Business History articles from January 1995

Business History archives from January 1995

British business history: a review of the periodical literature for 1993.
January 1, 1995... 1993 presented a slightly surprising mixture of periodical literature. Topics of increasing interest to business historians, notably banking and marketing,(1) were poorly represented, while what might be regarded as the more traditional fare of...

Complexity in corporate modelling: a review.
January 1, 1995... For many years large corporations have attempted to develop models describing the complex inter-relationship between their financial, marketing and production activities with a system of mathematical and logical relationships. These models aid...

British exports to Colonial North America and the mercantilist fallacy.
January 1, 1995... Over the first three-quarters of the eighteenth century, the domestic export trade to British Colonial America demonstrated a remarkable rise to prominence, as indicated in Table 1. O'Brien and Engerman have estimated that the colonies absorbed...

Regional variations in provincial business biography: the case of Birmingham, Bristol and Manchester, 1870-1914.
January 1, 1995... In the debate about the extent and cause of Britain's economic decline before 1914 the quality of her entrepreneurial class is an eagerly disputed issue.(1) One increasingly popular thesis is the assumption of its deep internal rift along a...

Investment group, free-standing company or multinational? Brazilian warrant: 1909-52.
January 1, 1995... From the late nineteenth century, Britain greatly extended her commercial and financial ties with the rest of the world. Those developments inevitably created new trading and investment openings for businessmen, especially in the peripheral areas...

Money, banking and sources.
January 1, 1995... These ten volumes represent the most adventurous and worthwhile exercise in economic history for many years. Each of the volumes deals with a separate topic in the history of money and banking in the period 1650 to 1850, and each contains a...

History of Banking, 10 vols.
January 1, 1995... These ten volumes represent the most adventurous and worthwhile exercise in economic history for many years. Each of the volumes deals with a separate topic in the history of money and banking in the period 1650 to 1850, and each contains a...

Leeds City Business, 1893-1993: Essays Marking the Centenary of the Incorporation.
January 1, 1995... This is a friendly cheerful book gathering together eight essays on leading Leeds businesses to celebrate the city's centenary and the activities of the Leeds Centre for Business History. The strength of the book lies in the variety of business...

The Missing Stratum: Technical School Education in England, 1900-1990s.
January 1, 1995... Michael Sanderson has developed an extensive reputation for his work on the relationship between education and industrial performance, and in this book he has provided a detailed analysis of what could be regarded as a crucial component in the...

Government and the Enterprise Since 1900: The Changing Problem of Efficiency.
January 1, 1995... This book will be welcomed by many who teach British industrial history. The typical 'enterprise' under scrutiny is not a Sainsburys, Marks & Spencers, Royal Exchange Assurance, Cunard, London North & Eastern Railway, Scottish Electric Traction,...

Accounting History: Some British Contributions.
January 1, 1995... This collection of 23 papers, mostly dating from the 1980s, has been assembled to demonstrate the range of both topics covered and questions raised by British accounting historians, as well as the relevance of such work to key aspects of economic...

The History of the British Petroleum Company, vol. 2, The Anglo-Iranian Years: 1928-1954.
January 1, 1995... This is the second volume of the history of British Petroleum. The first volume, which was published in 1982 and written by Ronald Ferrier, examined the first three decades of the company. In this book, Bamberg takes the story through the era of...

The European Economy, 1750-1914: A Thematic Approach.
January 1, 1995... There are certainly themes in this collection of essays, but sadly there are also several approaches. The editors' objectives are sound enough and clearly established, but, as is often the case in such enterprises, it is with variable success...

Government, Industry and Rearmament in Russia, 1900-1914: The Last Argument of Tsarism.
January 1, 1995... There is a popular view that on the outbreak of the First World War Russia was one of the least industrialised of the industrialised countries. Perhaps it is all a question of degree, but wherever Russia stood in the industrial league table it...

The German Tradition of Organized Capitalism: Self-Government in the Coal Industry.
January 1, 1995... This book pursues simultaneously two themes: the history of the German coal industry since the war, as set in the framework of the second theme, the German tradition of corporatist industrial organisation with its links to the state. It is not an...

Vom Werkzeughandel zum Maschinenbau: Der Aufstieg des Familienunternehmens W. Ferd. Klingelnberg Sohne, 1900-1950, Zeitschrift fur Unternehmensgeschichte.
January 1, 1995... Since the late nineteenth century, the Rhenian machine tool industry has been one of the major driving forces of the German economy. To the present day, the sector is dominated by small and medium-sized manufacturers. Due to the heterogeneous...

