Business History articles from July 1997

Business History archives from July 1997

The construction of cost accounting systems in Britain to 1900: the case of the coal, iron and steel industries.
July 1, 1997... Writing in 1952, David Solomons noted that. as late as 1880, virtually nothing had been written in England on the subject of cost accounting generally and, therefore, the use of cost accounting in an industrial setting.(2) Whilst conceding that...

Learning to do business in China: the evolution of BAT's cigarette distribution network, 1902-41.
July 1, 1997... In the era spanning the two world wars, few companies managed to achieve greater progress in foreign markets than the British-American Tobacco Company (BAT Co.). With operations embracing more than 40 national markets, in most cases utilising...

The impact of the international tin restriction schemes on the return to equity of tin mining companies, 1927-39.
July 1, 1997... Tin was the exciting metal of the 1920s. New consumer industries expanded demand, which soon outstripped supply, and the trade was dominated by talk of an impending tin 'famine'.(1) Since this diagnosis was confirmed with a rapid rise in price,...

The construction of the Dutch computer industry: the organisational shaping of technology.
July 1, 1997... In the 1950s the worsening of the Cold War and the rapid growth of America's capital-intensive industries created a market for high-technology products, such as computers. At the same time the electronic digital computer had come of age, which,...

The rise and progress of John Brown Engineering, 1966-97: US technology, Scottish expertise and English capital.
July 1, 1997... The decline of Scottish heavy industry, epitomised by the shipyards, has been extensively analysed by authors such as Slaven and Campbell.(1) More recently, Payne has charted the demise of the Scottish steel industry in its final phase under the...

Apprenticeship in England, 1600-1914.
July 1, 1997... I did not know, until I read this informative book, that according to the National Truss Society Report for 1842, about a tenth of all British workers then had hernias. This puts quite a different complexion on the mid-Victorian boom, and is but...

Bank of Scotland: A History, 1695-1995.
July 1, 1997... The Bank of Scotland is the oldest commercial bank in the United Kingdom; it was founded with an explicit political agenda, during a particularly unpropitious period for commercial enterprises, and was saddled with the burden of a prominent...

Women and Work in Eighteenth Century Edinburgh.
July 1, 1997... This is a clearly articulated empirical account, untrammelled by theory, of the experience of women in work outside the home. A particular focus is on the nature of women's ownership of business and their engagement in entrepreneurial activity...

City of Capital: Politics and Markets in the English Financial Revolution.
July 1, 1997... With at least three potential audiences, the author has set himself a difficult task with this book. As a Professor of Sociology he is confronting economists with a specialised study in late-Stuart financial history. Its context is the most...

Land and Society in Britain 1700-1914: Essays in Honour of F.M.L. Thompson.
July 1, 1997... This festschrift honours a truly great scholar. His influence has rubbed off on a multitude of fellow scholars, such that the list of those who could have been invited to contribute to this volume is almost certainly as notable as those who...

Escape from the Market: Negotiating Work in Lancashire.
July 1, 1997... This study returns to ground well worked by economic historians, the early nineteenth-century cotton industry in Lancashire. It offers a new approach to what the author calls a neglected comer of the industry through the exploration of a variant...

Shaping the Accountancy Profession: The Story of Three Scottish Pioneers.
July 1, 1997... Tom Lee is as well known for his historical researches into the socialisation of the accountancy profession, as for his research into accounting theory and his advocacy of cash-flow reporting in particular. This book brings together the...

Science, Technology and the British Industrial Decline: 1870-1970.
July 1, 1997... The main value of this recent edition to this popular series lies in its coverage of the relationship between science and industry, especially in terms of the history of industrial research and development, a subject on which the author is an...

Store, Wars: Shopkeepers and the Culture of Mass Marketing, 1890-1939.
July 1, 1997... This is an exceptional book. Bold in its scope, meticulous in its research, imaginative in its use of evidence and subtle in its arguments, it transforms our understanding of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Canadian retailing, and...

Britain in the 1970s: The Troubled Economy.
July 1, 1997... This is a fine collection of essays on British performance and economic policy during the crisis decade of the 1970s, a period when the economy was subjected to significant external shocks and experienced high rates of inflation, growing...

