This issue of Business History Review, the second in our 100th anniversary volume, continues our exploration of business history’s roots. The last issue featured articles on two leading figures: the medieval scholar Florence Edler and the German-American scholar Fritz Redlich, a principal architect of entrepreneurial history. This issue turns to one of Redlich’s close colleagues, Arthur Cole, head of Baker Library, and to the earlier influence of Gustav Schmoller and the German Historical School.
In “Arthur H. Cole: Rethinking Entrepreneurship in Society,” Christina Lubinski argues that financial security enabled Cole to build a research program for entrepreneurial history, which he did by redefining its evidentiary base, organizing it as a collective and interdisciplinary endeavor, and articulating a unifying analytical framework. As Lubinski shows, Cole promoted a study of entrepreneurship without heroes, resisting great-firm and great-man narratives by treating entrepreneurial change as an emergent effect of dispersed knowledge.
In “Gustav Schmoller and the German Historical School: Revisiting the Intellectual Roots of Business History at Harvard,” Matthias Störring follows the intellectual line connecting the German Historical School of Political Economy, especially the work of its leading representative, Gustav Schmoller, to the early formation of business history at Harvard Business School. The article shows how Schmoller’s approach to political economy shaped early business education at Harvard through key intermediaries such as William J. Ashley and Edwin F. Gay, and how their ideas were subsequently embraced and advanced at Harvard.
Alongside these two articles, the issue includes one that Redlich and Cole would have welcomed: John Wilson’s “The Emergence of Iron Shipbuilding on the River Tyne: A Study of Entrepreneurial Agency.” Wilson analyzes how, from the 1840s, Tyneside emerged as a major center of iron shipbuilding, rivaling Britain’s established hubs. He sees this industrial shift as driven initially not by legacy firms but by the divergent paths of migrant entrepreneurs from Aberdeen: John Coutts, Charles Mitchell, and Andrew Leslie.
Richard R. John’s “Home Protection: Frances Willard’s Anti-Monopoly Crusade” examines the history of anti-monopoly thought, politics, and practice, a current topic in the news, in a more distant past. His article explores the “home protection” campaign led by the temperance activist Frances Willard. To combat addiction, domestic violence, and child abuse, Willard joined like-minded activists in the 1870s to form the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), a grassroots, women-led movement to ban the “liquor traffic,” a catchphrase for the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages.
In addition, as part of our continuing Forms of Capitalism project, Sophus Reinert and Lorena Barale’s “Shaken and Stirred: Martini & Rossi and the Cycles of Globalization” draws on the company’s archives to trace its history from its origins in Piedmont, Italy, in the mid-nineteenth century to its global expansion in the twentieth. Martini & Rossi helped shape cocktail culture worldwide, and the article analyzes how individual entrepreneurs and firms prospered through cycles of globalization and deglobalization. Just as skilled management and new technologies enabled the production of vermouth at home, innovations in salesmanship allowed the company to break into markets abroad. Martini & Rossi offers a case of business expansion during the first era of global capitalism, and the article shows how it built one of the first global alcohol brands.
Finally, David Le Bris, William Goetzmann, and Sébastien Pouget’s “Contractual Innovation and Corporate Finance in Seventeenth-Century Toulouse” examines whether seventeenth century French mills operated in ways similar to joint stock companies and, moreover, how shareholders in these mills developed innovative shareholding claims to accommodate diverse investors and preserve the firm’s continuity.
The issue also includes several review essays: Jennifer Black on Pamela Walker Laird, Self-Made: The Stories That Forged an American Myth; Madeline Woker on Marc-William Palen, Pax Economica: Left-Wing Visions of a Free Trade World; and, finally, Laura Phillips-Sawyer on Jonathan Levy, The Real Economy: History and Theory.
