In 1888, George Eastman introduced Kodak, one of the first affordable, user-friendly photographic film cameras. The camera’s success planted seeds for a global market for amateur photography that the Eastman Kodak Company would dominate for over a century. Leveraging substantial profits from photographic film, Kodak invested heavily in research and development, continuously innovating in amateur photography and pioneering new technological domains. From the 1970s onward, as growth in its core business began to slow and new imaging technologies emerged, Kodak embarked on significant strategic renewal initiatives. These efforts included diversifying into industries such as plain paper copiers and pharmaceuticals and developing digital products for photography applications. Despite considerable investments in innovation and growing new businesses over several decades, Kodak ultimately failed to find a viable path to sustaining its success; it filed for bankruptcy in 2012. The company’s decline illustrates the inherent challenges of sustaining a successful enterprise in evolving markets and technologies. Furthermore, it raises critical questions about the effectiveness of strategic renewal efforts, particularly when high-performance expectations are set within an environment of significant uncertainty.

Drawing on a newly constructed database, this paper examines for the first time the 100 largest industrial enterprises in Turkey over a period of four decades, from 1970 to 2010. As in several other late-industrializing countries, Turkey transitioned from an autarchic to a liberalized and internationalized economy after the 1980s. Our findings show a marked change in large enterprises from a balanced composition of stand-alone family businesses, affiliates of diversified family business groups (FBGs), and state-owned enterprises toward a new configuration dominated by FBG affiliates and, to a lesser degree, foreign-owned firms. This result underlines the central role of the politico-economic and societal context in which the largest enterprises have developed. Furthermore, it demonstrates not only the persistence but also the proliferation of FBGs within a more liberalized and internationalized economic environment. We attribute the expanding prevalence of FBGs and their affiliates despite pro-market reforms to a combination of factors: the new business opportunities created by liberalization and privatization, the internal capabilities of FBGs, and the preferential treatment afforded to entrepreneurs with close ties to the incumbent government.

This article traces the history of the life sciences business in the Cambridge–Boston area and explores how it became the global epicenter of the modern therapeutics industry. While business history scholarship on therapeutics is extensive, few have studied recent technological modalities—from therapeutic proteins to cell and gene therapies—or adopted a regional ecosystem perspective. Based on archival materials and oral histories, this research bridges these works and incorporates insights from the innovation ecosystems framework. It considers how dynamic interactions between an evolving network of complementary and interdependent actors, including therapeutics firms, universities, hospitals, and risk capital providers, enhanced innovative capacity. This perspective also illuminates how ecosystem strength derived from the co-evolution of actors—from universities restructuring technology transfer offices to academic scientists becoming entrepreneurs. The research further highlights the nonlinearity of innovation processes. It shows how an extraordinary interplay between structural advantage, serendipitous timing, and strategic actions cultivated an unparalleled capacity to translate emergent technologies into novel therapies.

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.

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.

This article examines how Norway, a hydropower-rich oil and gas producer, has sought to diversify its energy production since the late 1990s. It explores how and why leading Norwegian oil companies have attempted to redeploy into offshore wind, and how this redeployment has been shaped by political developments and sectoral interests. Through a four-part historical analysis, the article pays particular attention to the motives and interests of key stakeholders within the so-called oil–industrial complex, which encompasses both industrial and political actors, including employer and labor organizations. By integrating corporate and political perspectives, the article explains Norway’s attempt to transform from an “oil nation” to a “wind power nation” despite growing awareness of poor profitability and challenging conditions for offshore wind.

This research reconstructs the business dynamics behind the evolution of the European mutual fund industry, which led Luxembourg to become its main international gateway since the 1960s. We analyze this local industry to understand how political and financial élites influence the economic specialization of small states. We argue that a closely-knit community of local professionals and politicians, well-versed in corporate and European legislation, leveraged the Grand Duchy’s small state status within the nascent European Community to become a financial hub specializing in mutual funds within an emerging network of international financial centers. This position was achieved through bifurcation of sovereignty strategies on the basis of two main premises. First, on the systematic acceptance of conflicts of interest within local financial and political leadership, comprising overlapping roles, revolving-doors, and familial ties in business relationships. Second, on regulatory engineering practices, such as the dynamic interpretation of laws, and the strategic planning of directive assimilation to advance Luxembourg’s interests as opposed to its EU counterparts. The analysis uses archival material from nine archival collections and oral history interviews.

Extant research has highlighted the impact of legal innovations on the organizational choices made by entrepreneurs and traced the diffusion of new business forms across international borders, such as the private limited liability company (PLLC). This paper uses a newly compiled database of all firms operating in Vienna between 1900 and 1936 to examine the PLLC’s impact on the Austrian business landscape following its introduction. Its findings reveal that the PLLC quickly replaced other legal forms. While suitable for a wide range of sectors, the PLLC was particularly attractive to new industries burdened by machinery investment rather than wage costs. By empirically demonstrating that the PLLC filled a critical gap in the legal framework of Austria, this study highlights the broader importance of legal forms as instruments for fostering entrepreneurial activity, shaping economic structures, and driving development.

As a source of credit on residential real estate in North America, private individuals played a vital role well into the 1950s, especially in Canada. Rare national surveys, together with varied case studies in Canada and the United States, indicate that they provided land contracts, construction loans, and first and junior mortgages to a variety of people, including family and friends and many strangers. Contacts were arranged through social networks, agents, and brokers. By comparison with major lending institutions, their role and significance have been overlooked, their loans often unrecorded. In the early decades, lenders included men and women in a range of occupations, not least because many owners offered credit to buyers to facilitate sales. By the 1950s, women, professionals, and businessmen were the main investors, the chief beneficiaries being lower-income households in less desirable districts. Some personal lenders were ill-informed or exploitive, but most enabled families to realize their aspirations to own. This sector’s decline was a consequence of federal policies that promoted national mortgage markets, making the business more professional but displacing practices that had enabled many home buyers and builders.

