Using Alabama as a case study of the beauty industry, this paper will demonstrate how licensing laws and regulations affected barbers and beauticians as they struggled to gain more clientele than their competitors. In the early twentieth century, white men dominated the market for cutting hair. Though the process started mid-century, by 1980, that relationship was inverted as women found themselves far outnumbering men. This research helps explain the gendered inversion of labor market trends while providing more general insights into the role of licensing laws in labor markets. Importantly, this work explores how race shaped labor market regulations, which affected and continue to affect labor markets and individual businesses in important ways.

The goal of this paper is to explain the multivariate causes of this important labor market reversal using an analysis of race, gender, and political economy. It will argue that the advocacy for restrictive licensing laws and regulations, the failure to innovate and adapt to new styles in hair, and the racial and gendered makeup of the Barbers, Beauticians, and Allied Industries (BBAI) led to the ultimate failure of the union and the overall decrease in barbers during the latter half of the twentieth century. On the other hand, the degree to which black women were represented on licensing boards and played a role in the unique structure of cosmetology groups and unions led and contributed to the proliferation of cosmetologists during the same period.

How has caste influenced entrepreneurship in India in the past and how does it do so in the present? Using the Industrial Census of 1911, this paper provides the first detailed caste-level mapping of firms in Indian business history and links it to the present by an analysis of the Economic Census of 2013–2014. It finds that while trading castes were dominant, there were significant regional variations and nontrading castes were far more important than usually posited in the literature. Over the course of a century, the social base of entrepreneurship has widened slowly but significant barriers remain. The paper argues that “caste embeddedness” through the nature of wealth distribution, social capital, and ritual purity affects entrepreneurial choices and presents a typology of “caste,” “caste-advantage,” “caste-restricted,” and “noncaste” businesses that characterize the economic life of India.

This paper demonstrates tensions between national environmental policies and international free trade rules and traces business reactions to environmentalism through a study of the Can War, a controversy over a Danish ban on beverage cans from 1970 to 2002. At its core was a conflict between Denmark and the European Economic Community (EEC, later the European Union, EU) over free trade versus environmental objectives. This study of the Can War demonstrates how environmental concerns were entangled with national and economic interests, but also how brewers, retailers, and packaging producers used environmental and economic arguments in pragmatic ways and adapted to changing political and economic environments. Thus, the paper adds to the literature on the formative years of environmental politics, with a focus on business interests and a conflict between a nation-state and the EEC in a period when environmental concerns gained political momentum yet remained contested in a system based on free trade. This study also adds to the literature on waste-handling by demonstrating how the Danish return system changed from one based on reuse to one based on recycling; it further shows how beverage cans went from banned to uncontested, everyday objects. Through a comparison with Sweden, the case shows how national businesses influenced the design of new deposit and return systems for single-use packaging, wherein refillable glass bottles became marginalized. Overall, the study offers an understanding of the intricate relationships between environmental policies, business interests, consumer habits, and competing container materials, with aluminum as the winner.

This article analyzes the Wallenberg family’s central role within Sweden’s neutrality-industrial complex (NIC) during the Cold War, highlighting their secret collaboration with the military intelligence service. Drawing on archival evidence from the Swedish War Archives and the family bank SEB, the study shows how the family’s uniquely dominant position in industry, banking, and national defense made them a close partner to the intelligence community. By applying the Resource Mobilization Model from the literature on military-industrial complexes, the article further argues that Sweden’s NIC mainly developed as a corporatist response to perceived Soviet threats, requiring close coordination between state, military, and business elites. The Wallenbergs’ cooperation with the military and economic intelligence services—specifically through their control of SEB and large Swedish exporting firms—had both business and nonbusiness-related reasons, including nationalism and elite consensus on total defense. This study adds to the sparse literature in business history on the relationship between the business and intelligence communities and demonstrates how elite business families can use access to senior decision makers and classified information in the service of both national security and to advance their own strategic positioning.

Business history and labor history have long evolved along separate paths, largely in isolation from one another. Political turmoil in many advanced industrial nations, driven in part by working-class populism, highlights the need to reckon with the ways that the labor question, long neglected in the United States and elsewhere, deserves attention from business historians.

International payments preceded modern banking, yet historians have rarely examined how they were organized under international bimetallism. This essay reconstructs the New Orleans specie market between 1839 and 1861 to argue that merchant finance constituted the principal institutional arrangement through which cross-border payments operated before the international gold standard. Shipment-level evidence from the New Orleans Price-Current reconstructs a regional payment system linking Mexican silver, Californian gold, bills of exchange on London, and merchant-financial firms in New Orleans. Rather than treating specie movements as isolated monetary flows, the essay interprets them as the observable traces of an institutional order connecting mining districts, payment centers, commodity markets, and long-distance trade. By placing merchant finance at the center of the analysis, it brings business, banking, and monetary history together with the history of U.S. capitalism within a common explanatory framework, while offering a new perspective on the historical foundations of international financial integration.

