Business History articles from October 1995

Business History archives from October 1995

Some early evidence of worksharing: Lancashire before 1850.
October 1, 1995... In hand spinning factories in Manchester in the late 1790s, hours of work were variable.(1) Hours fluctuated with seasonal demands, the availability of raw materials, changes in water levels and other technical vicissitudes, and because many...

'Give my regards to Uncle Billy...': the rites and rituals of company life at Lever Brothers, c.1900 - c.1990.
October 1, 1995... It is increasingly evident that the business historian's horizons are widening. The framework advanced by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., focusing on strategy and structure is being challenged. Chandler has suggested in his two most recent books, The...

The development of the UK clothing industry, 1850-1950: output and productivity growth.
October 1, 1995... The clothing industry was of great importance to the British economy of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Employment peaked before the First World War at well over 800,000, making the garment trades one of the single most important...

Argyll Motors Ltd.: a corporate post-mortem.
October 1, 1995... What's done we partly may compute, But know not what's resisted Robert Burns, Address to the Unco Guid The Argyll Motor Company, at the height of its aspirations in 1906, occupied Europe's largest and most up-to-date motor vehicle factory...

The world's largest industrial companies of 1912.
October 1, 1995... In a recent review of British business history publications, Martin Chick commented, not surprisingly, on the enduring influence of Alfred Chandler; observing that 'one obvious manifestation of this is the continuing compilation of lists of large...

The Economic History of Britain since 1700, 3 vols.
October 1, 1995... This new edition of Floud and McCloskey is launched with the bold claim that since its original publication in 1981 it has become firmly established as 'the leading textbook on British economic history of the modern era'. But this sense of...

Records of British Business and Industry, 1760-1914: Metal Processing and Engineering.
October 1, 1995... This small volume is a remarkably comprehensive and convenient guide to the nature and location of the records of 1,230 companies which existed during the 150 years of British predominance in the industrial economy of the world. For these firms...

The Age of Manufacturers, 1700-1820: Industry, Innovation and Work in Britain.
October 1, 1995... The first edition of Maxine Berg's The Age of Manufacturers was published in 1985. It provided a timely antidote to the increasing concentration on a national accounting approach to economic change, with its emphasis on selected major indicators...

Was the Industrial Revolution Necessary?
October 1, 1995... This slim volume contains six essays and 'attempts to look at the Industrial Revolution in a number of new and interesting ways' (p.x) without purporting to contain a comprehensive account, nor, indeed, any business history. The authors are all...

Law and English Railway Capitalism: 1825-1875.
October 1, 1995... This impressive and unusual book is about the relationship between the first railway companies and an unreformed legal system. The author makes the well-founded claim that economic and transport historians have had little to say about this...

Landowners, Capitalists, and Entrepreneurs: Essays for Sir John Habakkuk.
October 1, 1995... This long-awaited Festschrift for Sir John Habakkuk has by happy coincidence been published at the same time as its honorand's magnum opus, Marriage, Debt, and the English Estates System: English Landownership, 1650-1950 (Oxford, 1994). To the...

Rowntree and the Marketing Revolution, 1862-1969.
October 1, 1995... Most unusually for a company historian, Robert Fitzgerald does not allow us anywhere near the Rowntree enterprise until we have undergone a brisk crash course on marketing principles. Correctly, his key principle is that a marketing-orientated...

City Bankers: 1890-1914.
October 1, 1995... When Martin Daunton reviewed this book in its original French edition, in Business History in 1988, he finished by suggesting that its appearance in English would make a welcome addition to the debate on the nature of British Society. Now, ten...

Joseph Chamberlain: Entrepreneur in Politics.
October 1, 1995... Peter Marsh spent 12 years researching and writing this imposing biography of the first industrialist to enter the highest echelons of British government. Despite the title, the book is not intended to be a work of business history, given that...

Shop Floor Citizens: Engineering Democracy in 1940s Britain.
October 1, 1995... For just over 20 years James Hinton's classic study of shopfloor politics, The First Shop Stewards Movement (1973) has dominated debate over the impact of World War I on British labour and trade unionism. The same themes run through this new...

The Belgian Economy in the Twentieth Century.
October 1, 1995... Mommen's study of the Belgian economy in the twentieth century is part of Routledge's Contemporary Economic History of Europe series under the general editorship of Derek Aldcroft. Mommen sets the background to his study by relating the progress...

