Business History articles from April 1998

Business History archives from April 1998

The internationalisation of Dutch accounting firms.
April 1, 1998... Over the past 20 years the history of multinational companies has been extensively researched and debated. Initially discussions focused on the industrial companies, but in recent years companies in the service sector, especially banks, have been...

Public policy and British commercial vehicles during the export drive era, 1945-50.
April 1, 1998... The immediate post-war period was characterised by major economic challenges, particularly the need for reconstruction and financial rehabilitation of the British economy after the years of war. These tasks fell to a new Labour government which...

Constructing a balance between price and non-price competition in British multiple food retailing 1954-64.
April 1, 1998... Grocery retailing after the Second World War was characterised by small-scale atomistic competition, yet by the 1970s a phenomenal change had taken place. Oligopoly had replaced an atomistic industrial structure. A handful of major companies...

'An old story, freshly told'? A comment on Broadberry and Crafts' approach to Britain's early post-war economic performance. (response to S.N. Broadberry, vol. 38, p. 65, 1996)
April 1, 1998... The recent article by Broadberry and Crafts in this journal(1) picks up some of the themes emphasised in their previous work and uses them to explain Britain's early post-war performance. (Though, curiously, for them, 'early post-war' stretches...

The post-war settlement: not such a good bargain after all. (response to Jim Tomlinson in this issue, p. 62)
April 1, 1998... In our 1996 paper(1) we set out an interpretation of the implications of early post-war economic policy for industrial performance based on an analysis in which productivity outcomes depend on bargaining between firms and their workers. Our...

A review of Italian business history from 1991 to 1997.
April 1, 1998... The rapid changes that have occurred in the Italian economy in the last 50 years have stimulated the interest of economists, sociologists and historians alike. Nevertheless, despite a few notable exceptions,(1) there has been a scarcity of...

British business history: a review of the periodical literature for 1996.
April 1, 1998... I DEFINITIONAL PROBLEMS AND METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES Business history has always suffered something of an identity crisis - what is business history? The lack of any clear definition enables some writers to take a narrow, micro-view of the...

Mesters to Masters: A History of the Company of Cutlers in Hallamshire.
April 1, 1998... This book celebrates 700 years of recorded cutlery working in the Sheffield district. It is not another history of cutlery; it is institutional history, a re-examination of the Company of Cutlers, founded in 1642. Through a series of thematic...

Agricultural Rent in England: 1690-1914.
April 1, 1998... Of all the connections in the business world, rent is one of the most basic. It has been fundamental to English agriculture for many centuries, based, as farming has been, on the landlord and tenant system. Rent has thus featured frequently in...

The Warp of Ulster's Past.
April 1, 1998... There are many reminders of the historic importance of Ulster's linen industry still visible in the province: the street names; the factories disused or converted to other purposes; the public monuments like parks, cricket grounds, drinking...

Benjamin Collins and the Provincial Newspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century.
April 1, 1998... Benjamin Collins, born in 1715, the seventh son of a tallow chandler from Faringdon, Berkshire, moved to Salisbury after the death of his father in 1729 to join his elder brother William in the book trade there. Soon after his arrival, he...

Since Records Began: EMI: The First Hundred Years.
April 1, 1998... Anyone flicking through the pages of this volume in a bookshop would be impressed by its plethora of photographs illustrating celebrities who have recorded for EMI, different record labels, advertisements for discs, and famous trademarks such as...

Kleinwort Benson: The History of Two Families in Banking.
April 1, 1998... Kleinwort Benson is almost the last of the City of London merchant banks to have its history published, so students of the history of finance and banking will be keen to see if Mrs Wake attains the high standards of Dr Roberts on Schroders and...

Britain's Relative Economic Decline: 1870-1995.
April 1, 1998... This short book provides a quantitative overview of Britain's economic growth performance over the last century and a quarter. The broad picture presented is well known. While income per head has increased fivefold, Britain has moved from second...

The UK Fastener Industry: The Management of Decline.
April 1, 1998... Twentieth-century economic historians have long been fascinated by the issue of British entrepreneurial failure after 1870. Their successors (if there are any) in the next century may well display a similar absorption with the alleged managerial...

The Formation of the Parisian Bourgeoisie: 1690-1830.
April 1, 1998... In Old Regime France, positions of local power were acquired through family connections more often than by wealth alone. Middle-class families in the French capital retained their status through geographical stasis and enthusiastic procreation....

Marte e Mercurio: Industria bellica e sviluppo economico in Italia, 1861-1940.
April 1, 1998... Luciano Segreto's book deals with Italy's armaments industry from the perspective of an economic and business historian. It is a welcome attempt to put the Italian case on the map, after the pioneering work by Trebilock on the British armaments...

