Analysts of the post-war German “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder) have diverged sharply over its origins and dynamic. The well-known Olson thesis stresses the importance of a radical break in institutions and interests, while other historians have recently posited the centrality of continuities from the fascist era to the Bonn republic. This article examines the history of Volkswagen, the largest firm in the crucial automobile industry, to understand the balance between continuity and change and systemic and conjunctural factors in the impressive success of this firm. Tolliday rejects the Olsonian notion of institutional “cleansing” and argues that the legacies of both fascism and the British Occupation were vital but that during the 1950s overlapping institutional structures, argumentative interest groups and rival political coalitions at VW could well have choked off growth in the absence of quite favorable circumstances.

In 1892, a group of Chicago's business leaders organized the Society for the Prevention of Smoke in the hope of persuading the city's business community to install equipment to control the black smoke pouring out of downtown chimneys and smokestacks. The following article uses an examination of the Society's activities to explore the diverse roles that business interests played in pollution control in American cities during the late nineteenth century. The episode reveals a panorama of business responses to smoke pollution which ranged from voluntary smoke abatement and strong support for regulation to indifference, reluctance, and organized resistance to efforts to impose controls. The author explores reasons why business interests responded in such diverse ways. She places the spectrum of responses evident in this episode within the broader context of business involvement in pollution control in Chicago and other cities in this period. She concludes by pointing out the need for additional research to explore the complex ambiguities of the role played by business in the history of the American environment.

The micro-scale businesses of independent craft producers have received little attention from historians. This article examines the links between the financing and use of capital by these businesses, and the ambiguous social position of the petit bourgeois business owners. A quantitative examination of the relative importance of the various sources of finance for these firms is assessed in the context of the generally accepted picture of financing for British industry, revealing differences in the pattern of funding for micro-scale enterprises. The ambiguous social relationships between the micro-scale business owners and the larger bourgeoisie, and with the working class, are partly explained by the underlying economic relationships. In particular the supply of trade credit by larger firms, and the use of credit and infrequent wage payments in their relationships with the working class, are identified as important elements.