Business History articles from July 1993

Business History archives from July 1993

From private to public ownership of gas undertakings in England and Wales, 1851-1947: chronology, incidence and causes.
July 1, 1993... From the mid-nineteenth century onwards expenditure on urban infrastructure and services grew in many Western countries, as did both local and central government intervention. The economic organisation of this sector nevertheless varied...

What's in a name: merchants, merchant bankers, accepting houses, issuing houses, industrial bankers and investment bankers.
July 1, 1993... 'The term "merchant bank" is widely and loosely used today', observed Sir Edward Reid, the doyen of City of London merchant bankers, a director of Baring Brothers & Co. Ltd since 1926 and chairman of the Accepting Houses Committee since 1946,...

The profitability of Anglo-Chinese trade, 1861-1913.
July 1, 1993... 56. Chinese Maritime Customs, Decennial Reports (hereafter CMCDR), 1922-31, p. 27; B.P. Torgasheff, China as a Tea Producer (Shanghai, 1926), p. 153; Allen and Donnithorne, Western Enterprise, pp. 54-5; F.E. Hyde, Far Eastern Trade, 1860-1914...

The myth of the line: Ford's production of the model T at Highland Park, 1909-16.
July 1, 1993... 92. Arnold and Faurote, Ford's Methods, pp. 193, 174-9. 93. Ibid., p. 185. 94. Ford Archive, Detroit, W. Klann, 'Oral Reminiscences', p. 55. 95. Arnold and Faurote, Ford's Methods, p. 142. Myth is constituted by the loss of the...

Intensifying competition and the streamlining of Japanese shipping companies: the Pacific routes between the two world wars.
July 1, 1993... During and immediately after World War I, world shipping tonnage increased dramatically for two reasons. One was the oversupply of shipping, and the other was the decline in shipping demand. Many large ships, whose construction had been ordered...

The Widening Gate: Bristol and the Atlantic Economy, 1450-1700.
July 1, 1993... The title of this volume, The Widening Gate, derives from the coat of arms of the city of Bristol which shows a ship advancing from the city castle for a voyage. In 1985 Sacks published Trade, Society and Politics in Bristol, 1500-1640 (New York:...

Judging New Wealth: Popular Publishing and Responses to Commerce in England, 1750-1800.
July 1, 1993... The nature of the relationship between society, ideas and business enterprise has long preoccupied historians of modern Britain. Exploration of the connections between religion and the rise of capitalism is one part of that. Another centres on...

Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War I.
July 1, 1993... This book has been written by Chapman to complement an earlier volume, The Rise of Merchant Banking. In the previous book he documented the move from merchant to banker of a small number of those engaged in commercial activity, such as the...

The Ability to Manage: A Study of British Management, 1890-1990.
July 1, 1993... This interesting, readable and informative book deals with the quintessential importance of a relevant education for national prosperity and competitive edge. More particularly, The Ability to Manage documents -- with acute precision,...

Markets, Firms, and the Management of Labour in Modern Britain.
July 1, 1993... Gospel's aim is to chart the slow and incomplete transition from market-based to internal strategies in British industrial employers' management of manual labour since 1870. Management of labour has three dimensions: employment relations (hiring,...

A Domestic History of the Bank of England: 1930-1960.
July 1, 1993... This is a long book covering few years, and is the latest in a line of distinguished works sponsored by the Bank; as the line grows longer so the periods grow shorter and the number of pages per year of history multiplies. But this is not meant...

Education, Training and Economic Performance: 1944 to 1990.
July 1, 1993... Shortcomings in the provision of education and vocational training in Britain, and their bearing upon the performance of the British economy, have been the subject of intense debate for well over a century. That debate has gained in intensity...

A Distinctive Industrialisation: Cotton in Barcelona, 1728-1832.
July 1, 1993... Thomson's unusual case study sets out to illuminate a number of major themes within European industrialisation. The bold, multifaceted framework, described in a pithy introduction, incorporates a Marxist perspective, a protoindustrial model, the...

Technology Transfer and Scandinavian Industrialisation.
July 1, 1993... Scandinavia, as the editor remarks in her introduction, was hardly a promising host for industrial society. The region has timber, minerals and fish and Denmark good agricultural land, but less than three per cent of Norway's land surface can be...

Electrifying Finland: The Transfer of a New Technology into a Late Industrialising Economy.
July 1, 1993... Timo Myllyntaus' book Electrifying Finland tells the story of Finnish electrification from the earliest demonstrations of electric lighting in Helsinki in 1877 to the start-up of the first nuclear power plant, Loviisa 1, in 1977. Myllyntaus...

For Love of the Automobile: Looking Back into the History of Our Desires.
July 1, 1993... Wolfgang Sachs looks at the evolution of the automobile as a cultural symbol. He does so using German experience, starting with the pre-1914 period when the automobile established itself as a vehicle for the affluent. With rival nations like...

Recasting the Ruhr, 1945-1958: Manpower, Economic Recovery and Labour Relations.
July 1, 1993... The debate about the economic significance of the policies implemented in 1948 by the West German economics minister, Ludwig Erhard, continues to recruit participants. Roseman is among the more recent although his work is actually a labour...

Naturwissenschaften und chemische Industrie in Deutschland.
July 1, 1993... Historians have frequently interpreted Germany's industrialisation as a product of the successful marriage of science and industry. Wetzel's book offers empirical support for that interpretation. His topic is the development of chemistry as a...

Privatizing the Economy.
July 1, 1993... This is not a general book on privatisation and therefore the main title is misleading. Rather, the effects state ownership has on the performance of a firm and the role of political institutions in shaping programmes of privatisation are the...

