The realms of banking and finance reveal a far more complex approach to early twentieth-century African American activism than the conventional protest vs. accommodation paradigm. Whites’ anxieties about Black economic and political autonomy melded into a peculiar alchemy of progressive zeal and white supremacy that professed the idealistic goal of protecting citizens from exploitative business practices but had the practical effect of destroying symbols of Black economic progress. The context that drove the opening of Black banks in Mississippi as “monuments of protest” also made Mississippi's new banking law a powerful tool with which state actors and even regular citizens could strike blows against African Americans’ growing economic, social, and political agency.

In the nineteenth century, the Liverpool Cotton Brokers' Association (CBA) coordinated the dramatic growth of Liverpool's raw cotton market. This article shows how the CBA achieved this through the development of a private-order institutional framework that improved information flows, introduced standardization and contracting regimes, and regulated market exchange platforms. These developments corresponded with significantly improved market coordination, which facilitated the growth of the largest raw cotton market in the world. The article's findings demonstrate and quantify the importance of nonstate actors in creating institutions of global exchange central to the first wave of globalization.

This study examines the transplantation and evolution of business law in the late Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish republic, drawing broader implications for the economic and political determinants of legal transplantation for late industrializers. We show that the underlying political economy context was influential in shaping the way commercial law was transplanted and evolved in Turkey. Extraterritorial rights in the nineteenth century eroded the incentives to demand legal change by providing alternative legal rules to the non-Muslim commercial elite; the nation-building efforts of the twentieth century cultivated a new Muslim business class that was reliant on the state's goodwill for success and could not effectively push for more open access to novel forms of business organization.

Since 2008, academics and policymakers have frequently debated why bond rating agencies such as Moody's, S&P, and Fitch enjoy considerable power and influence. The 2008 financial crisis focused our attention on the bond rating agencies that had previously categorized mortgage-backed securities as investment grade. Scholars have attributed the power enjoyed by the rating agencies to regulations that confer a privileged status on those agencies that are designated as nationally recognized statistical rating organizations (NRSROs) by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). While these authors mention in passing that the relevant regulation went into effect in 1975, none has conducted archival research to examine why this regulation was introduced at that time. This article is the first historical investigation of the creation of this crucial regulation, which entrenched the concept of the NRSRO in federal securities law. It shows that the SEC mandated the use of NRSRO-created ratings even though SEC officials vigorously debated whether it was wise for the commission to endorse ratings produced by agencies that operate on the basis of the controversial issuer-pay model. This article contributes to our understanding of the SEC's role in the development of the distinctive features of American capitalism.

We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support of other organizations. Specifically, we show how Enron combined resources from partner firms with its own capabilities, manipulating the energy market and capitalizing on the crisis. From a methodological point of view, our study emphasizes the growing importance of digital sources for historical research, drawing particularly on telephone and email records from the period to develop a rich, fly-on-the-wall understanding of a phenomenon that is otherwise hard to observe.

Present-day advocates of antitrust reform referred to as “New Brandeisians” have invoked history in pressing the case for change. The New Brandeisians bemoan the upending of a mid-twentieth-century “golden age” of antitrust by an intellectual movement known as the Chicago School. In fact, mid-twentieth-century enforcement of antitrust was uneven and large corporations exercised substantial market power. The Chicago School also was not as decisive an agent of change as the New Brandeisians suggest. Doubts about the efficacy of government regulation and concerns about foreign competition did much to foster the late twentieth-century counterrevolution that antitrust experienced.

Gather a group of economists together and ask what most concerns them, and a wide variety of topics would soon emerge: slowing economic growth in the rich nations, the inability of many poor nations to converge toward the rich, rising income and wealth inequality, the increasing dominance of superstar firms, growing profit margins and the decline in labor's income share, globalization and the human costs of outsourcing, deaths of despair, and the threat of climate change. Decade after decade, numerous books have been written about each of these issues. But here we have in one compact package a blockbuster book that deals with all of them.