Business History articles from October 1992

Business History archives from October 1992

Fire insurance and the British textile industries during the Industrial Revolution.
October 1, 1992... The impact made by the textile manufactories of the late eighteenth century, with their large volumes of combustible stock and novel modes of production organisation, on Britain's largest fire insurers, has been well documented in the three...

British business and the African trade: Richard & William King Ltd. of Bristol and West Africa, 1833-1918.
October 1, 1992... Much work has been done on Liverpool's nineteenth-century African traders. The importance of Liverpool as the major British port in the nineteenth-century African trade has been long established and thanks to the work of Peter Davies, John Latham...

Employers and craft unionism: a programme of action for British shipbuilding, 1902-5.
October 1, 1992... In discussions of the relative decline of the British economy during the twentieth century much emphasis has been placed on rigidities in economic and social institutions inherited from the Victorian era. It is held that in the British case...

Colliery managers and nationalisation: the experience in South Wales.
October 1, 1992... Colliery managers, dismissed as hand-in-glove with, if not identical to, the coalowners, have been relatively neglected by historians. Their general image was so bad that Emmanuel Shinwell, the Minister of Fuel and Power, described them as...

An early academic enterprise: a study of technology transfer.
October 1, 1992... This paper explores the experience of a small academic enterprise which achieved a remarkable series of product and process innovations over a 15-year period. In a number of respects the case is typical of small innovative companies which have...

Power, Competition and the State, Vol. 2, Threats to the Postwar Settlement: Britain, 1961-74.
October 1, 1992... These two volumes of Keith Middlemas's trilogy on post-1940 Britain cover the period from 1961 to 1990. Together they contain something approaching half a million words, and the detail, delivered paragraph after paragraph, is relentless. Fact...

Land, Labour and Agriculture, 1700-1920: Essays for Gordon Mingay.
October 1, 1992... If anyone deserves a Festschrift it is surely Gordon Mingay. His has been one of the most potent influences on the direction taken by British scholarship in agricultural history since the Second World War. For this volume a group of former...

England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation.
October 1, 1992... Most historians who have been concerned with aviation would agree that undue economy in public expenditure led to the aircraft industry being underdeveloped in the inter-war period. Accounts of the post-war aircraft industry, for example Charles...

The British Economy Since 1945.
October 1, 1992... Entrepreneurial academics and publishers (probably in that order) have found a gap in the market, and several new textbooks on the British economy since 1945 are heralded. This, the first to appear, sets a very high standard indeed. Most...

The State in Business: 1945 to the mid-1980s.
October 1, 1992... The rush to privatise formerly nationalised industries and firms in the UK in the 1980s was the product both of political dogma and public disillusion with the record of public ownership. It was also in accord with the economic doctrine that the...

A Stagnating Metropolis: The Economy and Demography of Stockholm, 1750-1850.
October 1, 1992... Stagnating Metropolis sets out to accomplish two different historiographical tasks. On the one hand, Soderberg and his associates intend to fill gaps in our knowledge concerning the Swedish capital (and to a lesser extent, Sweden itself) in the...

The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800-1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy.
October 1, 1992... Alexander Gerschenkron once wrote that Russian economic history 'always was a political economic history'. Professor Owen agrees, noting that the Tsarist state devoted close attention to capitalist institutions, by turns promoting their...

Road to Power: The Trans-Siberian Railroad and the Colonization of Asian Russia, 1850-1917.
October 1, 1992... Broadly speaking, Siberia has been poorly served by western historians. In comparison with general histories or specialised monographs dealing with other parts of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, the literature dealing with the vast,...

Big Business and Industrial Conflict: A Social History of the Parisian Gas Company.
October 1, 1992... This is an awesome book. The social history of an industrial enterprise would be a welcome contribution in itself, Berlanstein has produced a work that penetrates the core of a number of issues that straddle business and labour history....

Die Allierten und die deutschen Grossbanken: Bankenpolitik nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg in Westdeutschland.
October 1, 1992... Theo Horstmann's study of post-war banking policy in West Germany makes a major contribution to several historical debates. This detailed study of Allied policy-making shows clearly the limitations of the military governments' ability to impose...

The Politics of French Business: 1936-1945.
October 1, 1992... The Third Republic's last tragic years and its replacement by the Vichy government mark a dramatic period in French history. In July 1940, attacked from without, undermined from within, the Third Republic committed suicide. It was -- and still...

Alternating Currents: Nationalised Power in France, 1946-1970.
October 1, 1992... This is a comprehensive history of Electricite de France (EDF), the nationalised electricity generator and distributor from its beginnings to the end of the 1960s. It covers all the major issues arising from the public ownership of one of the...

Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England.
October 1, 1992... This strikes a new theme among the many monographs about the economic development of New England: industry's impact on the environment. Reflecting late twentieth-century 'green' concerns, Steinberg makes a very useful contribution to wider...

