. Of particular note is the success with which accounting history is growing,...

Marketing strategy and the competitive structure of British General Insurance, 1720-1980.
April 1, 1994... 94. Carter, Economics and Insurance, p.9; for more detail on concentration see Channon, Service Industries, pp.98-9. 95. Supple, Royal Exchange Assurance, pp.538. 96. Data from PMA; Post Magazine (1960), p.127 and (1964), p.579; Economist...

Small businessmen and their credit transactions in early nineteenth-century Britain.
April 1, 1994... It is ten years since McKendrick suggested that historians should pay more attention to the 'hordes of little men who helped to boost the demand side' of the economy during the Industrial Revolution by 'satisfying a new consumer market of...

Restrictive practices on the shopfloor in Britain, 1945-60: myth and reality.
April 1, 1994... Many commentators on post-war Britain have suggested that the workforce and its unions must accept a large part of the responsibility for the country's continuing economic ills.(2) British workers may or may not have been unusually strike prone,...

Transnational Corporations and Business Strategy.
April 1, 1994... The transnational corporation (TNC) is one of the few institutions which has inspired researchers across the breadth of social sciences including economics, business history, and political science. The copious literature they have produced...

Road Transport Before the Railways: Russell's London Flying Waggons.
April 1, 1994... This is the most significant book on horse-drawn road transport to appear for well over a decade. It is unique in explaining the business history of a long-distance public carrier in the horse era, the only other works on similar lines being...

The Industrial Revolution and British Society.
April 1, 1994... This book comprises a collection of ten essays written in honour of Max Hartwell. They deal with key economic, social and political issues that arise in studying the Industrial Revolution. The contributors, all leading scholars in the field, aim...

The Last Shift: The Decline of Handloom Weaving in Nineteenth-century Lancashire.
April 1, 1994... In the 'heroic' accounts of the Industrial Revolution, the cotton industry is always portrayed as the pacemaker, in terms of both technological innovation and of labour organisation. While other industries were slow to mechanise, in cotton, it is...

The Greatest Brewery in the World: A History of Bass, Ratcliff and Gretton.
April 1, 1994... This book is an account of the history of one of Britain's most remarkable firms. Its origins are to be traced to the remote world of canals, carriers and the Baltic trade. It was a pioneer in the 1820s and 1830s of the sale of India Pale Ales...

British Multinational Banking: 1830 - 1990.
April 1, 1994... This book, together with his earlier works on the subject, incontestably establish its author as the leading authority on multinational banking. It is magisterial in conception, awesome in scope, and meticulous in execution. Besides that, it is...

Schroders: Merchants and Bankers.
April 1, 1994... This is a very long book with a wealth of detail on the history not only of the merchant banking firm, Schroders, but also the City of London itself. As such it is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on the subject for, only a few...

Professionalism, Patronage and Public Service in Victorian London: The Staff of the Metropolitan Board of Work, 1856-1889.
April 1, 1994... Much of the debate on cultural values in Victorian society has focused on the conflict between the ingrained snobbery of traditional institutions and the thrusting energy of provincial business. Much less attention has been paid to the growth of...

Beaverbrook: A Life.
April 1, 1994... Chisholm and Davie set out to write a complete and objective biography Beaverbrook. By the standard of all previous Beaverbrook biographies they have succeeded admirably on both counts. Their book is without doubt the most complete work thus far...

Trade, Tariffs and Empire: Lancashire and British Policy in India, 1919-1939.
April 1, 1994... In this well-researched work, Basudev Chatterji has set himself two tasks. On one level this is a study of the interaction between British and Indian cotton textile manufacturers and policy-makers during the inter-war period. However, Chatterji...

British Protectionism and the International Economy.
April 1, 1994... The subject of this book is essentially the trade agreements negotiated by Britain with a number of countries in the 1930s. The countries include Sweden, Denmark, Latvia, Poland, Argentina and the White Dominions. The implicit argument is that...

