Business History articles from October 1993

Business History archives from October 1993

The family firm in industrial capitalism: international perspectives on hypotheses and history. (Specal Issue on Family Capitalism)
October 1, 1993... The resilience of family firms, which survive even among the largest companies of the major industrial nations, is commonplace. A survey reported in the Financial Times in 1989 concluded that about one in eight of the firms listed in the FTSE...

Fortune and failure: the survival of family firms in eighteenth-century India. (Special Issue on Family Capitalism)
October 1, 1993... The indigenous family firm has traditionally been associated with India's trading interests and to the present day remains closely interlinked with the pattern of commercial life. Whilst there are many similarities between contemporary Hindu...

The society of friends and the family firm, 1700-1830. (Special Issue on Family Capitalism)
October 1, 1993... Historians have regularly observed the over-representation of Friends among successful entrepreneurs in the formative years of British industrialisation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It has also been noted that, given the...

The small family in Victorian Britain. (Special Issue on Family Capitalism)
October 1, 1993... Family firms occupy a unique position in the historiography of British business, and, more than at any other time, the Victorian age is commonly represented as the age of the family firm. In the nineteenth century the phenomenon was lauded; such...

The Dutch family firm confronted with Chandler's dynamics of industrial capitalism, 1890-1940.
October 1, 1993... In his book Scale and Scope, Chandler compares patterns of industrial growth and competitiveness in the United States, Germany and Great Britain. In his view, the ability of a nation to create an international competitive industry depends, to a...

The large family firm in twentieth-century France. (Special Issue on Family Capitalism)
October 1, 1993... The historiography of the French family firm focuses primarily on its role in the so-called Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and in the making of modern society. In France, as in Britain, family firms were normally assumed to be...

London in the Age of Industrialisation: Entrepreneurs, Labour Force and Living Conditions.
October 1, 1993... This long-awaited book is a major contribution to London history. It is, arguably, the most significant general work on Georgian London to appear since Dorothy George's famous London Life in the Eighteenth Century (1925). Many of Schwarz's...

The History of the Honiton Lace Industry.
October 1, 1993... Honiton lace once enjoyed the fame of Europe, and its history fully deserves the thorough investigation given here. For the first time we have a well-documented and convincing account of its fortunes from the late sixteenth century to the present...

Feeding the Victorian City: The Food Supply of Manchester, 1770-1870.
October 1, 1993... After graduation in 1964, Roger Scola returned to the history department of the University of Manchester to begin doctoral research on the food supply of Manchester in that crucial period of its growth during the late eighteenth and early...

Onwards from Osnaburgs: The Rise and Progress of a Scottish Textile Company, Don and Low of Forfar, 1792-1992.
October 1, 1993... Any history of a single company is by its very nature a limited exercise. Even as a case study, it is difficult to judge how representative any particular firm can be, especially, as in this case, when the firm is distinctive due to its actual...

White-collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845-1929.
October 1, 1993... Prudential regulation is now regarded as an essential component of the financial system. This excellent work is ample proof that it should have been so long ago. What is rather surprising is that no one had previously written a history of British...

The Power of News: The History of Reuters.
October 1, 1993... Over the last quarter-century, and especially over the last decade, economic and business historians have become increasingly interested in information-based businesses -- that is enterprises whose major activity consists of gathering,...

Glaxo: A History to 1962.
October 1, 1993... Anyone looking for an emerging world-beater amongst British industries in the immediate post-Second World War era would probably not have picked pharmaceuticals. It could scarcely have been imagined that the British pharmaceutical industry --...

The Decline of Industrial Britain: 1870-1980.
October 1, 1993... This is the first of a new series of 'short books on important historical topics and debates . . . written primarily for those studying and teaching history'. Such introductory guides are best when they are fresh, fair and have flair; offering...

The Provincial Insurance Company, 1903-38: Family, Markets and Competitive Growth.
October 1, 1993... This book is a novelty on two counts. It is the first academic study of a provincial non-tariff insurer, and an important contribution to what is, at last, becoming a growth area in business and economic history. Secondly, it examines a small...

Labour Governments and Private Industry: The Experience of 1945-51.
October 1, 1993... This collection of essays is focused on the relationship between the Attlee governments and the private sector. The editors are especially concerned with the question of whether Labour was thwarted by private industrialists in its attempts to...

The Manchester Experiment: A History of Manchester Business School, 1965-1990.
October 1, 1993... Business historians are familiar with the long-standing disdain in British industry and commerce for any kind of professional education for managers. As John Wilson suggests in the book under review, two mental barriers had to be broken down...

