The foreign (or international) firm, the multinational (or transnational) corporation, the multinational enterprise, are among the many names applied to the same complex economic organisation – an organisation which is neither a firm nor a corporation in the normal economic or legal sense, which may be incorporated domestically and only partly foreign-owned, which nevertheless is not international since it normally has a single nationality (although there are the few rare cases where its parentage is indeed multinational). It is not entirely within the jurisdiction of any single government. To the extent that the multinational enterprise dominates major international industries it has its roots in the industrialised developed world and thus early came to express in many ways in its own being both the pervasive interdependence of countries and their drive for independence, the positive and negative aspects of economic imperialism, a beacon for economic development and a siren call to a false path.

To describe it or to attempt ‘to penetrate its nature’ while looking at it from the point of view of any one of the social sciences, including economic history, is an exercise reminiscent of that of the proverbial blind men describing the elephant some part of which each touches: the observations are all valid but even when all are taken together the ‘nature’ of ‘the’ elephant is still not understood.