Wegvervoer, een grensverleggende activiteit; 50 jaar Stichting NIWO.
April 1, 1998... Dr Aart Camijn, of the Centre for Business History of Erasmus University, Rotterdam, was commissioned to write a history of the Netherlands Organisation for National and International Road Transportation (NIWO in Dutch) for its 50th anniversary....

Industrial Constructions: The Sources of German Industrial Power.
April 1, 1998... With this book, Herrigel offers a stimulating re-interpretation of the process of German industrialisation over the last two centuries. Three basic contentions underlie the argument developed in this text. First, the post-war research programme...

The Polish Coal Miners' Union and the German Labor Movement in the Ruhr.
April 1, 1998... It is well known that foreign labour played a great part in the rapid growth of German heavy industry before the First World War. Poles formed the largest group. There were about half a million Poles and Masurians in the Ruhr alone by 1914, and...

Von der MONTAN zur Industrieverwaltungsgesellschaft (IVG), 1916-1951.
April 1, 1998... With the emergence of the German Federal Trust-Company for the administration of the industrial property of the GDR and the recent politics of privatisation by the German government, the development of federal industrial property has become a...

Das Volkswagenwerk und seine Arbeiter im Dritten Reich.
April 1, 1998... In 1987 Volkswagen AG commissioned Hans Mommsen to explore the company's early history in the Nazi era, a step actively supported by the works' labour representatives. An unusually high budget enabled Mommsen to employ an army of research...

Merchants and Markets in Revolutionary Russia: 1917-1930.
April 1, 1998... This informative and sensible book can usefully be read alongside Alan Ball's study of Russia's Last Capitalists: The Nepmen, 1921-1929 (1987), whose work Professor Banerji has supplemented rather than displaced. (Banerji's book is a modified...

Industry, State, and Society in Stalin's Russia: 1926-1934.
April 1, 1998... David Shearer provides a detailed and well-informed account of industry-government relations at a critical moment in Soviet economic history (although readers should note that the focus is largely confined to 1928-30). There is much that will...

Kremlin Capitalism: Privatizing the Russian Economy.
April 1, 1998... Kremlin Capitalism is outstanding among the books dedicated to Russian contemporary economic and business history. The authors are not only competent and astute scholars but also practical experts who were personally involved in the establishment...

Integrated International Production: A Study of Foreign Transnational Corporations in Sweden.
April 1, 1998... Invarsson's book is a doctoral dissertation focusing on integration and international specialisation within transnational corporations. Empirical findings suggest that integration - measured by intra-firm trade - has been increasing at least...

Trading Beyond the Mountains: The British Fur Trade, 1793-1843.
April 1, 1998... This book provides a narrative account of the commercial expansion of Hudson's Bay Company activities in the area bounded by San Francisco and Sacramento to the south, Alaska to the north, the Rocky Mountains to the east and Hawaii to the west...

The Female Economy: The Millinery and Dressmaking Trade, 1860-1930.
April 1, 1998... This engaging book is a path-breaking analysis of the millinery and dressmaking trades in the United States. It is based on thorough research in the Dun & Bradstreet credit records, trade papers, magazines and novels, census data, personal...

Productivity and Performance in the Paper Industry: Labour, Capital, and Technology in Britain and America, 1860-1914.
April 1, 1998... This study harks back to a debate that was popular amongst some economic historians in the 1960s and early 1970s - the comparative performance of UK and American industry in the nineteenth century. That debate, sparked by H.J. Habakkuk's study of...

B.F. Goodrich: Tradition and Transformation, 1870-1995.
April 1, 1998... Blackford and Kerr have produced an excellent study with much of value for business historians. B.F. Goodrich has been by far the least well-documented of the major US tyre and rubber manufacturers, so this book is a welcome addition which...

Profits and Politics: Beaverbrook and the Gilded Age of Canadian Finance.
April 1, 1998... Max Aitken, elevated to the peerage in 1916 as Lord Beaverbrook, wrote various autobiographical accounts, has been the subject of a number of biographies, and figures in many memoirs and several novels. Most are oriented to his long career in...

A Living Wage for the Forgotten Man: The Quest for Fair Labor Standards, 1933-41.
April 1, 1998... President Franklin D. Roosevelt called the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) the second most important New Deal reform after the Social Security Act of 1935. Yet until recently many historians have neglected significant discussion of this...

US Economic History Since 1945.
April 1, 1998... In this succinct volume Michael French offers an informed, readable account of the economic development of the United States since World War II suitable for classroom use at the advanced undergraduate level. French takes a thematic approach to...

