This article explores the development of the Safari Rally in the context of intertwined trends in mobility, sports, and consumerism at local, global and intermediate levels. The first section briefly presents the Safari Rally. The second section discusses the significance and development of the sport of rallying in the context of global automobility and changes in the motor industry, highlighting in particular the professionalisation of sport and the forces driving it. The third section analyses why the Safari became relevant to so many stakeholders in Africa and across the globe, and how these shaped its development from its colonial origins through decolonisation and beyond. Highlighting the factors accounting for the rise, and decline, of the Safari as a sporting event of global significance contributes to understanding how mobility, sports, and consumerism were interlinked across continents in the second half of the 20th century.

The American craft beer industry’s creation narrative is rooted in countercultural food politics. Popular stories describe how plucky brewers pioneered complex and hoppy beers that revolutionized a bland American beer industry dominated by industrial lagers. Hops are now the most celebrated ingredient in the craft beer industry and serve as visual representations of the artisanal and revolutionary values of small brewers that contrasts with the industrial and bland products of the nation’s massive lager brewers. The history of hops and brewing presented here, however, demonstrates the connections between big and small brewers and the environmental impacts of craft brewers’ hoppy beers otherwise obscured by their preferred dichotomous narrative. Craft beer grew in tandem with the modern hop industry and became enmeshed with big business and industrial agricultural practices to access their signature commodity, hops. By integrating environmental and business history, this article explores how brewers, scientists, farmers, and nonhumans influenced each other to create the modern craft brewing industry. This approach demonstrates the often-obscured connections between big and small firms by examining the environments, organisms, and supply chains they depend upon.

In 1989, British Petroleum (BP) made the largest onshore investment in the company’s 72-year history in Scotland by expanding its Grangemouth petrochemical complex. Construction and operation were promised to generate between 1,200 and 1,500 jobs, but upon the project’s completion, over 1,000 industrial jobs were lost in the town, and employment never increased. This research explains this outcome by embedding it within a history of post-World War II deindustrialization and engaging with E.P. Thompson’s moral economy and the concept of “noxious deindustrialization”: expanding environmentally destructive capacity and shrinking industrial employment. It illuminates what the buildup and later transgression of moral economy promises looked like for a town experiencing rapid but fragile expansion on the back of petrochemicals, a modern, highly toxic, and land-intensive industry. Using oral history and archive study, the research establishes the presence of noxiousness in Grangemouth from the mid-twentieth century onward. Between 1951 and 1970, industrialization, urban expansion, and paternalistic corporate practices shaped customary notions that embedded the petrochemical sector into the community, justifying concerns about pollution, smells, and the industry’s intensive requirements on land. Between 1970 and 1989, the moral economy was transgressed as the planning system was dismantled and BP’s welfarist responsibility to Grangemouth lessened under economic liberalization. Amid growing environmental concerns globally, noxiousness became intolerable. Noxious deindustrialization accelerated with changes in energy prices, consolidation of private power, and discovery of North Sea oil, leading to company restructuring and job cuts in BP Chemicals. Consequently, the link between employment, population growth, and economic security broke down.

Trust is often the premier concern highlighted in relation to the formation of mercantile business partnerships, the role of culture, family, and religion at the forefront. This is especially the case for expatriate communities. However, the Danish merchants of nineteenth century Newcastle-upon-Tyne, as especially demonstrated in the diaries of one of their number, Richard Steenberg, did not conform to this trend. This article investigates Steenberg and two other leading merchants, the Borries cousins, as well as some of their former employees, who typify trends within a wider body of 126 businessmen. It will show that they strategically chose partners who had complimentary supplies of financial, human, and social capital to improve the position of a shared firm, and these supplies formed the key criteria in forming or entering these businesses. The role of trust is not denied. Rather, this article seeks to direct debate toward the importance of financial, human, and social capital in commercial partnership formation in relation to trust.

