Business History articles from January 1993

Business History archives from January 1993

British business history: a review of the periodical literature for 1991. (Survey Article)
January 1, 1993... Having read the 1991 business history literature, my abiding impression is of the enduring influence of Alfred Chandler. Chandler's influence is reflected both in the response to his latest book, Scale and Scope, and also in the extent to which...

Small producer capitalism in eighteenth-century England.
January 1, 1993... I Recent research on manufacturing organisation has challenged both the ubiquity and the efficiency of the large-scale firm and mass-production methods. Learning from the computer revolution and Japanese manufacturing methods has brought...

British watchmaking and the American system.
January 1, 1993... My own settled conviction is that the failure of English horological art, our finest mechanical trade, would foreshadow the decay of all our mechanical industries (Henry Ganney, 1878).(1) This paper explores reactions to the 'American system of...

Some cross-section evidence on the determinants of the diffusion of car ownership in the inter-war UK economy.
January 1, 1993... The diffusion of ownership of consumer durables through society, of which the car is one example, is often described in the following terms. In the first stage production levels are low, costs are high and purchase prices expensive. As a result,...

The History of the Haberdashers' Company.
January 1, 1993... The history of London, so difficult to handle because of the multiplicity of source materials and the kaleidoscopic nature of its economic and social life, is beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Ian Archer, who has already contributed...

Fashion's Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800.
January 1, 1993... Hoffmann, in his 1930s study of the industrialisation process, identified textiles as being one of the consumer goods industries which have historically dominated the early phases of development. His main criterion for such industries is that...

Lighting the Town: A Study of Management in the North West Gas Industry, 1805-1880.
January 1, 1993... Despite its importance as a major utility, the gas industry has attracted less than its due share of attention; this book is therefore very welcome. The north-west was at the forefront of the industry's development outside London. The first major...

Cazenove and Co: A History.
January 1, 1993... This is a history of Cazenove & Co., one of the City's leading stockbroking firms, from its origins in 1823 to the present. It has been commissioned by the firm, which chose David Kynaston to undertake the task. The result is an excellent...

Building Capitalism: Historical Change and the Labour Process in the Production of the Built Environment.
January 1, 1993... Books on urban history are legion. Those on the building industry are comparatively rare. Even scarcer are industrial histories like this one, set within a left-wing framework, its solidly capitalistic price notwithstanding. The familiar heroes...

Anglo-Japanese Financial Relations: A Golden Tide.
January 1, 1993... This book covers the financial relationship between Britain and Japan in the years since the signing of the 'unequal treaties' in 1858, which opened the Japanese economy to international trade. It is divided into three parts. Part One covers the...

The City of London: Continuity and Change, 1850-1990.
January 1, 1993... That a study of the evolution of the City of London is required is extraordinary, but true. Despite its significance for Britain's modern economic history, the literature available is either restricted to a particular period or to specific...

Fish and Chips and the British Working Class.
January 1, 1993... The common, one might almost say the automatic, reaction to a book of this title is likely to be facetiousness, even incredulity. John Walton has heard all the jokes by now, and gets down to a spirited justification for the fish and chip trade's...

The Bank of England and Public Policy: 1941-1958.
January 1, 1993... This is the latest volume in the official history of the Bank of England, and follows the earlier and much admired contributions of Sir John Clapham and Richard Sayers. Fforde is careful to point out that he is a central banker and not a...

The Political Economy of Merchant Empires: State Power and World Trade, 1350-1750.
January 1, 1993... This volume of 11 essays (to which is appended a useful bibliography of the relevant secondary literature) is the companion to The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long-distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350-1750 (CUP, 1990), also edited by...

The Role of Transportation in the Industrial Revolution: A Comparison of England and France.
January 1, 1993... This is yet another attempt to explain why England rather than France was first in the development race. This time it all hinges on transport. According to Szostak the spatial transmission is crucial because without improvements in communications...

