Business History articles from July 1995

Business History archives from July 1995

Asset or liability? Trade marks in the Sheffield cutlery and tool trades.
July 1, 1995... Sheffield has always been the very metropolis and headquarters of trade marks. Charles Hibbs, 'Cutlery', in Great Industries of Great Britain (London, 1886), vol.3, p. 189. Trade marks have recently attracted attention as a 'neglected...

Accounting systems and decision-making in the mid-Victorian period: the Case of the Consett Iron Company.
July 1, 1995... At a recently held workshop(1) on how British business history should develop in the wake of Chandler's Scale and Scope,(2) two areas were highlighted. The first of these was the issue addressed in that book, though only imperfectly in many...

The demise of the Anglo-Norwegian ice trade.
July 1, 1995... There has been little research on British involvement in the international ice trade. A conference in 1980(1) revealed that the natural ice industries of the United States and Norway had been the subject of some investigation, but the...

Global reach by Australian banks: correspondent banking networks, 1830-1960.
July 1, 1995... As Geoffrey Jones' seminal work demonstrates, multinational banking on a large scale has been in evidence since the 1830s, and was well entrenched by 1913.(1) However, these British multinational banks and similar institutions in other countries...

Enterprise groups, industry associations, and government: the case of the petrochemical industry in Japan.
July 1, 1995... Japanese enterprise systems have received increasing attention in recent years. In considering company systems in a comparative framework, Tsunehiko Yui has argued that Japanese enterprises exhibit a different structural pattern, both inside...

Afrikaner nationalism, Anglo American and Iscor: the formation of the Highveld Steel & Vanadium Corporation 1960-70. (response to T. Cross, Business History, vol. 35, no. 3, p. 81, 1994)
July 1, 1995... In his recent article,(1) Cross situates the development of the South African steel industry during the 1960s within the context of a complex configuration of economic and political factors involving the Afrikaner-controlled state enterprise...

The English Gentleman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley North, 1641-91.
July 1, 1995... Dudley North, or Sir Dudley as he became known in 1682, was born in May 1641. As the third son of Dudley, 4th Baron North of Kirtling, he was required to earn his own living after his family had financed an apprenticeship with a member of the...

Industry, Business and Society in Scotland Since 1700: Essays Presented to John Butt.
July 1, 1995... Professor John Butt has been researching, teaching and writing on aspects of modern Scottish history for over 30 years. Starting with his doctoral study of James 'Paraffin' Young and the Scottish shale-oil industry, Butt has contributed...

The Rise and Fall of the Grenvilles: The Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos, 1710-1921.
July 1, 1995... The fall of the house of Grenville was one of the causes celebres of the mid-nineteenth century. The effective bankruptcy of the second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos in 1847-48, with debts in the region of [pounds]1,500,000, attracted great...

An Environmental History of Britain Since the Industrial Revolution.
July 1, 1995... 'Manchester is encircled, with the exception of a breathing space to the south, by spouting factory chimneys. . . . Its fogs leave behind them a black deposit. When the sun shines it achieves an unearthly shimmer as though seen through dark...

Public and Private Ownership of British Industry: 1820-1990.
July 1, 1995... The core of this book is formed from work previously published by Foreman-Peck and Millward, but it is particularly valuable to have it brought together. The focus is on the so-called network industries of railways, tramways, telecommunications,...

The People's Business.
July 1, 1995... This book is a celebration of the achievements of 150 years of the Co-operative movement, charting its progress from the early beginnings before the Rochdale Pioneers, to the current extensive world network of the International Co-operative...

A History of British Trade Unions Since 1889, vol. 3, 1934-1951.
July 1, 1995... Thirty years have passed since Hugh Clegg collaborated with A. Fox and A.F. Thompson to produce the first volume of the history of British trade unions. This third volume covers only 17 years of that history, but captures critical episodes in...

The First Business Computer.
July 1, 1995... This book relates a particularly fascinating episode in the development of the computer industry - the diversification into the manufacture of computers by J. Lyons, the teashop, catering and hotel company. The link is not as bizarre as it would...

The History of Marley.
July 1, 1995... The origins of the Marley company lie with a small building business started by Owen Aisher in 1920 in Kent. When houses became difficult to sell, Aisher and his eldest son (also, and sometimes confusingly so, named Owen) began in 1924 to...

The British Insurance Business: A Guide to Its History and Records.
July 1, 1995... This is the second edition of an immensely useful work originally published in 1976 under a similar title. The first half outlines the history of British insurance and the records it has generated. The second provides the results of a survey of...

God's Plagiarist: Being an Account of the Fabulous Industry and Irregular Commerce of the Abbe Migne.
July 1, 1995... It is easy to see why the Abbe Migne seemed to be an attractive subject for a book. This eccentric, self-promoting cleric, frequently in trouble with the ecclesiastical authorities and an object of interest to the police, owned and ran one of the...

Von der Heimarbeit in die Fabrik. Industrialisierung und Arbeiterschaft in Leinen- und Baumwollregionen Westeuropas wahrend des 18. und 19. Jahrhunderts.
July 1, 1995... Pollard's espousal of a regional development model for understanding the broader processes of European industrialisation has redirected the focus of a great deal of recent research in this field. This book can be welcomed in this context, as it...