The Pre-Industrial Consumer in England and America.
July 1, 1993... This book attempts to shed new light on consumerism and consumer behaviour in the early modern period. Shammas argues that, although there were important changes in the composition of diet, and although new consumer durables appeared in large...

Cargill: Trading the World's Grain.
July 1, 1993... Cargill emerged from a succession of ephemeral grain warehousing partnerships in the Mid-West of the 1860s and 1870s. The Cargill family did well out of the 1870s depression. Strong backing from local banks, one of the keys to its trading success...

Threads of Solidarity: Women in South African Industry, 1900-1980.
July 1, 1993... In Threads of Solidarity Iris Berger has traced with meticulous care and scholarship the history of women's employment (and exclusion from employment) in South Africa from the turn of the century up to the 1980s. Using a wide range of archival...

Merchants of the Raj: British Managing Agency Houses in Calcutta Yesterday and Today.
July 1, 1993... Mackinnon Mackenzie, Andrew Yule, James Finlay, Balmer Lawrie, Shaw Wallace . . . the very names of Calcutta's managing agency houses are a dusty invocation of the long history of British commerce in India -- and an apt reminder of the Scots'...

The 100-Year History of Nippon Life: Its Growth and Socioeconomic Setting, 1889-1989.
July 1, 1993... Japanese life assurance companies tower over the international insurance market in scale. The largest British life company, the Prudential, ranked fourteenth in the world in 1987 behind three American and ten Japanese companies, which included...

The Role of Labor-Intensive Sectors in Japanese Industrialization.
July 1, 1993... The manufacture of buttons, pearl (shell), not used in Japan before 1868, brushes, tufted with bristle, originally made to clean the inside of gun barrels, bicycles and knitted fabric will not readily fire the imagination, and yet these...

Transfer of Japanese Technology and Management to the ASEAN Countries.
July 1, 1993... This volume is the product of a conference held in 1989 at Hiroshima University. The contributors are economists drawn from Japan and several of the ASEAN host countries, who conducted detailed research over a five-year period. Although it is not...

Enterprise Unionism in Japan.
July 1, 1993... The publication of Kawanishi's book in English should be welcomed by everyone in the West who is concerned with the study of Japanese management techniques and industrial relations including the implications for their diffusion/adaptation or...

Japanese Yearbook on Business History: 1991.
July 1, 1993... The eighth volume in this extremely useful series continues with the task of making texts published in Japan available to an English readership. The present study concentrates upon the corporate structure of Japan and seeks to explain why its...

New Silk Roads, East Asia and World Textile Markets.
July 1, 1993... This volume is a collection of ten conference papers from Australia on newly industrialising economies (NIEs) with particular reference to the role of their textile industries. It is very much an economist's approach and shows no interest in...

Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939.
July 1, 1993... The possibility that history provides lessons for present and future conduct is no doubt more popular amongst policy-makers and economic agents than amongst academics. Few, however, would disagree with Arthur Lewis's conclusion that one of the...

Business Organization and the Myth of the Market Economy.
July 1, 1993... In this fine collection of essays Bill Lazonick has two main objectives. The first is to elaborate both theoretically and historically why leading-edge business organisation shifted from Britain to the United States in the early years of this...

Sunk Costs and Market Structure: Price Competition, Advertising and the Evolution of Concentration.
July 1, 1993... The book under review can be described as two for the price of one; both are of interest to business historians, for different reasons. Those researching into the food and drink industries, especially on a comparative basis over different...

Financing Industrialization.
July 1, 1993... With these two volumes Cameron has produced an excellent collection of established essays on the role of banks in the financing of industrial development. As with other collections in the series (The International Library of Macroeconomic and...

International Banking: 1870-1914.
July 1, 1993... This collection of 22 essays is the outcome of a large-scale collaborative research project involving many of the leading historians of banking and of multinational enterprise drawn from the United States, Canada, Brazil, western Europe, the...

International Business and Global Integration: Empirical Studies.
July 1, 1993... This set of articles, assembled by Mark Casson, starts with the editor's introduction, followed by seven papers, three of which are co-authored by the editor. It has no summary or concluding essay. This book corresponds to the vintage Casson...

The Structure of Corporate Political Action: Interfirm Relations and their Consequences.
July 1, 1993... As its title implies, this book is less about the structure of business than about the extent to which different types of relationships between (American) corporations influence their unity of political action. It is not, of course, a work...

Regulation: Economic Theory and History.
July 1, 1993... This book attempts to build a bridge between the disciplines of economics and history in studying the regulation, by the state, of key sectors of economic activity in the USA. Being a child of its time the book focuses a good deal on the obverse...

Technology and Enterprise in Historical Perspective.
July 1, 1993... There is an honourable tradition, little observed today, that senior professors should teach introductory courses of wide scope, while their younger colleagues should deal with specialised topics. The strengths of that approach are richly...

The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s.
July 1, 1993... 'Why don't you just publish bestsellers?', was the question asked by executives of The Times Mirror Co. following their takeover of the art publishers Harry N. Abrams Inc. This question epitomises the reasons for the widespread concern at the...

The Rise of Big Business.
July 1, 1993... This is one of five volumes of The International Library of Critical Writings in Business History. Even though there is no introduction by the general editor to explain the aims of the series, the titles of the other volumes bear testimony to its...

Managerial Dilemmas: The Political Economy of Hierarchy.
July 1, 1993... This study is a contribution to the burgeoning literature on institutional economics, and explores the problems which lead to the formation of hierarchies and the difficulties inherent in such structural forms. The basic thesis is that...

Managing Business Archives.
July 1, 1993... The Business Archives Council was founded (as the Council for the Preservation of Business Archives) as long ago as 1934 -- before many local record offices were opened, long before the collecting and preservation of business records in proper...