Reiterating and broadening a theme broached by its author over a decade ago, this article seeks to redirect the attention of business historians to the central role of the individual entrepreneur in American economic history. In both giant corporations and small start-up firms, in the late twentieth century and the early nineteenth, it argues, the presence—or absence—of intelligent, organized, and creative entrepreneurs has determined the success or failure of companies much more clearly than has the nature of their organizational charts.

This essay analyzes the changing configuration of black-owned businesses in the South over nearly a century. It divides the region into two sections—the Lower South and the Upper South—and examines changes that occurred prior to 1840, during the late antebellum era, and as a result of the Civil War. It uses a “wealth model” to define various business groups, and then creates business occupational categories based on the listings in various sources, including the U.S. censuses for 1850, 1860, and 1870. The article compares and contrasts the wealth holdings among various groups of blacks in business, and it analyzes, within a comparative framework, slave entrepreneurship, rural vs. urban business activity, color—black or mulatto—as a variable in business ownership, and slave ownership among blacks engaged in business.

This article uses the R. G. Dun and Company credit ratings to analyze North Carolina black businessmen and their firms in the fifteen years following the Civil War. When combined with data in local histories and in the federal census, the credit ratings reveal how the postbellum black business community, especially the mulatto population, was significantly shaped by antebellum emancipation. Blacks who shared the advantage of prewar freedom employed their superior financial resources and business experience to dominate their local economies after the war. Further, both as individuals and collectively, blacks used their newly acquired political power to foster economic opportunities in ways hitherto unrecognized by both political and business history scholars.

This article analyzes the creation of the Fundo Crescinco, a mutual fund that Nelson Rockefeller started in Brazil in the 1950s as part of a larger effort to continue, using private means, the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fundo Crescinco reflected both the liberal assumptions of many academicians of that era about the importance of the middle class to economic development and the concerns of business people about placating Latin American nationalism. The fund's history provides insight into the complex and often contradictory nature of U.S.-Latin American relations following the Second World War, and it demonstrates the limits of entrepreneurship as an extension of diplomacy.

This article focuses on the roles of business-government relations, technology, financing, entrepreneurship, and management in the evolution of multinational corporations. It describes the Guggenheims' successive involvements in Mexican silver, Chilean copper, and Chilean nitrates and stresses the brothers' strategic use of technical innovation and relations with host governments to accomplish these major changes in the focus of their business. The essay's findings suggest the need for a more sophisticated treatment of business-government relations and for the incorporation of entrepreneurship and organizational structure as dynamic variables in theories of the MNE. It also points to the importance of historical conjunctures that shape technology in understanding the emergence of the MNE.

This wide-ranging discussion of the extent of entrepreneurship in colonial America surveys the recent historiography of the field and offers a reconceptualization. The article advances the view that a society “with pervasive entrepreneurial values” existed from the first years of English settlement in North America, and it examines the activities and goals of the primary occupational groups to demonstrate that thesis.