Inflation and Industry in Hungary: 1918-1929.
January 1, 1995... This book forms part of a large and authoritative German-led study of inflation and restructuring in Germany and Europe between 1914 and 1924, and is a study of the effects of the post-World War One inflation on Hungary's manufacturing industry....

War and Economy in the Third Reich.
January 1, 1995... The German economy has fascinated the British since the late nineteenth century, perhaps even more than the US economy. In British accounts it often has all the features allegedly missing in Britain: large companies, cartels, a highly technically...

Opting for Oil: The Political Economy of Technical Change in the West German Chemical Industry, 1945-1961.
January 1, 1995... At one level this is a straightforward narrative of the change-over from a coal-based to an oil-based technology in the German chemical industry in the later 1950s. At another, it sets out to explore the influence of national and international...

Banks, Finance and Investment in Germany.
January 1, 1995... The research on which this unpretentious but important book was based forms part of an international project by the Centre for Economic Policy Research on the financing of industry. Edwards and Fischer set out to test the `conventional wisdom'...

Brazilian Industrialists and Democratic Change.
January 1, 1995... Throughout the 1960s and 1970s businessmen in the three major southern cone republics of Latin America were seen as the key civilian group supporting military rule and ranked high among its beneficiaries. Yet the same business elites were...

The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835-1955.
January 1, 1995... Unusual among business histories, this study of one of the Lowell corporations spans over a century. Relying on vast and increasingly detailed archival sources, the principal analysis begins where many Lowell studies end, in 1850. The much...

News Over the Wires: The Telegraph and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844-1897.
January 1, 1995... In 1844, the American public first gained access to telegraphic communication with the opening of a government-sponsored line between Baltimore and Washington. From the outset the press was one of the most enthusiastic users of the service,...

Edison and the Business of Innovation.
January 1, 1995... When it first appeared in 1990, Millard's Edison met with almost unanimously favourable reviews, both from business historians and from historians of science. Reappearing now in paperback, the book will doubtless be welcomed by researchers,...

Unfinished Business: The Railroad in American Life.
January 1, 1995... This book is a collection of a dozen papers written over the last 25 years. The author explains that he was usually too busy with books to write many articles of the conventional kind, and came to regard shorter pieces as opportunities for...

Politics and Industrialization: Early Railroads in the United States and Prussia.
January 1, 1995... Comparative business histories are few and far between, and this fact makes Dunlavy's monograph a particularly welcome addition to the literature. Railway development provides a useful means of comparison, as Dunlavy observes in her introduction....

Never Just a Game: Players, Owners and American Baseball to 1920.
January 1, 1995... Baseball is still called `America's pastime' for good reason: more Americans watch and participate in baseball than any other sport. Yet, as Robert Burk convincingly argues, baseball has never been `just a game', but rather a business often...

Platt Brothers and Company: Small Business in American Manufacturing.
January 1, 1995... This book explores the history of one small Waterbury, Connecticut, metal-working company that has so far survived five generations. In one sense the Platts are almost unique, since very few small manufacturing firms have survived that long. In...

Uneasy Partners: Big Business in American Politics, 1945-1990.
January 1, 1995... Histories of the United States which focus on the evolution of the relationship between business and the government as their central theme are rare; works with this theme that are genuinely non-tendentious, informative, and pleasant reading are...

Tournament of Lawyers: The Transformation of the Big Law Firm.
January 1, 1995... This century has seen the development in the USA of the large law firm and `the distinctive style of lawyering associated with it', described and analysed in this book. Firms of solicitors in the UK, mainly in the City, have followed a similar...

Encyclopedia of American Business History and Biography: Iron and Steel in the Twentieth Century.
January 1, 1995... This book is one of nine of the Encyclopedia of American Business History which have been published at regular intervals since 1988. Each chronicles the fortunes of a particular industry in a free-standing study, though especially important...

The New Icons? The Art of Television Advertising.
January 1, 1995... This study of television commercials is frankly a popular book, designed for enthusiasts rather than for those interested in the history and theory of marketing on both sides of the Atlantic. Although Paul Rutherford has carried out his research...

Ottoman Manufacturing in the Age of the Industrial Revolution.
January 1, 1995... Did the Ottoman-ruled Balkans and Middle East experience de-industrialisation between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth centuries? According to the author of this book, it all depends what you mean by de-industrialisation. Relative to...

