Business History articles from January 1996

Business History archives from January 1996

Inter-firm relations and industrial policy: the French and German steel producers and users in the twentieth century.
January 1, 1996... With respect to industrial policy, France seems one of the most interesting cases to study. It has not only been characterised by a high level of state intervention in industry, at least since the late 1930s, but - even more importantly - shows a...

Industrial lending by English commercial banks, 1860s-1914: why did banks refuse loans?
January 1, 1996... There is a long-standing debate on the role of banks in industrial finance in Britain before the First World War.(1) At its broadest, the debate is bound up with the analysis of British ruling elites, their composition and the manifestation of...

The technological strategy of a leading iron and steel firm, Bolckow Vaughan & Co. Ltd: late Victorian industrialists did fail.
January 1, 1996... Many scholars have discussed the problem of British economic decline in the late nineteenth century, focusing on the responsibility of late Victorian and Edwardian entrepreneurs. The debate still resonates. In their surveys of the British economy...

The chrome trust: the creation of an international cartel, 1908-38.
January 1, 1996... I have ever had a leaning towards base metals in preference to the more precious ores. They have always interested me. I like tonnages'. (Edmund Davis interviewed in 1933).(1) Base mineral mining and marketing in the first half of this century...

Learning from joint venture: the Rover-Honda relationship. (Rover Group Ltd.; Honda Motor Co. Ltd.)
January 1, 1996... Debates on the internationalisation of business, on the transfer of technology, knowledge and systems, and the effectiveness of mergers and joint ventures have particular relevance to the past and current restructuring of the global car industry....

French banking history: a review article.
January 1, 1996... The history of French banking since the French Revolution has a long tradition dating back to the pioneering studies of Bertrand Gille,(1) Jean Bouvier,(2) and Maurice Levy-Leboyer(3) in the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the work of Herbert...

Men at Work: Labourers and Building Craftsmen in the Towns of Northern England, 1450-1750.
January 1, 1996... Donald Woodward's excellent study aims to balance with northern evidence the urban, south-east material of the Phelps Brown and Hopkins index which has hitherto been the main measure of real wages and thus living standards in pre-industrial...

Marriage, Debt and the Estates System: English Landownership, 1650-1960.
January 1, 1996... This great work of scholarship, elegant and lucid for all its length, is an elaboration of Sir John Habakkuk's Ford Lectures of 1985. The reworking has consisted chiefly in a more complete apparatus of criticism and the addition of many more...

The Origins of Middle Class Culture: Halifax, Yorkshire, 1660-1780.
January 1, 1996... While John Smail has not written a conventional business history, this excellent study is relevant to anyone interested in the origins of modern business. It is set against the backdrop of the transfer of the worsted industry from its East...

Business Enterprise in Modern Britain: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century.
January 1, 1996... This is an important book for both teachers and students. For those teaching or studying a course on 'business history' the choice of textbooks has been problematic in recent years. Pollard's seminal Genesis of Modern Management has long been out...

Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women.
January 1, 1996... Advertisements are multivalent historical documents, with different meanings for diverse groups of historians. While business historians have tended to concentrate their discussions primarily on the commercial purposes and context of publicity...

Victorian Insolvency: Bankruptcy, Imprisonment for Debt and Company Winding-up in Nineteenth-Century England.
January 1, 1996... It is a testimony to the thoroughness of Victorian legislators that the 1883 Bankruptcy Act remained the bankruptcy law of England and Wales, until the arrival of the Insolvency Acts in 1985-86, and even then the intent of the founding...

Uniting the Tailors: Trade Unionism Amongst the Tailors of London and Leeds, 1870-1939.
January 1, 1996... The history of the British clothing industry is not very well developed. Considering the vast army of researchers focusing on the textiles industry, relatively little is known about the firms and processes which turned the woollens and worsteds...

The Rise of Consumer Society in Britain: 1880-1980.
January 1, 1996... Although the publication in 1960 of Walt Rostow's book, The Stages of Economic Growth, sparked off a lengthy debate about the process of industrialisation, most discussion centred on his notions of the take-off and its pre-conditions. The final...

The Political Economy of Nationalisation in Britain: 1920-30.
January 1, 1996... The central question asked by this book is why nationalisation in Britain took the shape it did in the 1940s, when approximately 20 per cent of the economy came into public ownership. The issue focused upon here is why nationalisation embraced...

