Business History articles from July 1994

Business History archives from July 1994

Learning to multiply: the property market and the growth of multiple retailing in Britain, 1919-39.
July 1, 1994... The inter-war years saw a dramatic expansion of multiple retailing in Britain's high streets. Some of this country's best known retailers, such as Marks & Spencer, Montague Burton, and Woolworth's, became household names during this period, while...

British employers and education policy, 1935-45: a decade of 'missed opportunities'?
July 1, 1994... If we hope to be successful in any political or social endeavour there are two prerequisites besides good will. We must examine the system with which we have to deal, and we must examine ourselves. We must find out what we take for granted in the...

Origins, growth and concentration of bank capital in South Africa, 1860-92.
July 1, 1994... The world economy experienced rapid growth in the second half of the nineteenth century, growth that encompassed all the continents of the world and reached out to include the capital employed in South African banks. While in the long run...

Afrikaner nationalism, Anglo-American and Iscor: the formation of the Highveld Steel & Vanadium Corporation, 1960-70.
July 1, 1994... This article(1) is concerned with the history of the South African steel and engineering industry during the 1960s, particularly with the questions of ownership and control. It was a crucial period in the history of the industry for a number of...

British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction, 1914-1990.
July 1, 1994... Every so often a work appears which can already, from the first, be regarded as a landmark, and Cain and Hopkins' British Imperialism clearly comes into this class. Most economic historians will be familiar with the 'gentlemanly capitalism'...

The British Industrial Revolution: An Economic Perspective.
July 1, 1994... This collection of essays contains three contributors (Harley, Landes, Mokyr) looking at the Industrial Revolution in general together with essays on agriculture (Clark) and human capital (Mitch). As always with such ventures the standard is...

Capitalism, Culture and Decline in Britain, 1750-1990.
July 1, 1994... This book is a frontal assault on the 'cultural critique' of the British economy espoused by Anthony Sampson, Corelli Barnett, and Martin Wiener. Its main proposition is that these authors have made a fundamental error in their interpretation of...

Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain.
July 1, 1994... Geoffrey Seale is well known for his sparkling analyses of the corrupt links between businessmen and politics in Edwardian Britain. In his latest book he steps back two generations in search of the principled politics of mid-Victorian...

The History of the Yorkshire Miners: 1881-1918.
July 1, 1994... This book, the result of research financed by the Yorkshire area of the National Union of Mineworkers, is described on the dust cover as a detailed social history concerned with the workers in the Yorkshire coal industry, their union, and the...

ICI: The Company That Changed Our Lives.
July 1, 1994... This second edition, of a book published in 1986 to mark the diamond jubilee of ICI, is presented in a slightly larger format by a different publisher; the illustrations are integrated in the text rather than in blocks of plates as they were in...

Four Centuries of Warehousing. Pakhoed: The Origins and History, 1616-1967.
July 1, 1994... Pakhoed is an important warehousing and distribution company based in Rotterdam which was formed in 1967 by the merger of two organisations, which in turn were combines of older enterprises. The name Pakhoed only appears in the last half-dozen...

Invention, Innovation, Diffusion: Die Entwicklung des Spar- und Sparkassengerdankens in Europa.
July 1, 1994... The theme of the 1990 Munich conference from which these papers have been drawn was the 'innovation' and diffusion of the concept of the savings bank in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. While there are some useful contributions to this...

Bourgeois Society in Nineteenth Century Europe.
July 1, 1994... This book grew from a co-operative project in the Institute of Advanced Studies, Bielefield 1986-87. The original German version, published in 1988, ran to three volumes. The abbreviated English translation presents 17 extracts. Not surprisingly...

The Political Economy of Shopkeeping in Milan: 1886-1922.
July 1, 1994... If we know all too little about the economic history of the small enterprise in modern Europe, its social and political development was until recently no better understood, interpreted only as the supposed backcloth to inter-war fascism....

The Rainbow Makers: The Origins of the Synthetic Dyestuffs Industry in Western Europe.
July 1, 1994... Judging by the frequency with which the shortage of khaki dye for army uniforms in 1914 is mentioned in exam scripts, the British dyestuffs industry is firmly embedded in the undergraduate mind as an example of entrepreneurial failure. With the...

