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In Nazi Germany (1933–45), reclaiming waste became an intrinsic component of the regime's economy as well as its ideological, racial, and expansionist ambitions. National Socialist interventions into waste streams began in 1934 with salvage campaigns. The state then brought urban waste policies and municipal waste services under its control, restructuring and 'Aryanising' the waste salvage trade. Moreover, both consumers and producers were prompted to collect and reprocess waste. Over time, the gradual expansion of the Nazi waste recovery policies and campaigns – here referred to as the 'Nazi waste exploitation regime' – brought forth a determined vision of a circular economy in which no waste whatsoever should escape its reclamation for the national community or Volksgemeinschaft. This article sketches the actors, structures, and objectives of this waste exploitation regime for the case of rags and paper and uncovers its entanglement with Nazi racist and genocidal ideology and expansionism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines Soviet paper reuse as an ideological, economic daily practice, implemented through the advanced, but hitherto undescribed Soiuzutil'waste collecting system by the early 1930s as the reverse side of Stalinist industrialization. It argues that Soiuzutil'waste paper handling attempted to form a new socialist collective by reworking old print while cultivating citizens as classless scrap-collectors, for the sake of an (ir)rational resource optimization. While World War II intensified recycling efforts among the Allied and Axis powers, invasion and evacuation damaged Soviet waste collection to a point where no return of paper into a centralized system was possible. War forced printers and consumers to retreat to local self-supply networks, as paper remained a crucial, yet scarce resource. By analyzing technical-educational literature and correspondence of the reutilization offices, the article demonstrates the changing attitudes in the Stalinist war economy, the industries, and the population towards mobilizing and saving paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how companies can circumvent competition legislation by developing new informal ways of cooperation. We focus on the case of the Nordic pulp and paper industry which was particularly eager to set up cartels. Scholars analysing this sector can utilise exceptionally rich sources that reveal how industrialists reacted to the introduction and development of European competition policies. The article shows that companies defended their collusive practices by making them less transparent and more informal than before, a change that did not automatically lessen their effectiveness. Tougher competition policies also encouraged industrialists to create new giant companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the half century, which preceded the outbreak of the First World War, the paper industry was one of the most rapidly growing industries in Great Britain. After the repeal of the excise duty on paper in 1861, the annual output of the industry cannot he determined directly, but the growing dependence of paper manufacturers on imported raw materials permits the calculation of reasonably satisfactory estimates of production. These estimates suggest that output increased approximately eleven fold between 1860 and 1914 and although the rate of growth was slower by the 1890s the average annual increase in a decade never fell below four percent. A list of general reasons for the expansion of the British paper industry between 1860 and 1914 may he readily assembled. On the one hands costs were reduced by the introduction of esparto grass in the 1860s and wood pulp in the 1880s to supplement or replace the traditional and more expensive basic raw materials, pulped linen and cotton rags. At the same time chemicals used to treat the raw material tell appreciably in price, whilst the increasing size of plants-not least wider and faster paper-making machines-produced significant economies of scale. The article focuses on Alexander Pine & Sons, one of the leading paper manufacturers in Scotland and discusses the growth of paper industry in the nineteenth century.

Although the dioxin alarm broke at the same time in Sweden and the US in the mid-1980s, Swedish pulp and paper (P&P) firms led the way towards the new market for low-chlorine and chlorine-free P&P products. This study explores the transition in the Swedish P&P industry and contrasts the Swedish case to the US experience. We highlight the importance of already established technological paths to deal with pollution, paths which were strongly formed by the different national environmental policies since the 1970s. Thus while US P&P firms were technologically locked-in when the dioxin alarm broke, the strategy of Swedish P&P firms to proactively collaborate in environmental research and development (R&D) together with a national policy that favoured process integrated abatement technology, helped Swedish firms take technological leadership. This article particularly stresses the implications of technological path-dependency and different national regulatory styles in understanding the evolution of different modes of corporate environmental strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents summaries of papers of Business History Seminar. The Business History Seminar organized by Dr. Oddy met on 8 May 1981 in the Board Room of the Polytechnic of Central London. Dr. Charles Munn's paper, "Bank Finance for Industry: Scotland and Ireland 1820-1850" was concerned with the volume and techniques of lending by Scottish and Irish joint-stock banks in their formative years compared with their predecessors. In the 1820s and 1830s long established banking systems in the two countries gave way to systems of joint-stock banks and the average site of bank was larger than the English equivalent. The changing structures in the banking systems had implications for the ways in which they did business. Larger advances led the banks to look for more tangible forms of security than the traditional personal guarantee. Lending on the security of shares, property, goods, life assurance policies and ships became common but the banks struggled long and hard to find ways of obtaining effective security over these items. Acceptance finance and lending by means of unsecured overdraft also became common at this time.

