This Companion volume presents the latest research on the history of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and their impact on society and the environment. Multinational enterprises are often associated with large and powerful corporations like Ford or Coca-Cola. Their products are deeply embedded in our daily lives: waking up in an IKEA bed, being awakened by the alarm on an iPhone, putting on Levi’s jeans, drinking a Nescafé before commuting in a Tesla or BYD electric vehicle, reading emails at work on a Lenovo laptop, and ending the day by watching a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer classic on Netflix. However, these products and services represent just the tip of the iceberg. Behind them lies a complex global production network that integrates capital, labor, and diverse resources from around the world.

It is not necessary to be big to be called an MNE. Indeed, for at least two centuries not only have big businesses crossed national borders but so have many thousands of small and medium-sized firms. A working definition of an MNE is not size, but whether a firm owns and controls assets in more than one country. Simply exporting goods or services usually does not qualify. Owning and controlling assets in foreign countries is called foreign direct investment (FDI) to distinguish it from portfolio investment, which consists of capital flows across borders with no managerial control. It is the difference between an individual buying a few shares on a foreign stock exchange versus US-based software MNE Nvidia acquiring full control of Arm Holdings, a leading British technology company, for US $40 billion in 2020. Often MNEs like Nvidia wholly control their foreign affiliates, but they may also collaborate with other foreign or local firms in joint ventures or engage in cartels. One of the major contributions of business history research has been to show the remarkable heterogeneity of MNE strategies and organization over time.

Equally diverse and far-reaching are the societal impacts of MNEs. By exploiting natural resources worldwide, generating pollution through their production processes or standardizing technical standards, they have profoundly altered the environment and climate. Their products and branding both reflect social values and reshape lifestyles. As major taxpayers and active participants in politics, philanthropy, and public discourse, MNEs have played a significant role in coproducing governance and influencing institutions. Over time, they have interacted with a wide range of political regimes, including colonial administrations, dictatorships, socialist states, and weak governments vulnerable to corruption.

Overall, there is little doubt that MNEs have been and remain major shapers of the global economy and our modern world. The revenues of a handful of MNEs are higher than the GDPs of some nation-states. In 2025 the market capitalization of Tesla was almost as large as the GDPs of Switzerland and Sweden. A form of business organization once dominated by US, European, and Japanese firms has now become far more heterogeneous as Chinese, Indian, and other firms from the Global South have invested internationally. With the expansion of the internet and related technologies, a new cohort of MNEs such as Google and Alibaba have become key players of the world economy. At the same time, the persistence and worsening of major global challenges since the 2000s – particularly climate change and other ecological crises, rising inequality and fiscal deficits, the erosion of democratic legitimacy, and the spread of autocratic alternatives – have sparked growing scrutiny of globalization and of the role MNEs may have played in exacerbating, rather than alleviating, some of these issues.

It has been half a century since Mira Wilkins, the pioneer in studying the history of MNEs, published her two seminal books on the emergence of US-based MNEs before 1914¹ and their subsequent growth between World War I and the 1970s.² Their publication was a milestone not only in business history, but for the many other disciplines studying MNEs. The very concept of a “multinational” had only been belatedly developed by economists in the early 1960s, and there was a widespread assumption at that time that they were primarily a post–World War II phenomenon, and an US one. Since the pathbreaking books by Wilkins were published, there have been decades of research in business history (and other disciplines) on the topic, including by Wilkins herself, which has explored the rich, diverse, and global history of MNEs back to the nineteenth century and earlier.³

Multinational enterprises have been variously described as the “global goliaths of the 21st Century”⁴ and the “new Leviathans.”⁵ Much of the formidable body of research on multinationals has had the implicit assumption that MNEs had a linear upward trajectory, even if their growth was sometimes interrupted by world events including wars, revolutions, sudden changes of government, and economic shocks and downturns. Reflecting the assumption of linearity, the discipline of international business, which specializes in studying MNEs, has notoriously focused its attention more on “entry strategies” than exits and divestments. It has also largely implicitly assumed that MNEs had a positive impact on the world.⁶

However, in the words of business historian Alfred D. Chandler and historian of ideas Bruce Mazlish twenty years ago, MNEs have multiple intentional and unintentional impacts on the environment and society, and “we need better knowledge before we pass judgement on our new Leviathans.”⁷ More recently, international business scholars have also called for a clearer understanding of the societal impact of MNEs, recognizing that studying their long-term effects requires close engagement with the business history literature.⁸

This Companion therefore answers the calls for engaging with the historical evidence to examine the long-term impact of MNEs. History matters in explaining recent grand challenges. It is indeed evident that ecological and social impacts often take time to become visible and therefore need to be examined in a long-term perspective.⁹ Moreover, impacts are highly context dependent and new activities do not take place in a vacuum but are heavily influenced by past trajectories. An accumulating body of research has also made it possible for the study of impact to move beyond economic metrics, and to consider a variety of stakeholders.¹⁰ Aggregate cost-benefit analyses often struggle to account for public discontent and tend to overlook the social groups and regions negatively affected by the international strategies of MNEs. Lastly, the growing number of business history case studies across different time periods and geographies has provided nuanced insights into the ongoing and often polarized debates regarding the impacts of MNEs.

