This article examines how the ideological outlook of the British worker co-operative movement gradually assumed a neoliberal character. Drawing on methods from conceptual history, it traces the evolution of the movement’s key ideas and explores the changing language in which they were expressed. Central to this shift was the emergence of a social-enterprise discourse that reframed an earlier New Left commitment to pursuing worker control “in and against the market” as a conviction that such control could be achieved only “in and through” market participation. The study centres on the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (ICOM), a national federation of worker co-operatives active in Britain between 1971 and 2001. It uses items published by ICOM, material from numerous archives, and oral interviews conducted with some of those involved in the federation’s final years.

Commodity grades seem like innocuous measures of quality and thereby escape scrutiny as to their origin, purpose, and effect. Drawing on the National Live Stock and Meat Board’s executive meeting minutes and US Food Administration (USFA) records, this essay contextualizes and politicizes government beef grading. The USFA played a key role in the lead-up to government beef grading and in the creation of the Meat Board. USFA messaging as well as a post war depression curtailed consumption of feedlot-derived beef. In response, industry leaders formed a trade association called the Meat Board that acted as a liaison between industry and public sector scientists and helped bring about government beef grading. Beef grading emerged in the broader context of a campaign launched by the USFA to modernize meat retailers. At the same time, breeders, feeders, and western ranchers pushed for government beef grading in response to low prices and as a panacea. The Meat Board also cooperated with agricultural scientists in coordinating research to boost feedlot-derived beef. Rather than industry cooptation of science, this essay shows an alignment of vision in a mutually beneficial relationship. These actors, furthermore, used government beef grading to protect the feedlot system of production.

This article traces the origins of “big” tobacco, that is, international, multinational companies, in Cyprus during the British colonial period. It explores how the tobacco and cigarette industries developed from the 1920s until the end of colonial rule in 1960, and how “big” tobacco companies united and came to control these industries. The article shows that from the 1920s, and especially from the 1940s, the prevalence of smoking in Cyprus was exceedingly high. This corresponded to the large-scale importing of foreign-made cigarettes and the manufacture of cigarettes by local companies, before the first international company began to manufacture cigarettes in the island in 1951. The article explores how the British colonial governments and civil society did little to make the Cypriot people aware of the dangers of cigarette smoking, despite medical research linking cigarette smoking to the increase in lung cancer in 1950 and the debates and warnings in the UK. Ultimately, the origins and evolution of “big tobacco” companies in Cyprus had a profound impact on the local industry and the prevalence of cigarette smoking in Cyprus.

This essay examines the Peasants Land Bank, a state-run financial institution established in 1882 to accelerate the transfer of land to peasants in the Russian Empire. Initially designed as a credit provider, the Bank gained new powers in the 1890s, when the government granted it unprecedented authority to assemble its own land fund. This shift transformed the institution into a key instrument of imperial governance. By controlling access to land and credit, it privileged the idealized “all-Russian” Orthodox peasantry and systematically excluded groups outside this category, including indigenous groups (such as the Bashkirs), non-Orthodox subjects, individuals of foreign origin as well as women and urban dwellers who technically belonged to the peasant estate. The Bank’s practices of exclusion enable us to examine how a state financial institution, rather than a neutral intermediary, can perpetuate multiple hierarchies through its routine credit decisions.

This article examines the rise of craft brewing in Canada as a window onto a broader transformation in the cultural logic of post-Fordist capitalism. It argues that craft did not reject markets but reorganized the criteria by which markets conferred worth. In an industry marked by intense postwar consolidation, sensory standardization, and national branding, value had long been anchored in scale, efficiency, and managerial coordination. Craft brewers disrupted this settlement by reattaching moral and aesthetic significance to locality, visible labor, and artisanal care, transforming authenticity into a competitive resource.

Drawing on corporate memoranda, advertising debates, liquor-board files, and acquisition records, the article treats legitimacy as a historically recoverable form of symbolic capital—produced through processes of authentication and convertible into market power. It traces a sequence of conversions: consolidation generated efficiency but justificatory fragility; craft entrepreneurs reorganized evaluation around proximity and provenance; incumbents responded through mimicry, acquisition, and portfolio governance. As authenticity became legible and economically valuable, it became portable and vulnerable to “inauthenticity discounts” when ownership disrupted recognition.

The Canadian case demonstrates how markets metabolize critique by converting dissent into governable value, and it invites business historians to treat legitimacy not as reputational residue but as infrastructure within modern enterprise strategy.

