So much work has already gone into this theme, and so many accomplished experts have contributed papers on the general and theoretical, as well as on the detailed and empirical question of multinational enterprises, that there hardly appears much scope for a further contribution. And yet the sheer volume and variety of submissions – evidence of the pervasive significance of the topic as well as of the persistence of the organisers of this session – mean that some search for main issues might be useful. Looking through the contributions on multinational enterprises produced for this Congress, it is not difficult to detect a small number of themes which recur, and are worth emphasising.

The initial point is perhaps an obvious one. It concerns the role of historical research. The problem of multinational firms actually existed in the contemporaneous world of economic observation and political anxiety before it became a fully-fledged and explicit topic of historical inquiry. As with other questions in applied economics (inflation, for example, or economic development), it soon became clear that not only did multinationals have a history, they also only exist in history. The historian's task, then, became the essential one of empirical elucidation: to examine the origins of multinational enterprise and investment, to produce a typology of such activities, and to suggest (through case-studies and comparative work) answers to such questions as: Why do multinational enterprises evolve?