A long stretch of time exists between the first of what may be called multinational enterprises, such as the East India Co. and the Hudson Bay Co. of the seventeenth century, and the multinational corporations (MNCs) of today that we are calling the new Leviathans. In the case, for example, of the East India Co., it was a government unto itself, exercising state functions as well as economic ones in the course of its existence. Such enterprises have changed shape, grown enormously in number, and shifted from monopoly concerns to market-driven entities.

What is constant is the presence of change whose pace has rapidly increased in the last half century or more. It is not only the MNCs that have changed ceaselessly but the context in which they now operate. That context is a process of globalization that has taken on dimensions hitherto unknown. One such dimension is consciousness. The coining of the term “globalization” in the 1960s and 1970s is itself testimony to the newness of the new globalization.

We have tried, in the Introduction to this volume, to give some idea of how this new globalization can be studied. That is what New Global History is about. It is made up of many parts that must be brought into conjunction with one another. The MNC, we have argued, is one such part. It plays a major role in the developing process of globalization and can best be studied in the larger context it has helped create.

Some of the greatest opportunities for business history at the beginning of the twenty-first century are those offered by recording the creation and evolution of the electronic-based industries. These industries evolved primarily after World War II. No other set of industries had a more far-reaching impact in transforming life and work during the second half of the twentieth century. Nor was any major industrial evolution shaped by so small a number of enterprises. Finally, and most important of all, their dramatic and epic stories are still largely unknown. Very few historians have turned to recording their progress. Of these, almost none would call themselves business historians. I say this because I've just completed a preliminary sketch of the evolution of the consumer electronics industry, the closely related computer industry, and the larger information technology industry.

By contrast to the paucity of the history of electronic-based industries, there is a plethora of studies on individual enterprises and industries of the Second Industrial Revolution, which created the foundations of the industrial economy of the twentieth century. An explanation for this discrepancy calls for an understanding of the institutionalizing of the subdiscipline of economic history, a process that occurred immediately after World War II with the coming of the Economic History Association and the publication of its Journal of Economic History. For the next two decades economic history was taught and written primarily as history. In the 1970s, however, economic history changed dramatically and increasingly began to be taught and written as economics.