The phonograph presented American presidential aspirants with an opportunity to surmount eighteenth-century campaigning standards and meet the challenges of an expanding democracy and electorate. Thomas Edison’s invention—with its corresponding records—arguably was the first mechanical media technology to find its way into political campaigning on a mass scale. By 1908, canned, recorded speeches were poised to become a marketable alternative to soliciting ballots in person while also facilitating a candidate’s direct engagement with voters, thus enabling contenders and media firms like Edison’s National Phonograph Company to curate personas that were sold both commercially and at the polls. As a result, the phonograph’s practical role allowed the public to hear candidates directly and in their own words, marking an important but underrecognized step forward in the democratization of access to information (and the concomitant risk of manipulation and distortion that came along with it) that one finds in today’s social media.

This article offers the first extensive analysis of female agency in the marine insurance industry of early modern Europe. Drawing from a data set of more than four thousand insurance policies signed in the Royal Insurance Chamber in Paris between 1668 and 1672, the article studies the activities of Parisian women within the institution. These policies illustrate that women played a crucial role in the Chamber as underwriters, creditors, commission agents, and policyholders. Moreover, institutional papers and the records of the Parisian admiralty court reveal that women acted ably in defense of their interests when conflicts emerged, although there were limitations to their agency in the Chamber itself. In this way, the article challenges the long-standing perception that underwriting was an exclusively masculine activity in pre-modern Europe. Moreover, it sheds light on the role of women in supporting the maritime and colonial policies of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s eminent minister, thereby becoming underwriters of France’s early Atlantic Empire.

Recent work on white women in Jamaica has shown that they were active participants in Jamaica’s slave economy. This article adds to this recent literature through an innovative use of social network analysis (SNA) to examine the credit networks in which women operated in the thriving eighteenth-century British Atlantic town of Kingston, Jamaica. In particular, it uses closeness and centrality measures to quantify the distinctive role that white women had in local credit networks. These were different from those of men involved in transatlantic trade, but were vital in facilitating female access to credit enabling domestic retail trade. White female traders in particular facilitated female access to credit networks, acting as significant conduits of money and information in ways that were crucial to the local economy. Their connectedness within trade networks increased over time, despite their greater exposure than larger traders to economic shocks. We therefore demonstrate that white women were active protagonists in the developing economy of eighteenth-century Jamaica.

This article uses the case of Oppel Electric Manufacturing Co. Ltd.—the most important Chinese manufacturer of light bulbs before 1937—to explore the early development of the Chinese electrical lamp industry. The article first explores the Chinese market for electrical lamps before the 1920s and shows how the market was dominated by imports and lamps locally manufactured by foreign firms. It then traces how Oppel was established in the 1920s and subsequently grew into a successful manufacturing business able to compete with foreign products. The article explores how the fact that government institutions were major purchasers of light bulbs allowed Oppel to engage in nationalist lobbying and thereby win government contracts. The article shows how the absence of Western-style intellectual property rights allowed Oppel to transfer technology cheaply, efficiently, and without needing to enter into Sino–foreign joint ventures. These discussions of nationalist lobbying and China’s intellectual property environment contribute to our understanding of China’s early industrialization, both in terms of the rapid industrial growth early twentieth century China saw and the leading role that Chinese firms played in this growth.

Reconnecting Fligstein’s and Chandler’s models of long-term organizational change, this article challenges the idea that corporate financialization is alien to the Chandlerian enterprise. Based on the case of the French automotive firm Peugeot Société Anonyme (PSA), it shows that this historical transformation has been intrinsically linked to Chandlerian dynamics. The article first highlights the crucial role played by the French government and financial institutions in the establishment of large multidivisional companies in France. It then draws on PSA, public, and private archives, and an interview with a former financial executive to examine a decisive financial restructuring of the family business in 1965. In describing the challenges faced by the business in the 1960s, the article analyzes how the creation of a multilevel structure of holding companies was meant to deal with Chandlerian challenges while paving the way for the further financialization of the business.

In February 1956, Ronald Prain–chairman of the Rhodesian Selection Trust group of mining companies, and a significant figure in postwar international business—was subpoenaed and appeared before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigation of the U.S. Senate Committee of Government Operations as it sought to determine whether British international business was exporting copper to the Soviet Union. Following the seemingly contrived nature of the proceedings, and because of a hostile interrogation by Robert F. Kennedy, Prain was later to describe his appearance as a “witch-hunt”—a conscious reference to the political paranoia of the period. Using a microhistorical approach, this article examines how Prain understood and narrated his role in an event to which he was a minor actor, drawn into a larger narrative of the political and economic conflict of the Cold War. It evaluates the historical veracity of Prain’s testimony and discusses the limits of memoir and archival sources. It discusses the implications of the event to the historiography of international business, in particular with reference to debates about the “nationality of the company” and the decline of the “Free-Standing Company.” And by examining one personal experience in a wider context, the article also shows that the history of international business and its relationship to the politics of the Cold War should not be seen as remote, monolithic, impersonal, or abstract but as individually lived and suffused with emotion, memory, and personal meaning.

In the 1990s, three Scandinavian news media companies, Bonnier, Kinnevik, and Schibsted, internationalized their newspapers. Despite doing this during the same period, competing in the same industry and institutional environment, being exposed to the same opportunities by the opening of the Eastern European markets, and all belonging to a smaller language area, they differed in their internationalization models as well as in their outcomes. Despite initial successes, Bonnier and Kinnevik eventually discontinued their newspapers in the new markets, in many cases following significant losses, while Schibsted fared better. The main explanation for using different internationalization models was differences in business models, basically striving to do business internationally in a similar way as domestically. That is, they did not choose a specific internationalization model but sought to simply expand their business models internationally. Consequently, this article finds that when researching internationalization, more focus should be placed on business models.

This article presents an analysis of the operations of the Peruvian Amazon Company through an accounting lens. It is suggested that a focus on asset categories augments our knowledge of the company’s exploitation of the land and Indigenous peoples of Amazonia. In particular, the study explores the PAC’s questionable ownership of estates in the Putumayo, what its approach to valuing those estates implied about enslavement, how its treatment of “expenses of conquest” and the inclusion of armaments on the balance sheet indicated the forced subjugation of labor, and how the classification of rubber collectors and their Barbadian overseers as debtors further suggests the practice of debt peonage. Although the findings affirm the utilization of accounting as a facilitator of subjugation, it is shown that in the hands of humanitarians such as Roger Casement, accounting could also be deployed in the pursuit of emancipation.

Historians have long explored the links between the environmental and the economic. Yet as the global climate crisis deepens with every passing month, it becomes ever more obvious just how related the environmental and the economic are. Driven by the by-products of economic growth, rising sea levels, floods, droughts, and extreme heat devastate ecosystems and claim increasing numbers of lives. They also continue to wreck enormous economic damage, itself the cause of untold immiseration. The climate crisis, most obviously, is an environmental crisis. But it is also an economic crisis and a crisis of political and social action.