British Economic and Social History: A Bibliographical Guide: 3d ed.
July 1, 1997... At least in terms of format and layout this edition is rather better than the previous editions, especially the first. On other counts, however, the bibliography has shortcomings. The index leaves something to be desired, especially the numerical...

Wages, Manufacturers and Workers in the Nineteenth Century Factory: The Voortman Cotton Mill in Ghent.
July 1, 1997... In this book Peter Scholliers analyses the ways in which nineteenth-century manufacturers tried to lower production costs in general - and wage costs in particular - and the reaction of the labourers to these wage-cutting measures. The study is a...

Engineering and Economic Growth: The Development of Austria-Hungary's Machine-Building Industry in the Late Nineteenth Century, Forschungen zur Wirtschafts, Finanz-und Socialgeschichte, vol 3.
July 1, 1997... Towards the end of his foreboding and poignant novel Radetzkymarsch, Joseph Roth captured the stagnation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire on the eve of the First World War in the image of the mucus dripping from the nostrils of the elderly...

Societe Generale in the United Kingdom.
July 1, 1997... In 1992 the Paris-based bank, Societe Generale, appointed the well-known French banking historian, Hubert Bonin, to research its history. This book on the bank's operations in Britain is one of the first fruits of that research, having been...

Von Scheingewinnen zum Rustungsboom. Die Eigenkapitalrentabilitat der deutschen Industrieaktiengesellschaften 1925-1941, Vieteljahrschrift fur Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beiheft 123.
July 1, 1997... When examining the profitability of German industry (limited companies only) over the period 1900-1940, many scholars have found to their amazement that the yield on invested capital in most industries, during the years of rearmament under the...

Zwischen Kartellen und Konkurrenz: Der Schuman Plan und die Ursprunge der uropaischen Einigung 1944-1952.
July 1, 1997... This extremely detailed and learned study re-examines the origins of the European Coal and Steel Community. A considerable number of new sources are used, most of them French in origin, the key information being derived from the archives of the...

Le Marche du Charbon: un enjeu entre l'Europe et les Etats-Unis de 1945 a 1958.
July 1, 1997... Using the archives of the European Coal Organisation (ECO), located at the United Nations in Geneva, Regine Perron has written a thoughtful account of the negotiations between the United States and the European nations over the import and...

Business and Management in Russia.
July 1, 1997... This collection of essays edited by Sheila M. Puffer and her associates, among whom are experts from America (Daniel J. McCarthy, Peter J. Simmonds), France (Philippe Le Comte) and Russia (Iurij Ekaterinoslavskij, Tatiana Kozlova, Alexander...

Driekwart eeuw CSM: cash flow, strategie en menden.
July 1, 1997... CSM (Centrale Suiker Maatschappij), originally a sugar producer, now active in a wide range of food products, food derivatives and biochemicals, is one of the darlings of the Amsterdam stock exchange. The reason for this is its net profit growth...

Eisenbahnen und Staat im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung, Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial - und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beiheft 127.
July 1, 1997... Based on the continuing discussion of the role of the state in German industrialisation, Ziegler analyses the relationship between the development of the railways as a leading sector of German industrialisation and the economic policies adopted...

American Iron: 1607-1900.
July 1, 1997... An interesting feature of business history is that few, if any, of its practitioners have any real business experience, while many historians of technology have no technical expertise. This is not a criticism that can be levelled at Robert...

The First American Frontier: Transition to Capitalism in Southern Appalachia, 1700-1860.
July 1, 1997... Dunaway seeks to challenge what she considers to be the myth that ante bellum Southern Appalachia's economy was based on self-sufficient small-scale yeoman farmers and a manufacturing sector that specialised in craft-production for internal...

Work, Recreation and Culture: Essays in American Labor History.
July 1, 1997... Work, Recreation and Culture is a collection of ten essays illustrating many of the changes which have occurred in recent American labour history. Moving beyond the traditional history of organisations and industrial relations, these essays...

Managers and Workers: Origins of the Twentieth-Century Factory System in the United States, 1880-1920.
July 1, 1997... The first edition of Managers and Workers published in 1975 provided students of labour and business history with a concise and well-documented account of the transition in the American workplace in the period before and after World War One. It...