The sources formally documenting how tax policy evolves fail to capture many of the complexities inherent in such processes. Insights into such approaches would guide other tax administrations in navigating tax policy change in an international domain. This paper examines the historical background to the introduction of the Irish 12.5 percent corporate tax rate in 2003 in the face of the European Union’s (EU) dissatisfaction with the existing regime. A low corporate tax rate has long been seen as a critical element of the country’s industrial development strategy. Employing an oral history method to identify the perspectives and objectives of those involved in the policymaking process, we provide a case study of how one tax administration resolved what was seen as a particularly significant public policy dilemma.

This article presents a business history of the Barranquilla Railway and Pier Company (BRPC) and its impact on Colombia’s Caribbean region. It explores the company’s operations, profitability, shareholders, infrastructure development, and competition with other coastal railways for insights into the role of foreign capital in regional growth. The BRPC’s railway and port infrastructure connected the coastal city of Barranquilla with the Colombian interior, allowing the city to supplant Cartagena as the country’s principal international port. Statistical analysis reveals the railway’s remarkable profitability, which attracted transnational investors, who consolidated majority control. The company’s ability to leverage engineering expertise and capital underscored its strategic significance, yet its interests centered on protecting its transport monopoly. The railway’s lack of visibility in London and information asymmetries shaped investor perceptions. Extending the pier demonstrated BRPC’s role in accommodating rising export volumes during Colombia’s “despegue cafetero.” However, the railway faced obsolescence, as the government opened the obstructing Bocas de Ceniza sandbank and pursued railway nationalization. The railway’s redundancy, demographic shifts, and rise of Buenaventura underscore its eventual decline. This paper reveals the complex dynamics between foreign capital, infrastructure, and trade monopolies in shaping uneven development. It highlights the BRPC’s overlooked yet fundamental role in Colombia’s export economy and Barranquilla’s ascendancy.

This article studies the rise and fall of commercial aviation in Iran, then known as Persia, between 1923 and 1932. Two airlines, the German Junkers Luftverkehr AG and Britain’s Imperial Airways, invested significant time and effort in developing air routes but eventually failed due to financial hardship and political intransigence. Exploring this erratic development, the article has two aims: first, to investigate the entangled history of two of the world’s oldest airlines and the challenges they navigated; and second, to assess the fraught relationship between state and business interests. The German and British airlines were rivals in Iran, but they became partly dependent on each other. Both airlines suffered from the global political dynamics of the interwar period while Junkers, in particular, also struggled financially. Meanwhile, the Iranian state had yet to decide whether to view the new technology with enthusiasm or concern. Its ambivalent and reluctant reaction had profound effects on the trajectories of Junkers and Imperial Airways. Assessing the capability of a nascent airline industry to develop viable business models outside of Europe, the article also serves as a case study revealing the headwinds airlines encountered in the earliest phase of commercial aviation.

Like other creative industries emerging in mid-1945 from 12 years of Nazi rule, including six years of war, German publishing was ideologically suspect, internationally isolated, and insular. By the 1950s, however, the book trade in the two German successor states was once again varied and vibrant. And it was also tightly integrated into the international publishing business, within which it had become an increasingly active and important presence. This article analyzes the development of the German book publishing industry during the Allied occupation, 1945-1949, through the lens of knowledge transfer. It was a time during which capital-starved German publishers harnessed the political and ideological objectives of the occupiers and their prewar contacts to achieve their own commercial and cultural ambitions, including taking initial steps toward internationalization. The focus is on literary fiction, a genre that constituted a minority of all published output in the postwar period, but which also included all top bestsellers. Literature in translation, moreover, accounted for a substantial proportion of those bestselling books, and at the same time represented a key vehicle for internationalization. Two case studies, one drawn from the Soviet zone of occupation, the later East Germany, and one from the western zones that came to be dominated by the Americans, the later West Germany, illustrate two different, yet remarkably similar paths through which this interplay of ideological alignment and commerce played out among a range of actors and laid the basis for the subsequent development of the industry.