Buy Now, Pay Later: Advertising, Credit and Consumer Durables in the 1920s.
October 1, 1992... Martha Olney has identified and vigorously pursued a historical question which has never hitherto received this degree of scholarly attention. When did ordinary American families in any number begin to possess motor cars, household appliances and...

Governance of the American Economy.
October 1, 1992... This book is the result of a project examining the changing ways in which businesses have been organised in the United States between the mid-nineteenth century and the 1980s. It consists of two opening chapters on theories of governance and a...

IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems.
October 1, 1992... The computer industry has received relatively little attention from the professional business historian -- perhaps because it is so recent and so fast moving. This excellent book is thus a welcome addition to the literature of the computer...

The Rise of the Japanese Corporate System: The Inside View of a MITI Official.
October 1, 1992... The factors underlying Japan's rise to economic pre-eminence in the post-war period have been ascribed to a variety of factors by observers, most particularly in terms of its uniqueness, social homogeneity and work-orientation. This latest book...

The Hong Kong Bank in the Period of Development and Nationalism: 1941-1984.
October 1, 1992... This is the fourth and final volume of Frank King's history of the Hongkong & Shanghai Banking Corporation. The earlier volumes of this work have all attracted favourable reviews and this is no exception. The great strength of King's writing is...

China, Britain and Businessmen: Political and Commercial Relations, 1949-57.
October 1, 1992... It is appropriate that a Chinese scholar working with sources in China and Britain should document with such care the end of pre-eminence as Britain was turned out of China after a century of most favoured nation treatment. The roar of approval...

The Power to Manage? Employers and Industrial Relations in Comparative-Historical Perspective.
October 1, 1992... The role of employers in the development of industrial relations, long neglected, has received increasing attention in late years. Focusing on the last hundred years, and adopting a comparative framework, this volume brings together a number of...

Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory Since 1945.
October 1, 1992... Stephen Waring has written a book on a subject which does demand research. While the literature on pre-war Scientific Management thought is fairly voluminous -- the lives and activities of numerous pioneers and propagandists in Britain and...

State Policies and Techno-Industrial Innovation.
October 1, 1992... This book draws on the expertise of the Standing Group on Politics and Technology, founded as part of an international research network, the European Consortium for Political Research. It tackles the apparently opposing principles of the rolling...

Quantitative Economic History.
October 1, 1992... Clearly Business History is not alone in thinking that there is a market for reprinting in book form recent articles on related themes. Oxford University Press has also pursued this strategy with Oxford Economic Papers. This latest volume is...

Global Research Strategy and International Competitiveness.
October 1, 1992... Global Research Strategy and International Competitiveness, edited by Mark Casson, has five contributors; Casson's name is on five of the nine chapters; the other authors are John Cantwell, Robert D. Pearce, Satwinder Singh, and Christian Hudson....

The New Era of Global Competition: State Policy and Market Power.
October 1, 1992... This volume is a collection of 20 essays concerning the so-called globalisation of the Canadian economy and business community. This recent but already well-worn cliche refers to more than just markets that take little heed of political...

The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution and Development.
October 1, 1992... This volume comprises the papers presented at a conference in 1987 to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Ronald Coase's article on the nature of the firm. It is remarkable that a conference should be held to recognise and...

The Economics of Business Culture: Game Theory, Transaction Costs and Economic Performance.
October 1, 1992... The central theme of this work is that the cultural values held by society influence the level and nature of economic activity. This, in itself, is hardly a revelation, but what is of interest is that Mark Casson provides an analytical framework...

The Business of Professional Sports.
October 1, 1992... Sports has recently emerged as a popular subject among academic researchers. This book is a multidisciplinary anthology of 13 essays on various aspects of major professional team sports (baseball, football, basketball and hockey) in the United...

Entrepreneurs in High Technology: Lessons from MIT and Beyond.
October 1, 1992... Greater Boston's Route 128 and California's Silicon Valley have become synonymous with modern industrial success and the prototype for other regions' and other nations' visions of a high-technology future. But what are the ingredients in founding...

Strategic Partnerships and the World Economy.
October 1, 1992... The theme of this collection of nine papers is collaborative international competition between firms, and between firms and national governments. According to this volume, to be deemed a strategic partnership collaboration must comprise...

Technology and National Competitiveness: Oligopoly, Technological Innovation and International Competition.
October 1, 1992... What has become of the neo-classical theory of international trade? If the contributors to this volume -- which grew out of a 1987 symposium on oligopoly, innovation and competitiveness held at the University of Quebec in Montreal -- ultimately...

Restructuring the Global Automobile Industry: National and Regional Impacts.
October 1, 1992... Originating at a conference of the Institute of British Geographers in Coventry 1989, this collection of essays focuses on the spatial implications of change and challenge in the world motor industry. Overall the 12 chapters are reasonably well...