Have the Banks Failed British Industry?
October 1, 1993... In a relatively short monograph, Capie and Collins succeed in providing an accessible yet scholarly entry to one of the most confusing debates in economic history today. They manage to summarise the role that British banks allegedly played, since...

Innovation and Technology in Europe: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day.
October 1, 1993... The previous volume in this series on industrialisation edited by Mathias and Davis, which was called The First Industrial Revolutions, could be recommended to first and second year students as a good semi-textbook covering many of the important...

Vom Stadtwerk zum Elektrizitatsgrossunternehmen.
October 1, 1993... In this supplement to the German Journal for Business History, Hans Pohl traces the history of the Rhenish-Westphalian Electricity Company from its beginnings in 1898, when it concluded its first contract with the City of Essen to supply power...

The European Automobile Industry.
October 1, 1993... With considerable bravery James Laux looks at motor manufacturing in Europe from 1890 until the present day. His task is daunting and perhaps too great to be encapsulated within the confines of this slender volume. Nevertheless, Laux, following...

The Social Construction of an Industry: A World of Chemical Fibres.
October 1, 1993... This most interesting book provides an illuminating empirical study of the manner in which consenting capitalists co-operate and collude. More specifically, the book examines informal collective action among chemical fibre producers in Italy,...

The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel.
October 1, 1993... This ambitious and lengthy volume seeks to examine the culture, politics and socio-economic conditions of an industrialising America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Written as new labour history it is concerned with the basics of...

Soft Coal, Hard Choices: The Economic Welfare of Bituminous Coal Miners, 1890-1930.
October 1, 1993... Price Fishback provides a stimulating and lucid reassessment of a major area of US labour history -- the workforce in the coal mines in the early twentieth century. It is more a collection of essays than an overall survey. Each chapter takes up a...

US and UK Unemployment Between the Wars: A Doleful Story.
October 1, 1993... In this book, Matthews and Benjamin argue the case that much of the experience of mass unemployment in Britain and the USA during the inter-war period can be attributed to the pernicious effects of over-generous unemployment benefits. The book...

Entrepreneurship and Industry in India: 1800-1947.
October 1, 1993... This book is one of a series entitled Oxford in India Readings that reprints important articles and essays on a selected topic of modern Indian history, accompanied by a review essay summarising the themes involved and other literature in the...

Zaibatsu: The Rise and Fall of Family Enterprise Groups in Japan.
October 1, 1993... Despite their central importance to the growth of the Japanese economy, the material available in English on the development and role of the Zaibatsu, the giant industrial and commercial groups which came to dominate large sectors of the Japanese...

Japanese Management, Tradition and Transition.
October 1, 1993... 'Tradition and Transition', the sub-title of this book, helps to define its approach. Professor Whitehill is very conscious of the importance of 'groupism' in Japanese life, whether, historically, when it was vital for farming communities to work...

Malayan Rubber: The Interwar Years.
October 1, 1993... The facts of the pre-World War II rubber industry in Malaya are remarkable. Its development after 1900 stands as the last and greatest of the world's agricultural commodity booms. During the inter-war period, just as the industry reached...

The Growth of Big Business in the United States and Western Europe: 1850-1939.
October 1, 1993... 'Few subjects of solemn enquiry have been more unproductive than study of the modern large corporation'. Twenty years after J.K. Galbraith's pessimistic 1972 verdict, as Schmitz points out, his problem was rather selection from a much more...

Production Process and Technical Change.
October 1, 1993... This book has been written by an economist in an attempt to unify the process of technological change with its organisational impact. The first part of the book is an explanation and critique of neo-classical, static equilibrium analysis, and...

The World's Pharmaceutical Industries: An International Perspective on Innovation, Competition and Policy.
October 1, 1993... The publication of this book, in which the authors present a 'global map' of the pharmaceutical industry, is timely, given that the large multinational corporations composing a major part of the international pharmaceutical' industry are, it...

Cooperative Research in R and D-Intensive Industries.
October 1, 1993... In this valuable pioneering study Nicholas Vonortas provides an analysis of a contemporary institutional development which addresses a much more longstanding problem. At issue is the perceived difficulty in creating market structures that...

The Shipbuilding Industry: A Guide to Historical Records.
October 1, 1993... This is the second volume in a series of industry-based archive studies promoted by the Business Archives Council, and it sets rigorous standards of clarity, ease of use and comprehension. The bulk of the book, 140 of the 206 pages, comprises...