This study examines Weber's Protestant Work Ethic and its power in explaining the business ethos and progress of a leading Scottish papermaking firm, Alex Cowan & Sons Ltd. of Penicuik, which existed independently from 1779 to 1965. Beginning with a summary of the Protestant Work Ethic, as outlined in Weber's thesis of 1904–06, a review of key debates around it is given, followed by details of some recent works which demonstrate its continuing relevance for historical scholars as well as the shortcomings of some recent studies which have sought to test it in detail. A brief outline of the business progress of Cowan's papermaking business then follows, after which key aspects of Weber's thesis are tested against the firm's experience. The study concludes that Weber's thesis adequately describes the motivation and progress of the firm and its owners, providing detailed empirical evidence which supports the Weber thesis and justifies further detailed studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

London goldsmith-bankers' development of paper credit-money in the seventeenth century ushered in the era of modern banking. This essay argues that this innovation of paper credit-money by goldsmith-bankers was the institutionalisation of the double-ownership scheme known as trust. This trust scheme was at the centre of the custom or morality that underlay the political struggle between the Crown, landowners, and the bourgeoisie in early modern England, the struggle from which goldsmith-banking and, later, joint-stock banking developed. This double ownership remains a central feature of the present banking system. Also during the financial boom of the late twentieth century, which ended in the present world financial crisis, the trust scheme was used extensively by many financial firms, such as mutual funds, pension funds, and asset-securitisation trusts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This massive book started life about two years after Cortada retired from IBM. Cortada has put forward the argument that computers fundamentally changed the nature of work and supported this idea through a number of key contributions to the business history of computing. The rise and fall and reinvention of a global icon: James W Cortada. [Extracted from the article]

This article presents information on the Business History Seminar which was held on 8 November, 1974. The seminar deliberated on the pricing policies of firms and their determinants. One of the papers which was read out in the seminar was "Pricing Policies in the Tobacco Industry, 1780-1939." The said paper was read out by Dr. B.W.E. Alford. This paper examined the way in which prices were set, and by doing so emphasized the importance of a relatively mundane level of business activity. It is informed that the most effective means by which tobacco firms may increase their profitability was through skilful leaf-buying and blending of leaf, i.e., through its cost-effectiveness in producing a limited range of homogeneous products. Branding was beginning to creep into the market from the 1840s onwards but, broadly, competitive pricing remained the predominant pattern up to the 1870s, by which time regional markets had become far less pronounced as a result of the impact of railway transportation. The demand for cigarettes grew rapidly. Cigarette sales overtook sales of smoking tobaccos in 1920, and by 1930 they accounted for 67 percent of all sales by weight. This change in the composition of demand had the effect of transmitting consumer choice from one of choice between cigarettes and smoking tobaccos to one of choice between cigarette brands.

