Offshore development is one of the most important but least analyzed chapters in the history of the petroleum industry, and the Gulf of Mexico is the most explored, drilled, and developed offshore petroleum province in the world. This essay examines offshore oil and gas development in the Gulf of Mexico, highlighting the importance of access and how the unique geology and geography of the Gulf shaped both access and technology. Interactions between technology, capital, geology, and the political structure of access in the Gulf of Mexico generated a functionally and regionally complex extractive industry that repeatedly resolved the material and economic contradictions of expanding into deeper water. This was not achieved, however, simply through technological miracles or increased mastery over the environment, as industry experts and popular accounts often imply. The industry moved deeper only by more profoundly adapting to the environment, not by transcending its limits. This essay diverges from celebratory narratives about offshore development and from interpretations that emphasize the social construction of the environment. It challenges the storyline of market-driven technology and its miraculous ability to expand and create petroleum abundance in the Gulf.

The ‘corporate veil’ refers to the separation of legal identity between parent firms and their subsidiaries, which gives the parent protection against the liabilities of its subsidiaries. Fearing that such liability protection would facilitate illicit activity, early twentieth century courts, especially in America, would sometimes ‘pierce’ the corporate veil. This article explores Adams v. Cape (1990), in which American plaintiffs attempted to persuade the English courts to lift the corporate veil and impose liability for industrial disease on Cape Industries, a leading U.K. asbestos manufacturer. This landmark case shows how corporate strategy can be closely intertwined with international corporate law and occupational health and safety issues. It also highlights how limited liability law and separate legal personality can result in significant injustice to claimants against multinational enterprises.

Business historians have treated the emergence of large, modern, vertically integrated meatpacking firms in the second half of the nineteenth century as the economically rational and inevitable product of the industry's search for ways to maximize profits through technological innovation, vertical integration, and the achievement of economies of scale and scope. This is only part of the story, however. Society's efforts to force the industry to abate its environmental pollution through government regulation and private lawsuits also stimulated and shaped these processes of modernization.

A growing number of historians have turned their attention to the past behavior of industrialists toward their waste. Many have argued that the price system and competition typically fostered a short-term outlook that rewarded pollution rather than encouraging “loop-closing,” a modern term that refers to the linkages between different industries in which the residual of one becomes the input of another. Others have identified precedents in this respect that are credited to Progressive Era reformers. Building on evidence that has, by and large, escaped the attention of the present generation of historical writers, this essay challenges both views by arguing that market institutions, which included both profit motive and property rights, actually resulted in the usage of industrial by-products. Although past industrial activities did create significant pollution problems, perhaps our ancestors should be given more credit than they generally are for the creativity and resourcefulness they displayed in profitably solving numerous environmental problems.

In France, between 1870 and 1914, the business world was very concerned with the increase in “fraud” and “counterfeiting” in beverages and foodstuffs. This paper explores the origin and significance of this phenomenon. Three main products and markets are analyzed: wine, butter, and milk. On the basis of primary research, the paper contests the traditional interpretation according to which adulteration was linked to an increasing demand for food by low-income classes in highly imperfect markets. The paper adopts a radically different approach by questioning the way innovation is defined and perceived in a market economy: why is it common to speak of “innovation” for manufactures while evoking the term “adulteration” when food and drinks are concerned? The argument is that food and drink adulteration had its origins in technical progress (the introduction of chemistry into the food industry), urbanization, and the internationalization of the economy. As such, adulteration was a juridical category that was mobilized on occasions by economic lobbies in order to benefit from rents in the market, while continuously regulating innovation by agreement and compromise.One clear implication is that quality is not an objective, ahistorical category but that at different times different definitions of an item's quality compete with one another. It was only after the institutional and legal framework had been defined that social conventions and consumers' choices could take effect.