At the turn of the nineteenth century, modern insurance started to spread from the British Isles around the world. Outside Europe and the European offshoots in North and South America, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, it began to compete with other forms of risk management and often met with stiff opposition on religious and cultural grounds. Insurance arrived in Southeast Asia via British merchants living in India and Canton rather than through agencies of European firms. While the early agency houses in Bengal collapsed in the credit crisis of 1829–1834, the firms established by opium traders residing in Macau and Hong Kong, and advised by insurance experts in London, went on to form the foundations of the insurance industry in the Far East. Until the early twentieth century, they sought to use the techniques of risk management that they had developed in Europe to win Europeans and Americans living in Southeast Asia as clients, along with members of the local population familiar with Western culture.

This study explores how Norway, as a latecomer to oil production, was able to develop both effective oil companies and an internationally competitive oil service industry. The article focuses on two rather distinct phases: the protectionist phase, in which a strong focus on local content fostered skilled Norwegian oil companies as well as a national oil service industry, and the phase of liberalization or financialization, where new forms of contact and openness to foreign ownership laid the basis for internationally oriented Norwegian oil companies and oil supply and service firms.

Prizes for innovations are currently experiencing a renaissance, following their marked decline during the nineteenth century. Debates about such incentive mechanisms tend to employ canonical historical anecdotes to motivate and support the analysis and policy proposals. Daguerre's “patent buyout,” the Longitude Prize, inducement prizes for butter substitutes and billiard balls, the activities of the Royal Society of Arts and other “encouragement” institutions—all comprise potentially misleading case studies. The article surveys and summarizes extensive empirical research using samples drawn from Britain, France, and the United States, including “great inventors” and their ordinary counterparts, and prizes at industrial exhibitions. The results suggest that administered systems of rewards to innovators suffered from a number of disadvantages in design and practice, which might be inherent to their nonmarket orientation.

More than forty years ago (in the autumn of 1974), Business History Review had a special issue on multinational enterprise (MNE). With two exceptions, the authors in this new special issue were not yet born or were toddlers when that issue was published. Whereas in 1974 relatively few individuals were writing on topics directly related to the history of multinational enterprise, in 2015 numerous authors are considering subjects that fall under this rubric. Still, by the mid-1970s the study of the history of multinationals was not virgin territory. Glenn Porter, then editor of Business History Review, wrote in a preface to the 1974 issue, “Most of the contributions here underscore the deep historical roots of multinational business and point to the importance of an awareness of the past in understanding the present.”

From the mid-nineteenth century, raw wool became a global commodity as new producing countries in the Southern Hemisphere supplied the world's growing textile industries in the North. The selling practices of these big-five exporters—Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and Uruguay—ranged from auction through a hybrid of auction and private sale to exclusively private sale. We explore why these countries persisted with different marketing arrangements, contradicting two streams of literature on institutions: isomorphism and the new institutional economics. The article makes several important contributions through blending distinct branches of theory and by focusing on the international constraints to convergence in an earlier period of globalization.

The recent surge of emerging-economy multinational enterprises (EMNEs) has prompted a debate on whether existing international business theory—particularly internalization theory—can accommodate this phenomenon. Our view is that no new, EMNE-centric theory is required to study EMNEs. Using historical evidence, we argue that “new” internalization theory is sufficient to address the complexity of EMNEs, and we illustrate our argument with examples of ten successful EMNEs from Asia and the Americas. We further argue that a business history lens can illuminate the behavior of developed-economy multinationals. We show how management scholars can advance their research agendas by engaging with business history and how business historians can use internalization theory to analyze the history of multinationals.

This article addresses the issue of whether large shareholders in Victorian public companies were active in the control of companies or were simply wealthy rentiers. Using ownership records for 890 firm-years, we examine the control rights, socio-occupational background, and wealth of large shareholders. We find that many large shareholders had limited voting rights and neither they nor family members were directors. This implies that the majority of public companies in the second half of the nineteenth century cannot be characterized as family companies and that large shareholders are better viewed as wealthy gentlemen capitalists rather than entrepreneurs.

