American merchant networks facilitated, and were in turn transformed by, the War for Independence. They also played a crucial role in the establishment of financial and political institutions in the new republic. John Carter (a.k.a. John Barker Church) and Jeremiah Wadsworth were among the foremost merchants and financiers of the Revolutionary era. This article follows their careers from the beginning of their wartime activities through to the end of the Federalist Era in 1800. It explains how they created and manipulated networks of supply and credit, and how they invested the proceeds of their success in the years after the war. Through this case study, the article demonstrates how wartime requirements reshaped merchant networks, not simply by increasing risk and encouraging retrenchment, but by creating influxes of credit and pressures for expansion. It argues that war led to increased inequality among merchants in terms of wealth and credit. Furthermore, this increased inequality impacted the nature of postwar finance and commerce. It shaped the economic and political structures of the new republic, in part through the agency of successful merchants like Carter and Wadsworth.

The role of the small shareholder has been largely ignored in the literature, which has tended to concentrate on controlling shareholders and family ownership. Yet, focus on the importance of small shareholders can capture significant aspects of financial development. Pre-1970 debates and policy conflicts linked to stock exchange development concentrated on shareholder democracy and diffusion as key indicators. This article explores the so-called democratization of investment and the factors behind it through the lens of trends in estimates of the UK and U.S. shareholding populations between 1895 and 1970. It covers three key periods: before World War I, before and after the stock market crash of 1929, and post-World War II. It identifies three periods in the United States when shareholder numbers were paramount: in the boom years of the 1920s, as part of the inquest into the 1929 crash, and post-World War II in an attempt to boost stock market activity. In the United Kingdom, although some concern was expressed during the 1920s and 1930s at the passive nature of small investors, who held diversified portfolios with small amounts in each holding, it was the fear of nationalization after World War II that led to more in-depth shareholder estimates.

The evolution of the co-operative wine sector in traditional wine-producing countries in southern Europe, such as France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal, presents similar historical features in the first half of the twentieth century. However, the analysis of their current state shows that Spanish co-operatives are smaller in size than their French and Italian counterparts. Additionally, the analysis shows that Italian (and French) co-operatives have adopted a more modern business model. The main target of this work is to establish the reasons behind the differences between the Spanish and the more successful Italian co-operative wine sectors. This is carried out through comparative analysis and the examination of the development of both sectors. For this, the framework of the co-operative business life cycle is used.

There are a number of strategies employed by companies to limit price competition, including patenting. This article investigates patent licensing restrictions as a strategy to erode price competition, using mainly information gleaned from the 1960–1962 Kefauver Committee hearings. The article deals with the pharmaceutical industry, which is one of the few sectors in which patents are essential to the development and introduction of innovations. The current study adds to a body of literature that has yielded mixed results with respect to the role of patents in this industry. The main contribution of this research is that restrictive licensing clauses, specifically field-of-use restrictions, are found to be relevant in eroding price competition in the institutional market. However, in the retail ethical market, price competition was absent even when no field-of-use restrictions were included in licensing contracts, although product competition was relevant between patented drugs.

The cantilever chair is both a modern classic and a tradable commodity. Iconic designs, such as those by Marcel Breuer, are part of museum collections and are being produced for the contemporary furniture market. Moreover, there are countless other variations of the cantilever principle on the market. This article explains the emergence of the upmarket segment for iconic designs through historical sources. The focus is on the role of intellectual property rights and their interaction with management, branding, and pricing activities in the early 1930s. The article establishes that legal and perceived authenticity of cantilever designs were necessary but not sufficient to establish the upmarket segment. A substantial premium could only be charged once customers revealed that they had a high willingness to pay for authentic furniture that was chrome-plated.

In this article, I describe the partial forward integration of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Boston breweries. I argue that both brewers and saloonkeepers used the fluid market in capital lending as a lever of power. An analysis of the minutes of three breweries and their loan records, covering more than ten years, reveals that saloonkeepers were often delinquent in repaying their annual loans and brewery owners only infrequently threatened to call the loans. Using the structure-conduct-performance paradigm, I suggest that the particular conditions in Boston (a limited number of saloon licenses and a geographical position that precluded long-distance shipping of beer) gave the saloonkeepers much greater leverage in the so-called “tied system.” Brewers used vertical restraints but, because of obligations to British owners, did not fully forward integrate by buying saloon property, as brewers did in the United Kingdom.

Historians are increasingly using networks as an analytical framework. However, recent research has stressed the inherent problems with networks, including networking institutions. Historians therefore have to consider why and in what ways actors do, or did, engage with networks. This article posits a novel interdisciplinary methodology by bringing together regression analysis, visual analytics, and history to analyze actors’ relationships with an institution rather than with one another. This methodology, illustrated by the case study of the Liverpool African Committee, from 1750 to 1810, demonstrates that actors’ relationships with an institution may be affective or instrumental, reflecting different relationships with and uses of the network. Moreover, actors’ relationships with an institution are not static and change over time. The methodology and case study presented in this article suggest a reassessment of the understanding of metropolitan business networking institutions to reflect the complexity of their use.

