In the early 1890s, financial crises occurred in many countries, most of which were connected to international capital flows. Australia, a major importer of capital, had difficulty borrowing after the Baring crisis of 1890. This article argues that local factors shaped the consequences of the banking crash in early 1893. A fortuitous legislative change averted a calamity by allowing for reconstruction rather than liquidation of banks, economic activity was depressed as banks became more conservative lenders, and the reconstructions reduced the wealth of domestic bank creditors and shareholders. The article concludes by noting that there was no targeted policy response in the short or medium term to prevent a recurrence of such an event.

This article focuses on the involvement of Siemens in the market for radiology equipment in Japan between 1900 and 1945. It explores why the German multinational company was unable to keep its dominant position in the Japanese market in the interwar years despite its technological competitiveness. At this time the Japanese medical market was already well structured when the country opened up to the West. In particular, it examines the firm's strategic choices in relation to the changing economic and technological environment, highlighting the importance for foreign multinationals of working together with national trading firms involved in the distribution of drugs and products for doctors.

The literature on inventors has traditionally focused on entrepreneurs who exploited their ideas in their own businesses and on researchers who worked in large firms' R&D laboratories. For most of US history, however, it was as common for inventors to profit from their ideas by selling off or licensing the patent rights. This article traces the different ways in which inventors resolved the information problems involved in marketing their patents. We focus in particular on the patent attorneys who emerged during the last third of the nineteenth century to help inventors find buyers for their intellectual property.

This article delves into the origins of the first national multi-sector employers' associations in Denmark and the United Kingdom to understand why some countries produce highly-centralized, unitary national business associations, which develop labor market coordination with unions and the state. In contrast, other countries conclude their experiment with coordination by ultimately falling back on laissez-faire liberalism. In particular, I explore how the structure of party competition works to augment or to diminish coordination among employers. I argue that the interplay of party politics in the policy-making process influenced the incentives of opposing parties to block the legislation sought by employers, informed the incentives of the business-oriented right parties to delegate policy-making authority to private business and labor organizations, and shaped the capacities of employers to get what they wanted from the state.

“Corporate reputation” is a term that on the face of it hardly needs explanation. Historians have long used it in an unproblematic fashion to refer to the way a firm is perceived by others. Yet as with many such terms, corporate reputation can be theorized or at least formally defined. Scholars in the fields of marketing and organization increasingly are doing both; since the 1980s they have attempted to distinguish reputation from the related constructs of image, identity, status, legitimacy, celebrity, and brand equity. The project is ongoing, and a strong consensus has not yet been reached on how to define corporate reputation. Charles Fombrun, whose definitions have been perhaps the most widely used, suggests the following: “a collective assessment of a company's attractiveness to a specific group of stakeholders relative to a reference group of companies with which the company competes for resources.” Fombrun's definition contains three core ideas: firms have multiple reputations, depending on which stakeholders are being considered; corporate reputation is a comparative construct, because a firm is always judged in relation to something else—in this case, the firm's competitors; and firms' reputations are a source of competitive advantage or disadvantage.

Historians, who for valid intellectual reasons rarely attempt the formal definition of terms, have not participated in the theorizing of corporate reputation. Yet the peculiar skills of historians are much needed; for if the study of corporate reputation has underemphasized the role of institutional phenomena such as rules, norms, processes, and structures, it has all but ignored historical context and historical processes.

An extensive global market in patents and innovations developed after the middle of the nineteenth century. I employ data from the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, New South Wales, Spain, and Japan during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to assess the evolution of transfers in patent-property rights across these countries. The empirical analysis examines the factors that affected patterns in patent assignments and foreign patenting for these countries. It sheds further light on cross-sectional variation in foreign patenting and transfers to corporations, based on a panel data set of patent grants and assignments at issue in the United States during the Second Industrial Revolution. The results indicate that, just as inventive activity responded to incentives, the patterns of market exchange in patent rights varied in accordance with legal, economic, and institutional parameters. The analysis is consistent with the position that developing countries today might benefit from tailoring their patent institutions to individual circumstances rather than adhering to harmonized standards.

Signs of improvement in the early twentieth-century Brazilian economy enabled a process of urban renewal. One of the most visible features of Brazilian urban modernization was street and house lighting, as well as electricity for tramways and industry. Conflicts between the Canadian company Light and the Brazilian firm CBEE over the supply of urban electricity to Brazil's main economic centers—Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Salvador—mirror the contradictions in the country's capitalist formation during the first decades of the twentieth century. From an emerging market view, and through political debates, this article addresses the development of electric utilities in major Brazilian cities.