The German pharmaceutical industry dominated global drug creation from the late nineteenth century to World War I. Most of the industry's products were based on extensive scientific research. However, the research intensity of products varied across companies and intensified over time. A main contribution of this article is thus to identify different groups of firms within the industry and provide an analysis of their product portfolios before 1914. This essay embeds scientific developments in a coevolutionary framework of science, firms, and institutions and shows that the industry's research capabilities were complemented by other important factors for corporate success.

This article describes the features of the international mercury market during the first half of the twentieth century. It analyzes the various market agreements made, their effectiveness, and their consequences. The period studied is little understood, although it was one in which mercury production greatly increased. It was also one that saw persistent efforts at market manipulation, owing to a series of agreements between Spanish and Italian producers that proved very effective until the arrival of shipments of mercury produced by Soviet bloc members and by some developing countries.

The history of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), one of the most prestigious business schools in the world, highlights the role of multinationals in establishing business education in Europe and the problem of legitimacy. The creation of IMD's predecessors CEI and IMEDE by Alcan and Nestlé also illuminates the role of Harvard Business School in their development and the reciprocal influences of American and European management education after World War II.

This article compares two media multinationals that supplied different genres of news, political and economic. Most media companies provided both genres, and these categories often overlapped. Still, investigating two firms founded in twentieth-century Germany shows how product differentiation affects the organization, geographical orientation, and business models of multinationals. While political news had the greatest impact when it was free and ubiquitous, economic news was most effective when it was expensive and exclusive.

This article explores how clusters have reacted to the recent process of globalization by comparing the development of two clusters that are located in the same region, the county of Møre og Romsdal in Norway. These are the furniture cluster and the maritime cluster on the west coast of Norway. When international competition increased, the first one declined while the other prospered and became more global. Structural differences explain only partly the different development paths of these clusters. In addition, firms’ strategic actions and the degree of collectively shared visions about international operations mattered for how the clusters developed.

This article examines the early industrial chaplain movement. In the midst of a postwar religious revival, companies, primarily in the South, hired Protestant ministers to care for their workers' spiritual needs. Many were motivated by both religious convictions and the desire to build a productive, loyal workforce. The opposition of unions and liberal Protestantism slowed the movement's growth, although over the last three decades thousands of employers have rediscovered the benefits of faith-based workplace programs. This article illuminates important postwar trends such as the persistence of paternalism and the importance of religion in managerial strategies.

This article examines the mid-twentieth-century transformation of U.K. pension fund investment policy known as the “cult of equity.” It focuses on the influence exercised by the Association of Superannuation and Pension Funds over actuarial and corporate governance standards, through actuaries who were members of its council. This intervention led to increasingly permissive actuarial valuations that reduced contributions for sponsors of pension funds investing in equities. Increased demand for equities required pension funds to adopt a more permissive approach to corporate governance than insurance companies and investment trusts, and contributed to declining standards of corporate governance.

This article focuses on the construction of turnkey hospitals in Latin America by the German electromedical equipment maker Siemens-Reiniger-Werke (SRW) in the 1950s and 1960s. After World War II, SRW was unable to return to the overseas markets it had lost during the war through only the export of goods. Hospital construction was thus a way to reenter these markets, offering local governments a new form of service and product: a German hospital. In order to achieve this strategy, SRW organized and directed an informal association called Deutsche Hospitalia, which gathered together some thirty German manufacturers involved in the process of building a fully equipped hospital. This article argues that SRW, by diffusing a standardized hospital model in Latin America, contributed to the globalization of medicine.

Executives of today's public companies face a considerably different set of opportunities and constraints than did their counterparts in the managerial capitalism era, which reached its apex in the 1950s and 1960s. The growing importance of corporate governance featured prominently as circumstances changed for those running public companies. This article explores these developments, taking into account high-profile corporate scandals occurring in the first half of the 1970s and the early 2000s, the 1980s “Deal Decade,” the “imperial” chief executive phenomenon, and changes to the roles played by directors and shareholders of public companies.