The Aberdeen Granite Industry.
January 1, 1996... Any visitor to Aberdeen is struck by the almost universal use of granite as a building material. However, it was not until the middle of the eighteenth century that this hardest of all building stones began to be commercially extracted -...

The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence.
January 1, 1996... The Florentine super-companies of Peruzzi, Bardi and Acciaiuoli, prominent in the early fourteenth century, were huge organisations compared to most other medieval enterprises. Primarily engaged in international commodity trade, they were also...

Planning the French Canals: Bureaucracy, Politics and Enterprise under the Restoration.
January 1, 1996... A searching analysis of the ambitious programme of canal construction, largely conceived and executed between 1820 and 1850, provides Geiger with the material not only to supplement the historiography of French transport development, which...

Werner von Siemens, Inventor and International Entrepreneur.
January 1, 1996... Wilfried Feldenkirchen's well-written book on Werner von Siemens (1816-92) is the first in a three-volume history of the Siemens corporation. This first volume deals primarily with Werner von Siemens as a businessman. Feldenkirchen gives an...

Zeitschrift fur Bayerische Sparkassen-Geschichte, 8 vols.
January 1, 1996... This annual journal represents one of the fruits of a project which commenced in 1981, when Manfred Pix, Director of the Sparkasse in Neustadt a.d. Aisch, and Josef Wysocki of the University of Salzburg, established a research group, with regular...

Introduccion a la historia de la empresa en Espana.
January 1, 1996... Business history is manifestly in its infancy in Spain. Like its parent discipline, economic history, it was a late starter by comparison with developments elsewhere north of the Pyrenees. As Sebastian Coll and Gabriel Tortella inform us in a...

Before Command: An Economic History of Russia from Emancipation to the First Five-Year Plan.
January 1, 1996... This is a culmination of many years' detailed empirical study by Gregory into the economic history of Russia. Specialist readers will be aware of Gregory's main findings, which have been published in many essays and articles as well as a major...

Engendering Business: Men and Women in the Corporate Office, 1870-1930.
January 1, 1996... Gender is increasingly being recognised as an important category of historical analysis. Yet its major presence has been in women's history, where it has stimulated a separatist approach with its own language and ideology. Gender, however, is...

Regulation and the Revolution in United States Farm Productivity.
January 1, 1996... This is a rather uneven investigation into the relationship between regulation and farm productivity in the United States. Clarke's underlying theme is how the successful American farms between the early 1920s and the mid-1970s were transformed...

A.P. Giannini: Banker of America.
January 1, 1996... There are two reasons why this biography will be of interest to business historians. The first is that there is a growing interest in contextualised biography either to supplement, or as an alternative to, prosopography as a means of identifying...

Auto Opium: A Social History of American Automobile Design.
January 1, 1996... Considering the amount of ink that has been spilled in writing the history of the American automobile industry, one might have thought that there was nothing much more to say on the subject. This well-written short book shows clearly that this is...

Business Interest Groups in Nineteenth-Century Brazil.
January 1, 1996... Business interest groups flourished throughout Brazil in the nineteenth century and this meticulous study, based mainly on extensive study of the archives of half a dozen commercial associations, uses them as a window on the entire spectrum of...

The Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire: 1300-1914.
January 1, 1996... This is a truly enormous book, more than a thousand pages, available for sale at a monstrous price. Certainly it covers a long time period and a vast area (and some readers of this journal may need to remind themselves just how large the Ottoman...

Merchant Capital and Economic Decolonization: The United Africa Company, 1929-1989.
January 1, 1996... The United Africa Company (UAC) was formed in 1919 by a merger between two British trading companies active primarily in West Africa, the Niger Company (virtually wholly owned by Lever Brothers since 1920) and the African and Eastern Association....

The Advance of African Capital: The Growth of Nigerian Private Enterprise.
January 1, 1996... The development and importance of indigenous African capital has been the subject of only limited research. With regard to South Africa interest has focused largely on the implications for the apartheid system of the creation of a black...

Nigeria: The Political Economy of Oil.
January 1, 1996... Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa. It is also the fourth largest oil producer within the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting countries (OPEC). A feature of Nigeria's oil which distinguishes it from that of most other OPEC members is...