The globalization of financial markets over the past decade has focused the spotlight on the responsiveness of financial firms to international pressures. Insurance markets have traditionally relied on global networks not only to expand the insurers' sphere of influence but also to support domestic business. Until relatively recently, Australian insurance companies have not played a significant role in the development of international markets. However, in the last decade of the twentieth century Australian insurers ventured overseas on a scale without precedence. This article presents an historical perspective on the internationalization of the Australian life-insurance market with a view to understanding why these firms have been classified “late starters” in the internationalization stakes. In a broader capacity it provides insights into the impediments to overseas expansion and the forces encouraging or discouraging the development of cross border networks.

This article examines the marketing practices of the Soviet state trust for cosmetics, TeZhe, in the 1930s. Drawing on company records, industry reports, and popular press, we show that TeZhe used an array of marketing tactics, which were similar to those of the Western manufacturers. However, TeZhe's marketing was aligned with the state's economic and sociocultural initiatives and shaped by the ideological dictates of the Soviet system.

Examining the development of credit reporting in the United States, this article shows how new, formal methods of assessment of risk and trustworthiness came to mediate business reputations in the credit market over the past century and a half. It focuses on the conflicts over reputation provoked by the new means of assessment and how those conflicts were controlled through organizational procedures and routines as new methodologies were introduced. After World War II seemingly objective quantitative methodologies for evaluating credit worthiness were developed, but they did not eliminate the place of reputation in business decision-making.

Using newly collected patent assignment data for late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany and a standard econometric approach from the international trade literature—the gravity model—we demonstrate the existence of border effects on a historical technology market. We show that the geographic distance between assignor and assignee negatively affected the probability of patent assignments, as well as the fact that a state or international border separated the two contracting parties. Surprisingly, we show that the effect of a state border within Germany was nearly as large as the effect of an international border.

Many commentators believe that the business press “missed” the story of the twenty-first century—the 2008 economic crisis. Condemned for being too close to the firms they were supposed to be holding to account, journalists failed in their duties to the public. Recent historical studies of business journalism present a similarly pessimistic picture. By contrast, this article stresses the importance of the press as a key intermediary of reputation in the nineteenth-century marketplace. In England, reporters played an instrumental role in opening up companies' general meetings to the public gaze and in warning investors of fraudulent businesses. This regulation by reputation was at least as important as company law in making the City of London a relatively safe place to do business by the start of the twentieth century.

In both developed Western nations and developing countries, economic growth was based on the development of industrial districts, which were much more organized and institutionalized in modern Japan than economist Alfred Marshall had described. Local trade associations played an important role in enhancing Marshallian externalities, arising from the ease of imitating improved ideas and transacting unfinished products among clustered enterprises by facilitating joint actions in the supply of public goods, such as through the creation of local district brands and through the efficient provision of business information. These activities were clearly beyond the scope of agglomeration economies. This article examines the case of Kiryu, one of the best-known silk weaving districts in Japan.

Greek family firms developed sustainable businesses in the Azov Sea area during the nineteenth century. Despite the discouraging conditions for entrepreneurship and the geographical constraints, they succeeded in constructing trading and shipping networks based on kinship, common historical experience, and close links with their place of origin. Medium-size firms represent the main bulk of Greek family enterprises that were located in the Azov port cities, and through their activities these contributed to the integration of the area's economy in the world market. Geographical mobility and diversification in transport services were their main responses to situations of high risk and controversy. The key to understanding their resilience and flexibility in adapting to environmental changes resided in their family culture, shared values, and social-network support that added value to their international performance.

This article examines the relationship between patents, appropriability strategies, and market for technology in the English brewing industry before 1850. Previous research has pointed to the apparent paradox that large-scale brewing in this period showed both a self-aware culture of rapid technological innovation and a remarkably low propensity to patent. Our study records how brewery innovators pursued a wide variety of highly distinct appropriability strategies, including secrecy, selective revealing, open innovation and knowledge-sharing for reputational reasons, and patenting. All these strategies could co-exist, although some brewery insiders maintained a suspicion of the promoters of patent technologies, which faded only in the nineteenth century. Furthermore, we find evidence that sophisticated strategies of selective revealing could support trade in inventions even without the use of the patent system.