Privatisation, Public Ownership and the Regulation of Natural Monopoly.
April 1, 1994... This book draws on Christopher Foster's wide experience as a history and economics graduate, a board member of the UK Post Office and of British Telecom, and as a senior partner of Coopers & Lybrand. This fusion of history, economics and the...

British Industrial Relations.
April 1, 1994... This second edition of Gill Palmer's widely used textbook has been extensively revised and updated. Howard Gospel's contribution has been to raise the profile of historical perspectives and to place his now familiar emphasis on the initiatory...

The British Economy Since 1945.
April 1, 1994... As Anthony Seldon comments in his editor's preface to this study, there can be few individuals more fitted than Alec Cairncross to write a book on Britain's post-war economic record. Combining academic commitment with periods of increasingly...

The Welfare State in Britain Since 1945.
April 1, 1994... Textbook treatments of British welfare policy have traditionally been solid, uninspiring tomes which cover an enormous span of time but in a boringly written and intellectually uninteresting fashion. Lowe has succeeded in producing a text which...

Ferme Entreprise Famille: Grande Exploitation et changements agricoles.
April 1, 1994... Over the last three decades, European historians have abandoned the notion of an agricultural revolution. Change, it is agreed, was more gradual, with its origins in the Middle Ages. Doubt has more recently been thrown on the role of the key...

The Advent of Modern Capitalism in France.
April 1, 1994... The eighteenth-century entrepreneurial activities of Francois Tubeuf in the Cevennes region of south-eastern France were undervalued by his local contemporaries and largely ignored by historians. Until now, that is. Gwynne Lewis has sensitively...

The Politics of Technological Change in Prussia: Out of the Shadow of Antiquity, 1809-1848.
April 1, 1994... This book looks at the politics of technological change in the kingdom of Prussia from the aftermath of the country's defeat by Napoleon to the Revolution of 1848. Brose shows that modern political parties were non-existent at this time and that...

Paribas, 1872-1992: Europe and the World.
April 1, 1994... The author of this book and those involved in its conception deserve to be congratulated for their attempt to lift a bank history out of the buildings, bank clerks and balances approach which, with one or two honourable exceptions, has tended in...

British and American Commercial Relations with Soviet Russia: 1918-1924.
April 1, 1994... The title of this monograph gives an accurate idea of its content. Christine White provides a clear, straightforward and informative account of Anglo-American commercial involvement in post-revolutionary Russia, drawing upon a broad range of...

The Rise of Multinationals in Continental Europe.
April 1, 1994... Just as the conviction persists that the characteristics of a multinational enter prise are inherently different from those of a large firm, so does the view that such firms originating in continental Europe are qualitatively different from those...

Technology and Work in German Industry.
April 1, 1994... Analysing the adoption of new technology in industry presents particular difficulties to social scientists as well as business historians. Due to these difficulties, the temptation is to describe the adoption of new technology in industry as a...

Industrial Relations and European State Traditions.
April 1, 1994... Colin Crouch has written a major comparative study of industrial relations in western and central Europe since 1870. When studying post-1945 industrial relations in Britain, France, Germany and Italy in order to identify different types of...

John Nelson, Merchant Adventurer: A Life Between Empires.
April 1, 1994... With some notable exceptions, much of the recent literature on the first British Empire has focused on the American plantation colonies and their trade with the mother country. In his biography of John Nelson, Richard Johnson draws our attention...

Aspirations and Anxieties: New England Workers and the Mechanized Factory System, 1815-1850.
April 1, 1994... The responses to and perceptions of America's industrial workers to the powered factory are the principal themes in this study of nineteenth-century manufacturing. Based predominantly upon the private am public observations of factory workers,...

Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956.
April 1, 1994... This book is an economic and business history of the information-handling industry from its origins in the late nineteenth century up to the emergence of the data-processing computer in the 1950s. The author's 'approach in this book has been to...

