Business history has never paid much attention to the environment. Brushing aside the firm's reliance and impact on the natural world, early business historians zeroed in on the role of the entrepreneur in big business's rise. They found it easy to truncate, marginalize or altogether ignore the physical processes by which the stuff of nature—“raw” materials—was carved or coaxed out of mountains, forests, and deserts, channeled into factories and squeezed and cajoled into commodities. They scarcely considered the ever-changing varieties of “waste” generated by businesses and customers, which so often infiltrated, polluted, and otherwise altered the world beyond factory and office. They devoted equally little attention to the effects of resource extraction and use on plants, animals, land, air, or water, much less entire ecosystems and climate.

This article assesses the brand-building strategies of Henry Heinz. Heinz began selling bottled horseradish to Pittsburgh residents in 1869. When he died in 1919, his company, H.J. Heinz, was one of the largest food processors in the world. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and other scholars have pointed to Heinz's ability to make use of supply-side innovations such as improved transportation and continuous canning technology. But Heinz also paid attention to economic and social changes that were altering the demand side of the economy. Between 1860 and 1920, rising incomes, population growth, and urbanization helped shape the wants and needs of consumers. Heinz understood that shifting household priorities represented an important strategic opportunity. Acting on input from consumers and his own intuitions about the demand side, he created quality products and a meaningful brand. The entrepreneur also invested in a range of organizational capabilities that would support his products and corporate identity. Heinz's success in manufacturing, branding, and distributing condiments and other foods, many of which had previously been prepared at home, helped create a mass market for additional foodstuffs and eventually other consumer products.

In order to facilitate commercial transactions and economic investment after the American Revolution, many inhabitants of northern Virginia became convinced that the region needed financial institutions. Indeed, most politically active residents of the region—at least after the 1790s—saw banks as crucial agents of economic development. Thus, the philosophy of “agrarian republicans” such as Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor of Carolina—who saw banks as monopolistic and anti-republican institutions—had limited appeal in the region. Moreover, the banks of northern Virginia were not controlled by planters who sought capital to finance the purchase of slaves and land. Instead, banks supported a wide range of economic endeavors—agriculture, industry, internal improvement projects, and commercial activities. The broadening access to bank capital in northern Virginia reveals that in the South—as in the northern states—there was a “democratization” of banking in the years after Revolution.

In the mid-nineteenth century, American wholesalers began increasingly to rely on credit-reporting agencies to provide information about customers in distant localities. The demand for dependable information, coupled with the dynamism and competitiveness of the American market, helped usher into place a business culture that favored transparency and open networks. This article examines one group of merchants—immigrant Jews—whose traditions stood in contrast to the business elite's growing demand for disclosure.

In the first half of the twentieth century, most firms sought to reduce emissions, effluents, and other pollution-causing discharges only when it resulted in the recovery of valuable material or decreased the amount of money spent on damage and nuisance suits. However, this did not necessarily mean that engineers and technical managers saw themselves—or the firms that employed them—as polluters. Rather, they assumed that as they made industrial operations more efficient, they would also address pollution concerns. This article illustrates the initial success and ultimate failure of this efficiency-based ethic of self-regulation by examining efforts to eliminate the pollution associated with the disposal of oil field brines. Until the 1950s, it argues, efforts to address problems associated with the disposal of oil field brines reinforced the notion that economic incentives to increase the efficiency of industrial operations overlapped with efforts to fight pollution. However, by the late 1950s, economic incentives proved incapable of encouraging further reductions in brine contamination. Yet pollution concerns remained. Since then, the efficiency-based ethic of self-regulation has gradually been replaced by an ethic that most people—and most firms—now treat as legitimate: reaching consensus on environmental objectives and then regulating pollution-causing discharges to meet those objectives.

This article surveys the expansion of American management consulting companies to Western Europe in the twentieth century. It focuses on the way these consultancies built and sustained activities outside their home country. A number of elements facilitated expansion abroad, including the creation of new and distinctive “products,” or approaches to management, and the use of domestic multinational clients as “bridges” to foreign countries. But to be successful in the long run, American consulting companies needed to create relationships with clients in the host country. In this respect, social and, sometimes, political contacts with the local elite, usually established through a few well-connected individuals, proved a crucial advantage.

This article analyzes all known cases of foreign direct investment in British manufacturing prior to 1890. From 1890 onwards the bulk of foreign entrants were industrial goods producers. Before 1890, the pioneering entrants were mostly consumer goods manufacturers. The article demonstrates that, with one monumental exception, these pioneers were narrowly focused, driven entirely by a concern about enhancing access to the British market. Typically they failed. The one exception was the Singer Manufacturing Company. This investment was of an entirely different nature. Singer's commitment was large and non-reversible from almost the very beginning, and was predicated on an awareness of the possibility of using Britain as an export platform. Its consequence was the emergence of Singer as the world's first modern multinational enterprise and as one of the world's largest firms by 1900.

