This article examines the attempts of several generations of manufacturers of cooking and heating appliances to manage competition in their very unconcentrated industry. They started with overt price-fixing, which soon failed, then moved on to a variety of more effective techniques—particularly joint regulation with the aid of a strong craft union, and the adoption of uniform cost-accounting and price-setting systems. The article illuminates the numerous ways in which a trade association could make cartel-like behavior work in an industry whose structural characteristics were apparently unfavorable and also the importance of state intervention to shaping and eventually limiting this strategy.

Since the early 1970s, as shipping has undergone a period of structural change, Swedish shipping has rapidly declined from a position of global importance. The Swedish-controlled fleet has dwindled, and the structure of the industry itself has changed. This article explores the influence of shipping markets, shipping regulations, company strategies, maritime know-how, and financial resources on the development of Swedish shipping from 1970 to 2010. A comparison is made between, on the one hand, the direction taken by two failing companies and, on the other, the courses followed by two companies that managed to grow despite difficult conditions. On a broader level, the article traces the development of expertise in a declining industry.

From professional baseball to legal services, discrimination against sellers became widespread in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This article examines the means by which African American inventor-entrepreneurs overcame discrimination against them by consumers. It makes use of data from the advertising records of Garrett Morgan, who invented the modern gas mask and the traffic light. Both the deliberate use of measures, such as disguises and surrogates, and serendipity (the result of the racial neutrality of patents) were critical in facilitating sellers' anonymity and in promoting desirable economic outcomes.

Anecdotal evidence from the British Railway Mania and other historical financial bubbles suggests that many investors during such episodes are naive, thus contributing to the asset price boom. Using extensive investor records, we find that very few investors during the Railway Mania can be categorized as such. Although some interpretations of the Mania suggest that naive investors were expropriated by railway insiders, our evidence is inconsistent with this view as railway insiders contributed substantial amounts of capital, and their investments performed no better than those made by other experienced investors.

This article argues that a cultural and narrative perspective can enrich the business history field, encourage new and different questions and answers, and provide new ways of thinking about methods and empirical material. It discusses what culture is and how it relates to narratives. Taking a cultural and narrative approach may affect questions, sources, and methodologies, as well as the status of our results. Finally, a narrative approach may contribute to our historical understanding of entrepreneurship and globalization.

Once described as “neglected,” brands and brand history have benefited from a recent surge of work in business history, economics, and management studies. This research, however, remains relatively tightly focused. Most attention is given to successful, long-lived brands and to the entrepreneurs who developed them. As in the market, so in research, the attraction of successful brands is understandable. Nevertheless, such a focus only reinforces both the well-known tendency to read history through the eyes of the winners and the assumption that losers and also-rans have nothing to tell us. The authors of the articles in this special section share both the wish to look beyond such assumptions and the belief that one way to do so is by complementing the study of brands with the study of trademarks and of the related legal, economic, and business arrangements that stand behind brands and provide context for their development since the nineteenth century.

Over the last fifteen years, scholars have documented the rapid development of the U.S. financial system between the ratification of the Constitution in 1788 and the Civil War. To date, most of this work has concentrated on commercial banks and securities markets while neglecting the roles early marine, fire, life, and other insurers played in American financial and economic development. This article seeks to redress the balance by presenting new data on the number and authorized capitalizations of specially incorporated insurers in all states prior to 1861, by analyzing agency problems within the insurance industry, and by describing the economic roles fulfilled by those hitherto underappreciated corporate financial intermediaries.

Firms engage in a multitude of interactions with the external environment, most critically with government and its regulatory agencies. Despite an extensive literature on “regulatory capture,” little attention has been paid to the interactions between merging firms and competition authorities. Yet the possibility of capture exists where there is a recurring series of merger investigations of one firm by the same authority. This analysis of the impact of political influence on the merger history of the brewing firm Scottish & Newcastle extends into a discussion of regulatory capture in the oversight of British brewery mergers during the 1980s and 1990s.

Most of the academic work on the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) has focused on sociopolitical and military affairs; few scholars have considered the economic aspects of the period. Even though business historians know now that the Revolution did not bring generalized chaos or total destruction of manufacturing, we still need more research on economic issues. This article analyzes the evolution of the businesses of the Braniff family, as well as their involvement in politics once the regime of Porfirio Díaz collapsed. It examines the Braniffs' political ideas, their strategies to gain power, and their support of the political faction favorable to their interests. The article exposes the tactics the family used to guarantee the safety of their businesses, the losses they suffered, and the new ventures they made after the Revolution.

