A substantial literature documents the importance of trademarks and brands to business success. How does this relationship change when we enlarge our focus from individual firms to industries and nations? This articles examines the dominance of Danish bacon in Britain between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We argue that this supremacy required state intervention and cooperation between government and producers to underpin high and consistent levels of quality throughout the supply chain, both of which were necessary to ensure the successful marketing of “Danish” bacon. In Britain, by contrast, state intervention to increase bacon production was only partially successful because it was undermined by a nineteenth-century legacy of uncoordination and deregulation. Such weaknesses affected the supply of appropriate pigs and the production of bacon that was uniform in quality, and ultimately negated the efforts of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to promote a “British” bacon brand.

Why is there no SEAT Barcelona? Barcelona is a well-named place brand, but SEAT consciously has disassociated itself from its geographic origins. This seems rather strange decision if one takes into account the increasing importance of the place-of-origin effect in automotive industry. This article describes how SEAT has constructed its Spanish identity and hidden its Catalan-Barcelona origins, and discusses SEAT’s own growing “denationalization” because of the acquisition by Volkswagen Group by using banal nationalism to gain the loyalty of the country’s nationalist consumers and to fashion a corporate image in line with Spain’s Marca España, or national brand. Through this decision, SEAT has lost the opportunity to associate itself with Marca Barcelona, a successful urban brand.

In this article, the authors interrogate legal and economic history to analyze the process by which the Chicago School of Antitrust emerged in the 1950s and became dominant in the United States. They show that the extent to which economic objectives and theoretical views shaped the inception of antitrust law. After establishing the minor influence of economics in the promulgation of U.S. competition law, they highlight U.S. economists’ caution toward antitrust until the Second New Deal and analyze the process by which the Chicago School developed a general and coherent framework for competition policy. They rely mainly on the seminal and programmatic work of Director and Levi (1956) and trace how this theoretical paradigm became collective—that is, the “economization” process in U.S. antitrust. Finally, the authors discuss the implications and possible pitfalls of such a conversion to economics-led antitrust enforcement.

In the nineteenth century, firms operating in the Anglo-Indian tea trade were organized using a variety of ownership forms, including partnership, joint-stock, and a combination of the two, known as the managing agency. Faced with both an increasing need for fixed capital and high agency costs caused by the distance between owners and managers, the firms adapted and increasingly adopted the hybrid managing agency model to overcome these problems. Using new data from Calcutta and Bengal Commercial Registers and detailed case studies of the Assam Company and Gillanders, Arbuthnot and Co., this article demonstrates that British entrepreneurs did not see the choice of ownership as a dichotomy or firm boundaries as fixed, but instead drew innovatively on the strengths of different forms of ownership to compete and grow successfully.

Unlike their national counterparts, international trade associations are a little-studied aspect of the global economic system. Much of the literature on trade associations has focused on rent-seeking behavior, although theories of transaction costs and social capital have been gaining influence. This article uses the early history of the International Federation of Master Cotton Spinners’ and Manufacturers’ Associations (IFMCSMA), still operating today as the International Textile Manufacturers’ Federation, to test different explanations for the formation and persistence of international trade associations. The IFMCSMA case illustrates the challenges of rent-seeking on an international scale, and highlights the importance of social ties in building cooperation. Firms and individuals used the IFMCSMA to pursue reforms across the cotton textile industry and enjoyed some success in collective negotiations with other actors and organizations.

Under the leadership of Tiny Rowland, Lonrho became the largest and most widely established company in post-independence Africa. Using newly available materials mainly from the National Archives London, this article investigates the activities of Lonrho in Africa and the company’s relationship with the British government during the period. Although Prime Minister Edward Heath publicly labeled the company as the “unacceptable face of capitalism,” evidence presented in this article suggests that this was at best a normative assertion. The subsequent Department of Trade and Industry investigation of Lonrho was carefully guided by the British government with the objective of protecting wider British interests in Africa. Evidence in this article therefore contradicts the view that the British government did not work “in concert” with British businesses in Africa once political independence became imminent.

The London House of Rothschild depended on Brazil to maintain its reputation. This became a problem in the 1890s, when the Brazilian government almost defaulted on its sovereign debt after a change of regime had made politics unstable and economic policy unorthodox. This article shows how the relationship between the bank and the state developed to the point that Rothschilds was forced to rescue its client. Exposure enabled Brazil to implement policies designed to defend the regime at the expense of payment capacity without defaulting. The debt crisis ended only after the political situation stabilized toward the close of the century, when the bank pressured the government to tighten economic policy.

Daguerreotypes (cased photographic images), introduced in 1839, required different strategies for marketing, pricing, and securing patronage than other media did. The Philadelphia firm of T.P. and D.C. Collins incorporated knowledge from past pursuits, modeled some of their practices on those of other studios, and employed novel strategies to appeal to clients. To meet and create demand for a novel product, the Collinses depended in part on the introduction and timing of innovative methods and materials and corresponding capital expenditures. An analysis of their entrepreneurial and marketing strategies between 1845 and 1855 allows us to better understand how a small, urban businesses that employed limited technical improvements operated in an environment in which consumers increasingly prized innovation.

The British trustee savings banks that operated throughout the nineteenth century were designed expressly for working-class use, and solely to promote long-term saving. Despite the substantial numbers and national spread of these banks, there have been few studies of their use by savers. Their neglect as a data source is puzzling, given the extent of the surviving depositor records that provide long-run empirical data that includes savers’ identity, marital status, and occupation, as well as account balances and transactions. Our preliminary work on four banks (Limehouse, Newcastle, South Shields, and Bury) shows results of significant interest in understanding working-class financial behavior, including a substantial number of accounts opened and maintained by working-class married women, accounts opened and run by minors from earnings, and varied patterns of account usage.

During the late nineteenth century, sales of life insurance products in Australia increased at a rapid rate. An investigation of the way in which life insurance products were targeted to the consumers provides insights not only into the marketing approaches, but also the changing nature of the mutual organization. This article uses a “stages” approach to analyze the evolution of the marketing message. The experience of Australian mutual insurers suggests that marketing strategies, as with other types of organizational skills, evolve in response to both the prevailing business environment and the ability of the firm to acquire and implement new knowledge and ways of conducting business.