This article explores the career of Fritz L. Redlich and his influence on business history. Redlich completed his degree in economics in Berlin in 1914 when the German Historical School still dominated the field. He then had to withdraw his Ph.D. dissertation on the German tar industry because of his Jewish origin. In 1936, he left Germany for the United States, where he taught in several universities and also served in public administration. A major breakthrough in his career occurred when he answered the call to join the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History at Harvard University. There, in continuous dialogue with Joseph Schumpeter, Arthur Cole, and many other researchers, Redlich developed an interesting epistemological foundation for the newly born entrepreneurial history, a discipline bent on verstehen (“understanding”) and becoming an integral part of the social sciences. Via an international network of numerous students and scholars, Redlich was decisive in the emergence and diffusion of business history not only in the United States but also in Germany.

This paper examines Harrisons and Crosfield’s Quilon operations in interwar South India to highlight the role of site specificity in shaping global firms. Unlike most British companies headquartered in major colonial port cities, Harrisons and Crosfield established its Indian base in Quilon, a small town with strategic access to estates and backwaters but limited infrastructure. Situating the case within debates on multinational enterprise and colonial business, the paper argues that geography and foreignness were central to the firm’s longevity, shaping both opportunities and limits to expansion.

We examine corporate ownership and control using a sample of 90 Australian companies in the 1930s. The interwar period was formative in Australia for the growth of corporations and share ownership, although investor protections and information lagged. We estimate the ownership share of the Board, separately the CEO/Chairman, and other significant blockholders. Our sources enable us to account for shares controlled indirectly through family ownership and related entities. This matters to our results, especially in identifying family firms. Board ownership was similar to the US and UK in the early twentieth century; but taking account of shares controlled through related entities changes the story to an insider system where ownership and control had not separated. Dual CEOs mattered and blockholders beyond the Board. The drivers of these patterns of ownership and control included the role of family firms, firm age and size, and the types of shares.

Focusing on cooperative marketing associations (CMAs) in the raw cotton sector, this article asks how the federal government got involved in providing intermediate credit to farmer cooperatives. Around the turn of the twentieth century, farmers and financiers shared some key financial reform objectives, but it was only during and after World War I that the federal state began supporting CMAs’ access to credit through the Federal Reserve and War Finance Corporation. Key public and private actors appropriated decades-old Populist claims about cooperatives’ macroeconomic benefits to justify top-down efforts to support their development. Cotton played a central role in these institutional reforms designed to neutralize the danger that commodity markets and agrarian politics posed to US capitalism through centralized mechanisms of monetary and credit control. But even the creation of the Federal Intermediate Credit Banks in 1923 failed to provide CMAs with the generic working capital necessary to coordinate both production and distribution. Instead, federal policies focused on trade financing in the name of good financial practices and therefore patently ignored Southern Populists’ progressive dream of eliminating the crop-lien system.