Cooperatives are member-owned institutions, no more, no less. According to the International Cooperative Alliance they should also be self-managed by an open and voluntary membership and committed to coordination with other cooperatives. In recent popular imagination, the raison d’être of cooperatives is to mitigate the structural inequalities of investor-owned capitalism and to make the economy more democratic. In practice, however, the range of cooperative institutions has been wide and varied, as Greg Patmore and Nikola Balnave show in their recent comprehensive study, A Global History of Co-operative Business.
This book is an important contribution to a small but growing literature studying cooperatives as part of, rather than alternative to, the history of modern capitalism. Patmore and Balnave offer the book as a response to recent neoliberal trends suppressing “recognition of cooperatives as a legitimate form of economic participation” (p. 1). This agenda places their study in conversation with other scholars who see such silencing as harming both the study of capitalism and those interested in reforming it. As Patmore and Balnave illustrate repeatedly throughout the book, cooperatives have been an instrumental part of the evolution of industrial economies, consumer culture, international supply chains, colonial governance, and the global financial system. To miss the role of cooperatives, their work shows, is thus to miss an important chapter in the history of economic globalization. Conversely, as others have noted, cooperatives have often been rediscovered without context as a political intervention during economic downturns, and practicing cooperative businesses are not helped by excited outsiders “overstat[ing] their successes or their potential” at times of crisis (James DeFilippis, Unmaking Goliath [2004], 141; John Curl, For All the People [2009]). Between the invisible and the utopian, then, a gap remains for careful historical treatment of cooperatives as a widely practiced, often flawed, ideologically influential, and variably “successful” form of economic institution that has long operated within and contributed to the evolution of the industrial global economy—like any other form of business.
Addressing this gap, Patmore and Balnave have contributed a deep and comprehensive synthetic history that pulls together a vast literature on cooperatives around the world since the early nineteenth century. This is a real service for scholars of cooperatives. As Patmore and Balnave write, there is bias in scholarship toward the European experience over other regions, and consumer co-ops over other types of cooperative business. While being attentive to how this limits their own research, the authors also do an admirable job of trying to privilege these less-studied areas. The global and cross-sector scope of their study helps situate cooperatives as an evolving business model that has been selectively applied to a wide variety of institutions navigating different and changing economic, legal, and cultural contexts across time and space. They complement their predominantly synthetic study with selected archival and interview data, particularly in the later chapters.
The book is organized chronologically, with regional subsections in each chapter. Chapter 1 provides a helpful overview of cooperative business practices, the different kinds of cooperatives (consumer, worker, agricultural, and financial), and a discussion of factors behind cooperative growth and decline. The next two chapters focus on early cooperative experiments leading to the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers and its influence on cooperative ventures around the world in the nineteenth century. Then, the book turns to the expansion of cooperative practices in international networks, exploring the development of cooperative wholesaling and industrial pursuits as well as coordination between cooperatives in national politics and in new international organizations, such as the still-operating International Cooperative Alliance. Subsequent chapters follow cooperatives at the local, national, and international scales through the tumultuous decades of the world wars and the postwar period. The final chapter explores the influence of neoliberalism and “other aspects of ‘Americanization’” on cooperatives and their networks (p. 188). The book ends with the United Nations declaration of 2012 as the International Year of Cooperatives.
This chronological but global structure allows the authors to explore how cooperatives both influenced and were affected by changing political economies. Particularly illuminating is their attention to divergent responses of European states to cooperative ventures in metropoles and colonies. Even as the French government failed to pass legislation specific to cooperatives, for example, the colonial government in French West Africa created and administered compulsory agricultural cooperatives and credit unions. In other words, they show how cooperatives were harnessed as tools of empire.
In their attention to the relationship between cooperatives and the state, Patmore and Balnave also make clear how the cooperative model differs significantly from public ownership. Despite cooperatives having often been attacked as socialist, Patmore and Balnave show that cooperatives’ “democratic nature [and] control of significant economic assets” made fascist and communist governments perceive them as threatening (p. 115). As such, authoritarian regimes frequently destroyed or nationalized domestic cooperative associations upon taking power. Likewise, more recent global trends of liberalization, privatization, and financialization have created myriad challenges for cooperatives; many have merged, sold, or gone out of business, but others have found ways to survive and grow during these periods of state retreat.
The authors’ comprehensive approach is both a strength and a weakness of the book. In their sweeping history of the variations of cooperative experience around the world, the authors offer more observation than analysis. They provide little conceptual framing for the study beyond the first and last paragraph, in which they simply argue that cooperatives deserve recognition as part of a complex economic ecosystem (pp. 1, 226–27). In one of the few places where they cite themselves, it is on the absence of cooperatives in the business school curriculum (p. 216). Shedding light on an understudied topic is itself a significant contribution to business history. Nonetheless, I would have appreciated the authors’ perspective on the broader significance of this history, as well as how they see it in conversation with other studies of cooperatives. For this kind of broader analysis, readers might pair this book with James DeFilippis's study of American urban cooperatives, Unmaking Goliath: Community Control in the Face of Global Capital, which directly discusses collective ownership as a response to neoliberalism; Alex Gourevitch's labor history, From Slavery to the Cooperative Commonwealth: Labor and Republican Liberty in the Nineteenth Century (2015); and Ellen Furlough and Carl Strikwerda's edited volume, Consumers against Capitalism: Consumer Cooperation in Europe, North America, and Japan, 1840–1990 (1999). More direct engagement by Patmore and Balnave with these or similar works would have helped the reader to understand the broader importance of this study.
As is, I expect this book will serve primarily as a valuable reference for scholars and practitioners directly engaged with cooperatives. Nonetheless, the authors do a powerful job in their aim of making cooperatives visible vis-à-vis more neoliberal conceptions of economic history. The comprehensive scope of the book makes clear that cooperatives do not respond in the same ways as private companies to market volatility and have in fact been more robust to external shocks in certain conditions. In other words, the authors show that many different kinds of economic institutions beyond investor-owned firms have contributed to building the global economy over time, and that includes cooperatives.
