By taking note of new developments in economic theory and cultural theory, business historians have the opportunity to lead a reintegration of mentality and materiality in the study of history. This task will require rethinking the field’s traditional approach to strategy, structure, organization, and culture. An emerging literature of practice theory and the shift from a linguistic to a practice based model of culture offer to business historians, and to all interested in the economic past, a way to conduct this integration. The new approach will complement but go beyond the economics of information, institutions and behavior. Though the task will require some new methods and approaches, the result will bring the study of business and economic history to the forefront of history.

My dissertation uses the Enron Corporation to examine how companies use culture to shape political and economic systems. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the company morphed from a vertically integrated natural company into a derivatives trading house. An emphasis on innovation, free markets and knowledge work in the firm’s marketing efforts accompanied this organizational shift. Because the change was so dramatic, after its 2001 collapse the company became an ideal site for Americans to express cultural anxieties about the move away from Fordist production and toward an emphasis on working with complicated pieces of information. Drawing on archival sources such as issues of the employee magazine and executive correspondence, this study contributes to an understanding of the cultural work that must be performed in order to establish and maintain political economic systems, as well as the ways in which cultural production is used to make sense of economic change.

Blending business and environmental history, Citizen Coke seeks to answer a simple question: how did the Coca-Cola Company acquire the natural resources it needed to become one of the most ubiquitous branded items of commercial trade in the twentieth century? The dissertation shows how Coke satiated its ecological appetite by depending on state institutions and private sector partners that built infrastructure Coke required to extract, at low cost, raw materials for its beverage products. Not just a story of one soda company, Citizen Coke chronicles the making of Coca-Cola capitalism, a new strategy for accumulating profits first introduced in the Gilded Age that involved scavenging natural capital abundance generated by vertically integrated industrial empires, agribusinesses, and government-run utilities.

From Memory to Mastery explores the development of commercial numeracy and accounting in America and the English-speaking Atlantic world between 1750 and 1880. Most histories of accounting begin in the factories of England and New England, largely ignoring slave economies. I analyze both traditional sites of innovation, including textile mills and iron forges, and also southern and West Indian plantations. Along several dimensions, the calculative practices of slave owners advanced ahead of northern merchants and manufacturers, and many recorded and analyzed the productivity of their human capital with cruel precision. Following threads from Jamaica and Barbados to the American South, I show how plantation power relations stimulated the development of new accounting practices. The control of planters over their slaves made data easier to collect and more profitable to use. Commercial recordkeeping also expanded in free factories, but in different ways than on southern plantations. The mobility of labor made accounting necessary for keeping track of wages but relatively futile for detailed productivity analysis.

In 1868, the prominent British firm, Jardine, Matheson & Co., opened the Niuzhuang Oil Mill, one of China’s earliest mechanized factories, but closed it in 1870. The mill faced no oppositions from local government officials but suffered from some technical defects. It produced better quality products that obtained higher prices. This essay argues that the mill’s failure had to do with high capital costs and low profitability.

The rapid development of the Chinese economy over the past several decades has stimulated new interest in the institutions, practices, and social formations that supported the development of business in China before the intensification of pressure from Western traders to conform to “modern” practices in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This article aims to provide a foundation for understanding merchant practice as it developed during the important years of market expansion during the last Chinese dynasty and to dispel some of the enduring myths about the Chinese merchant, his relationship to family, community, and the state, and the ideological constraints on his activities. To that end I examine several aspects of late imperial merchant culture, beginning with the everyday practices that allowed business to flourish in the Qing, turning next to the large social formations through which long-distance merchants in particular identified and pursued their interests, and ending with some preliminary thoughts on the impact of the laissez-faire policies of the last dynasty and their implications for post-Imperial China.

This article describes how a French family, the Jeans, built and expanded its wealth in Central Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. It explains how this family, using a different strategy than other French businessmen who settled in that region, began in textiles and diversified into the financial and housing sectors. The article also explores whether the Mexican Revolution and the early agrarian reform programs affected their properties and/or economic activities. Finally, the article explains how a branch of this family linked into the most powerful media family in Mexico and persisted among the Mexican economic elite until today.

The aim of this article is to clarify and discuss the various ways firms can make workforce reductions. How do managers perceive the options for downsizing and why do they implement a particular mix of measures before another? These questions are addressed in relation to the downsizing process undertaken in the 1920s by the Swedish Tobacco Monopoly, a state-owned company that had to balance between rational business conduct and social responsibility. The study makes use of rich primary sources, such as board minutes and memos, from the company and from the Tobacco Workers’ Union. Its main contribution is to move beyond the simple characterization of reductions as being either smooth or harsh and instead emphasize the multitude of choices involved in reducing head count. The article also emphasizes the active roles of managers and union officials in shaping reductions and the overall characteristics of the organization.