The Rise and Decline of Holland's Economy: Merchant Capitalism and the Labour Market.
July 1, 1994... This is an ambitious book. In less than 200 pages, the author covers the period from 1300 until 1850 and develops a Marxist-inspired theory of merchant capitalism, while at the same time wanting to shed new light on the rise and decline of...

Markt, Staat, Planung - Historische Erfahrungen mit Regulierungs- und Deregulierungsversuchen der Wirtschaft.
July 1, 1994... Sidney Pollard retired from his chair at the University of Bielefeld in 1990. This inspired his colleagues to organise a conference on economic history in his honour. Spanning the period from the eighteenth century to the present, these papers...

Glanzstoff: Zur Geschichte der Chemiefaster, eines Unternehmens und seiner Arbeiterschaft.
July 1, 1994... Glanzstoff, as admitted by Wicht, is an unlikely name for a multinational company. Difficult for non-German speakers to pronounce, and in itself fairly meaningless -- it translates roughly as 'Lustre fabric' -- the name nevertheless survived 80...

Erfolgsbeteiligung und Vermoegensbildung der Arbeitnerhmenr bei Krupp.
July 1, 1994... This volume reports a preliminary part of a research project of the German Business History Society on 'Success Participation and Wealth Accumulation by Workers in Certain German Firms between the Mid-19th Century and the Second World War'. The...

Made in Germany: The Corporate Identity of a Nation.
July 1, 1994... This book is the history of an image -- that conveyed by the label, 'Made in Germany' -- as it appears in advertising and is discussed in the press. This history starts at the time when the British Merchandise Marks Act (1887) made the label...

German Yearbook on Business History: 1989-92.
July 1, 1994... Gustave Flaubert once wrote that the longer one looks at something, the more interesting it becomes. That observation certainly holds true for the most recent German Yearbook on Business History. The majority of the articles it contains are...

Business and Banking.
July 1, 1994... The title of this book is a little misleading. The central concern is really with the demise of left-wing political parties in Europe in the last 20 years. Banking, after a fashion, does come into it. The explanation given for the demise is that...

Planting the Province: The Economic History of Upper Canada, 1784-1870.
July 1, 1994... Planting the Province is the first of three chronological volumes on the economic history of Ontario in the Ontario Historical Studies Series, a project which is intended to run, when completed, to more than 30 volumes. It is also the last of the...

Farm, Factory and Fortune: New Studies in the Economic History of the Maritime Provinces.
July 1, 1994... In this collection Kris Inwood aims to set a new research agenda for the economic, business and social history of the Canadian Maritime provinces. Since the 1970s or so conventional interpretations of Maritime economic history have revolved...

A History of Small Business in America.
July 1, 1994... At first sight 'Small Business in America' might seem to imply a study of petty manufacturers, local banks and 'mom and pop drug stores'. However the subject is more than a history just of small business because Blackford is very concerned about...

Franchising in America: The Development of a Business Method, 1840-1980.
July 1, 1994... This book is a study of the development of franchising as a business method in the United States and the relationships between franchisers and franchisees. The importance of franchising to the contemporary American economy is clear: over a third...

Paradox of Plenty: A Social History of Eating in Modern America.
July 1, 1994... If Americans are what they eat, then they are a bundle of contradictions. The 'junk foodie', snacking either in front of the television or on the run between activities, contrasts with the diet freak who maintains a slender shape by constant...

Pursuing Happiness: American Consumers in the Twentieth Century.
July 1, 1994... A visitor to the USA cannot fail to be impressed (or appalled) by the impact and extent of American consumerism -- the sheer cornucopia of products and services compared to other nations. Professor Lebergott traces the history of that consumerism...

Industrial Democracy in America: The Ambiguous Promise.
July 1, 1994... The introduction and a brief epilogue enclose nine chapters examining how notions of industrial democracy developed, competed and changed between 1890 and the 1980s. Overall the book is an evaluation of the limitations of the contractual unionism...

America and the Multinational Corporation: The History of a Troubled Partnership.
July 1, 1994... This book deals with considerably narrower issues than its title suggests, being primarily concerned with relationships between American federal government and big business, and with the bulk of the narrative concentrating on the post-1945 era....

Technology and US Competitiveness: An Institutional Focus.
July 1, 1994... This book deals with technology policy in the light of the impact of technological development on national competitiveness. It is particularly concerned with US technology policy from the Reagan years onwards, and without very much historical...

