This special issue, “On Their Own Terms: Experts in Imperial China,” examines various kinds of expertise from Han times into the twentieth century from the angle of practitioners themselves, and sometimes even on their own terms.

Politicization is one of the most fundamental characteristics of Chinese society, manifested in the direct and comprehensive control of society by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Methods include soft control through ideology and coercive control through campaigns. Based on the varying degrees of the CCP’s social control, the trajectory of China’s regime politicization can be divided into four periods: (1) the politicized regime of 1949–1965, (2) the hyper-politicized regime of 1966–1978, (3) the de-politicized regime of 1979–2012, and (4) the re-politicized regime of 2013–2023. We established an annual politicization index for the years 1949 to 2023 through a content analysis of two million articles in the People’s Daily, validating the trajectory of politicization changes in China. We use a model analysis of CCP membership attainment to demonstrate the applicability of the index in assessing how regime dynamics affect Party membership across the four periods.

Este trabajo vincula la evolución del poder de mercado de la banca española con la liberalización financiera entre 1970 y 1990. Se realiza una cronología de las medidas de desregulación y se mide empíricamente el poder de mercado, para lo que se ha elaborado un indicador directo, el índice Lerner. Se comprueba que la desregulación bancaria no fue lineal, y las entidades bancarias compitieron incluso antes de la liberación completa. Se aprecia que el poder de mercado disminuyó en los años 70, por la mayor competencia a través de la red de oficinas, seguido por un aumento en los 80, coincidiendo con un parón en las medidas liberalizadoras. Desde 1988, la competencia se intensificó de nuevo con la consolidación de las medidas liberalizadoras. Además, los resultados permiten descartar la tesis de las reformas financieras consideradas como un pacto entre la banca y las autoridades que no alteró el marco competitivo permitiendo a los grandes bancos cartelizar el sector.

Welcome to Volume 26, No. 4 of Enterprise and Society. By tradition, this issue carries the Presidential Address delivered at the annual meeting of the Business History Conference, alongside summaries of those dissertations shortlisted for the Krooss Prize for Best Dissertation in Business History. The 2025 Presidential Address was delivered by Stephen Mihm at the annual meeting in Athens, Georgia (USA). Stephen’s topic was “The Business of Labor.” Unfortunately, unforeseen circumstances have as yet prevented Stephen from finalizing his address for publication. We look forward to publishing the address as soon as possible. Three dissertations were shortlisted for the Krooss Prize: Joshua Lappen on “Electrification, Politics, and Visibility in Greater Los Angeles”; Pablo Pryluka on “Developing Consumers: A History of Wants and Needs in Postwar South America”; and Mattie Webb on “Diplomacy at Work: The South African Worker, U.S. Multinationals, and Transnational Racial Solidarity (1972-1987).” We congratulate all three finalists, and especially Dr. Pryluka, who was the 2025 prize recipient. All three summaries are presented in this issue.

Since the 1990s, growing interest in the relationship between clusters and economic growth has highlighted the importance of understanding their internal structures and life cycles. Still, the mechanisms underlying cluster emergence remain largely unknown, especially regarding the influence of public policies in this initial stage. This paper examines the emergence of a metalworking cluster in the Spanish steelmaking pole of Asturias, focusing on Francoist industrial policy and the regime’s relationship with regional firms.

Findings indicate that Asturias presented favorable conditions for cluster formation since the late eighteenth century. However, only the establishment of the national steelmaking champion Ensidesa in 1950 triggered the appearance of self-reinforcing dynamics, finally boosting the cluster’s emergence. This process resulted from the indirect externalities generated by the steel industry and was never part of the Francoist industrial agenda. Despite the recognized sector’s potential, the regime prioritized strategic base industries and systematically ignored calls for direct support for metalworking firms.

In the final decades of its existence, the Qing imperial state sought to unify and standardize policies of frontier management. In this context, mapping and surveying practices developed as socio-technological discourses that transformed how Qing authorities asserted their territorial claims in the Eastern Himalayas. Most scholarship on the history of Qing-era frontier management has tended to focus on Chinese nation-building practices. However, this article foregrounds the deconstruction of the epistemic regime governing the production of geo-knowledge about the Eastern Himalayas by investigating the appropriation and rejection of the interlocutors of local and indigenous knowledge, networks, and actors.

