Business History articles from July 1996

Business History archives from July 1996

The unsatisfied fringe in Britain, 1930-80s.
July 1, 1996... The problem which small firms face in raising finance may be summarised in what could be termed Binks's Law: 'the smaller the firm, the larger the proportionate increase in capital base required to respond to an increase in demand, but the lower...

Small firm financing in Sweden, 1960-95.
July 1, 1996... The small firm sector has been long neglected by academic researchers. Small firms have been viewed as embryos of later and more mature stages in the development of industrial society.(1) In the perspective of monopoly capitalism, they were...

Networks and venture capital in the Australasian pastoral sector before World War Two.
July 1, 1996... The rapid and successful expansion of the pastoral sector in Australia and New Zealand in the nineteenth century is a well-established feature of the economic development of both countries.(1) While the macroeconomic parameters of this story are...

Regional bank-industry relations during the mid-ninteenth century: links between bankers and manufacturers in Sheffield, c.1850 to c.1885.
July 1, 1996... The developing German banking system of the second half of the nineteenth century has been often commended by historians for its increasingly intimate relationships, especially through interlocking directorships, with industry. Moreover, a...

Between markets and networks: regional banks in Italy.
July 1, 1996... Using network theory formulated by sociologists, this essay aims to show that local banks, by belonging to a regional network, can overcome information asymmetries within loan contracts, and therefore reduce screening, monitoring and enforcing...

Jewish soft loan societies in New York and London and immigrant entrepreneurship, 1880-1914.
July 1, 1996... The connection between ethnicity and entrepreneurship has been the focus of much debate in recent years, with researchers attempting to isolate the key determinants of ethnic business success in ever more detailed case studies.(1) Much remains...

AB Gust Carlsson, 1880-1990, networks and survival in the Swedish printing industry.
July 1, 1996... Agencies in business history writing are usually presented as a problem for producer firms to solve. This is probably a result of the extreme focus on big business and, thus, the imperative of explaining why these giant firms continued to grow...

The Tyranny of Taste: The Politics of Architecture and Design in Britain, 1550-1960.
July 1, 1996... In The Tyranny of Taste, Jules Lubbock explores the history of British taste and the debates which have surrounded it over the last 400 hundred years. The treatment is not purely art-historical, but also draws upon social and economic history,...

Steel City: Entrepreneurship. Strategy and Technology in Sheffield, 1743-1993.
July 1, 1996... This excellent book manages to be both scholarly and a pleasure to read. It provides a masterly survey of the rise and adjustments of an almost unrivalled localised complex of steel and steel using trades which until now has never been...

British Business History: 1720-1994.
July 1, 1996... John Wilson's textbook surveying British business history since 1720 is guaranteed a prominent place on the reading lists of courses in British and comparative business history. The book is structured in a manner which will maximise its...

The First Industrial Woman.
July 1, 1996... This exciting recasting of the process of industrial transformation departs from traditional emphases on technological development and places gender and the nature of work at the centre of interpretation. Rather than locating women where they...

Hanging by a Thread: The Scottish Cotton Industry, c. 1850-1914.
July 1, 1996... The Scottish cotton industry has been the poor relation of Lancashire as far as historians are concerned. While there have been endless studies of the English cotton industry there has been relatively far less interest in the Scottish industry;...

Smith and Nephew in the Health Care Industry.
July 1, 1996... For most of its long history, Smith & Nephew was largely a producer of sanitary towels and elastoplast, products that may not appear to offer, at first glance, the most enticing subject for a history. However, Dr Foreman-Peck manages to make his...

The City of London, vol. 2, The Golden Years: 1890-1914.
July 1, 1996... David Kynaston's project on the history of the City of London is hugely ambitious. It comes in three volumes, of which this is the second. The first, A World of its Own, covered the 75-year period from 1815 to 1890 and ran to almost 500 pages....

At the End of the Road: The Rise and Fall of Austin-Healey, MG, and Triumph Sports Cars.
July 1, 1996... Reading this book has been both a labour of love for this reviewer and a source of frustrated regret. With a boyhood traversing the 1950s and 1960s and with an unfailing interest in the sporting products of the British motor vehicle industry, it...

The British Motor Industry.
July 1, 1996... This is the first in a series on British industries in the twentieth century, seeking to contribute to an understanding of the processes of British 'de-industrialisation' over the last generation and marks the revival of the detailed industrial...

3i: Fifty Years Investing in Industry.
July 1, 1996... This corporate history casts a unique, if not conclusive light on the recurrent question of how well British industry, and in particular the small manufacturer, has been served by Britain's financial system. The Industrial and Commercial Finance...

Never Trust an Expert: Nuclear Power, Government and the Tragedy of the Invergordon Aluminium Smelter.
July 1, 1996... When the British Aluminium Company decided in 1968 to build an aluminium smelter at Invergordon on the Cromarty Firth, it was on the understanding that nuclear power could be purchased at a price which would allow it to compete with producers...

Merchants and Shopkeepers: A Historical Anthropology of an Irish Market Town From 1200-1986.
July 1, 1996... The Irish market town of the book's title is Thomastown, Co. Kilkenny, through most of the last 200 years a community of around 1,000 people, or 2,500 including the adjacent rural area. The work's scope, though, is narrower than its title...

The Fountain of Privilege: Political Foundations of Markets in Old Regime France and England.
July 1, 1996... In seeking an explanation for the very different political outcomes of eighteenth-century economic growth in France and England, Root analyses the institutional structures of finance and politics of the two nations. These structures gave rise to...