This article analyzes the evolution of banking supervision in Spain under Franco’s regime (1939–1975), highlighting how political and economic factors shaped oversight in an authoritarian setting. Two phases emerge. In the 1940s–50s, supervision—lodged in the Ministry of Finance—was weak, poorly staffed, and focused on enforcing banks’ oligopolistic interest rate agreements, reflecting regulatory capture. Following the 1959 Stabilization Plan, rising external pressure, domestic concerns about oligopolistic practices, and the 1962 Banking Law prompted reform. Supervision shifted to the Bank of Spain with the establishment of the Private Banking Inspection Service, resulting in more frequent inspections and gradual formalization of supervision. Archival records indicate that by the 1970s, inspections had become more frequent and rigorous, signaling a cautious shift toward risk-based oversight. However, the reforms remained incomplete. Persistent systemic vulnerabilities culminated in the severe banking crisis of 1977–1982, underlining the limitations of supervisory transformation under authoritarian rule.

This article examines American “capitalist feminism” as a type of “business feminism” through the lens of biography. To demonstrate crucial linkages between business culture and historical social developments, the article foregrounds an account of the first woman president of a major commercial bank, Mary G. Roebling. Roebling sought women’s collective uplift primarily through economic empowerment, forwarding her message through accommodationist tactics, such as presenting a “feminine” image, embracing capitalism, and espousing moderate politics. This essay briefly explores additional biographies to suggest that other professionally successful, elite white women held similar “capitalist feminist” views. The article also employs biographical and associational examples to illustrate how capitalist feminism is a distinct category of business feminism.

Following the recent resurgence of capitalism as a key subject in historical analysis, historians have highlighted the globally interconnected making and remaking of capitalism. Commodity-centered histories in global history have shown how to write locally grounded histories of global capitalism, emphasizing the complex and contingent relationship between the local and the global. In these accounts, however, businesses and global firms rarely appear as the analytical centerpiece. We argue that the globally active firm provides an ideal prism for writing locally grounded histories of global capitalism. Furthermore, drawing on recent usages of assemblage theory in economic history, we propose viewing “the global firm” as a “capitalist assemblage” in order to capture the spatiotemporally contingent processes through which capitalism and distinct ways of organizing business, labor, and life under capitalism emerged and evolved at specific sites and times. This approach will contribute to global studies and address limitations in business history’s treatment of the global firm.

The uncertain aspects of early modern merchants’ future business activities are often emphasized. However, historians have not yet examined how merchants themselves discursively expressed the future. This paper examines the letters of eighteenth-century French merchants active in long-distance trade to explore how they wrote about future events with their business correspondents. The systematic analysis of merchants’ expressions about the future shows that, while the business context is often described as uncertain, this uncertainty was not prominent in their own writings. The article contributes to our understanding of the early modern future and the role of business correspondence.

During World War II, condom consumption increased in both belligerent and non-belligerent countries, including Sweden. Yet the relationship between state-led initiatives and commercial marketing in driving this trend has received little scholarly attention. The main sources in this article consist of wartime public health campaigns and condom advertisements. Applying the concepts of social and consumer engineering, the article examines how government interventions, specifically through public health measures, influenced condom marketing practices. The findings show that wartime campaigns sought to engineer citizens’ sexual behavior and that businesses strategically aligned their messaging with government propaganda. This convergence was instrumental in positioning condoms as essential tools for public health and facilitated a more permissive attitude toward condoms as prophylactics, bridging state-led public health efforts with commercial objectives. By examining this dynamic, the article contributes to understanding how wartime policies shaped consumer behavior and forged enduring connections between public health and market strategies.

In the 1920s, Coca-Cola successfully registered both its English and Chinese trademarks in China. Its product strengths, experience with trademark enforcement, and the legal privileges it enjoyed under extraterritoriality all contributed to its ability to combat counterfeits and defend its brand. Yet the company failed to align its trademark protection efforts with local conditions in China. Cultural differences between China and the United States, the uncertainties brought by war, and the structural limitations of Chinese commercial law introduced new challenges. Coca-Cola lacked targeted responses to these issues and operated without reliable local partners in its enforcement efforts. Consequently, it encountered increasing difficulties in protecting its trademarks. This article demonstrates how cultural, wartime, and legal factors profoundly shaped trademark protection for multinational corporations abroad. It argues that attention to local specificities in overseas markets proved essential for effective trademark enforcement.

This paper examines peak national co-operative associations. It initially explores the business and co-operative history literature relating to these peak bodies highlighting the concept of Business Industry Associations. It then briefly explores the history of long-standing peak national co-operative associations in the US and the UK. By contrast the Australian experience has been one of limited progress until the formation of the Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals in 2013. There are a number of factors that explain the Australian experience including ideological conflicts, state-based co-operative legislation, the autonomy of state based federations, separate peak national bodies for financial co-operatives, and Neoliberalism. The Business Council of Co-operatives and Mutuals does not follow the theorized pattern of formation for Business Industry Associations and its brief history highlights the dependence of Business Industry Associations on recognition by the State for their survival.