This article examines a familiar Cold War event, the Polish Crisis of the early 1980s, but from an unfamiliar perspective: international financial history. Historians have yet to examine how the growing international activity of Western commercial banks and the Eastern Bloc’s heavy borrowing on international capital markets during the 1970s influenced the course of the late Cold War. This article covers the history of the Eastern Bloc’s largest borrower—Poland—and its road to sovereign default in 1981. It examines how financial diplomacy among banks, communist countries, and the U.S. government catalyzed the formation of the labor union Solidarność (Solidarity). Ultimately, this article speaks to an important theme in the history of U.S. capitalism since World War II; namely, how the construction of global finance influenced U.S. foreign policy. The end of the Cold War in the fall of 1989 was the result not only of communism’s loss of legitimacy among the peoples of Eastern Europe, but also its loss of creditworthiness on global financial markets.

The Manchester Chamber of Commerce established the Manchester Testing House in 1895, and introduced uniform yarn contracting rules in 1897. The chamber made these institutional “innovations” to deal with the nefarious practice of “short-reeling.” This case study explains how and why merchants were crucial to undoing weaknesses in domestic —and to some extent foreign—legislation to overcome this fraudulent activity. We argue that the Testing House and uniform contract were tantamount to developing a quasi-legal system such that private standards established through cooperative agreements had legal sanction. Our study shows how institutions evolved to improve governance along the supply chain for this highly specialized export-orientated industry. This article contributes to the growing literature on historical markets, institutions, and standards. Based on extensive archival sources, we show how specific and complementary commercial institutions developed within grounded notions of governance rather than abstracted spaces of market exchange.

This article examines why wine marketers struggled to build a mass market for American wine from the 1930s to the 1950s. Wine promoters worked to both surmount and accommodate existing preferences for spirits by casting wine both as a base for cocktails and as the budget-friendly alternative to them. Previously marked as either too highbrow or too lowbrow, wine gradually lost its foreignness as merchandisers learned to sell the glamour of wine without the demands of connoisseurship. Instead of setting their sights on urban sophisticates, wine promoters aimed for young married couples and budget-conscious new homeowners—the most recent entrants into the middle class. These populist marketing approaches, I contend, sowed the seeds of the table “wine revolution” not in bohemian enclaves and gourmet dining societies but in middle-class suburbia, where wine found its way to the American dinner table via the cocktail glass, the casserole dish, and the backyard barbecue.

The Coca-Cola affair is a notable incident that is often cited in the history of American investments in France. However, the previous literature has generally not examined the social and economic contexts framing the incident, choosing instead to focus on the perspectives of the French communist attacks on Coca-Cola and the political pressure exerted by the French beverage industry to deny Coca-Cola’s application to operate in France. This article, by analyzing the affair based on a broader historical framework, attempts to offer another perspective on this famous incident. Drawing on French and American archival materials, it argues that the major causes of Coca-Cola’s defeat in France were primarily practical, financial considerations of the French government. The success of Pepsi Cola’s investment project in France provides confirmation of such considerations, and were closely related to France’s ultimate national objectives in the postwar years.

Between the 1970s and the 2000s, Costa Rica became established as the world’s leading ecotourism destination. This article argues that although Costa Rica benefited from biodiversity and a pleasant climate, the country’s preeminence in ecotourism requires more than a natural resource endowment explanation. While previous literature has emphasized the efforts of the government and nongovernment organizations, this article demonstrates the critical role of small entrepreneurs in the co-creation of the industry. Making extensive use of oral history, the article explores the role of tour companies in drawing affluent Western ecotourists to the country, and of the creators of ecolodges and other forms of accommodation in providing them with somewhere to stay. Clustering created positive externalities, drawing new entrepreneurs into the industry who could also learn from knowledge spillovers. There were downsides to the new industry. The creation of the national image of a natural paradise enabled many businesses which were not environmentally sustainable to free ride on the green image.

This study widens the historical perspectives of how a firm coordinates its activities to simultaneously achieve financial and political ends while using regional efforts to enact a national strategy. It examines how AT&T organized Bell Telephone Securities (BTS), a transitional subsidiary during the period 1921–1935, to broaden ownership of corporate shares and to develop political and cultural identities with Bell among small investors, particularly in the South and West. Equally significant was BTS’s maintenance of liquidity of the Bell shares in the stock market, particularly in support of periodic rights offerings and debt conversions that were primary channels for increasing corporate equity. The subsidiary was eventually disbanded when its defining financial policies became unsustainable because of the radical socioeconomic and regulatory changes brought on by the Great Depression, but by this time many of its original objectives had been realized.

Since the 1970s, a stretch of Broadway Avenue in Wichita, Kansas, has seen the growth of both Latino and Asian businesses. Using mapping, data analysis, and historical research, this study compares the growth of ethnic entrepreneurship between both populations. The results not only reveal similarities but also illustrate the degree to which ethnic entrepreneurship varies, depending on a population’s situation in a given location.