By April 1942, Japan had cut off almost all US supplies of natural rubber, a key raw material for which the country had effectively no domestic sourcing. The resulting shortage aggravated downward pressure on manufacturing productivity and seriously jeopardized military capability. The risks that this would happen, widely foreseen, could have been mitigated by more or earlier stockpiling, subsidization of domestic plant-based sources of latex, or development of a synthetic rubber industry. At the time of Pearl Harbor, each route had been pursued in a limited fashion or not at all. This paper explores why, highlighting the outsized role played by businessman/politician Jesse Jones, as well as the multiple channels through which the rubber famine adversely affected the country’s wartime economy. This history starkly illuminates a policy dilemma still with us: How much “insurance” should a country carry when it depends heavily on interruptible foreign sourcing of a strategic input?

The automotive lobby’s voluntary commitment to reducing CO2 emissions in 1998 was widely perceived as evidence of the influence of multinationals on European decision-making. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) denounced the lack of transparency. Interviewing negotiators or quoting published reports, scholars focused on the disappointing effects of this agreement. Pending the opening of the public archives, this study is based on primary industry archives, which shed light on the highly confidential negotiation phase. Exchanges within the industry and meetings with the European Commission reveal the limits of the automotive lobby’s power, which had to face internal divisions and seemed to suffer more than choose the agreement. It was the result of Directorate-General (DG) III’s maneuvering. The companies “voluntarily” accepted it as the lesser evil, as it was more advantageous than a directive. The idea of standards being co-constructed by public and private stakeholders needs to be qualified: the balance of power was unbalanced. With these soft regulations, it was above all the Commission that strengthened its position in the decision-making process, to the detriment of other stakeholders such as the European Parliament.

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.

Recovering Senator Robert Owen’s role in creating the Federal Reserve System, this article reclaims the original vision of the Federal Reserve as an institution in which state democratic power checked private expertise. Populist-minded Southern farmers and country bankers embraced the Reserve as a politically palatable vehicle to ease credit, protect against bank runs, and ensure seasonal liquidity. However, the perception of a “populist Federal Reserve” eroded with the onset of the 1920 postwar recession and the ensuing agricultural depression. We show that Federal Reserve officials prioritized combating inflation and made several decisions between 1920 and 1921 that aggravated the agricultural crisis by artificially contracting rural credit access, alienating farmers and country bankers from “their” central bank. This estrangement was further compounded by Reserve failures during the Great Depression, which encouraged Southern farmers and their representatives to re-embrace old populist nostrums that would become centerpieces of the New Deal.

Just before World War I, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) geographically expanded its trade in the Canadian Arctic to derive profits from Arctic fox fur and secure its position in a global value chain (GVC) delivering fur to metropolitan consumers. The “problem of nature” challenged the company’s business venture. Furthermore, “nature” was made and remade by the HBC’s own capital investments. The fox trade itself changed human ecology. Technology transfers to Inuit modified their hunting regimes to increase the company’s returns of polar bear skins. Though these skins had high potential market value, modes of production introduced by the HBC to the Arctic precluded the company from sending high-quality products to metropolitan dressers. Within a changing Arctic human ecology, the HBC produced one highly valued commodity for the market while producing another from which it could derive only modest profit. The HBC’s fox and polar bear trade at the onset of the last century suggests ways that business empires can set off complex and unanticipated changes in human ecologies and, therefore, the dynamics of nature and business at their very peripheries.

Business-led conservation of wildlife based on private property rights and formal governance has often yielded inconsistent results. In pursuit of alternative approaches that prioritize long-term sustainability in wildlife exploitation, this paper studies the novel case of the Nivkh people’s bear hunting enterprise, which functioned in the Lower Amur Basin and Sakhalin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. I demonstrate that the Nivkh ran their bear enterprise sustainably via a conglomeration of traditional ecological knowledge, religious beliefs, and informal social institutions, satisfying their personal demand for the animal while successfully selling bear furs and gallbladders to foreign merchants. Such developments were also supported by the regional political economy in which the Nivkh retained a large degree of autonomy. The paper highlights the productive impact that ideas of sacrality, human–animal kinship, and reciprocity exert on sustainability in wildlife enterprises while also stressing the importance of careful government policy in relation to Indigenous conservation systems. The study validates its claims through field notes, expeditionary journals, state reports, and historical and ethnographic research.

This article examines historical evidence to analyze how the standardization and globalization of bank credit cards transformed the competitive framework of European retail banking. This process was facilitated by the deployment of a new business model with significant implications for the profit-and-loss accounts of banking institutions. The change occurred in the context of growing synergies between technological and organizational developments in the United States and Europe in bank cards, which encouraged the progressive universalization of the system. This historical analysis explains how intense market competition, specific European market conditions, mass tourism, and consumer society acted as drivers of change, as exemplified by the transition from Eurocheque to plastic card. The globalization of cards reveals that competition in markets with a high technological base generated important network externalities, a phenomenon that has been pronounced in Europe and Japan, which have had a less fragmented payment model than in the United States. The shift toward service banking transformed the structure of retail financial markets. Ultimately, the transformation of the retail banking sector tells us about the narrative of globalization in financial markets.