Forming a Colonial Economy: Australia, 1810-1850.
January 1, 1996... This is the final work of Australia's greatest economic historian, Noel Butlin, who died in 1991 before he was able to finish its later stages. Nonetheless, it completes his two-volume history of the early colonial economy with Economics and the...

Mr Brooks and the Australian Trade: Imperial Business in the Nineteenth Century.
January 1, 1996... Robert Brooks was one of the most prominent figures in mid-nineteenth century England who was active in trade with the Antipodes. Brooks had extensive interests: he owned a fleet of ships, extended advances to Australian woolgrowers, handled...

Japanese Business Success: The Evolution of a Strategy.
January 1, 1996... This collection of original essays has been published in honour of Professor Shin'ichi Yonekawa, the doyen of Japanese business historians, who taught and researched at Hitotsubashi University for many years and continues to pursue an active...

Architects of Affluence: The Tsutsumi Family and the Seibu Enterprises in 20th Century Japan.
January 1, 1996... This book is stimulating, instructive to those who are not Japanese specialists, and, what is more, a first-class read. A survey carried out in 1992 found that only three out of ten Japanese men in their twenties thought that work was the most...

The Competitive Advantages of Far Eastern Business.
January 1, 1996... The title of this slim volume is deliberately intended to echo that of Michael Porter's 1990 book The Competitive Advantages of Nations in that it attempts to account for the success of five of the dynamic East Asian economies; Japan, Hong Kong,...

Caste and Capitalism in Colonial India: The Nattukottai Chettiars.
January 1, 1996... This is primarily a business history analysing the banking practices of the Nattukotai Chettiars [Nakarattars], the chief banking caste of South India in the period 1870-1930. It goes much further than this in assessing the business world of the...

Management in China During the Age of Reform.
January 1, 1996... Professor Child's new book can be read as a contemporary history of the Chinese economy, an analysis of how management is conducted in China, a practical guide to doing business there, and finally as a contribution to the development of...

Gifts and Commodities: Exchange and Western Capitalism Since 1700.
January 1, 1996... This is a fascinating but frustrating book. Its aim, Carrier explains, is to develop the ideas that the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss put forward 70 years ago in his classic study The Gift. Its aims more specifically are to describe the...

Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organisation in a Comparative Perspective.
January 1, 1996... This book examines a comparative sociological and historical study of theories of organisation, management, and work, focusing on the US, Germany, Spain and Britain. The stated intention is in part to extend and develop the classic sociological...

Universal Banking in the Twentieth Century: Finance, Industry and the State in North and Central Europe.
January 1, 1996... This volume is the latest in a series of research reports on the historical role of banks in the provision of industrial finance in a number of 'small' countries of northern and central Europe. This particular collection of essays arises from a...

Cars: Analysis, History, Cases.
January 1, 1996... Written by a team of authors with a strong accounting background, this slim volume covers a great deal of ground relating to the history of the automobile industry and contemporary trends. It challenges most of the recent work on the industry...

Labour market Evolution: The Economic History of Market Integration, Wage Flexibility and the Employment Relation.
January 1, 1996... This volume was designed to provide a venue for the considerable amount of work emerging on the operation of nineteenth and twentieth century labour markets. Its focus is limited in the sense that it neglects features such as the development of...

Machines and Economic Growth: The Implications for Growth Theory of the History of the Industrial Revolution.
January 1, 1996... This is a very ambitious book which seeks within fairly modest dimensions to provide both a historical survey of modern economic growth and an explanation of it. The structure of the book is dominated by sequential development, successive...

Technical Change and the World Economy: Convergence and Divergence in Technology Strategies.
January 1, 1996... This book, based on a collection of papers selected from the MERIT (Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology) Conference held in December 1992, considers a number of different aspects to determine whether convergence or...

Global Japanization? The Transnational Transformation of the Labour Process.
January 1, 1996... For three decades business history has been largely a project of charting the rise of the multidivisional firm in America and its uneven diffusion across the capitalist world. But, despite a burgeoning literature charting the impact of Taylorism...

Tin in the World Economy.
January 1, 1996... A cover note tells us that this book is part of a series on Commodities in the International Economy, edited by Bill Albert and Adrian Graves. All volumes in the series are written to a common format and are designed to introduce the general...