Business History articles from October 1996

Business History archives from October 1996

Export versus direct investment in the German optical industry: Carl Zeiss, Jena and Glaswerk Schott & Gen. in the UK, from their beginnings to 1933.
October 1, 1996... The final quarter of the nineteenth century witnessed the growth of various science-based industries.(1) They developed most vigorously in the newly industrialising countries such as Germany and the US. The companies that came to dominate these...

Exchange controls and multinational enterprise: the sterling-dollar oil controversy in the 1950s.
October 1, 1996... The relationship between British government policy and the expansion of multinational enterprise into the United Kingdom in the post-war period is attracting increasing interest among historians of multinational enterprise and those trying to...

The worst of both worlds: British regional policy, 1951-64.
October 1, 1996... During the 1950s British regional policy was put into abeyance by successive Conservative governments. While there were no fundamental changes in the legislative framework of regional policy until the end of the decade, initiatives introduced by...

British economic policy and industrial performance in the early post-war period.
October 1, 1996... In analyses of British productivity performance in the 1930s, we have argued that the policy framework adopted in response to macroeconomic shocks was understandable and quite effective in ameliorating short-term adjustment problems, but harmful...

The Business Community of Seventeenth-Century England.
October 1, 1996... It is impossible to summarise adequately this dense and absorbing study. Richard Grassby has set himself the task of dissecting the business community of seventeenth-century England with the aid of the original papers of more than 300...

From Artisans to Paupers: Economic Change and Poverty in London, 1790-1870.
October 1, 1996... As the subtitle of David Green's nicely produced and well written monograph indicates, his primary theme is the relationship between economic change and poverty in nineteenth century London. Much of the book, therefore, is concerned with fairly...

British Blast Furnace Statistics: 1790-1980.
October 1, 1996... In this lavishly produced volume, the authors have brought together a mass of statistical information relating to the British primary iron industry after 1790 - details for the earlier eighteenth century having been published before. The...

German Immigrants in Britain During the Nineteenth Century: 1815-1914.
October 1, 1996... The study of Britain's ethnic minorities has always been relatively limited compared to that of other countries where immigration was more important: the United States, Canada, South Africa and Australia are the obvious examples. Those monographs...

Building in Britain: The Origins of a Modern Industry.
October 1, 1996... This comprehensive study of the development of the modern British building industry was originally submitted by Satoh as a thesis at Tokyo University in 1986. The English version includes additional research conducted in the early 1990s and was...

The Department Store: A Social History.
October 1, 1996... In this readable and well illustrated book Bill Lancaster explains the origins and development of the impersonal shrines to consumerism whose physical presence dominates the landscape of many city centres and which have so far survived the...

Information, Mediation and Institutional Development: The Rise of Large-Scale Enterprise in British Shipping, 1870-1919.
October 1, 1996... Building extensively on a doctoral thesis which studied a single concern, the Furness Group, this book provides a detailed insight into the business history of British shipping in the period when the industry still controlled almost one-half of...

The History of the Distillers Company, 1887-1939: Diversification and Growth in Whisky and Chemicals.
October 1, 1996... The Distillers Company (DCL) dominated the Scotch whisky industry for well over half a century, playing a leading role in the Scottish economy as it grew by merger, acquisition and diversification from an amalgamation of six grain distillers in...

The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe: 1780-1914.
October 1, 1996... The petite bourgeoisie as a social group and petit bourgeois enterprise as a form of business organisation have been sometimes disparaged, often neglected and typically poorly understood historically. Social historians and business historians...

Management and Business in Britain and France: The Age of the Corporate Economy.
October 1, 1996... The book of the conference has become an established type of publication, but even in the guise of edited highlights it is a form that carries substantial attendant risks. Uncoordinated analysis and widely uneven quality are two of the more...

Banking, Currency, and Finance in Europe Between the Wars.
October 1, 1996... This edited volume contains 20 essays which were first aired at a conference in 1992 as part of a international networking exercise initiated by the European Science Foundation. The essays are arranged within three broad headings covering related...

Industry and Society in Europe: Stability and Change in Britain, Germany and France.
October 1, 1996... In an increasingly interdependent capitalist world is it possible for individual economies to cope with external shocks better than others? Francis Fukuyama's optimism that Germany and Japan have found the formula for economic success through the...

Le royaume desuni: L'economie britannique et les multinationales.
October 1, 1996... The central theme of this study is the growing contrast over recent decades between the diminishing relative strength of the British economy and the rising power of multinationals. Farnetti argues that this experience reflects a traditional...

Wirtschaft, Gesellschaft, Unternehem: Festschrift fur Hans Phol zum 60. Geburstag (= Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte, Beihefte, Nr. 120)
October 1, 1996... The wish of 69 scholars, 26 of them not German, to contribute to this super-festschrift testifies to Hans Pohl's place in historical research and its organisation, particularly in the fields of economic, business and Latin American history. The...

The Baldwin Locomotive Works, 1831-1915: A Study in American Industrial Practice.
October 1, 1996... More books must have been published on various aspects of railway history than almost any other technology; yet only a small proportion of them have been written by scholars, and even fewer have discussed the subject of locomotive manufacture. In...

Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912.
October 1, 1996... Cameron examines local influences which supplied the ingredients for worker protect, principally the strikes of 1882 and 1912, in the textile city of Lawrence. The study aims to establish the central place of women in community networks and in...

The Machine in America: A Social History of Technology.
October 1, 1996... This brief survey of the social history of American technology from colonial times to the present is a brave attempt to introduce readers to a subject which has usually been deemed inaccessible. Machines, innovations, engineering and science are...

