Business History (Taylor and Francis Journal)

This article analyzes the business organisation and activities of Genoese naval entrepreneurs who managed galleys for the Spanish Empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. While conventional narratives of business history begin with the Industrial Revolution and focus on the rise of the modern corporation, this article brings to the fore early modern entrepreneurs from Italy and shows how they led family-controlled firms running permanent navies in the Mediterranean. By using private ledgers and merchant correspondence, the paper aims to understand how these naval entrepreneurs governed their affairs and managed resources internationally. We find that delegation (through family ties, hierarchy, and networks) was the main solution chosen to deal with distant commodity, labour, and capital markets. We retrace the different forms this delegation took and explain its determinants considering alternative options and providing comparative insights.

This article provides a new understanding of how organisations from the profit and non-profit sectors collaborated to fundraise for the arts in Interwar Britain. The central focus is the Contemporary Art Society (CAS) an organisation established in the belief that the art being acquired for national collections was inadequate. Based on an analysis of CAS committee members; the relationship between the CAS and commercial galleries through the Society’s subscriber scheme; and a number of collaborative exhibitions organised between 1919 and 1939, we argue that the CAS exercised cultural entrepreneurship, raising revenue to shape a new direction for the British Artworld.

This study explores the financial performance and economic impact of British  investment  in  the  Colombian  National  Railway  Company,  the  largest British direct investment in Colombia during the first period of globalisation. It aims to ascertain the railway’s impact on the regional economy and explain why it failed as a going concern. It explores three dimensions: the use of guaranteed railway bonds, the financial perfor-mance of the company, and the economic impact within different sec-tors  of  the  local  economy.  The  article  implements  existing  methods  such as financial analysis, internal rate of return, social savings, coun-terfactual analysis, and tailors these to a case study methodology for a micro business history of a single company. The article provides three main conclusions. Railway bond guarantees were critical to completion of  the  railway  but  detrimental  to  its  long-term  financial  viability.  The  company  was  operationally  profitable  but  stymied  by  construction  delays. The railway contributed to growth of the export sector, internal agricultural  trade,  and  government  revenues.  Contributions  include  tailoring the social savings method to a local rather than national focus, re-evaluation  of  the  role  of  railways  in  Colombian  economic  growth,  and exploring the influence of railways on internal trade within Latin American economies.

Technological progress in semiconductor chips plays a central role in enabling the Information Technology revolution. Continual technological progress in semiconductor chips, which has become popular under the name of Moore's Law, reduces the cost of storing and processing information. While the role of the semiconductor chip manufacturing companies in driving Moore's Law is well known, less attention has been given to the equally important role played by upstream suppliers who produce the tools that are necessary to make the chips. In the early stages of the industry, the chip manufacturers made their own tools in-house. Using data at the initial stages of the industry and a wealth of publicly available information from interviews with industry pioneers conducted as part of oral history projects, this article examines how (i) market size (ii) heterogeneity in firm capabilities (iii) geographic proximity to manufacturing clusters, influenced the emergence of these semiconductor tools suppliers.

TOC 64-2
Special Issue
Noblemen Entrepreneurs

This editorial introduces the 10 articles included in the special issue on ‘Noblemen-entrepreneurs in the Nineteenth Century. Investments, Innovation, Management and Networks’. The collected works focus on the business activities of noblemen in Europe and Asia, thus offering up opportunities for comparison in an age of economic expansion and globalisation. What was the contribution of the nobility to the economy? Can we consider noblemen to have been endowed with an entrepreneurial spirit? What differences or similarities can we draw between the European and Asian elites? In this introduction, we give a synthetic overview of the relevant issues in the broad topic of the collection and their importance to business history, and briefly present the accepted articles. As two of the articles deal with the Japanese case, while the others focus on Europe, we have dedicated specific sections to the European and Japanese nobilities.

A special issue on history and paradoxes would be the first opportunity to start a dialogue between paradox theory and historical research on organizations. Paradox theory has developed in management studies over the last 25 years as an analytical lens with which to understand tensions and conflicting objectives persisting in organizations' life over time. However, historical organization studies have yet to join the conversation. The theoretical definition of paradoxes as interdependent contradictions enduring for an extended period is grist for the mill of historical organization studies' scholarship. The study of paradoxes in business history is a promising research avenue.

The latest volume of Business History brings articles on feminism and female entrepreneurship in the restaurant industry, de-industrialization in Scotland, Scottish family business, and two articles about Spain, one on gas companies and another one on the tourism industry.