Farewell to the Factory: Autoworkers in the Late Twentieth Century.
April 1, 1998... The two decades following the oil crisis of the early 1970s were years of distinct challenge to the Western car manufacturers, especially those of the United States. Ruth Milkman's study, always empathetic rather than sympathetic, concentrates on...

Globalising Australian Capitalism.
April 1, 1998... Globalising Australian Capitalism examines the dismantling of Australia's dual economy, which was based predominantly on commodity exports, capital imports and a protected and highly regulated manufacturing sector, in favour of an internationally...

The Thoroughbred among Banks in New Zealand, 1872-1947: The Early Years.
April 1, 1998... The National Bank of New Zealand was founded in 1872, taking over the business of the 'first generation' Bank of Otago. This first of a two-volume commemorative history was written in 1972, and has now been resurrected and edited (not by Hawke,...

Small Firms in the Japanese Economy.
April 1, 1998... This book is about Japanese small firms. As Whittaker points out, Japan ranks alongside Italy as having the highest proportion of small firms - and employment within them - among the OECD countries. However, compared with the amount of literature...

Supplier Customer Interaction: Supplier-Customer Interaction in Product Development.
April 1, 1998... This is one of those all too common books whose general title hides a very specific content. Even the subtitle gives little idea of the narrow focus of the book. In fact, the study is based upon two case studies of product development undertaken...

An Economic History of the Silk Industry: 1830-1930.
April 1, 1998... To capture the complexities and contradictions inherent in the structure and development of the silk industry is a challenging task, to which Frederico has proved himself more than equal. Production and trade in silk has been held responsible for...

Scientific Culture and the Making of the Industrial West.
April 1, 1998... Historians have for several decades been discussing the extent to which the British Industrial Revolution was influenced by substantial contemporaneous improvements in the human understanding of nature. Professor Jacob has herself contributed to...

The International Economy Since 1945.
April 1, 1998... This is the first volume in a new series, 'The Making of the Contemporary World', which is claimed to be global in range and multi-disciplinary in approach. Forthcoming titles cover such diverse topics as Thatcher and Thatcherism, The Green...

The World Textile Industry.
April 1, 1998... Going global is tough, both for enterprises and for scholars. John Singleton's study of textile and apparel trades in more than 20 nations, the first in Routledge's series, 'Competitive Advantage in World Industry', undertakes a Herculean task:...

Dangerous Commerce: Insurance and the Management of International Risk.
April 1, 1998... One opens a book about international insurance with some anticipation, for, in sharp contrast to banking, the globalisation of this financial service still awaits its historian. Haufler, however, is not that historian. Instead she is a political...

Business Cycles and Depressions: An Encyclopaedia.
April 1, 1998... Reviewers of encyclopaedia face a more difficult but also perhaps a more enjoyable task than that posed by other new books. The utility of the genre would be greatly lessened had they the tight organisation, thematic consistency and parsimony of...

Beyond the Firm: Business Groups in International and Historical Perspective.
April 1, 1998... This is, overall, a highly recommendable volume. Not only is it an important book on an important subject, most of the individual chapters are also very interesting and enjoyable to read. The book is based on the contributions to the 22nd Fuji...

Information and Organization: A New Perspective on the Theory of the Firm.
April 1, 1998... In this new book, Mark Casson elaborates on his earlier work on entrepreneurship and trust by examining the role of information in market transactions. As earlier writers including Hayek, Richardson and Marschak have noted, in practice the...

Contemporary Capitalism: The Embeddedness of Institutions.
April 1, 1998... This impressive volume sets out with at least three ambitions. First, the study tries to identify trajectories of capitalist development during this century. More specifically, it focuses on how economic activity is co-ordinated through various...

Multinational Firms and International Relocations.
April 1, 1998... The central issues of this volume concern the impact of inward foreign direct investment (FDI) on host economies and the extent to which such investment displaces jobs in the home economy. The alleged export of jobs to low wage countries has been...

The Development of Accounting in an International Context: A Festschrift in Honour of R.H. Parker.
April 1, 1998... This volume reflects the outstanding degree to which Bob Parker has increased our knowledge and understanding of accounting history, set in its context, in Britain and Australia. His work on the development of financial reporting, including...

Management, Marketing, and the Competitive Process.
April 1, 1998... This is an exciting collection, providing another example of the productive interaction taking place between industrial economics, business history and management studies. Indeed, the book is explicitly designed by the editor to demonstrate and...

Current Issues in International Business.
April 1, 1998... This volume of essays is part of a stock-taking exercise in the academic study of International Business (IB). The book charts the evolution of IB, delineates its conceptual frontiers and considers some current issues in the area. It then debates...