Trademarks have traditionally been viewed as assets that, although intangible, nevertheless contribute to the success of firms. This study, based on a compilation of national trademark data, corrects existing distortions of the historical role of brands and their—often unsuccessful—use as business tools by countries, sectors, or firms. Legislation on, and the profuse use of, trademarks in the Western world was pioneered by Spain, rather than by France, the United States, or the United Kingdom, and was initiated in unusual sectors, such as papermaking and textiles, rather than in the more usual ones of food and beverages. Analysis of the applicants of Catalan trademarks, across sectors, during almost a century, reveals that the legal possession of a brand cannot in itself guarantee a firm's success.

Many people today consider curbside recycling the quintessential model of eco-stewardship, yet this waste-management system in the United States was in many ways a pollutersponsored initiative that allowed corporations to expand their productive capacity without fixing fundamental flaws in their packaging technology. For the soft-drink, brewing, and canning industries, the promise of recycling became a powerful weapon for combating mandatory deposit bills and other source-reduction measures in the 1970s and 1980s. In examining the nexus of business, envirotech, and political history, this article explores how American corporations enrolled government agencies to construct resource reclamation systems in the United States that became models for waste management programs in municipalities around the world.

Unlike the majority of Spanish multinationals, which have developed only recently, firms in the publishing industry became international in the early twentieth century and have managed to hold on to much of their business, despite the instability of their own institutional systems and those of their principal host economies. Today, the Spanish publishing industry ranks fourth in the world, and its foreign markets continue to grow in North America, Europe, Latin America, and, most critically, in Mexico. The internationalization of Spanish publishing firms was fueled initially by a search for new markets and by linguistic and cultural advantages. With the passage of time, the process came to be built on accumulated knowledge and on the personal and social networks created by Spanish publishers, both inside and outside Spain.

Taking as its starting point Alfred D. Chandler's studies of big business, this investigation explores how the largest corporations in Italy and Spain transformed their strategies and structures during the second half of the twentieth century. Empirical evidence reveals that, in contrast to the more advanced nations of Europe, these two southern European countries did not adopt either product diversification or the multidivisional structure until later in the century and, even then, did so only partially. By forming business groups and focused companies, the two nations came up with their own viable alternatives to the dominant paradigm that originated in the United States and spread among the bigger European economies.

This article examines the establishment of the field of operations research (OR) at the Arthur D. Little consulting firm and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. OR advocates envisioned the field as a new kind of bureaucratic organ dedicated to general studies of business problems, staffed by trained scientists who could employ sophisticated methods if needed. The crux of their promotional strategy was to use their appreciation of general managerial practice to overcome the tensions to be expected from their claims to apply generic scientific methods to nonscientific activities. However, they discounted possible intellectual competition with established professions. This competition ultimately confined OR's identity to a jurisdiction defined by novel mathematical techniques.

The Nigerian Enterprises Promotion Decree of 1972, which was promulgated in Nigeria after the country gained its independence from Britain, put in place a framework for the varied transfer of equity ownership of expatriate businesses to Nigerians. The decree was replaced by a more stringent order in 1977. Despite the extensive research on the Nigerian indigenization episode, there have been few studies on the role of the British government in the entire exercise. This paper, using newly available evidence from the National Archives London, investigates the role played by the British government during the indigenization episode. Evidence in this paper suggests that the British government explored various strategies, orthodox and unorthodox, in its bid to protect British business interests in Nigeria during the period.

This reassessment of the importance of trademarks in business during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that the focus by business historians on the beverage and processed-foodstuff industries has resulted in comparative neglect of the textile and metal-fabrication industries. The trademark histories of the latter two show that they followed their own paths, which resulted in their adopting three solutions to trademark issues that differed sharply from the approaches taken by the former two. The textile and metalfabrication sectors participated heavily in the evolution of an international regime to protect intellectual property; featured prominently in the development of patents in trademarks and trade names; and devised unique institutional solutions to the emerging problem of conflicting private marks in the Lancashire cotton-textile and Sheffield edge-tool industries. The history of these two industries indicates that trademark protection was not sufficient to ensure international competitiveness and long-run survival.