This paper utilises a systematic review of 110 Polish corporate histories to explore the question of how the genre of corporate history has evolved over time in a country that has undergone multiple transitions. The corporate histories subjected to review were published in three different historical periods: prior to World War II, during the socialist period and following the transition to capitalism. The analysis is focussed on both formal and thematic features of Polish corporate history as a genre. This paper contributes to the business history literature in three ways. First, it showcases some unique features of relatively unknown corporate histories in the Polish context. Second, it provides an empirical illustration of the process of genre evolution by analysing continuity and change in corporate histories published over three different historical periods. Third, it offers methodological insight into the analysis of the corporate history genre in countries where it is not recognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new technological paradigm coupled with a powerful wave of deregulation and liberalisation that was unleashed worldwide from the 1980s onwards acted as a catalyst for profound transformation in the telecommunications equipment industry, which was dominated at the time by large multinational corporations. These developments, in turn, led to worldwide restructuring in the sector. The present paper hypothesises that the sector's oligopolistic structure remained, but that it did so under the leadership of new global players that sought to impose their strategies in response to the prevailing conditions. The paper also aims to explain the reasons for the global restructuring in the sector by looking at the strategies, choices, and decisions of the involved multinationals from the viewpoint of the nation-state. Based on the assumption that a separate analysis of one national unit can help to understand the process as a whole, the paper draws on primary sources to describe and analyse the adjustment path within Standard Eléctrica, a Spanish subsidiary first of IT&T and then of Alcatel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relative economic decline of Britain since the last quarter of the nineteenth century has often been attributed to its firms' continued prediction for small-scale batch production and highly skilled labor. Britain's loss of leadership in paper making in the second half of the nineteenth century was most apparent in the level of output it and its main competitor, the U.S., produced. While in 1860 both the U.S. and Britain shared the honor of the being the world's biggest paper producers, each with around 100,000 long tons of paper and board per annum, by 1914 the United States had shot out ahead; in that year manufacturing some 4,705,400 tons to Britain's 1,110,000. This changing fortune of the British industry in the late nineteenth century was clearly recognized by contemporaries. Many of these observers noted that, in addition to the advantages that nature had bestowed on the American industry in terms of cheap and accessible supplies of wood and energy. The idea that the U.S. had established a lead in paper-machine technology by 1900 also appears to be supported by the different types of data available from the period.

Examines the conflicting theory and practice concerning the inclusion of fiat currency in the money stock in Great Britain. Possession of radical monetary systems of the North American colonies; Apprehension of irreversible depreciation; Issuance of tax anticipation bills.

The financial newspaper, Dagens Industri, published by the Swedish media conglomerate the Bonnier Group, was not only the first successful financial newspaper in Sweden but also one of few newspapers that managed to internationalise. In this paper, it is argued that the survival and success of Dagens Industri could be attributed to the production model that the paper was made to adopt in order to cope with the special technological and labour market-related circumstances that were present at the time of its creation. This includes the outsourcing of composition and printing, something that allowed the paper to stay out of the labour conflicts that rocked the media industry at the time. It is also shown that, because of the differences in the structure of the labour movement, the challenges met, and the solutions used by the Bonnier Group, differed significantly from those of American newspaper companies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the Special Issue 'Minorities and Grain Trade in Early Modern Europe'. While an area's traditional supply circuits benefitted from satisfactory harvests and a stable food demand, minorities' contribution became crucial during crisis. Due to their commercial networks, facilities, and capital, minorities and their agents were able to cope with market disruption, especially when inflation and the reconfiguration of supply areas rendered 'traditional' grain merchants unable to face the emergency. The papers included in the Special Issue focus on the geographical and financial scope of legal grain-trading minorities' businesses and their degree of specialisation and analyse how political authorities' reliance on minorities to face food scarcity not only represented an economic opportunity for minorities but also contributed to shaping their relationship with public authorities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a systematic review of the existing literature on business longevity by conducting a bibliometric analysis of 142 papers published in the leading business history and management journals during the last three decades. The results show similarities (e.g. in explanatory models) and differences (e.g. in citation patterns, theories, and methods) between the disciplines, thus indicating that the literature is partially segmented into separate domains that prevent business longevity research from representing a truly unified field of study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the historical significance of the "Sunday Advertiser" in London, England. Entrance of the newspaper into the weekend market of journalism; The role of Elizabeth Johnson in the pioneering of English Sunday papers; The activities of the Friendly Society of Licensed Victuallers in opening a school and funding it with a newspaper; Discussion of content and circulation of the "Sunday Advertiser" in the early 19th century; Management of operating costs and profits; The committee system of management; Sale of the newspaper to William J. Clement.