Unlike most contemporary New England banks, early commercial banks of the Middle Atlantic region were widely owned and frequently traded corporations. They lent to a broad segment of the business community, including artisans, farmers, and women. Banks lent widely, first, because their large capitalization made it difficult for a few privileged insiders to control a substantial percentage of loanable funds and, second, because banks were able to acquire reliable credit information on a variety of customers in an efficient manner. As a result, small enterprises had access to bank credit.

Beginning in the 1930s, American corporations increasingly turned to radio for their public relations campaigns. Major firms, including Ford, Du Pont, and General Motors, sponsored network radio programs that carried messages designed to improve their image. Other large corporations funded national radio news commentators, while smaller businesses sponsored weekly or even daily local radio programs. For twenty years, radio was an important component of corporate public relations, allowing businesses to speak more directly to the public than print advertisements had. By the mid-fifties, institutional broadcasting, combined with other public relations activities, had succeeded in helping business improve its status in American society.

Business historians have illuminated how first movers in many emerging industries secure an enduring leadership position, but have devoted less attention to the processes by which industry leaders relinquish their dominance. This paper examines why rubber industry leader Firestone Tire & Rubber failed to respond effectively to new technology and foreign competition. The author argues that Firestone did not respond by doing nothing, but rather accelerated activities that had contributed to its past success. Firestone's response was constrained by managers' existing strategic frames and values, and the company's processes and long-standing relationships with customers and employees.

This article counters a common misconception that business was universally opposed to air pollution control at the beginning of the twentieth century. In comparing the reaction of German and American businessmen to smoke abatement efforts before World War I, it shows that behavior was primarily shaped by national culture, rather than by a general desire to “externalize costs.” German smoke abatement did not meet significant resistance from industrialists, with regulation being based on a general consensus of all parties involved—a process which turned out to be as much a chance for abatement as it was an impediment for reforms. The American business community was split into two factions: those opposed to smoke abatement because they feared additional costs and the intrusion of factories by officials, and others, frequently organized in Chambers of Commerce or similar civic associations, who took a broader perspective and argued that the economic prospects of their city were at stake. The ultimate success of the latter group was largely due to changes in strategy, which allowed businessmen to develop a more positive attitude toward smoke abatement while simultaneously increasing the effectiveness of regulation. Business, therefore, should not be viewed as an inevitably “negative force” in environmental regulation.

This article recounts the birth of the clothing industry in the United States after 1815. It contends, in contrast to recent historical literature, that the clothing business was at the center of the American experience of industrialization. This was not because ready-made clothing was a novel commodity. Nor was it because of new production technologies, social innovations, or legal structures adopted by the industry. Rather, clothing entrepreneurs were significant because they integrated several important markets—a trans-Atlantic trade in cloth, an urban trade in labor, and a market for manufactured goods in the interior regions of the United States. This helped to make the ready-made clothing business among the country's largest industries by 1850.

This research note reports on the quantity of business records available in Australia as indicated by a recent survey of the top one hundred firms operating during the twentieth century. The archival work was undertaken as part of a large study investigating aspects of corporate leadership in Australia, conducted Jointly at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne. We found that the surviving records of Australian businesses cover a wide selection of firm types, and that the comprehensiveness of many archives places business history on a sound foundation for the future.

By building retail and wholesale market halls in the 1880s, the city of Berlin rationalized the distribution of food while maintaining public control of commerce. In designing the market hall system, technological improvement and public orderliness emerged as top priorities, while the interests of consumers and small retail dealers who had relied on the traditional outdoor public markets remained secondary. The emphasis on order reflected the interests of the city's economic and cultural elite, the Bürgertum, who sought to make Berlin fit their image of a world-class city.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, fueled largely by a deal with General Motors' international operations, opened thirty-four branch offices in Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, India, Australia, and South America. The overseas branches allowed the agency to sharpen its methods of quantitative research. They also enabled J. Walter Thompson to establish lasting understandings of European markets that proved beneficial for its long-term health.

In the early 1900s, a powerful antismoke movement in Chicago forced the Pennsylvania Railroad to develop strategies for reducing public protest against the company, limiting fines, and blocking legislation forcing railroads to electrify. The company pursued a policy of least steps, by retrofitting locomotives with ameliorative technology, through fuel substitutions, and by training firemen and engineers in efficient combustion methods. By 1909, however, pressure for electrification in Chicago intensified, and Pennsylvania managers worked to retain control over the pace of technological change. In coordination with other railroads, management attempted to obey smoke ordinances without interfering with railroad operations and profitability. Company archives reveal an earnest learning process and differences among railroad managers regarding appropriate responses to antismoke regulations.

This paper examines a pivotal moment in the history of the built environment in America. At the beginning of the twentieth century, factions within the American paint industry fought in state and federal legislatures over the definition of paint: What was pure paint? Were new paint formulations to be encouraged, or labeled “adulterated”? Was the known toxicity of lead to be a consideration? Despite some opponents' recourse to a rhetoric of toxicity and public health, all sides agreed that the best paints contained a significant quantity of lead, and that government should stay out of setting industry standards. This accord all but assured that Americans would apply tons of lead paint on the walls of their homes.