By specifying the currency on which returns were to be repaid, respondentia was a ubiquitous financial instrument to carry international trade. Where multiple currencies existed and silver specie was the preferred money, imported silver performed as foreign currency. Thus, the import of foreign coins created issues for prices, profits, and exchange rates. Eighteenth-century Europeans alternatively used respondentia or bills depending on the monetary context, casting a shade of doubt on the inherent efficiency of a cashless means of payment. Until the 1820s, private bills of exchange did not circulate where cash had a premium. Europeans developed means to regulate the price of foreign coins and exchange rates. Elsewhere, respondentia allowed for hedging against exchange risk and propitiated arbitrage profits, giving an advantage over bills. The article documents the global scope of the instrument; it explains the exchange nature of the contract and explores the issues that the respondentia came to solve. It highlights the role of monies of account Europeans used in pricing foreign currencies in international trade.

This article examines how lightning fires shaped anti-monopoly sentiment among Pennsylvanian oilmen in the late nineteenth century. Drawing on 138 lightning-fire incidents coded from local periodicals, the study investigates the environmental impacts of Standard Oil’s expansion in the Pennsylvania oil fields—particularly how its oil storage infrastructure attracted lightning and thus increased the risk of oil fires. Leveraging its monopsonistic position, Standard Oil sought to financialize this environmental risk and shift it onto independent producers, inventing a quasi-fire-insurance system called the “general average assessment.” Viewing this practice as a major threat to their business, oilmen developed bottom-up antagonism toward Standard Oil. Ultimately, this study offers a new framework for integrating environmental and business history by showing that the financialization of environmental risk acts as a central arena where corporate power is consolidated, contested, and politically reconfigured.

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.

Life insurance companies, including those founded by African Americans, historically sought to invest their policyholders’ premiums in reliable securities, including mortgages. With fewer safe investment outlets after the Great Depression, government-backed mortgages resulting from New Deal housing market reforms attracted insurers seeking security, into the early 1950s. However, with the post-World War II economy on an upswing and growth-related inflation looking likely, the potential downsides of federally insured mortgages grew clearer. The Eisenhower administration (1953–1961) especially leaned on institutional investors to underwrite low-interest home loans backed by the Federal Housing Administration and Veterans Administration. However, Black-owned life insurance firms faced competitive disadvantages due to their small size, information asymmetries, and a postwar housing market characterized by pervasive racial discrimination, mounting civil rights gains notwithstanding. This situation put African American life insurers in a difficult position as they continued to function as a credit reserve for the Black middle class, while simultaneously trying to work with federal agencies and remain profitable despite their limited influence in the broader financial economy.

This article reframes late medieval and early modern merchant governance through the lens of distrust, conceived as a structured and productive force for sustaining order amid uncertainty. Drawing on insights from economic sociology and organizational studies, and grounded in archival documents from across Europe, it introduces the art of distrust as a framework for understanding how merchants navigated both foreseeable risks and deeper, more pervasive forms of the unknown. Distrust operated as a discipline embedded in recursive documentation, distributed surveillance, rhetorical restraint, and tactical conflict management. These practices were not merely technical responses to risk but part of a broader normative tradition honed over centuries of mercantile life and codified in manuals guiding merchants in observing others and managing their own conduct. The protocols of vigilance articulated in this literature treated opacity as a terrain to be strategically navigated in the name of the common good. Their echoes in courtly and political writings invite reflection on how mercantile practices of surveillance and self-discipline contributed to shaping impersonal rule as a defining logic of modern institutional life.