This issue of Business History Review features new research on the history of multinational firms and on the forces shaping globalization, including technological innovation, new competitive strategies, and changing national regulations. Chinmay Tumbe's article, “Transnational Indian Business in the Twentieth Century,” explores, in particular, the historical precedents to the post–1991 globalization of Indian firms. Looking at the overseas investment projects of the Aditya Birla Group, the article traces the way investment and migration in India moved in parallel with the spread of international business. Nuno Luís Madureira's “Squabbling Sisters: Multinational Companies and Middle East Oil Prices” examines the emergence of the Middle East oil fields in the 1940s and its effects on the structure of the industry, including on the “seven sisters” multinational firms, and especially on global pricing. The changing fortunes of international business are also analyzed in René Taudal Poulsen, Kristoffer Jensen, René Schrøder Christensen, and Liping Jiang's article “Corporate Strategies and Global Competition: Odense Steel Shipyard, 1918–2012.” In it the authors examine the embrace of a national responsiveness strategy by the shipyard to counteract global competition. Volodymyr Kulikov provides a valuable source for further study of international business in his article, “The Hundred Largest Employers in the Russian Empire, circa 1913.”
Also in this issue, Christina Lubinski and Dan Wadhwani propose a new conceptual approach to studying entrepreneurial history, a field that was popularized in the mid-twentieth century by Arthur Cole and other scholars at Harvard's Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and that is now receiving new attention. In their article, “Reinventing Entrepreneurial History,” the authors define the subject as the “study of the creative processes that propel economic change.”
In a timely review, Mary Yeager considers Ellen Fitzpatrick's The Highest Glass Ceiling: Women's Quest for the American Presidency.