Cane and Labour: The Political Economy of the Queensland Sugar Industry, 1862-1906.
July 1, 1994... A book long in the making, but one which was well worth the wait. Whilst concentrating upon the use of labour from the Pacific Islands in the production of sugar in Queensland, Graves gives us an insight into far more than just labour market...

Innovation, Policy and Law: Australia and the International High Technology Economy.
July 1, 1994... In this wide-ranging book, Christopher Arup investigates the effects of various legal regimes on the adoption of new technologies. His central distinction is between liberal and corporate approaches to regulation and, ultimately, to economic...

The Commerce of Smyrna in the Eighteenth Century: 1700-1820.
July 1, 1994... This book, which draws on a wide range of European and Ottoman archive sources, is a study of the development of commerce in the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Frangakis' principal contribution to the study of...

The Economy of Modern India: 1860-1970.
July 1, 1994... 'Assumptions about the nature and course of Indian economic history', B.R. Tomlinson observes at the start of his contribution to the New Cambridge History of India, 'lie at the heart of many analyses of South Asia's recent past'. Certainly...

Technological Innovation and the Development of Transportation in Japan.
July 1, 1994... This edited collection examines the rapid development of a modern transport system in Japan over the course of the last century and a quarter since the imperial restoration. It is the first book written in English to tackle this task. The study...

Oil and Revolution in Mexico.
July 1, 1994... Though its title might suggest a narrower span, this volume provides a complete history of the oil industry in Mexico from its inception to about 1920. Brown draws on the public archives of four countries and the records of at least five oil...

IG Farben's Japan Strategy: A History of Japan-German Business Relations during the Interwar Period.
July 1, 1994... This historical study of IG Farbenindustrie Aktiengesellschaft's strategic entry into the Japanese market in the inter-war period is a contribution to the wider debate on international business relations. In his analysis, Kudo has challenged A.D....

Making Capitalism: The Social and Cultural Construction of a South Korean Conglomerate.
July 1, 1994... This work is an anthropological study of contemporary South Korean industrial management. The author, an American Korean studies academic with an MBA from Wharton, spent nine months working in the offices of one of South Korea's largest chaebol,...

Women and the Economic Miracle: Gender and Work in Postwar Japan.
July 1, 1994... Women and the Economic Miracle is an ambitious book which seeks to chart and explain the position of women in the Japanese economy in the twentieth century. Brinton's analysis embraces the constraints faced by women both in the domestic...

Elusive Stability: Essays in the History of International Finance, 1919-1939.
July 1, 1994... One great benefit of reviewing for this journal is that in recent years there have been a ready supply of new books on inter-war international finance by Barry Eichengreen to read whilst holidaying abroad amidst successive rounds of turmoil in...

Foundations of Corporate Success: How Business Strategies Add Value.
July 1, 1994... There are many business strategy texts; few of them merit the attention of business historians, except perhaps as revealing illustrations of the business fads of past ages. This one is different. It is not that it says anything startlingly new --...

Time and Money: The Making of Consumer Culture.
July 1, 1994... Social historians have often stressed the cultural context in which we spend time and money, from the changing face of mechanical time in the industrial factories to the moral weights placed on bread prices by hungry crowds. In this ambitious and...

The Economics of Training.
July 1, 1994... The book is divided into three sections: theory, empiricism and policy. The first section begins with an outline of human capital theory and its implications for the provision of training. The model is subsequently refined by introducing...

The Economics of the Second World War.
July 1, 1994... In 1977, in his pathbreaking War, Economy and Society, 1939-1945, Alan Milward commented caustically on 'the seemingly countless works on military history in which armies and navies come and go, commanded by greater or lesser figures deciding...

The Corporation as Anomaly.
July 1, 1994... Unusually, this book on corporate economic theory is by a philosopher, who has conceived it as a case study in the philosophy of science. David Schrader demonstrates his philosophical expertise in an early chapter, which offers a menu comprising...

Tobacco in History: The Cultures of Dependence.
July 1, 1994... The declared aim of this book is 'to provide a systemic way of understanding current debates [on tobacco] from a historical perspective'. Jordan Goodman seeks to achieve it through what amounts to a series of essays dealing with the cultivation,...

Culture in History: Production, Consumption and Values in Historical Perspective.
July 1, 1994... This book is dedicated to Michael Havinden, the well-known agricultural historian and former Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Exeter. Appropriately, the volume is a collection of essays by members of that Faculty along...