Regolazione e Competizione - Storia del Mercato Azionario in Italia (1808-1938).
July 1, 1996... This is an interesting research, charting new territory. It explores the history of the Italian stock market, from its early origins - the Milan Exchange was set up in 1808 by the French on the model of the Paris bourse - to the Second World War....

The Economic Development of Spain Since 1870.
July 1, 1996... Although modern Spanish economic history has made great strides during the last couple of decades, the vast bulk of the new findings have appeared only in Spanish. And sometimes in Catalan. As a result, the authors of this volume warn us, there...

Politics and Culture in Wilhelmine Germany: The Case of Industrial Architecture.
July 1, 1996... Architectural history set in an economic and social framework is all too rare: the present work is to be doubly welcomed, for it is also both knowledgeable and sensitive, and it makes fascinating reading. The theme is the modernising drive in...

Innovations in the European Economy Between the Wars.
July 1, 1996... Some bold claims are made for the importance of this book. In his introduction Caron sees it as showing that technology and innovation were the main sources of dynamic change in the inter-war European economy, while Erker's concluding survey...

Zwischen Marktwirtschaft und Dirigismus: Bankenpolitik im 'Dritten Reich', 1933-1939.
July 1, 1996... The summer of 1995 brought another reminder of how acutely 'aktuell' German history can continue to be, even in the world of international finance, as the Dresdener Bank sought to take over one of Britain's premier merchant banks, Kleinwort...

U.S. Capitalist Development Since 1776: Of, by, and for Which People?
July 1, 1996... This book is a revised and up-dated version of The Twisted Dream: Capitalist Development in the United States since 1776, first published in 1974. It is particularly unfortunate that this book appears to have been completed in the autumn of 1992....

A Nation of Steel: The Making of Modern America, 1865-1925.
July 1, 1996... This is the latest book in the interesting and valuable series, Studies in the History of Technology, whose volumes analyse the nexus between technology and American society and culture. The previous 16 works in this series have included some...

Strictly Business: Walter Carpenter at Du Pont and General Motors.
July 1, 1996... When Alfred D. Chandler published Strategv and Structure in 1962 he argued a forceful case for the centrality of administrative and organisational reform in the rise of the modern corporation and also provided a deeply researched study of the...

Autowork.
July 1, 1996... This collection consists of an introductory essay and eight separate articles examining aspects of US car manufacturing and its work force since the 1910s. All of the contributions are well written and impressive in their command of detail and...

Manufacturing Renaissance.
July 1, 1996... This is a collection of articles from the Harvard Business Review, 20 in total, spanning the years 1974 to 1994. A 'greatest hits' collection, the book aims to distill the essential ideas on management strategy and practice promoted through the...

Science and Innovation: The U.S. Pharmaceutical Industry During the 1980's.
July 1, 1996... This is a book about the industry by a non-specialist in the industry and therefore it provides a different perspective on it. Gambardella's purpose in this book is to extend to the US pharmaceutical industry the analysis he has already carried...

The Merchant-Warrior Pacified: The VOC (The Dutch East India Co.) and Its Changing Political Economy in India.
July 1, 1996... This slim volume, amounting to only 150 pages of text, has its origins in three Henry Heras Memorial Lectures delivered by George Winius at the University of Leiden in 1988. Nevertheless, the authors have much to say, providing readers with a...

The Economic Growth of Singapore: Trade and Development in the Twentieth Century.
July 1, 1996... Given the pivotal regional position of Singapore, this study contributes greatly to the economic history of Southeast Asia during the 'high noon' of colonial rule. Engaging with a wide variety of development economists, Huff shows that...

The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843-1993.
July 1, 1996... Writing a history of the Economist is a formidable undertaking if, as in this book, the author sets out to provide an account of the ideas and intellectual traditions which have characterised the journal throughout 150 years. Analysing a century...

Family Business.
July 1, 1996... Family businesses have been critical in the early stages of industrialisation and in the early years of particular industries, but have they been a handicap at later stages of industry or firm growth? This volume, the thirteenth in the...

Big Business in Mining and Petroleum.
July 1, 1996... This tenth volume in the Edward Elgar series on Critical Writings in Business History consists almost entirely of recycled material. An editor's introduction of 11 pages is followed by 29 articles and chapters reprinted from various journals and...

Explaining the Economic Performance of Nations: Essays in Time and Space.
July 1, 1996... This collection of Angus Maddison's most important papers on the comparative, historical and quantitative aspects of economic growth appears in the series 'Economists of the Twentieth Century', edited by Mark Perlman and Mark Blaug. The book is...

Acknowledging Consumption: A Review of New Studies.
July 1, 1996... The study of consumption could scarcely be more fashionable. Indeed, Daniel Miller argues in the introduction to this collection that consumption 'is not merely one more topic to be added to various subdisciplines or bandwagons of academic...

International Cartels Revisited: Vues nouvelles sur les cartels internationaux, 1880-1980.
July 1, 1996... This volume consists of the proceedings of a preliminary conference for a C session of the 1994 International Economic History Conference in Milan. It contains 20 essays on the history of international cartels, mostly before 1945, as well as a...

Consuming Habits: Drugs in History and Anthropology.
July 1, 1996... Consumers of recreational drugs have known for a long time that their supposedly deviant behaviour is similar to that of users of coffee, tea, alcohol and tobacco. Western societies have acknowledged and legitimised the use of certain drugs but...