How did military surveyors establish authoritative ideas about their own expertise? This article focuses on the late-Qing surveys of the Dzayul river basin commissioned by Zhao Erfeng and carried out by his subordinate officials Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu. Between 1910 and 1911, Zhao Erfeng ordered new surveys of the regions located at the north-easternmost tip of modern-day Arunachal Pradesh, to demarcate the Qing Tibetan dominions and Chinese territory from that of British India. The surveyors Cheng Fengxian, Duan Pengrui, and Xia Hu, mapped the route of the Dzayul River which flowed into British Indian territory through the Mishmi hills into Assam as the Lohit. These surveys largely claimed that natural features marked the “natural” or “traditional” boundaries of the imperial state, against local knowledge productions that framed those same topographical features as connectors rather than dividers. By dissembling the various strands that informed this archive of Qing colonial knowledge, I investigate the processes by which state-produced narratives created new kinds of citational practices to designate who could be recognized as an “expert” of the mountainous geography of Tibet and the trans-Himalayan regions.

African historiography is most persuasive when it refuses to let the state’s archive dictate the story of the nation. Across the last two decades, historians and historical anthropologists have widened the evidentiary field beyond bureaucratic texts—toward oral histories, ritual grammars, sacred ecologies, newspapers, vernacular maps, and the grainy everyday of rumor and reputation. This scholarly review exemplifies that methodological turn while voicing a shared theoretical wager: African political and social life is not best explained by models of institutional consolidation but by moral economies, spatial counter-imaginaries, and religious idioms through which communities fashion accountability and meaning.

This collection of articles focuses on some instruments that served to finance the expansion of private European trade and enabled the European intermediation of global commerce in the early modern period. Because they were distinct from those featured by the financial modernization of northern European economies -i.e. banks, bills and bonds, they have been conventionally assumed as archaic and lacking the efficiency and productivity gains of the modern vehicles and institutions. However, they coexisted, completed the financial architecture of Europe, and allowed a substantial extra-European commerce whose expansion was at the core of the Smithian growth of the period. Their persistence, scope and geographical reach were central for the expansion and integration of markets in the early modern globalization. Yet, their understanding is confined to micro-case studies of trades that reliant in cash payments and remittances were lagging in the innovations that revolutionized financial markets and long-distance commerce. This view also ignores their relevance even for the very European economy. Whilst the origins preceded the commercial expansion of Europe, research of the European trade finance has mostly focused on institutions of corporate models of trade finance and their institutional spillovers to bonds markets and banking infrastructure that developed exceptionally in some European economies. The alternative instrument common to these contribution was probably more ubiquitous than others more “modern” and persisted despite the flaws associated with its relative “archaism”.

Max Weber and Émile Durkheim are two of the most important classical authors in the social sciences. The influence of their respective theories and methodological approaches is still seen in the work of many contemporary authors. This article presents some contributions of the authors to qualitative and quantitative research. For this, we discuss Weber’s qualitative research in the work Protestant Ethics and Spirit of Capitalism and Durkheim’s quantitative research in Suicide: A Sociological Study. We are interested in showing how the authors use methodological and epistemological constructs to produce a sociological analysis with interpretative and causal scopes on social phenomena.

The word taʿawuniyya (“cooperative”) in Palestine today can mean multiple things. It can mean a registered cooperative, or can loosely refer to any initiative based on collective labor and possession, geared toward a collective societal benefit—a communal garden, for example. This vernacular usage of the term, close to the concept of the commons, is borne out of Palestinian history and is an invitation to go beyond the formal definition of a cooperative when searching for a Palestinian “cooperative movement.” Registered cooperatives in Palestine have historically played a role that ranged from subordination and placation by ruling authorities to reformist and survival mechanisms for a colonized population. Informal cooperatives, on the other hand, played roles that surpassed survival and attempted to upend the basis of colonial control. Apart from structure and labor relations, what unites both senses of the term “cooperative” is the political role they have played, as well as their tendency to focus on basic necessities such as food and housing. The history of the cooperative movement in Palestine tells a story of social production and reproduction as an arena of struggle, particularly against Zionist colonization. This essay will give an overview of this history, focusing mainly on the areas of Palestine occupied in 1967.