Business History articles from April 1996

Business History archives from April 1996

British business history: a review of periodical literature for 1994.
April 1, 1996... What do the articles published in 1994 tell us about the historians of British business?(1) Many display a high level of individual craftsmanship in the interpretation of archival material and other contemporary sources. Most focus on an aspect...

Stock transfer patterns in the Hudson's Bay Company: a study of the English capital market in operation, 1670-1730.
April 1, 1996... In recent years, there has been expanding interest in the growth, structure and integration of the English securities market in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Capital markets matter. Indeed, Brewer's discussion of the...

Should historians trust late nineteenth-century company financial statements?
April 1, 1996... The views of business historians on accounting practices in general and on the informational value of company financial statements in particular are likely to have been influenced, if not shaped, by a series of articles in Business History on the...

The development of management information systems in the British coal industry, c. 1880-1947.
April 1, 1996... In his recent study of the inter-war British coal industry, Dintenfass has emphasised the importance of entrepreneurial performance, and has argued that managerial failure contributed to the industry's problems during the 1920s and 1930s.(2) On...

Despite best intentions: the evolution of the British minicomputer industry.
April 1, 1996... In November 1964 Harold Wilson appointed Frank Cousins as Britain's first Minister of Technology and warned him that he had about one month to save the British computer industry. For the next three years the Ministry of Technology (MinTech)...

The Bank of England: Money, Power, and Influence, 1694-1994.
April 1, 1996... The Bank of England celebrated its tercentenary in the summer of 1994, with a variety of functions and publications, of which this is one. The initiative for this volume came from outside, but was supported by the Bank, where a conference was...

The early history of the Law of Bills and Notes: A Study of the Origins of Anglo-American Commercial Law.
April 1, 1996... This is a thoroughly absorbing and consistently illuminating book. The author, an American professor of commercial law seeking to understand its Anglo-American origins, found himself embarking on a voyage of discovery and re-interpretation which,...

Family Structure in the Staffordshire Potteries, 1840-1880.
April 1, 1996... This study makes a substantial and significant contribution to the understanding of the nature and form of family relationships within industrial communities of the mid-nineteenth century. It is based on a detailed investigation of the Potteries,...

Crewe: Railway Town, Company and People, 1840-1914.
April 1, 1996... The origins of modern Crewe can be precisely dated - a cold, wet day in March 1843. The causation was highly fortuitous, as both the unfriendliness of Nantwich towards railway projects and the financial problems of another company were needed to...

George Hudson: The Rise and Fall of the Railway King.
April 1, 1996... Of all the figures thrown up by Britain's 'railway age' there can be none more fascinating than the York draper and furnisher, George Hudson. From humble beginnings as the uneducated son of a yeoman farmer he had inherited a fortune by his early...

Constructing a Competitive Order: The Hidden History of British Anti-Trust Policies.
April 1, 1996... 'People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment or diversion, but the conversations ends in a conspiracy against the Public or in some contrivance to raise prices.' Adam Smith's well-known words are applied by Helen Mercer to...

Whessoe: Two Centuries of Engineering Distinction.
April 1, 1996... This is an interesting but frustrating survey of a Darlington company which has occupied a prominent position in a variety of engineering trades for 200 years. The frustration is a response to a gross imbalance in the cover of its long history;...

The History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom.
April 1, 1996... In this splendid book Lord Briggs recounts a 'long and difficult' discussion of a controversial play by the BBC Board of Governors, the difficulty compounded by the fact that only one of them had actually seen the programme! A concern about the...

British Charitable Gambling, 1956-1994: Towards a National Lottery.
April 1, 1996... Andrew Douglas has made a timely contribution to the rapidly growing library on the study of gambling. His book traces the history of charitable gambling from the Small Lotteries and Gaming Act of 1956 to the initiation of the block-busting...

The Fabrication of Labour: Germany and Britain, 1640-1914.
April 1, 1996... This innovative, erudite and prospectively influential work of comparative labour history argues that two different conceptions of what workers were supplying in return for their wage obtained in late nineteenth-century Germany and Britain. In...

Der Deutsch-Osterreichische Telegraphenverein und die Entwicklung des deutschen Telegraphenwesens 1850-1871.
April 1, 1996... In recent years, the importance of information and communication has been reaffirmed by the emergence of the Internet. Indeed, the information super-highway has been hailed as the key to the next phase of economic development. This history of the...

Paper and Iron: Hamburg Business and German Politics in the Era of Inflation, 1897-1927.
April 1, 1996... As the sub-title implies, this study attempts to combine two themes: an explanatory account of modern German history and the role of Hamburg and its leading businessmen in it. Clearly, the author has set himself an ambitious task. The economic...

Economic Change in Eastern Europe Since 1918.
April 1, 1996... Both politically and economically, the fate of eastern Europe has been to feel the impact of the aspirations of neighbouring great powers. Similarly, in general writing on the economic and social history of Europe, discussion of eastern Europe...

The Evolution of Financial Institutions and Markets in Twentieth-Century Europe.
April 1, 1996... The book is a fine collection of papers given at an international conference held at Zurich by the European Association for Banking History. It brings together contributions from established scholars and relative newcomers, including both surveys...

Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917.
April 1, 1996... Simply put, the main hypothesis of Berk's book is that politics, much more than technology, determined the business landscape of the second industrial revolution in the United States. He examines why immense trans-regional and national railway...

Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections and Economic Development in Industrial New England.
April 1, 1996... This is an important book which explores the evolution of bank lending strategies during the industrialisation of New England. As a developing economy, lacking a sophisticated network of financial institutions and with legal restrictions on...