Japan's Winning Margins: Management, Training and Education.
January 1, 1995... This book aims not only to explain the Japanese post-war economic success, but also to answer the question: what can the West learn from Japan? By bringing together two authors, one from Britain who has been doing research on Japanese management...

Does Ownership Matter? Japanese Multinationals in Europe.
January 1, 1995... The spectacular rise of Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Europe in recent years has excited considerable interest. Scholars, amongst others, have been eager to discover and evaluate the real implications of the so-called `Japanese...

The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India: Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940.
January 1, 1995... Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's study of the textile workers and industrialists of Bombay opens with the bold claim that `if the 1970s "witnessed the return of the peasant to South Asian history", the urban poor and the working classes have remained...

Artisans and Industrialization: Indian Weaving in the Twentieth Century.
January 1, 1995... In this study, Roy emphasises the complexity of the impact of imports of machine made British cotton products on the Indian handloom industry. He argues that the classic de-industrialisation debates with their concentration upon employment levels...

Transnational Corporations in Southeast Asia: An Institutional Approach to Industrial Organization.
January 1, 1995... The modern revival of interest in institutional economics and its application to the analysis of firms owes much to the `rediscovery' of Nobel Laureate Ronald Coase's seminal article, `The Nature of the Firm', published in 1937 and the more...

The Politics of Work: Gender and Labour in Victoria: 1880-1939.
January 1, 1995... This exceptional study extends the terms of the labour process debate from the narrow focus established by Braverman, and incorporates, among other neglected components, an examination of gender relationships in the workplace and the social...

Tariffs and Growth: Some Illustrations from the World Economy, 1850-1940.
January 1, 1995... The growth of protectionist measures since OPEC I, the long-drawn-out negotiations of the last GATT round and the emergence of a `new' international trade theory Provide testimony that the maintenance of free trade, like the preservation of...

Information Acumen: The Understanding and Use of Knowledge in Modern Business.
January 1, 1995... This collection contains ten papers drawn from a 1992 conference at the University of Reading. The aims are to provide an international comparative view and to draw on different disciplines in analysing the nature and uses of business...

Adding Value: Brands and Marketing Food and Drink.
January 1, 1995... It is not unusual, of course, for edited books to promise more than they deliver. However, in this case the imbalance between ambition and achievement is less striking than is often the case because the collection as a whole is tightly organised,...

Country Competitiveness: Technology and the Organizing of Work.
January 1, 1995... This is an excellent collection of essays and a compilation which for the most part works extremely well. The aim of the editor, as stated in the introduction, is to provide an overview of changes in work organisation and to link such changes to...

Capital Markets and Corporate Governance.
January 1, 1995... In both the United States and the United Kingdom, there has been growing interest in the subject of the relationship between the management of a company and its owners. The central question is how managers can be made more accountable to...

Foreign Direct Investment.
January 1, 1995... In May 1992, at a National Bureau of Economic Research-sponsored conference, Kenneth Froot of the Harvard Business School assembled a large group of scholars to give papers and to discuss Foreign Direct Investment Today'. In the fall of 1991,...

An International Directory of Business Historians.
January 1, 1995... This volume undoubtedly fills a need. At the simplest level it satisfies the idle curiosity of the business historian as to his colleagues' ages, qualifications, and important publications. At a less facetious level, it provides an indication of...

Transaction Costs, Markets and Hierarchies.
January 1, 1995... Christos Pitelis has brought together 11 essays by leading critics of the Coase-Williamson approach to the firm. The aim is to provide a rigorous critique of the assumptions and implications of this transaction costs perspective. The...

Entrepreneurship, Management and the Structure of Payoffs.
January 1, 1995... The author has been writing about entrepreneurship, and its neglect in economic theory, for at least 25 years. This monograph draws together many of the ideas developed in that time, and encompasses material published already, in expounding a...

Twentieth-Century Accounting Thinkers.
January 1, 1995... The book is a celebration of the quincentenary of the publication of the first printed book to include details of the principles of double-entry bookkeeping. It is a biographical compendium including considerable detail of the lives, backgrounds...

The Culture of the Market: Historical Essays.
January 1, 1995... When business historians hear the word 'culture' they usually reach for their calculating machines. The domain of culture is notoriously difficult to define. It appears to be everywhere business is conducted and nowhere in particular. The editors...