'Wir haben fast immer was Neues': Gesundheitswesen und Innovation der Pharma-Industrie in Deutschland, 1880-1935.
July 1, 1995... This lighthearted title hides a serious and learned doctoral thesis on the process of innovation in the German pharmaceutical industry from the 1880s to the beginning of the Nazi era. It is based on detailed and painstaking research above all...

Science on the Run: Information Management and Industrial Geophysics at Schlumberger, 1920-1940.
July 1, 1995... The Paris-based Schlumberger company is a remarkable example of a small family engineering firm which successfully entered the fiercely competitive international oil industry in the 1920s to survive and prosper into a multinational enterprise in...

Why Doesn't Russian Industry Work?
July 1, 1995... This book has rather a misleading title. Its scope stretches well beyond the confines of the industrial sector. Kosals looks at innovation in the Russian economy and society as a whole. For example, the empirical work underlying the argument...

American Public Finance and Financial Services: 1700-1815.
July 1, 1995... The development of financial institutions and public debt in the 13 British colonies in North America that later formed the United States has attracted a great deal of attention from historians. Interest has centred in particular on colonial...

Railroad Crossing: Californians and the Railroad, 1850-1910.
July 1, 1995... William Deverell's study of opposition to the Southern Pacific Railroad in California is a well-written and well-researched scholarly monograph. It is concerned with the criticism of politicians and the press and with Frank Norris' best-selling...

Contrived Competition: Regulation and Deregulation in America.
July 1, 1995... Contrived Competition examines the massive deregulation in American industry that occurred after the late 1970s. But the book's scope is wider than that. The roots of the regulatory system that were so swiftly dismantled in that era lay in the...

Engines of Growth: The State and Transnational Auto Companies in Brazil.
July 1, 1995... The main concern of this book is Brazilian industrial policy. How was it that the government of Juscelino Kubitschek came to place development of a motor industry so close to the heart of its economic strategy in the later 1950s? How was policy...

Capital and Entrepreneurship in South-East Asia.
July 1, 1995... This book makes an important contribution to the debate about the development of the economies of South-East Asia by taking a strong institutional line that argues that the crucial agents of economic change were capital and entrepreneurship and...

Japanese Government Loan Issues on the London Capital Market: 1870-1913.
July 1, 1995... Professor Suzuki's study of Japanese government borrowings on the London Capital Market before the First World War is a welcome addition to the literature in two respects. First, from the Japanese perspective, there has been a general...

'Rich Nation, Strong Army': National Security and the Technological Transformation of Japan.
July 1, 1995... This book is a pleasure to read. It is a well argued, lucid account and explanation of Japanese economic success since the Second World War, it is an excellent example of how, historically, to tackle questions of technology and technological...

Japanese Multinationals: Strategies and Management in the Global Kaisha.
July 1, 1995... The Introduction (by Nigel Campbell) is the first chapter, in which the objective of the collection is set out: to put into perspective the contention that Japanese multinational enterprises (MNEs) and the foreign direct investment that they...

The MIT Encyclopaedia of the Japanese Economy.
July 1, 1995... This encyclopaedia dictionary defines hundreds of basic concepts and terms from the Japanese economy. It consists of a mixture of very short definitions and over 150 longer essays concerning major subjects. The book is extremely useful for...

Management Studies in an Academic Context.
July 1, 1995... Professors Engwall and Gunnarsson have edited a useful collection of essays dealing with the development of management education in Sweden, Norway, Holland, Germany, Japan and the USA. It was compiled to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the...

Forging Industrial Policy: The United States, Britain and France in the Railway Age.
July 1, 1995... The empirical core of this book is a detailed comparative account of the development of public policy on railways in the nineteenth century in the USA, France and Britain. Frank Dobbin deals in detail with the major dimensions of railway...

The Shaping of Automation: A Historical Analysis of the Interaction Between Technology and Organization, 1950-1985.
July 1, 1995... In a book initiated by the Committee on the History of Automation in the Netherlands (CHAN), a subcommittee of the Dutch Computer Society (NGI), Dirk de Wit has given a historical analysis of interaction between technology and organisation, and...

World War II and the Transformation of Business Systems.
July 1, 1995... This volume represents the proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Business History which took place in Japan on 5-8 January 1993. In addition to the conference papers and discussion notes, the book includes valuable overview...

Transaction Cost Economics and Beyond: Towards a New Economics of the Firm.
July 1, 1995... Over the past 20 years, transaction cost economics has provided economists and historians with important new tools with which to analyse the development and organisation of business enterprise. In this work Michael Dietrich attempts to refine and...

Breaking with Taylorism: Changing Forms of Work in the Automobile Industry.
July 1, 1995... Written by a team of German scholars, this book investigates how the automobile assemblers in America, Britain and Germany tried to move away from traditional Fordist to neo-Fordist methods of assembly in the early 1980s. Divided into 12...

The Moral Philosophy of Management, from Quesnay to Keynes.
July 1, 1995... The existence of an academic subject named socio-economics was news to me until this book arrived, and I feared it might turn out to be economics with the hard bits left out, on the pattern of the celebrated gibe about social history. That...