Business is commonly regarded as one of the powerful actors in the world today. However, this position is neither as straightforward as often believed nor particularly new. Nevertheless, business historians have not focused on the topic of business power to date, often leaving it as something lurking in the background of their analyses. There are signs that this may be beginning to change with the growth of studies on the history of capitalism, but this revised presidential address encourages business historians to engage more fully and explicitly with the concept of power and to recognize the different ways in which the concept can be used to enlighten the study of business history.

In this article, we study the role that media plays during a speculative bubble on an emerging market, and in particular the London financial press’s relation to the West African mining bubble of the early twentieth century. The focus is on the leading company in this sector at the time, Ashanti Goldfields Corporation. The London financial press lacked access to independent, reliable information on the ground, so it often failed to provide readers with relevant factual information. In some instances, the press might have even fueled the speculative cycles through the reporting it provided.

This article revisits the story of one the greatest financial frauds in history: Poyais. In the 1820s, Gregor MacGregor issued bonds for this alleged fictitious Central American state on the London capital market. Putting together scattered evidence reveals a complex, multifaceted experiment undertaken by a private adventurer hoping to politically and economically position himself in a changing world. Poyais was a failed project to establish a settlement on a territory granted by an Indigenous leader and financed through British capital markets. Studying a financial failure provides nuanced insights into the political and legal frameworks defining origination processes of early nineteenth-century foreign loans. Following MacGregor’s actions entails drawing a story with contours that extend well beyond the City of London, revealing a rich set of transatlantic actors and spaces not known to be traditionally linked to the London-based capital market. The story of Poyais constitutes a window into the early financial dynamics of private colonialism and how these contributed to British imperial expansion. The Poyais loan appears as constituting a financial endeavor born from the encounter of different “worlds,” with MacGregor mediating these together but ultimately failing to legally and politically guarantee their lasting encounter.

The history of insurance has been characterized in most countries by the coexistence of a wide range of organizational forms. The reasons for this plethora of vehicles remain unclear, as does the impact of this diversity on the development of insurance around the world. Drawing on the latest research, this paper examines, first, the different functions of the state in relation to insurance in a wide range of national markets from the early modern period to the present century; second, the path-dependent effects that determined the historical distribution of public and private forms of insurance; and third, the relation between public and private insurance and its impact on market development.

In the 1950s, outdoor retailer Eddie Bauer donated down jackets to American mountaineers embarking on climbing expeditions in the Himalayas. In the 1990s, chemical manufacturer W. L. Gore & Associates donated both goods and $2 million to an expedition in Antarctica. The funds dedicated to sponsorship by the end of the twentieth century reflect a shift in how companies saw expeditions as useful to their marketing goals. This article uses two archives previously unexplored by historians that offer an unprecedented chance to compare sponsorship relationships in a single industry across decades. Commercial sponsorship of American expeditions and athletes has undergone three dramatic changes since 1950, and these shifts help explain how sponsorship as a form of marketing became so popular. Sponsorship contracts shifted from vague to specific as a result of decades of unsatisfying results for corporate sponsors. Sponsored athletes became business partners and began taking an active role in promoting the companies that provided them cash or donations in-kind. Finally, companies developed strategies for leveraging their sponsorship deals. The changing landscape of the business of expeditions ultimately reveals how the most long-lasting legacies of these extreme adventures happened far from the trail and much closer to company boardrooms, sponsorship managers’ offices and retail stores where consumers learned to engage with the narratives companies and athletes had crafted together.

This paper reconstructs the history of the reform of Britain’s company laws during the 1850s and makes three major arguments. First, the Law Amendment Society was the driving force for reform and organized the campaign for change. Second, the advancement of working-class interests and ideas of fairness were central to the conceptualization of these reforms and the course of their advocacy. Company law reform was broadly conceived to include the revision of the law of partnership, corporations, and cooperatives to create a level playing field in which smaller entrepreneurs could compete against established capitalists. Finally, central to this campaign was the institutional logic of “fair competition.” Socialists and liberals both used this logic, demonstrating how moral ideas can shape organizational change.