Historical Perspectives on the American Economy: Selected Readings.
October 1, 1996... This compilation of selected readings from the 'best sellers of recent American economic history' covers economic growth, money and banking, transportation, technical change, agriculture, slavery and labour. The period is mainly the nineteenth...

Entrepreneurship in Maine: Essays in Business Enterprise.
October 1, 1996... This volume which belongs to Garland's 'Studies in Entrepreneurship' brings together nine essays on business enterprise on Maine covering a range of industries from the middle of the 1840s to the present. The chapters are concise and of...

A Concise History of Business in Canada.
October 1, 1996... This book is described as a concise history of Canadian business, but is actually over 500 pages long. Broadly speaking it is chronological and looks at themes from before European contact until the end of the 1980s over various periods of time....

Chinese Business Enterprise in Asia.
October 1, 1996... Much of the East Asian miracle has a distinctly Chinese flavour, whether we look at the mainland itself, at such distinctly Chinese states as Hong Kong, Taiwan, or Singapore, or at the Southeast Asian tigers with their influential Chinese...

Japan's Computer and Communications Industry: The Evolution of Industrial Giants and Global Competitiveness.
October 1, 1996... Increasingly the economic historian is having to come to terms with the rise of Japanese business. Because of the linguistic and cultural differences that divide East and West, most of us can do little more than muddle through using the meagre...

Japanese Banking: A History, 1859-1959.
October 1, 1996... Norio Tamaki, Professor of Banking History at Keio University, seeks to provide in his volume a chronological account of the evolution of the banking and monetary systems in Japan. Starting with the response of indigenous quasi-banking networks...

Keiretsu: Inside the Hidden Japanese Conglomerates.
October 1, 1996... In view of the current American paranoia concerning Japanese dominance in key industrial and financial sectors, Miyashita and Russell have produced a timely contribution to the debate over whether certain activities ought to be prohibited. As...

The State and Transnational Corporations: A Network Approach to Industrial Policy in India.
October 1, 1996... The relationship between host-country governments, foreign direct investment (FDI) and multinational enterprise (MNEs), particularly in developing countries, has long been a matter of some debate, both among policy-makers and academics. In the...

The Consumption of Culture, 1600-1800: Image, Object, Text.
October 1, 1996... The Consumption of Culture is the third of three volumes produced since 1992 by the Clark Library and the Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. Consumption and the World of Goods...

The Evolution of International Business: An Introduction.
October 1, 1996... The maturing of British business history, having already led to the production of a number of worthwhile indigenous surveys, is here exemplified by a pioneering textbook on the history of multinational enterprises (MNEs). Admittedly, these last...

Entrepreneurship and Business Culture: Studies in the Economics of Trust, vol. 1.
October 1, 1996... In this new volume, Mark Casson further explores topics already broached in his books on The Entrepreneur (1982) and The Economics of Business Culture (1991). Although most of the essays have been published elsewhere, Casson has revised them to...

Databases in Historical Research: Theory, Methods and Applications.
October 1, 1996... Within the historical computing fraternity there has recently been something of a reaction against the 'Me and My Database' approach to research, not least because of the awareness by some that the mainstream of the historical profession remains...

Entrepreneurship.
October 1, 1996... Given the attention paid nowadays to the entrepreneur by business historians and economists alike, the subject of entrepreneurship has rightly been chosen for both the Elgar Reference series involved. Mark Casson's volume in the 'International...

Entrepreneurship and the Growth of Firms.
October 1, 1996... Given the attention paid nowadays to the entrepreneur by business historians and economists alike, the subject of entrepreneurship has rightly been chosen for both the Elgar Reference series involved. Mark Casson's volume in the 'International...

Productivity, Education and Training: An International Perspective.
October 1, 1996... For the last 15 years, Prais has led a major research project at the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, investigating the extent of Britain's skill deficiencies and their effects on productivity. This research has been...

Firms, Markets and Economic Change: A Dynamic Theory of Business Institutions.
October 1, 1996... This volume combines theoretical exposition in the tradition of new institutional economics with illustrative case studies taken from historical experience. The authors' starting point is the idea that organistions comprise two key components....

Technology and Industrial Progress: The Foundations of Economic Growth.
October 1, 1996... The principal objective of this work is 'to synthesize and interpret the patterns of industrialization past and present' (p. 1). In doing so, von Tunzelmann's approach reflects much more that of the Science Policy Research Unit environment of his...

Capital, the State and Labour: A Global Perspective.
October 1, 1996... This substantial volume includes essays on a wide range of countries and charts the transformation of labour relations since the end of the post-war Golden Age. The studies emerged from a United Nations University project which sought to provide...

Studies in Accounting History: Tradition and Innovation for the Twenty-First Century.
October 1, 1996... This collection was published under the auspices of the Accounting History Association of Japan and comprises a selection of 13 of the 50 or so papers presented at the Sixth World Congress of Accounting Historians held in Kyoto in 1992. Of the 16...

British Economic Development Since 1945.
October 1, 1996... Designed for 'sixth-formers and undergraduates', this volume is a collection of extracts about various aspects of the post-war British economy, taken from contemporary documents and publications. The extracts are brief - from one to three pages...

Economic Evolution: An Enquiry into the Foundations of New Institutional Economics.
October 1, 1996... A general assumption underlying much research in economics and economic history since the 1950s, and one usually held by those trained in the neo-classical tradition, is that in the long-run the process of competition ensures that only the most...