The Development of Industrial Society in Ireland.
October 1, 1995... This edited volume is the product of a conference held in 1990 under the joint auspices of the Royal Irish and British Academies. It provides a powerful testimony both to the high calibre and to the extent of research into the social and economic...

The Contest for Control: Metal Industries in Sheffield, Solingen, Remscheid and Eskilstuna during Industrialisation.
October 1, 1995... In this work arising out of the project group on the transition from decentralised to centralised forms of production, located in Uppsala, Sweden, the author has set out to study an industry in which the traditional decentralised structure...

Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century.
October 1, 1995... This is the English translation of a well-received book by a French social historian, originally published in 1981. Perrot's thesis is socio-anthropological: people buy clothes not for their utility but because they signify something about the...

Wealth of Contrasts: Nyegaard & Co. - A Norwegian Pharmaceutical Company, 1974-1985.
October 1, 1995... This is the story of the evolution of a small Norwegian company, established in 1874 as an agency to import pharmaceuticals, into a major player in the world pharmaceutical industry, as the Hafslund Nycomed Corporation. The industry in Norway...

Schneidwarenindustrie in Europa: Reisen zu den Wekstatten eines alten Gewerbes.
October 1, 1995... This lavishly produced and richly illustrated volume, written by the two chief officials of the Industrial Museum in Solingen, deals with the recent history and the current state of the cutlery industry in 11 European countries. Beside Belgium,...

Banque coloniale ou Banque d'affaires. La Banque de l'Indochine sous la Ille Republique.
October 1, 1995... As far as I know, this book is a premiere: it deals with French business history, but it was written by a Japanese scholar, in Japanese, and first published in Japan in 1985. It has now been translated into French (the translation has been...

Internationale Kartellierung einer neuen Industrie: Die Aluminum-Association, 1901-1915.
October 1, 1995... At the dawn of this century the electrolytic production of aluminium was a new industry with just five firms in a market already characterised by oligopolistic practices. Between 1901 and 1908 the industry's first international cartel, the...

Handbook on the History of European Banks.
October 1, 1995... This is one of the most remarkable books of the past decade. It has been produced by the European Association for Banking History (EABH), a very youthful organisation founded in 1990, whose energies over its short life have been devoted to...

Zwangsarbeit bei Daimler-Benz.
October 1, 1995... The heart of this book is an account of the working and living conditions of various classes of foreign and forced labour at Daimler-Benz during the Second World War; and it is based mainly on an extensive oral history project, supplemented by...

Mary Parker Follett - Prophet of Management: A Celebration of Writings from the 1920s.
October 1, 1995... This collection of essays contains 11 selections of Mary Parker Follett's work on management, first delivered either as lectures in 1925 and 1933 or written as part of books on government and behaviour. These essays are embellished with...

International Capital Markets and American Economic Growth: 1820-1914.
October 1, 1995... On the eve of the First World War, the United States was the largest debtor nation in the world, despite being both the richest and an important international investor in her own right. It is the causes and consequences of this position that...

In An Age of Experts: The Changing Role of Professionals in Politics and Public Life.
October 1, 1995... The professional classes remain a mystery, despite so many attempts by sociologists and historians to understand them. Clearly, they are of the middle classes - indeed, the heart and soul of the middle classes - but their precise relationship to...

Shawinigan Water and Power, 1898-1963: Formation et declin d'un groupe industriel au Quebec.
October 1, 1995... In his classic book on the role of hydroelectricity and industrial development in Quebec, John H. Dales put forward the hypothesis that the availability of cheap hydropower favoured the resource sector at the expense of the urban market. As a...

New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-35.
October 1, 1995... There is a vast literature on the New Deal in the United States, as Colin Gordon amply demonstrates in a most impressive array of references and an extensive bibliographical essay. Much of this literature is of a specialised nature, and Gordon...

The Making of Harcourt General: A History of Growth through Diversification, 1922-1992.
October 1, 1995... The firm now known as Harcourt General began as a cinema operating company, Smith Theatrical Enterprises, in 1922. Philip Smith, the founder of the company, built up a successful chain of cinemas in New England, but had to sell most of them after...

Hybrid Factory: Japanese Production System in the United States.
October 1, 1995... This book is a translation of parts of earlier Japanese publications drawn from a research project conducted between 1986 and 1990 into the extent to which Japanese consumer electronics, semiconductor, and automotive companies (car firms and...