German Industry and German Industrialisation: Essays in German Economic and Business History in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries.
January 1, 1993... The volume presents ten contributions, each of about 30 pages. Six cover the period up to World War I, two the inter-war period. All these have been written by distinguished German economic historians. The tenth contribution, on a two-year...

Les Patrons du Second Empire, vol. 1, Anjou, Normandie, Maine.
January 1, 1993... This book is the first of a series which has been inspired by an English example, the Dictionary of Business Biography. When news about the latter reached Paris, the Institut d'histoire moderne et contemporaine (IHMC), then directed by Francois...

Finance and Financiers in European History: 1880-1960.
January 1, 1993... I review this book with some trepidation. In the first place, I am the subject of one of the chapters ('Banking and Industrialization: Rondo Cameron Twenty Years On', by Sidney Pollard and Dieter Ziegler), on which I will have no further comments...

Die wilhelminische Flottenrustung 1908-1914: Weltmachtstreben, industrieller Fortschritt, soziale Integration.
January 1, 1993... Michael Epkenhans has written an impressive monograph on naval rearmament in Germany. His book is the result of painstaking research in 20; archives, including the Krupp archives (the papers of Rheinmetall, Krupp's chief rival, were not available...

Betriebspolitik im 'Dritten Reich': Deutsche Arbeitsfront, Unternehmer, und Staatsburokratie in der westdeutschen Grossindustrie, 1933-1939.
January 1, 1993... After the Nazis seized power, the new regime dissolved all unions and promptly legislated to reshape industrial relations in line with its ideology. The Gesetz zur Ordnung der nationalen Arbeit reorganised the management-labour relationship...

Uberlebenschancen von Unternehmungsgrundungen: Zeitschrift fur Unternehmensgeschichte, Beiheft 63.
January 1, 1993... This book is the report of a conference on the survival chances of new firms in Germany, which was jointly organised by the (German) Society for Business History and the (German) Institute for Banking History Research in November 1989. Four...

Economy and Society: European Industrialisation and its Social Consequences: Essays presented to Sidney Pollard.
January 1, 1993... For over four decades, the writings of Sidney Pollard have illuminated many important debates in economic and social history. This Festschrift offers a celebration of this remarkable scholarship by way of 11 contributions from authors of...

Profits in the Wilderness: Entrepreneurship and the Founding of New England Towns in the Seventeenth Century.
January 1, 1993... In examining the development of New England towns in the seventeenth century, this study challenges a number of traditional assumptions: that commercial enterprise played little part in town-founding in the New World; that in the first years of...

A History of Industrial Power in the United States, vol. 3: The Transmission of Power, 1780-1930.
January 1, 1993... This is the last of three volumes on the history of industrial power by the late Louis C. Hunter. The first two were on the history of water power and steam power respectively. This volume has been published posthumously on behalf of the Hunter...

Enterprise and American Law: 1836-1937.
January 1, 1993... This is a very interesting book which attempts to trace the history of American enterprise, and parallel developments in American law. Hovenkamp traces some of the links between legislations and judicial decision-making on one hand, and the rise...

Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900.
January 1, 1993... This is a worthwhile addition to the growing American literature on the history of industrial research. Carlson's subject is a man usually dismissed as a second-rater both as a scientist and as an inventor, and one left much of the business of...

The Rise of the American Business Corporation.
January 1, 1993... This slim volume is part of a series which professes to be aimed at 'economists wishing to keep up with the development of their science', by providing 'short books, each surveying the state of the art in a given area'. In it, Richard Tedlow...

Manufacturing Knowledge: A History of the Hawthorne Experiments.
January 1, 1993... This study, begun as a doctoral dissertation, focuses on the celebrated experiments conducted at the Hawthorne Works of Western Electric between 1924 and 1932. Gillespie summarises the main theme in one succinct question: 'How did the activities...

