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 article offers a biographical reappraisal of Arthur H. Cole (1889–1974) as a field creator and architect of business history’s mid-century ambitions. It traces how institutional position and financial security enabled Cole to develop a research program for entrepreneurial history by redefining its evidentiary base, organizing it as a collective and interdisciplinary endeavor, and articulating an analytical framework for it. The article argues that Cole advanced two arguments that continue to provoke the field. First, he promoted the study of entrepreneurship without heroes, resisting great-firm and great-man narratives by treating entrepreneurial change primarily as a knowledge problem. Second, he sought to align levels of analysis, tracing the entrepreneurial function from micro-level decision-making through meso-level interfirm ecologies to macro-level social legitimacy. To communicate this complex agenda, Cole often theorized in metaphors, notably the “entrepreneurial stream,” that helped his ideas travel even when his synthesis proved difficult to canonize.

This article traces the intellectual lineage between the German Historical School of Political Economy—particularly the work of Gustav Schmoller—and the formation of business history at Harvard Business School. It reconstructs a connection that remains insufficiently recognized in accounts of the discipline’s origins, situating its emergence within a broader transatlantic exchange of ideas and academic practices around the turn of the twentieth century. The article shows how Schmoller’s approach to political economy informed early business education at Harvard through key intermediaries such as William J. Ashley and Edwin F. Gay, and how these influences were subsequently embraced and advanced within the Harvard milieu. Focusing on the divergent yet complementary contributions of N. S. B. Gras and Arthur H. Cole, it highlights Harvard’s role as an intellectual incubator rather than a point of origin. In doing so, the article recovers a genealogy of business history and considers its implications for the field’s self-understanding.

This article examines the career of Florence Edler de Roover, whose Glossary of Mediaeval Terms of Business, Italian Series, 1200–1600 (1934) established her as a leading business historian of medieval Italy at a time when it was widely understood as the cradle of capitalism. Drawing on extensive archival sources, it traces Edler’s extraordinary formation as a scholar, her pivotal role in N. S. B. Gras’s business history program at Harvard Business School, and the gradual eclipse of her independent career following her marriage to the Belgian accountant and historian Raymond de Roover in 1936. Edler’s trajectory illuminates the conditions under which women’s contributions could be indispensable and yet become invisible in mid-twentieth-century American academia, but the article attends equally to Edler’s temperament, choices, ambitions, and self-fashioning, arguing that her career was shaped by the interplay of institutional constraint and personal agency. Her story also sheds new light on the gendered dimensions of the founding of business history in the United States—largely submerged in the existing scholarship—and on the uneasy relationship between business and economic history during her lifetime.

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.

In Toulouse, after a destructive flood in 1641, a coordination failure made traditional capital calls ineffective, preventing the recapitalization of the Castel Mills. Drawing on agreements registered with the Parlement of Toulouse, we show how shareholders crafted a solution combining a temporary governance regime with three classes of equity claims featuring distinct risk–return profiles and intertemporal payoffs. This menu of claims accommodated heterogeneous investors with different risk tolerances, liquidity constraints, and expectations about the repairs’ success. Corporate innovation can thus arise from profit-seeking investors relying on explicit contracts, addressing agency problems through the reallocation of control rights and access to information while explicitly seeking to preserve the firm’s continuity. The case challenges teleological narratives of the joint-stock company’s origins and speaks to debates on capitalism’s development, convergent evolution in business organizations, institutions and economic growth, the flexibility of “corporations by contract” in a civil-law setting, and cooperation among individuals.

From the 1840s, Tyneside emerged as a key center for iron shipbuilding, rivaling Britain’s established hubs. This industrial shift was driven initially not by legacy firms but by migrant entrepreneurs from Aberdeen—John Coutts, Charles Mitchell, and Andrew Leslie. This article investigates the divergent trajectories of these entrepreneurs, asking why two succeeded in establishing sustainable enterprises while the other failed. Drawing on the entrepreneurship literature, it explores this divergence by focusing on the entrepreneurs’ ability to convert opportunity into commercial success in a new industrial landscape. Despite archival limitations, triangulated evidence reveals the importance of trust and personal reputation in establishing a new business, alongside the pursuit of cautious strategies that were based on meticulous cashflow management.

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.

The neo-Brandeisian anti-monopoly movement that emerged in the United States following the 2008 financial crisis provides a new perspective on anti-monopoly thought, politics, and practice in the less recent past. The “home protection” crusade led by renowned temperance activist Frances Willard is a case in point. To combat addiction, domestic violence, and child abuse, Willard joined like-minded temperance activists in the 1870s to form the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, a grassroots women-led social movement to ban the “liquor traffic.” To free the nation from its “monopoly in sin,” Willard opposed federal alcohol taxes and municipal liquor-retailing licensing fees. Inspired by the utopian journalist Edward Bellamy and the Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Willard reinvented herself in the 1890s as a Christian socialist committed to improving the living conditions of the poor—an anti-monopoly ideal more expansive than anything championed by the lawmakers who drafted the 1890 law known today as the Sherman Act.

This article draws from Martini & Rossi’s archives to trace the company’s history from its beginnings in Piedmont, Italy, in the mid-nineteenth century to its global expansion in the twentieth century. Martini & Rossi shaped cocktail culture globally, and its history sheds light on how entrepreneurs and firms prospered through cycles of globalization and deglobalization. Just as skilled management and new technologies facilitated vermouth production at home, innovations in salesmanship allowed the company to penetrate new markets abroad. The article highlights how Martini & Rossi emerged as a pioneering multinational and created one of the first global alcohol brands during the first era of global capitalism. It also examines the strategies firms could adopt amid increasing protectionism following the onset of the Great War in 1914, adding nuance to our understanding of how macroeconomic processes of globalization and deglobalization are experienced and navigated by individual companies.

The Creating Emerging Markets (CEM) project (2007–2025) produced a publicly accessible oral history archive documenting how senior business leaders in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East navigated institutional change, innovation, and social responsibility. Led by Harvard Business School professors Geoffrey Jones and Tarun Khanna, CEM recorded 196 in-depth interviews and produced hundreds of short video clips for classroom use. The project advanced research on leadership, reputation, philanthropy, and institutional voids and generated teaching cases and multi-method scholarship. The completed project was moved to Baker Library’s Special Collections and Archives in December 2025; transcripts and short clips remain open for research and teaching.