Industrial policy is back on the agenda of policymakers at a global level. In the EU, industrial policy has a very controversial history: it has been not only conditioned by the multilevel competencies shared between the EU and the Member States, by the different national priorities and the varieties of economic cultures, but also by the crucial problem of resources. Based on archival sources and relevant multidisciplinary literature, the paper traces the emergence of European initiatives in industrial policy from the 1960s until the launch of the Europe 2020 strategy (2010). Following this, the role of the Juncker Plan (2014) in promoting EU industrial policy is examined, highlighting the potential contradiction between ambitious goals and limited resources. Subsequently, an analysis is conducted to determine whether the launch of the new EU industrial strategy in 2020, coupled with the adoption of the Next Generation EU, could offer a blueprint for establishing an ambitious EU industrial policy and represent a potential Hamiltonian moment for the Union.

This article explores the dynamics of court practice with regard to mercantile preinsolvency in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Belgium. In 1883, the Belgian legislature introduced the proceeding of concordat préventif, making it possible for insolvent entrepreneurs to remain outside the liquidation-oriented procedure of faillite. Instead, they could declare their financial problems and propose a scheme of payment to their creditors. Despite this goal, however, the 1883 law, along with subsequent laws of 1885 and 1887, imposed high majority voting requirements. Accordingly, in the Antwerp commercial court, the shortcomings of the legislation were amended to ameliorate its procedural and judicial practice. The new practices of the court resulted in higher rates of acceptance of applications. However, these success ratios were not evenly distributed among the groups of debtors who applied. Perceptions shared by both creditors and judges may have advantaged merchants, brokers, and entrepreneurs who belonged to the higher strata of the city’s business world.

This study provides a business history of the construction project to build a large Anglican church in colonial Shanghai in the 1860s. Employing three theoretical lenses, it focusses on the project’s management, setting it in its social, political, economic and architectural contexts. As well as analysing the project’s progress in detail, the paper discloses circumstances that were being faced more generally by resident British and international traders in Shanghai at this unsettled time. It also identifies forces which would in due course influence the long process of change leading to the eventual transformation both of Shanghai and of China itself, enhancing our understanding of the region’s economic history.

This article examines the development of offshore commercial and financial services in tax havens between 1955-1979. The geographic locus of this paper is the Caribbean region, mainly focusing on the island tax havens that had been part of the British empire prior to decolonization. The article examines the relationship between the development of tax havens and decolonisation, and explores questions of international capital movement, the institutional structure of tax havens, the development of banking and commercial services in tax havens, and other offshore business activities. The article presents new data on international capital investment and capital movement, and provides empirical evidence in relation to the structure and function of businesses located in tax havens. This evidence is used to engage with emerging debates with reference to the history of tax havens: specifically, the nature of capital movement and the importance of beneficial ownership rights, and the relationship between the (re)location of business to tax havens and the mitigation of political risk and instability. We demonstrate that the development of tax havens in this period was a consequence of substantial innovation by business and finance to create advantageous environmental conditions in relation to taxation and governance. This was supported by an isomorphic process that spread similarly favourable regimes of law and regulation between different tax havens, as well as the development of a range of supportive commercial and financial services. We conclude by discussing the implications for future research on this topic.

This article examines the role of state-owned firms in economic growth. While some scholars denigrate state firms, most analysts of East Asian development have noted their importance. To date, however, little work has been done on how state firms operate and how they have actually contributed to industrial development and economic growth. Looking closely at postwar Taiwan as a newly industrializing country and the case of Taiwan Machinery Manufacturing Corporation (TMMC), this article argues that state enterprises resolved coordination failures and provided manufacturing capacity to infant industries. Drawing on company archives and state records, I argue that TMMC helped drive growth through the provision of manufacturing machinery, equipment, parts, repairs, and upgrading. By supplying firms with the necessary technology and materials to modernize production and be competitive on the global market, I show how TMMC helped facilitate Taiwan’s economic miracle.

This paper assesses a major transition in energy usage and distribution in the United Kingdom (UK) between 1953–73 as domestic coal gave way to electricity, and a centralized electricity generation and distribution system reached every home in the country. Our analysis significantly extends and reinterprets the business history of the National Grid by exploring the consequences of its completion. We argue that the National Grid facilitated the removal of the railways as an energy distribution network and enabled prototype “Net Zero” policies in the context of atmospheric pollution. We tie these themes together to conclude that the construction of the national grid was a major environmental success but removed an essential rationale for much of the rail network.