Strong Managers, Weak Owners: The Political Roots of American Corporate Finance.
October 1, 1995... The dominant explanation for the structure of the American corporation in the twentieth century was first set out in a book published by Berle and Means in 1932. They argued that the separation of ownership and control was the inevitable outcome...

Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890-1914.
October 1, 1995... This is a comparative study of the foundation of the Canadian and Argentinian wheat industries in the prairies and pampas respectively. Adelman considers in turn the role of land, labour and capital in these two regions. Canada copied the...

Manufacturing Apartheid: State Corporations in South Africa.
October 1, 1995... This study recovers the intense debates surrounding the birth and development of South Africa's three key state corporations; the Electricity Supply Commission (ESCOM), the Iron and Steel Corporation (ISCOR) and the Industrial Development...

The Labour Wars in Cordoba, 1955-1976: Ideology, Work and Labour Politics in an Argentine Industrial City.
October 1, 1995... At the centre of this book lies, arguably, the definitive analysis of the dordobazo, a popular uprising in the city of Cordoba in late May 1969, which has been compared with the Prague and Paris springs of a year earlier. Yet this study is much...

Strikes: Causes, Conduct and Consequences.
October 1, 1995... In this book, Douglas Blackmur analyses two of the six major strikes that occurred in Australia during the period of early post-war reconstruction between 1945 and 1949. The Meat Industry Strike of 1946 and the Railway Strike of 1948 were largely...

Harvesting Mountains: Fujian and the China Tea Trade, 1757-1937.
October 1, 1995... Tea was one of the most important industrial crops of pre-Communist China, and this book presents the first serious study of its economic role. Gardella focuses on the Fujian tea trade between 1757 and 1937 but throughout relates this to both the...

Technological Independence: The Asian Experience.
October 1, 1995... This book edited by Saneh Chamarik and Susantha Goonatilake is a collaborative research by Asian scholars and scientists. It analyses, in an interdisciplinary framework, the different national experiences of the process of technological...

The Memoirs of Tan Kah Kee.
October 1, 1995... Academic inquiry reflects events in the world to a surprising degree, and the recent rapid emergence of Pacific Rim economies has made Asian business history a growth industry. Tan Kah Kee, the most famous of a legendary group of pre-World War II...

International Commercial Rivalry in Southeast Asia in the Interwar Period.
October 1, 1995... The title of this collection, resulting from a 1988 workshop, is somewhat misleading, for the real subject is Japanese economic penetration in Southeast Asia. As such, the book fills a major gap for teaching purposes in the Anglophone world....

The Japanese Automobile Industry: A Business History.
October 1, 1995... This volume consists of a welcome synthesis in English of research on the automobile industry to which Professor Shimokawa has been a major contributor. The questions which he pursues are: what were the roots of the competitiveness of Japan's...

Japanese Industrialisation and the Asian Economy.
October 1, 1995... This is not business history nor analysis of Japan's recent penetration of Asia. It is trade history stretching back to the seventeenth century. Conventional interpretations of Japanese industrialisation in terms of catching up and closing...

The Japanese Firm: Sources of Competitive Strength.
October 1, 1995... This collection brings together 14 papers, ten of which were presented to a gathering of academics at the Stockholm School of Economics in 1991 as the prelude to the foundation of the European Institute for Japanese Studies. Each of the papers...

Mercantile States and the World Oil Cartel: 1900-1939.
October 1, 1995... This book is a critique of the principal theories of international relations through an analysis of world oil politics before World War II. Nowell finds that existing, state-centric theories are deficient in explaining the very complex actions...

The Political Economy of International Oil.
October 1, 1995... This book is a study of the impact of the oil industry on the economies of oil-exporting LDCs. In methodology it is a comparative historical analysis, rather than an exercise in pure theory. In structure, it is based on the familiar contours of...

Structure and Strategy of Small and Medium-size Enterprises since the Industrial Revolution.
October 1, 1995... How do you define (a) small, and (b) medium-sized, enterprise? Had the organiser of the session held at the Tenth International Economic History Congress in Leuven in 1990, the papers from which make up this volume, asked this question and...

A History of the World Economy: International Economic Relations since 1850.
October 1, 1995... This new edition of a student text first published in 1983, and well-reviewed at the time, provides an accessible and reliable synthesis of a mass of literature on the history of the world economy from the viewpoint of growing interdependence...