This paper examines Britain’s process of electrification following a disruptive stock market boom and bust in 1882. This is done by noting the companies that raise finance on British stock exchanges, the amounts raised, and the returns earned on that money. It also examines the impact of the Lighting Act of 1882, finding that the Act inhibited investment, but with important exceptions. We find the Act was not a barrier to entrepreneurs alert to the possibilities of electrification. However, the limited British electrical investment after the 1882 crash was more heavily and successfully concentrated on supplying electricity to end users than on developing electrical equipment. When electrification began in earnest after 1888, upon the amendment of the 1882 Lighting Act, there existed only a very weak engineering base to support it, leading to slow, expensive, and unimaginative electrification.

This article examines the postwar Franco-Italian struggle over Sudameris (Banque Française et Italienne pour l’Amérique du Sud), a multinational bank operating across South America. After 1945, Paribas sought to transform Sudameris into a French institution, backed by government pressure and asset sequestration. Italy’s Banca Commerciale Italiana (BCI) resisted, regaining majority control in 1948 through strategic share acquisitions. The ensuing conflict (1948–1955) centered on executive power. Paribas relied on French corporate law to maintain managerial dominance, while the BCI finally succeeded in appointing an Italian managing director in 1955. Under Italian leadership, Sudameris shifted from transactional to relationship banking in South America, reversing stagnation and achieving renewed growth by 1960. Sudameris’s early postwar history reveals how postwar European economic rivalries extended into South America and how multinational banks adapted to nationalist environments amid the contradictory forces of regional integration and global competition.

Until recently, much work on the process and impact of compensated emancipation in the British Empire tended to exclude the Cape Colony, instead focusing on Britain and the Caribbean. This analysis of the Cape Town agents who acted as intermediaries in the business of compensation reintegrates the Cape Colony into these discussions. Using Thomson, Watson & Co.’s account book, this article details how the Cape Town firm used its networks within the colony and in London to profit from the business of compensation. The firm handled over 800 claims from Cape Colony principals, purchased them on its own and others’ accounts, and remitted them to several associates in London for collection. This article contributes a new perspective to the growing literature on the process and impact of compensated emancipation and raises questions about the role of slavery and emancipation in the development of commercial and financial capitalism in South Africa.

During the 1920s, the newly formed American Legion used its unique placement as a nonprofit lobbying for veterans’ causes in a novel way—to enter movie distribution with the creation of its Film Service. The era was famously marked by the consolidation of Hollywood studios into conglomerates and the establishment of their powerful trade association, which moguls used to exert significant control over the emerging medium. Yet while big business was important in structuring the rise of motion pictures, small enterprises—including nonprofits like the Legion Film Service—still found ways to contribute to the sector’s growth by innovating and adapting complex operational strategies, becoming a surprising resource to their well-financed peers in the process. By taking these steps, Legionnaires’ civically minded playbills shaped the development of an industry that projected American cultural and economic influence for the rest of the century.

The setting up of “second registries” by European governments in the 1980s was a formative moment in contemporary maritime history. Developed in an effort to counteract the growing use of offshore flags of convenience, these registries provided European shipping companies with spaces of exception from normal regulation, lifting national manning requirements and allowing for foreign labor to be hired on local wages. This article investigates the emergence of the Nordic variants, called “international ship registries” (ISRs). Employing a global perspective which focuses on the interplay between business actors, narratives, and national politics, it argues that the influence of offshore actors in shaping the Nordic developments was more pronounced than previous research suggests. The ISR policy was originally proposed to Norwegian policymakers by an offshore shipowner living in Bermuda. From there, it transferred to Denmark and Sweden, shaping their policy debates in the 1980s and 1990s.

It is widely recognized that the hostile takeover is a key element of the UK’s shareholder value system of corporate governance. This article draws on archival evidence to offer a detailed account of the emergence of the hostile takeover and its acceptance within the media and government between 1952 and 1954. The existing literature claims that the takeover was not normalized until 1959, and that finance was restricted until then. This article shows that takeovers were accepted within government five years earlier, and that the Bank of England and Treasury knew that insurance companies were financing them, but did nothing about it.

The article begins with the legal and accounting changes introduced in Companies Act 1948, as well as the precarious financial position of shareholders. Together, they created an opening for hostile takeovers to emerge, which were driven by the desire of bidders to gain control of, and sell off, real property that was undervalued on corporate balance sheets. First emerging in 1952, the hostile takeover took the corporate and financial community, as well as the Government (the Bank of England, Board of Trade and Treasury) by surprise. The media led the way in cheerleading for the hostile takeover, while companies such as the Savoy Hotel Group and the Daily Mirror sought to defend themselves against unwelcome approaches. The Government ultimately settled for condemning “speculative” bids in public, but behind the scenes accepted the hostile takeover as legitimate. By 1954, it was recognized that: companies were under pressure to raise dividends and sell off assets in order to deter takeover bidders; that they only had limited options to defend themselves; and that there was little that could be done by Government. Managerialism had begun to give way to shareholder value.