United States Corporation Histories: A Bibliography, 1965-1990.
January 1, 1993... The second revised edition of this bibliography lists over 3,000 references produced during the quarter century 1965-1990 about United States' companies whose history extends to 1965 or later. The citations include books, periodical and newspaper...

Japanese Management Structures: 1920-80.
January 1, 1993... When Japan's long era of seclusion came to an end with the arrival of Commodore Perry's 'black ships' in 1853 the extent of the nation's technical backwardness was quickly revealed. The subsequent upheavals which followed this event then led to...

Organization and Management in China: 1979-1990.
January 1, 1993... Business historians will find this book of little value. Its main aim is to analyse Chinese management and organisations in the light of the post-1979 reforms. It does this by trying to assess the impact of the reforms on Chinese enterprises...

The Four Little Dragons: The Spread of Industrialization in East Asia.
January 1, 1993... The Four Little Dragons -- is this a fairy tale then? Well, yes, in a way it is. For this is the story of how one large island, Taiwan, one half-peninsula, South Korea, and two city states, Hong Kong and Singapore, successfully emulated the big...

The Rise of NEC.
January 1, 1993... This book is the story of the growth of NEC, which is now the largest manufacturer of semiconductors in the world, written by the man who was the company's CEO between 1964 and 1988, and who served his entire professional career with the...

Power and Economic Institutions: Reinterpretations in Economic History.
January 1, 1993... This volume provides a much-needed introduction to the application in historical research of economic models and theories which take one beyond the limited applicability of neo-classical assumptions and analyses. At first glance the contributions...

International Technical Transfer: Europe, Japan and the USA, 1700-1914.
January 1, 1993... This collection of essays, which may be said to be an indirect product of an Anglo-Japanese conference on textile history held in 1987, falls easily into two parts: in one, the subject is the transfer of technology into societies lacking a proper...

Explaining Long-Term Economic Change.
January 1, 1993... Like the other essays in the Studies in Economic and Social History series, this short book seeks to provide a summary of recent work on a specific topic. The subject matter, long-term economic change, makes this a particularly difficult task...

The International Petrochemical Industry: Evolution and Location.
January 1, 1993... Much of the history of the chemical industry as a whole and of the individual companies in it, particularly during the most recent period -- the years since 1945 -- has yet to be written. Dr Chapman provides here a readable and scholarly insight...

The Growth of Multinationals.
January 1, 1993... This volume brings together 25 strong essays on the rise of the multinational corporation. Seven are the editor, four by Geoffrey Jones, while the remainder come from a variety of scholars representative of the full span from theoretical to...

Multinational and International Banking.
January 1, 1993... This volume constitutes the second in a ambitious series under the general editorship of Forrest Capie which aims to make readily accessible all the main articles written in the English language on one of a series of important issues in...

Antitrust and Regulation.
January 1, 1993... This is the latest volume in the International Library of Critical Writings in Business History and is comprised of 28 articles divided into six sections. Two articles cover government regulation and its effects on business, six explore the...

Government and Business.
January 1, 1993... This collection of 25 re-published articles is the second volume in Edward Elgar's 'International Library of Critical Writings in Business History'. As with others in the series, it brings together in accessible and beneficial form a diversity of...

The International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 4.
January 1, 1993... This is the fourth volume in what has established itself as a useful series. The sectors covered are mining and metals, paper and forestry, petroleum, publishing and printing and real estate. Among the contributors are some well-known names from...

Rival States, Rival Firms: Competition for World Market Shares.
January 1, 1993... While this is not a book in business history, the ideas discussed -- the relationships between states and firms -- will be stimulating to readers of this journal. The business historian will, however, be appalled by the many declarations of...

New Directions in International Business: Research Priorities for the 1990s.
January 1, 1993... This volume comprises several state-of-the art pieces by specialists in the expanding field of international business. Its primary objective is to plot desirable research trajectories for international business in the 1990s. Despite the diverse...