This article analyzes the business organisation and activities of Genoese naval entrepreneurs who managed galleys for the Spanish Empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While conventional narratives of business history begin with the Industrial Revolution and focus on the rise of the modern corporation, this article brings to the fore early modern entrepreneurs from Italy and shows how they led family-controlled firms running permanent navies in the Mediterranean. By using private ledgers and merchant correspondence, the paper aims to understand how these naval entrepreneurs governed their affairs and managed resources internationally. We find that delegation (through family ties, hierarchy, and networks) was the main solution chosen to deal with distant commodity, labour, and capital markets. We retrace the different forms this delegation took and explain its determinants considering alternative options and providing comparative insights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on summaries of papers presented at the SSRC Business History Seminar, which was held on May 14, 1982 in Central London. Three papers on the theme "The Professionalization of Investment Advice," were read. Researcher Judy Slinn's paper "The Solicitor As an Investment Agent," was illustrated mainly by examples from the history of Freshfields. In the paper it was argued that the part played by solicitors in the investment process remains an important one, although the nature of it has changed, particularly this century. The importance of attorneys in the eighteenth century as bankers, money lenders and investment intermediaries has been noted. The second paper, by Edgar Jones, entitled "The British Accountant As an Investment Adviser, 1850-1980," attempted to show how the accountant's role has fluctuated within this field and to identify the economic and institutional forces responsible for these developments. In the nineteenth century their late admission in the ranks of the professions and their principal involvement in insolvencies and to a lesser extent audits, meant that investment advice, when offered by accountants, tended to be in special circumstances, and mostly in provincial centres.

Large firms are faced with an ever-widening array of consultancy services and providers. From management consulting to accounting to logistics to human relations, the professional services industry has seen extraordinary growth in the number of firms and range of services they provide. In this paper, we examine the history of one consultancy firm, albeit a small and particular one. The Fantus Factory Locating Service was established in 1919 and pioneered what we know today as the site selection or location consulting industry. Brokering between firms and communities seeking to attract investment, Fantus was able to structure and powerfully shape the landscape of economic activity in the United States. Drawing on a variety of secondary sources and a primary source of archived company files the paper examines the growth of the firm, the nature and scale of its work and its extraordinary and lasting influence on the changing US economic landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 1970s and 1980s, economic and financial crime turned into a societal issue in Switzerland. The perpetrators of white-collar crime often enjoyed total impunity: legal proceedings were very time consuming, authorities in charge of judicial investigation were under-resourced. This paper investigates how the political and judicial authorities responded to this challenge. By the end of the 1980s, a strong shift towards a more specialized handling of financial crime by public prosecutors occurred. Specialized departments were set up and judges were trained in commercial matters. This transformation breached with a long tradition of leniency and inefficient judicial handling of economic crime. Based on archival evidence, this paper sheds new light on the drivers of an institutionalization process which affected not only the Swiss financial centre, but also all the global judicial proceedings which relied on it. Professionalizing the response to financial crime also aimed at restoring the corporate reputation of Swiss financial firms, in a context of growing competition among offshore financial centers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historical scholarship on Chinese diasporic enterprise has largely rejected culturalist paradigms in favour of structuralist ones, but the question of culture remains contentious. It has also been addressed primarily via case studies of Southeast Asia's largest and most prominent Chinese firms. Through examining the collection of 101 Chinese insolvency and bankruptcy files created in Sydney between 1857 and 1926, this paper presents an unseen view of Chinese diasporic enterprise. It argues that Chinese entrepreneurs employed strategies common across business in Australia, coined and used distinctive methods of their own and applied cultural resources imported from China within complex and dynamic Chinese Australian entrepreneurial approaches. That these were so nuanced, I suggest, reveals the considerable scope for balancing different practices in Chinese business overseas that existed beyond the most familiar examples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the history of Amélie de Dietrich in her role (1806 to 1855) as the head of one of the oldest family-owned businesses in Europe: the De Dietrich Company. Economic history has long given a very minor place to women entrepreneurs. Recent analyses nevertheless tend to show that women business leaders were not exceptions in the nineteenth century. This paper is a further attempt to bring women entrepreneurs – and their contribution to the industrial take-off – out of invisibility. Amélie de Dietrich took important strategic decisions to adapt the company to the new economic opportunities which arose in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her choices were decisive for the future of the company; what is more, she succeeded in restoring the familial ownership. Drawing on Amélie de Dietrich's own unpublished correspondence, this contribution examines the factors that