Chester I. Barnard and the Guardians of the Managerial State.
April 1, 1994... Contrasting the push and go of inter-war America with the inexorable decline of Europe, Sinclair Lewis had George F. Babbitt proclaim 'one thing that distinguishes us from our good brothers, the hustlers over there, is that they're willing to...

Was There a Pepsi Generation Before Pepsi Discovered It? Youth-Based Segmentation in Marketing.
April 1, 1994... With niche marketing being a 'buzz' phrase among business and marketing experts, questions about when a youth segment emerged and what youth segmentation means could become important debates. For many people the 'Pepsi Generation' and the 'Baby...

The Airline Industry (Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography).
April 1, 1994... This volume is the latest addition to the Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography series. It provides 157 separate entries on all aspects of the commercial airline industry in the United States, both passenger and freight. The...

Technology and Industrial Development in Pre-war Japan: Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard, 1884-1934.
April 1, 1994... Yukiko Fukasaku has made a welcome addition to our knowledge of the industrialisation of Japan. The volume opens with the now customary theoretical discussion of the place of transfer of technology in economic development; but this is left...

The South African Economy: 1910-90.
April 1, 1994... In the first of these books, Stuart Jones once again provides a collection of articles dealing with specific aspects of South Africa's financial institutions since the more formal start of the apartheid regime. Some of the chapters overlap...

Vision of Japanese Entrepreneurship: The Evolution of a Security Enterprise.
April 1, 1994... In many ways this is an important study which deserves the widest possible circulation amongst all those interested in the post-war development of Japan. While written primarily as a biography of Makoto Iida, and as a record of the security...

Capitalism in Crisis: International Responses to the Great Depression.
April 1, 1994... The combination of recession in the OECD, with consequent rising unemployment and soaring budget deficits, together with exchange rate instability and the ever-present threat of a return to autarky on the part of many key countries, naturally...

Entrepreneurship, Networks and Modern Business.
April 1, 1994... The dozen essays in this volume originated in a (1991) symposium of business historians from Reading and Lancaster universities which has become an annual event. The theme of this volume is entrepreneurship and all the contributions analyse...

Education and Training in the Development of Modern Corporations.
April 1, 1994... This volume is the collected papers of the nineteenth Fuji Conference on Business History held in 1992. It follows the Anglo-Japanese conference at the LSE in 1988 on the same theme of education and training. These present papers and those edited...

Consumption and the World of Goods.
April 1, 1994... Business historians should welcome the recent surge of interest in the history of consumption. For they, more than most, have grappled with -- or at least recognised the importance of -- the nature of consumer demand, the workings of the market,...

The Rise and Fall of Mass Marketing.
April 1, 1994... What is marketing, how important is it and how does it relate to changes in production and society over time, place and product? These are questions which The Rise and Fall of Mass Marketing seeks to address. As the editors point out, this...

The World Pharmaceutical Industry.
April 1, 1994... One of the most successful industries in recent years has been the pharmaceutical industry. Even though most of the largest pharmaceutical firms are old firms rounded in the nineteenth century or at the beginning of the twentieth, the industry is...

Organization and Technology in Capitalist Development.
April 1, 1994... This is a timely and useful collection of Professor Lazonick's principal articles on those related themes in economic history to which he has devoted his considerable scholarly abilities and his stimulating search for originality. Admittedly, the...

Multinational Enterprises in the World Economy: Essays in Honour of John Dunning.
April 1, 1994... John Dunning has been a leader in the study of international business for many years, and this collection of 12 original essays by leading scholars represents a tribute to him upon his retirement from the University of Reading. The essays treat a...

The Internationalization of the Firm: A Reader.
April 1, 1994... The last two decades have seen the emergence of a substantial body of literature, both theoretical and empirical, on the development, organisation and structure of multinational enterprises (MNEs). This volume of 24 readings is the first attempt,...

Multinational Enterprises and the Global Economy.
April 1, 1994... The doyen of international, as well as British, scholars engaged in the study of the multinational enterprise (MNE), John Dunning has now produced his magnum opus. Running to over 400,000 words, it is claimed to be the most comprehensive and...