This article investigates how British textile traders navigated Cuban markets when Spain, Britain, and the United States competed to maintain or gain access to Cuba’s commercial activity. Cuba was one of the largest textile consumers in the Americas and a loyal market for British textiles, a significance hitherto overlooked by existing scholarship on Anglo-Hispanic trading relations. The article fills this gap by examining the interplay between local dynamics and imperial rivalry through the case of the Manchester-based textile commission merchant, Stavert, Zigomala, & Co. Through the cross-examination of the company’s business records, visual, material, and other archival and primary printed sources this article contends that a successful engagement with the Cuban market required a nuanced approach transcending formal trading structures, challenging traditional assumptions about commercial predominance based on forms of imperialism. The article’s argument is divided into three parts: 1) it locates Stavert, Zigomala within Cuban consumer culture; 2) it examines how traders responded to Cuban demand; and 3) it situates the role of British textile merchants in the context of Cuba’s international relations between approximately 1860 until1914.

This paper explores the historical development of management thought around the cost of public infrastructure. We argue that swings between ex post pricing and ex ante discounting as temporal frameworks within which the public, managers, politicians, and the media appraised major transport infrastructure projects constitute a dominant but unrecognized narrative. We use London in the twentieth century as a case study, identifying major changes in the 1920s and again in the 1960s which decisively rebalanced how projects were evaluated. We conclude that the current cost-benefit and ex ante discounting framework arose out of the adoption of American concepts and processes from the early 1960s onward. We think that this approach fostered rent-seeking activity and principal-agent problems, but that the empirical costs and timeframes for completing transport infrastructure have changed much less than is commonly believed in over a century.

In March 1933, the United States Congress declared beer up to 3.2 percent alcohol by weight to be “non-intoxicating,” thus allowing it to be produced and sold while the nation was still under the 18th Amendment’s ban of intoxicating liquors. Brewers had long argued that beer was a temperance beverage that should be regulated with a lighter touch than harder liquor. In fact, the declaration that 3.2 beer was non-intoxicating opened several markets that would otherwise have been closed to brewers. In the decades that followed Repeal, 3.2 beer continued to be treated differently than stronger alcohol with respect to who, when, where, and how it was legally available. This paper explores the important—and continuing—role that 3.2 beer has played in the post-Prohibition United States.

Since the 1990s, growing interest in the relationship between clusters and economic growth has highlighted the importance of understanding their internal structures and life cycles. Still, the mechanisms underlying cluster emergence remain largely unknown, especially regarding the influence of public policies in this initial stage. This paper examines the emergence of a metalworking cluster in the Spanish steelmaking pole of Asturias, focusing on Francoist industrial policy and the regime’s relationship with regional firms.

Findings indicate that Asturias presented favorable conditions for cluster formation since the late eighteenth century. However, only the establishment of the national steelmaking champion Ensidesa in 1950 triggered the appearance of self-reinforcing dynamics, finally boosting the cluster’s emergence. This process resulted from the indirect externalities generated by the steel industry and was never part of the Francoist industrial agenda. Despite the recognized sector’s potential, the regime prioritized strategic base industries and systematically ignored calls for direct support for metalworking firms.

After World War II, Japan was severely degraded, and its people were generally devastated. For the country’s very survival, the beleaguered Japanese people sought to rebuild economically and reputationally. During this postwar period, Japanese business, union, and government leaders grappled with lagging progress and the necessary abandonment of prior transwar social and business arrangements. They sought new strategies to stimulate advancement in the wake of a governmental vacuum, labor unrest, and the threat of communism. In this context, Moral Re-Armament (MRA) took root in some areas of Japan during the period when Japan’s gross domestic product (GDP) grew from $102 billion in 1945 to $420 billion by 1961. MRA introduced Western-oriented societal values, intended to help nurture individual and societal change, including collaborative relations between unions and management. Of the first eight Japanese prime ministers after World War II, six either worked openly with or endorsed the MRA movement.

In the early twentieth century, the Malayan pineapple was the cheapest but most consumed canned fruit in Britain, most of which was produced by local Chinese enterprises in British Malaya. Current historiography of the Malayan pineapple industry has highlighted its lack of automation and branding that made the canned pineapples low quality and therefore cheap; a consequence of colonial commodity production framework that prioritized rubber exports. A key assumption is that Britain’s high demand for Malayan pineapples was mainly driven by the harsh economic conditions during the Depression years. However, using previously unexamined colonial newspaper reports and archival sources on the Empire Marketing Board, this study sheds light on how two representatives of the pineapple industry—Tan Kah Kee and Lee Kong Chian—actively leveraged colonial ties and production cheapness to corner imperial markets. This study’s contribution is two-fold. First, it expands the Malayan pineapple industry’s current historiography by situating it within the broader debates on imperial marketing, commodity chains, and local entrepreneurship. By focusing on the marketing strategies which Chinese entrepreneurs devised within a colonial framework, it adds nuance to the literature on local entrepreneurship and the trajectories of a secondary commodity sector in British colonies. Second, it challenges the predominantly ethnically essentialist readings of Chinese business strategies under colonialism of Southeast Asia, by demonstrating how intra-ethnic cooperation was not always effective in business modernization. In this case, leveraging colonial and imperial ties to navigate colonial logic in commodity trade and production was more useful, even though its success was transient.