explain her success in imposing herself as a Maître des Forges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The British Railway Mania of the mid-1840s led to a massive expansion of the railway network, a socially beneficial legacy that however produced a collapse of profitability and dividends. Paradoxically, the majority of this expansion was carried out by established (and hitherto successful) railways, rather than Mania promotions. Campbell and Turner (2015) see this expansion as a rational, indeed optimal, response to the Mania: they would have been worse placed with alternative strategies. This paper contends that it was established railways which began the expansion in 1843–1844, and that the high returns they generated for their shareholders depended crucially on the rights issues that financed their projected lines. This helps to explain both shareholder support for expansion, and investor enthusiasm for Mania projections. But the new lines were unprofitable: the established railways' expansionary strategy was a major managerial failure with, in the longer term, disastrous consequences for shareholders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the relationship between merchant networks and the rate of profit on merchant capital (RPMC), that is, the ratio of net profit to investment. A case study focusing on Majorca in the eighteenth century shows how merchants built up their personal networks in order to gather information and reduce the uncertainty of maritime business. The rate of profit is an additional indicator of the strength of ties and the need to diversify investments by incorporating estate and tax farming, as well as public supply contracts, all of which was only possible through the control that networks bestowed on big merchants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the process of the internationalisation of Japan Tobacco (JT), as a former state-owned enterprise (SOE) in the context of varied state motives and interventions influenced by changing social and political environments. The account of the successful internationalisation of this large Japanese multinational corporation (MNC), frequently listed in the Fortune Global 500, helps to meet a growing need to elaborate the relationship between the privatisation and internationalisation of SOEs. The historical analysis of JT's internationalisation is presented with two distinct focuses, each of which illuminates significant implications for scholars of business history. First, breaking down the narrative into distinct phases helps to reveal the dynamic interaction between processes of privatisation and internationalisation over time. Second, the focus on distinct stakeholders draws on resource dependency theory to elaborate the nuanced relationship between the State's motives and JT's determination to internationalise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scotland was a premier destination for American direct investment from the 1940s to the 1970s. Multinationals were attracted by regional policy inducements that sought to develop modernised engineering sectors. This paper examines the evolution of four American-owned manufacturing subsidiaries between the 1940s and 1980s using correspondence between plant managers and policymakers. Reconciling existing Scottish subsidiary literature, success and failure are both documented. Subsidiary entrepreneurial behaviour was displayed in each case, but developmental outcomes were inhibited. Centralised American management exercised power over Scottish plants, including stripping subsidiaries of innovative products that were developed in Scotland. However, corporate product market competitiveness, a subsidiary's existing strength within a multinational's global region presence and business governance structures coalesced to condition success and failure. Policymakers must attempt to embed competitive advantages within localised linkages, but their ability to do so is strongly conditioned by the domestic industrial structure's capacity to respond favourably to these challenges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Invented market traditions are practices and memories of the past created by corporations and sustained through consumption. Invented market traditions show how organisations have the potential to reorganise collective memories of the past, creating new mnemonic narratives rather than drawing on existing ones. Materiality provides long-term stability to these narratives. This paper focuses on the institution of Italian breakfast, based on milk, coffee, and convenience bakery products such as biscuits, invented by the brand Mulino Bianco. Biscuits exemplify how commodities imbued with nostalgic meanings can mobilise these invented memories and fold them into social practices. The recurring consumption of biscuits at breakfast, which was marketed as a rediscovery of Italian heritage, created those very nostalgic memories that consumers wanted to remember. Invented market traditions show the social repercussions of organisations' rhetorical work and expose how context plays a role in understanding their success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The activity of Italian banks in Egypt represents an almost unexplored field of investigation in economic history. This article is the first to attempt to add to the Italian banking literature in this area. At the same time, it contributes to the multinational banking literature on the characteristics of banks belonging to multinational groups, which are subject to a 'liability of foreignness' due to differences between the home country and the host economy. The paper explains the short-lived success of Italian banks, which were able to occupy primary positions in the Egyptian banking sector thanks to an aggressive policy focussed on the cotton market. It then highlights the reasons for the subsequent problems these institutes faced, showing the difficulties of a latecomer and capital-poor country, such as Italy, in carrying out a catching-up process aimed at widening its influence over geographical areas considered strategic in terms of political and commercial penetration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schumpeter