The Antitrust Impulse: An Economic, Historical and Legal Analysis.
April 1, 1996... The Sherman Antitrust Act celebrated its centenary in 1990. To mark this milestone, experts have been surveying the historical trends of antitrust and its enforcement, the economic foundations for changes in legislation and practitioners' views...

Working Women of Collar City: Gender, Class and Community in Troy, New York 1864-86.
April 1, 1996... Troy, a small town near Albany in upstate New York, became the centre of the world's detachable collar manufacturing industry after Hannah Lord Montague in 1827, the wife of a prosperous merchant, grew tired of the continual washing of her...

Beyond the Typewriter: Gender, Class, and the Origins of Modern American Office Work, 1900-1930.
April 1, 1996... This represents an ambitious and welcome development in the growing volume of accounts detailing the feminisation of clerical labour. While feminisation is dealt with, this always remains within the context of the broader aim of the book. This is...

Cold War in the Working Class: The Rise and Decline of the United Electrical Workers.
April 1, 1996... In recent years much of the very best writing on labour history has been by US academics, and often this has been work on the American labour movement. This book can be added to the list of such excellent studies. Cold War in the Working Class...

The CIO, 1935-1955.
April 1, 1996... The 1930s in the United States witnessed an astonishing re-invigoration of trade unionism. In this development the lead was taken by the Committee for Industrial Organisation - the CIO - established in 1935. Composed initially of dissident...

Erie Lackawanna: Death of an American Railroad, 1938-1992.
April 1, 1996... Why write the story of a defunct railroad of moderate size, whose characteristics were summed up by the nickname, the 'Weary Erie'? Because, argues the author, it had an uncommonly interesting history. From its opening in 1851, the Erie was...

Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60.
April 1, 1996... Although World War II saw organised labour build on the solid foundations that had been established during the New Deal, business too regained some of the confidence that had been lost during the depression decade. In 1945 the unions and the...

Coordination and Information: Historical Perspectives on the Organization of Enterprise.
April 1, 1996... Building on an earlier conference, the proceedings of which were edited by Peter Temin (Inside the Enterprise: Historical Perspectives on the Use of Information, Chicago, IL, 1991), Lamoreaux and Raff have brought together a group of economists...

Lean but not Mean: Studies in Organization Structure.
April 1, 1996... This is a selection of James C. Worthy's writings on industrial organisation from the 1940s and 1950s, when he was with the major US retailer Sears Roebuck. There is a short biographical note and brief introduction to the collection by David G....

Waves of Change: Business Evolution Through Information Technology.
April 1, 1996... The business history of computing has been dominated by the supply side - almost exclusively focusing on the major computer suppliers such as IBM (of course), ICL, the Digital Equipment Corporation, and so on. By contrast, there have been only...

Understanding American Economic Decline.
April 1, 1996... The United States has declined relative to other powers in many ways since the peak of her global hegemony after World War II. At first this was expected, since no power could hope to retain for long more than 50 per cent of world manufacturing....

The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence.
April 1, 1996... Most of Latin America obtained independence from Spain and Portugal in the 1820s. Contemporary accounts were filled with glowing reports of the prospects of the resource-rich, newly liberated countries. This book explains why that early promise...

Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation.
April 1, 1996... The focus of this book is the promotion of industrial growth by the state in three newly industrialising economies (Brazil, India and Korea), and in particular the promotion of local information technology from the 1970s to the early 1990s. Evans...

The Food Industries of British India.
April 1, 1996... This is a curious volume whose intended readership is difficult to ascertain. It is the work of a food industry scientist funded by the Indian National Science Academy as part of its long-term project on the history of science in India. At first...

The State and Economic Development: Lessons from the Far East.
April 1, 1996... The papers in this slim volume cover a range of countries in East and Southeast Asia (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, the Philippines and the People's Republic of China). Discussing both theoretical and empirical issues, the contributions are...

The Technological Transformation of Japan from the Seventeenth to the Twenty-First Century.
April 1, 1996... This is not a work of primary research, but an introductory text that seeks to present some of the major features of technological change in Japan over the last three centuries. The book's subject matter is structured around three major themes:...

Easternisation: The Spread of Japanese Management Techniques to Developing Countries.
April 1, 1996... This book expands our understanding of a business phenomenon that has transformed perceptions of US economic hegemony and its once-powerful association with mass production and 'scientific management'. There is already a large and growing...

The Japanese Iron and Steel Industry, 1850-1990: Continuity and Discontinuity.
April 1, 1996... This book deals with the development of the Japanese iron and steel industry from the end of the Tokugawa era to recent times. Yonekura describes the founding of Kamaishi Works, Yawata Works, Nippon Steel Inc., and the building of Chiba Works by...

The Rise of the Korean Economy.
April 1, 1996... The emergence of the Pacific Rim as the most dynamic region of the global economy has attracted a great deal of attention among economists and other academics as well as the general public. The post-war period has seen the rise of Japan, the...

Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R.M. Hartwell.
April 1, 1996... This volume contains a collection of essays that were presented at a symposium held at the University of Virginia to celebrate Max Hartwell's 70th birthday and his retirement from formal academic life. Though born and educated in Australia,...

Organizational Capability and Competitive Advantage: Debates, Dynamics and Policy.
April 1, 1996... This volume forms part of an extensive series of readings, the Elgar Reference Collection, that is increasingly visible on the shelves of academic libraries. As No. 11 of a sub-series, the 'International Library of Critical Writings in Business...

International Financial Centres, 4 vols.
April 1, 1996... Nowadays any city, of any size, with any sense of self-regard wants to be a financial centre. Not just any financial centre, but an international financial centre. This is new. Twenty or 30 years ago financial services seldom appeared on...