Putting Foreign Policy to Work: The Role of Organized Labor in American Foreign Relations, 1932-1941.
July 1, 1997... This book, a revised version of Roberts' Maryland Ph.D. of 1992, is concerned with the high politics of the two major national trade union federations in the USA during the 1930s and early 1940s, a period in which the rise of totalitarianism in...

The Modern Corporation and American Political Thought: Law, Power and Ideology.
July 1, 1997... For most business historians, it is enough that the modem corporation exists and its growth, management and strategies are analysed accordingly. Bowman, too, is interested in these areas (indeed, his book is informed by the work of several...

Across Fortune's Tracks: A Biography of William Rand Kenan, Jr.
July 1, 1997... Across Fortune's Tracks is a well-written, well-researched biography of a man who, despite the sympathetic attitude of the author, seems to have had few virtues. Despite Kenan's own attempts to project such a persona, he appears as neither a...

Crisis Banking in the East: The History of the Chartered Mercantile Bank of India, London and China, 1853-93.
July 1, 1997... Someone once said that there were three routes to madness: love, ambition, and the study of bimetallism. If this is true it leads one to wonder about the sanity of the employees of this bank in the nineteenth century; for its business at that...

Divided Sun: MITI and the Breakdown of Japanese High-Tech Industrial Policy, 1975-1993.
July 1, 1997... As the title of the book indicates, Scott Callon examines the industrial policy of Japan's Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI), for high-tech industry between 1975 and 1993, and focuses his study particularly on MITI's high-tech...

Foreign Direct Investment in Japan.
July 1, 1997... Why is contemporary foreign direct investment (FDI) in Japan so small? How could more be encouraged? These two questions, posed by Masaru Yoshitomi, provide the subject matter of this proceedings volume, based on a conference held at the Wharton...

Industrialization and the State: The Korean Heavy Industry Drive.
July 1, 1997... This is an interesting and important study which throws fresh light on South Korea's remarkable industrial progress after 1960. The authors focus upon Korea's 'industrial targeting', and the principal aim of the study is to find out whether, in...

The Revolutionary Mission: American Enterprise in Latin America, 1900-1945.
July 1, 1997... The end of the Cold War presents an opportunity to attempt a rounded assessment of the impact of the United States abroad, and O'Brien sets out to argue that even in Latin America, where US troops intervened so frequently, a more profound...

An Accounting Thesaurus: 500 Years of Accounting.
July 1, 1997... This reference book is a labour of love; it could not be otherwise. Usually such a voluminous work is the result of joint endeavour, but this accounting companion is the product of one scholar's dedicated meticulousness in surveying 500 years of...

The Alliance Revolution: The New Shape of Business Rivalry.
July 1, 1997... In an interview published in the Financial Times of 22 April 1992, the former head of the German Cartel Office, Wolfgang Kartte, expressed his concern about the growing number of strategic alliances and their consequences for the level of...

Accounting Innovation: Municipal Corporations, 1835-1935.
July 1, 1997... The accounts of companies in the private sector have at last come under sustained scrutiny by historians, but public sector accounting has been neglected. Coombs and Edwards, whose research was financed by the Research Board of the Institute of...

The Banking Panics of the Great Depression.
July 1, 1997... Banking panics attract a great deal of attention from both economists and economic historians. They provide extreme observations which can suggest new theoretical developments and test the robustness of existing ideas, and they are often...

Economic Influences on the Development of Accounting in Firms.
July 1, 1997... Staubus is a senior US-based accounting academic, having published A Theory of Accounting to Investors (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press) in 1961. The objective of the present book is to stimulate interest in explaining the...

Fordism Transformed: The Development of Production Methods in the Automobile Industry.
July 1, 1997... This volume, the first in a Fuji Conference series, derives from the twenty-first International Conference on Business History, held at the foot of Mount Fuji in January 1994. It is much more coherent and generally of a higher standard than many...

Management, Education and Competitiveness: Europe, Japan and the United States.
July 1, 1997... This book consists of 13 essays, most delivered in May 1994 at a University of Reading conference on management education. Although the volume contains papers on Japanese and American management education, the title is somewhat misleading because...

Business Networks: Prospects for Regional Development.
July 1, 1997... These ten essays on recent regional development initiatives and business networks derive from a 1993 Canadian conference. Like most 'news from the front', these studies do not directly address customary business history themes - indeed, Chandler...