The book is organized in four parts. Part I considers the impact of MNEs in fashioning our global world. In Chapter 1, Geoffrey Jones and Sabine Pitteloud draw on the rich business history literature to provide a framework for understanding the emergence and growth of MNEs over time. Chapter 2 by Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Geoffrey Jones examines the environmental impact of MNEs over the long term, highlighting in particular the malign role of natural resource MNEs in the developing world. In Chapter 3, Adam Frost and Shuang Frost emphasize the discontinuities seen in Chinese MNE investment over time, contrasting the remarkable difference between the first global economy before 1929 and the contemporary global era. Their suggestion that the impact of strategies of Chinese MNEs in Africa in recent decades is more positive than that of their predecessors from Europe and the United States demonstrates how historical evidence can be used to challenge excessively broad generalizations about MNEs. In Chapter 4, Valeria Giacomin and Andrea Colli highlight that the global value chains of MNEs created employment in emerging markets, but sometimes at the cost of human rights violations, while technology transfer was limited.

Part II studies the interactions between MNEs, governments, and institutions. Chapter 5 by Pierre Eichenberger and Sabine Pitteloud shows how MNEs organized politically to promote their interests and opportunistically adapted the form of their collective action to changing political circumstances. Chapter 6 by Marcelo Bucheli underscores how MNEs often accommodated authoritarian governments and even actively supported regime change toward dictatorships when facing labor unrest and socialist redistributive policies. In Chapter 7, Boris Gehlen and Christian Marx discuss to what extent the goal of MNEs to maximize profits conflicted with the aim of states to collect fiscal revenue and explore MNE tax avoidance strategies. Chapter 8 by Grace Ballor looks at how MNEs contributed to shape market integration and progressively seized the business opportunities it offered, which led to uneven societal outcomes and public discontent.

Part III deals with how MNEs interacted with and impacted a variety of stakeholders over time. In Chapter 9, Thomas Fetzer discusses the extent to which MNEs transferred labor practices across borders and impacted industrial relations and the power of labor unions. Chapter 10 by Paula de la Cruz-Fernández explores how MNEs contributed to reproduce and globalize gender stereotypes through their products, their hiring practices, and their organization of production, for instance in company towns. Chapter 11 by Geoffrey Jones demonstrates that while the use of corruption by MNEs is intrinsically difficult to document, historical evidence suggests that its use by MNEs, including blue chip ones, has been quite extensive, notably in countries with weaker institutions.

Part IV analyzes how MNEs were impacted by and coped with geopolitical evolutions, including a variety of regime changes. In Chapter 11, Chinmay Tumbe explains why India, despite its large market, only attracted a small portion of world FDI and how the roots of this trajectory are found in the impacts of imperialism and the way subsequent Indian governments regulated FDI after the country’s independence. Chapter 12 by Alfred Reckendrees discusses the meaning of nationality for multinationals and illustrates how MNEs proved resilient in a variety of political contexts such as wars, social unrest, and authoritarian regimes thanks to the strategic use of this notion. Chapter 13 by Andrea Lluch and Rory M. Miller revisits from a business history perspective the dependency theories debate in Latin America and shows that market-seeking companies had an overall better developmental track record than resource-seeking ones.

Collectively the chapters in this Companion have three broad conclusions. First, the book emphasizes that the history of MNEs has seen much discontinuity. There have often been assumptions of linearity about the growth of MNEs. Earlier business history contributions have long stressed that growth patterns have been far from linear. There have been exogenous shocks – wars, revolutions, expropriations; dramatic shifts in geographical location – most FDI was located in the non-Western world prior to 1929, then for next fifty years became largely a matter of cross-investment between developed countries. The chapters in this volume challenge even further the idea of teleological development by looking beyond the experience of Western countries.

The historical evidence in this Companion also confirms that MNEs are diverse – organizationally, strategically, and in terms of ethics – and shaped by contexts. While research in international business typically aspires to develop universalist theories, this volume shows how important geographic, institutional, and political contexts are in influencing the nature of MNEs’ impact. For example, the chapters show that MNEs were more willing to engage in corruption in countries with weaker institutions. It is also clear that resource-seeking MNEs operating under colonial rules had no interest in aligning their economic goals with the well-being of populations.

Finally, the chapters in this Companion demonstrate that MNEs are a resilient organizational form of business that has survived shocks and changing policy regimes. It has long been accepted that MNEs diffused technologies and employed large amounts of labor, but the historical evidence points to the darker side of things. Resilience had social costs – arbitrage of weak regulations, bribery and corrupt governments, poor human rights records, poor environmental records, and inequality. Overall, MNEs have often behaved in a very opportunistic fashion. Their CEOs and business associations supported political regimes (democratic or not) and regulations that favored their economic operations.