envisioned entrepreneurship research as a way to examine and understand how capitalism changes. This notwithstanding, contemporary entrepreneurship studies predominantly explore the emergence and growth of new business firms, thus adopting a view that assumes a positive macro-level role for entrepreneurship in society even as it neglects the destructivity which was key to Schumpeter's theory. To bring capitalism back into entrepreneurship, we suggest a narrative approach to entrepreneurial history. Specifically, we introduce counternarratives to discuss new ways of thinking about the micro-macro linkage in entrepreneurship and to open up fresh understandings of creative destruction within, and beyond, capitalism. We conclude the paper with practical suggestions for new entrepreneurial histories that develop alternative narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Entrepreneurial imagination is core to the entrepreneurial process but hard to study in the present. Methodologically, historians have the advantage of reconstructing entrepreneurs' future thinking in their time. However, traditional historical methodology offers only limited tools to analyse and interpret uncertainty in historical future-oriented sources. In this paper, we suggest that Construal Level Theory (CLT), a theory in social-cognitive psychology, represents a complementary resource to deal with uncertainty and analyse the role of entrepreneurial imagination in evaluating and selecting business opportunities. We elaborate on four manifestations of abstraction suggested by CLT: desirability vs. feasibility, primary vs. secondary aspects, words vs. pictorial representations, and small vs. large categories. We further explain how insights from CLT can raise important questions for source analysis and facilitate comparisons, and then demonstrate it by investigating Thomas Edison's ego-documents. We conclude by sketching a future interdisciplinary dialogue with entrepreneurship scholars and psychologists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the management of the Victorian local newspaper. While Victorian journalism has received a great deal of attention from historians its commercial aspect has been relatively neglected. The development of a few of the larger enterprises has been explored, but still little is known of the detailed organization and management of a Victorian provincial paper. The Victorians themselves recognized that the commercial aspect was vital to the whole institution of the Press, and the newspaper proprietor was commonly accorded a higher status than the mere journalist. Business records, however, are particularly vulnerable to the passing of time, and those of newspaper enterprises have also been subject to a more than usual proclivity for secrecy on the part of the proprietors. Further losses occurred as the result of structural change in the industry in the twentieth century. Such records as do survive are, therefore, all the more important, and it is from one such survival that an attempt is made to show how a small provincial paper was conducted.

The article focuses on crew lists, agreements and official logs of the British empire from 1863 to 1913. As a result of negotiations during the last five years, the Memorial University has now acquired a collection of some 22, 500 boxes of shipping records which were previously stored at Hayes, Middlesex, England, under the custody of the Registrar General of Shipping and Seamen. These records are of two types, the Crew Lists and Agreements submitted by the masters of all merchant ships registered under the British Flag, and the Official Log Books of British Vessels. The Crew Lists, which form by far the greatest part of the collection, are basically the descendants of the ancient Muster Rolles submitted after 1730 by merchant captains. However, as a result of various pieces of legislation passed between 1835 and 1854, the method of recording and maintaining the agreements made between the captain and the crew was modified and improved, above all by the establishment of a registrar to supervise and have custody of the agreements once they had been signed. In 1854 the Merchant Shipping Act greatly improved the system of registering merchant vessels by allotting a distinct official number for every British merchant ship.

This paper will examine Estate Duty(ED) and its impact on the structure of smaller British businesses. ED was one of the most controversial and wide-ranging taxes ever imposed in the UK. It was the first substantive tax on capital. It was partly responsible for the reconfiguration of British business in the 1940s- 1950s as businesses sought to avoid the Duty with measures which could result in the loss of a family firm to the 'corporate economy'. Examining this phenomenon adds a hitherto unexplored dimension to the arguments of business historians surrounding the structure of British business and its relative performance after World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In connection with World War II, the advertising industry in neutral Sweden began cooperating with the government. This proved beneficial for the industry since blockades and rationing caused the civilian advertising market to almost disappear. After the war, the cooperation continued, albeit primarily regarding military matters. Later, however, the government began procuring advertising and media services on largely commercial grounds. This paper covers the history of the relationship between the advertising industry and the government and provides an analysis of the influence of the public advertising market and cold war institutions on the industry. I find that the government, by acting as a customer of last resort, conserved the industry structure and made it possible for the Swedish advertising cartel to survive World War II, and for the large firms that dominated the industry during most of the century to survive the dissolution of the cartel in 1965. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nuclear energy was one among business opportunities brought by the take off in science and technology after the Second World War. The narratives of the milestones of atomic history neglect the commercial, industrial and organizational aspects that made it possible. This paper concentrates on what makes the nuclear business exceptional (or not). We undertake an analysis of the nuclear supply business (designing, manufacturing and installing nuclear facilities) distinct from the analysis of the demand side (business operating nuclear power plants). We identify a continuing role of the state in civil nuclear businesses and a symbiotic relationship with private atomic business. And yet, for the most part the nuclear business applies the usual criteria of cost minimization and profit maximization within the boundaries of a non-perfectly competitive market. We argue that the development of civil nuclear projects is core not just to business history as a discipline but to post-war history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the comments raised by W. D. Rubinstein against the author's article on wealth making in the nineteenth and early twentieth century in Great Britain. In my earlier paper, I used data taken from the Dictionary of Business Biography (DBB) and probate records to test the hypothesis put forward by Rubenstein that the center of wealth earning in this period was London, England, a city dominated by commerce and finance. I grouped 790 businessmen into regional and occupational categories, and subjected their wealth to a battery of quantitative tests. I found no evidence of inferior provincial London wealth, or industrial to commercial and financial wealth, and concluded that the Rubinstein hypothesis should be rejected in the view of the diverse pattern of wealth holding discovered. In his comment Rubinstein suggests that there are two main flaws in my method analysis. First, I used a data set based solely on businessmen who appear in the DBB, a source that he claims does not accurately represent the distribution of British business leadership. Second, he alleges that my paper misrepresents his views on wealth making in this period. According to Rubinstein, he has never understated the wealth earning of the northern manufacturing elite; rather he has emphasized that Londoners should be singled out because of there prevalence at the top of the British wealth structure.

The case study presented here relates to Ursus – one of the world's oldest makers of agriculture tractors. Founded in the late 19th century, and nationalised in the inter-War period, Ursus became one of the success stories of communist-era Poland. This denoted that, when the transition to a market economy took place, the enterprise came to typify state-owned 'dinosaurs'. However, once Poland had acceded to the European Union, Ursus was acquired by a family firm and began to increase its international presence rapidly once again. This paper therefore revisits the processes whereby the state firms of post-communist economies underwent organisational transformation; and sheds light on the non-linear nature of its subject's development process, unfolding in the context of radical institutional change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the National Socialist policy towards insurance companies. The puropse of this paper is to examine the impact of Nazi economic policies on the scope and the scale of the world biggest reinsurance company Munich Re. Contrary to prior assumptions, the substantial foreign business of Munich Re was not seriously affected by the Nazi policy of autarchy and the strict regulation of currency transfers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article celebrates the life, career, and intellectual contribution of Leslie Hannah, while also summarising the other papers of this festschrift. We discuss Hannah's early life, the development of business history prior to the launch of the London School of Economics' Business History Unit (BHU), together with Hannah's contribution to business history research and disciplinary development during and after his time as BHU director. We conclude with brief summaries of the other eight articles in this special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Applying tenets of legal origin theory, this paper traces the origins of banking financial accountability resting behind paragraphs 78 to 82 of the First Schedule of the Companies Act 1862 (UK), where the timely disclosure of a balance sheet and statement of income and expenditure to stakeholders are scrutinised. Comparative legal analysis of 503 banking enactments of the US, Canada and England during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries reveals that expectations of formal accounts raised by the Companies Act 1862 (UK) were informed by the Colombia Banking Act 1817 (CO) in the US, the Canadian Mauritius Regulations 1830 and the Joint Stock Banks Act 1844 (UK). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses questions seeking to clarify the nature of personal networking between modern Japan's wealthy economic elite and the Japanese nobility. In particular, to explore whether the social connections between the wealthy and the nobility led to changes in behaviour and formation of social ties, the marriages between the wealthy economic elite and the Japanese aristocracy, will be the focus of this study. The general overview, the motives, causes and effects of marriage alliances will be explored. And the examination of the cases of aristocratic elite who entered into business through the choice of entrepreneurial occupation will be presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we respond to the useful comments made by J. J. Bissell 2017, on our paper Garnett et al 2015. We use this opportunity to explain in more detail our use of agent based modelling of historical processes, and how it can raise interesting and thought provoking questions that could be answered by additional historical research. In this case, questions around the possible relationship with the size of the British banking sector and the formation of new banks. We also take the opportunity to present further data on on the possible reasons for the rise and fall in the population of British banks, and suggest that the 'tipping point' might not have been such a radical change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]