This paper examines how automated multiphasic health testing and services (AMHTS), which were originally developed in the United States but never widely adopted there, gained traction in Japan despite being excluded from the country’s public health insurance system. Drawing on Fitzgerald et al.’s theory of interlocking interactions, we show how Japanese physicians and other stakeholders reframed AMHTS as a streamlined and affordable alternative to Ningen Dokku, Japan’s high-cost, elite medical checkup service. This creative reinterpretation helped spur efforts by actors such as the National Federation of Health Insurance Societies (Kenporen) to provide health screening subsidies outside the formal insurance framework, which supported the widespread adoption of the AMHTS by middle-class consumers. We introduce the concept of the “democratization of premium health services” to explain how care originally designed for elite users was redefined as both accessible and trustworthy. By highlighting how symbolic framing can promote innovation diffusion even beyond formal institutional boundaries, this study contributes to the business history of health care.

This paper examines the management of spiritual services in late medieval and early modern Europe through the case of the Monastery and Shrine of Guadalupe, one of the most prominent Marian pilgrimage destinations of the fifteenth century. After the Hieronymite Order assumed control in 1389, the monastery expanded into a diversified enterprise that encompassed agriculture, livestock, crafts, as well as charitable and spiritual services. We argue that this expansion resulted from three interrelated factors: the human capital accumulated within monastic management, the development of a recognizable spiritual brand centered on the icon of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and its endorsement by the Order’s founding values and by the principal legal authorities of the time—the Church and, more decisively, the Spanish Monarchy. The paper thus contributes to scholarship by identifying early forms of branding and endorsement, and highlighting the role of spiritual services in the consolidation of monastic economies.

Money and Edinburgh go back a long way. The Bank of Scotland was founded in 1695, just a year after the Bank of England. Three centuries later, the first edition of the Global Financial Centres Index (in 2007) confirmed what everyone had always assumed: second only to London in the UK, sixth in Europe. But how? This small city, its population only topping 500,000 in the twenty-first century, was far from the centers of power and finance, with only a modest trading and manufacturing base of its own. This paper marries fresh oral history from the city’s mid-twentieth century financial elite—that is, an Edinburgh before the Global Financial Crash—with Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of habitus in the relatively new paradigm of Historical Organisation Studies, treating the industry as a single unit across banking, life assurance, and investment management. This reveals their personal characteristics and demonstrates the “symbolic violence” which socialized them into absorbing and embracing both the values and practices of the organizations where they worked and the external structures, including professional bodies and, not least, the Church of Scotland, which helped maintain some of those values.

In 2023, Princeton University Press published Richard Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. It is a book of comparable mass to Alfred Chandler’s 1977 The Visible Hand and equally ambitious.1 The erudition is vast. (The bibliography alone runs 78 closely-printed pages. There are 122 pages of equally closely-printed footnotes to the 522-page main text whose own font is not large.) A production such as this seemed worth more than the usual traditional-form reviews, and in the September following its publication, the Penn Economic History Forum put on a symposium to discuss it. Interest was widespread: attendance in the room was agreeably substantial and came from far beyond the seminar’s usual catchment area, and there were requests for the Zoom link to the proceedings from around the world. (The expense was not vast and the ratio of impact to expense was almost certainly favorable relative to ordinary seminars. The economic history community might not suffer from putting on more such events when suitable occasions arise.)

The Hudson Bay Company (HBC) fundamentally changed food strategies in North America. Rather than go where food was, company servants stationed along Hudson Bay traded with Indigenous hunters for the flesh of wild animals. HBC officials expected this food to be cheap, a strategy that defines our understandings of commodity frontiers. Yet a focus on price requires greater attention to how firms account for costs. This article argues that the HBC’s post-1774 expansion inland exacerbated tensions related to control over the trade in country provisions between the company and Maškēkowak hunters. Recurrent food crises related to one animal—partridge—at the HBC’s principal post, York Fort, in the 1780s and 1790s prompted defences of what food was worth beyond its exchange value, in evaluations recorded outside the company’s ledgers. Not only did experiences hunting and eating partridges shape the HBC’s later search for other cheap foods. It also suggests ways to rethink the politics of prices within commercial enterprises.

On January 4, 1966, a major accident occurred at an oil refinery at Feyzin in South-East France. Although this event has been recognized as a watershed in the history of French industrial hazards regulation, little has been studied about the oil industry’s response. The period following the disaster saw an initiation into public relations for the leading figures of the young French oil industry, concurrent with the energy transition that was happening in Western Europe. Most of these leaders continued to hold executive roles in the same companies during the following decades and capitalized on these experiences to communicate on environmental issues. While many oil historians have focused on either a global or a national scale, this contribution proposes a multi-scalar approach to scrutinize how oil companies crafted their communications in the chosen territories for refining and petrochemical activities. Focusing on these areas enables us to emphasize that levers of consent to industrial activities are phenomena that are constructed in lived spaces where frontline communities have to cope with petroleum-based industry’s ordinary risks.