In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, New York State trust companies were successful, grew quickly, and failed rarely. The few failures, however, played a leading role in shaping the rules that governed trust companies. Because trust company failures were consistently interpreted as isolated departures from the norm of conservative management, trust companies were able to continue to participate in the rule-making process. The institutions that evolved promoted financial stability by imposing the costs of failure on decision makers and discouraging risky behavior. These failures shed new light on the treatment of failure and the development of corporate governance and financial regulation in the United States

Malaysia and Indonesia account for 90 percent of global exports of palm oil, forming one of the largest agricultural clusters in the world. This article uses archival sources to trace how this cluster emerged from the rubber business in the era of British and Dutch colonialism. Specifically, the rise of palm oil in this region was due to three interrelated factors: (1) the institutional environment of the existing rubber cluster; (2) an established community of foreign traders; and (3) a trading hub in Singapore that offered a multitude of advanced services. This analysis stresses the historical dimension of clusters, which has been neglected in the previous management and strategy works, by connecting cluster emergence to the business history of trading firms. The article also extends the current literature on cluster emergence by showing that the rise of this cluster occurred parallel, and intimately related, to the product specialization within international trading houses.

Business history for three generations has focused almost exclusively on capitalist firms, their managers, and their relations with markets, states, and rivals. However, enterprises on all scales also operated within communist nations “building socialism” in the wake of World War II. This article represents a first-phase exploration of business practices in three Central European states as Stalinism gave way to cycles of reform and retrenchment in the 1960s. Focusing chiefly on industrial initiatives, the study asks: How did socialist enterprises work and change across the first postwar generation, given their distinctive principles and political/economic contexts, and implicitly, what contrasts with capitalist activities are worth considering.

E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co. is one of the world’s largest chemical corporations, and its operations are of interest to business historians. This article explores the early history of the firm within the context of early republic political economy in order to show how it came to a place of prominence in the American gunpowder market by the early 1820s. The article utilizes the archival and printed records of DuPont, associated firms, government correspondence, and early War Department and trade statistics to show how the company, unlike other powder mills of that time, had access to both large reserves of foreign capital and the halls of power in the federal government. These resources helped DuPont become a principal supplier of gunpowder to the army, the navy, and a major exporter during the War of 1812 era.

This comment challenges two main points of Phil Scranton’s article: his periodization, and the adequacy of the utilized sources. His interpretation neglects the efforts of the de-Stalinization attempts in Eastern European socialist countries during the mid-1950s, though these measures established all subsequent reforms. He based his argumentation on contemporaneous articles from the 1950s and 1960s while an expanding fresh literature is available on socialist economies, thanks to the large-scale declassification of formerly top-secret documents. However, his article is an extremely important contribution to the business history of communism and a delightful point of departure for many kinds of future research in this field.

This comment, in response to Phil Scranton’s article, suggests that communist business practices differ from those adopted in the West along three dimensions: (1) the locus and degree of centralization of production decisions, (2) the mechanism for coordinating the producers’ actions, and (3) the use of state terror in shaping the workers’ and the managers’ incentives. My analysis focuses on the third dimension—state terror, which I define as workers and managers experiencing extreme penalties for failing to meet the state’s goals. I argue that business history and allied disciplines of management and economics would benefit from studying state terror as a management practice and outline several avenues for pursuing such research.

This study takes a step toward reconceptualizing the process of financialization, the reorientation of the US economy toward financial services that scholars view as a product of the 1970s economic shocks and subsequent regulatory liberalization. Instead, I argue that financialization was equally dependent on the gradual development of new financial technologies and business practices within the political and regulatory environment of the early postwar era. I do so by examining a cohort of small U.S. banks, which in the early 1950s began experimenting with a novel form of consumer credit: the charge account credit service. These plans allowed consumers to shop at a variety of local merchants using a single bank charge card. Bankers, though, developed charge account plans not as a conduit for consumer lending but as a business service, which enabled their small-merchant customers to compete with the credit plans offered by expanding department stores. In this way, charge account banking conformed with the 1950s political economy of finance, in which commercial bankers primarily lent to businesses and were still wary of consumer credit. Although they operated differently than the credit cards consumers know today, charge account banking plans were still a necessary first step toward this later financial technology, paving the way for commercial bankers to invest in unsecured card-based credit in the decades that followed.

This article examines the case of U.S. corporate environmentalism as a dramatic instance of issue management over four decades. Drawing on administrative and trade publications, archival sources, and personal interviews, the article tracks the gradual adoption of issue management and strategic planning techniques by the environmental public relations industry, demonstrating the increasingly powerful role of PR in influencing environmental policy making in the United States. By tracing its origins in the realm of environmental issues, the article argues that issue management became, over a forty-year period, a key strategy to define, limit, and control the concept of the environment in American society. The issue management tactics deployed by public relations actors to counter environmental activism and regulation offer a paradigmatic example from which to derive critical insights about the twin evolution of American social movements and the public relations industry.

In the latter part of the nineteenth century, the three largest life insurance companies had a presence in more than forty countries. In the 1880s they turned their attention to the Australian colonies, in which life insurance markets were expanding. The venture, however, was met with unexpected market resistance, and the expectations of the Big Three were never fully met. An eclectic paradigm provides an explanatory tool, which is applied to an investigation of the experiences of American companies. These companies were not able to realize the ownership and location, or internalize the advantages, needed to build a sustainable presence in the Australian life insurance market.

This comment attempts, first and foremost, to place Phil Scranton’s article within the overall trajectory of his career as a writer and historian. A common theme of that career has been complicating—or, as this comment puts it, “mucking up”—existing historical narratives. Finally, this comment suggests that Scranton’s role as complicator sometimes gives too little guidance for how his thoughts connect to existing literature, and it puts forward some possible avenues for future exploration that spring from Scranton’s examination of communist enterprise.

Today, nearly the entire adult population in Sweden uses a digital BankID for more purposes than only financial ones. Issuing identity documents is commonly perceived as a task for state authorities, but in Swedish society banks have played a dominant role as identificators. The first contribution of this article is that it explains this unique emergence of bank identity and traces the historical roots of a financial identification society to the mid-1960s. Banks started issuing standardized identity cards as a complement to the new system of paying salaries and wages by direct deposit to checking accounts, and these cards eventually became quasi-official identity documents. The Swedish story thus contrasts the scholarship on identification and state control. By treating identity as both a socio-cultural category and a materialization of a technology of control, I argue that the formalization of official identity documents for everyday use was intertwined with the creation of new financial identities. The introduction and general distribution of ID cards were parts of a process whereby wage earners became financial consumers, and the banks transformed themselves into retail companies. My second contribution therefore relates to the scholarly narrative on the financialization of everyday life since the 1980s. While the mass move to financial identification in Sweden, highlighted in this article, certainly fits the content of this narrative, it questions its chronology.