Business History

Walter A. Friedman; Geoffrey  Jones

Book | 2014

Business History

by Walter A. Friedman and Geoffrey Jones

Abstract

This volume contains a selection of 42 foundational articles on the discipline of business history written between 1934 and the present day by scholars based in the United States, Europe, Asia, and Latin America. A wide-ranging editorial introduction describes the formation and evolution of the discipline from its origins at the Harvard Business School in the late 1920s. Over the following century, the editors show that the discipline and its practitioners often found themselves on the margins of academic discourses and their own institutions. There was a constant struggle to define the borders of the field and the central research questions that it sought to answer. However, the commitment to engage with the complexities of business and the disinclination to rely on models with simplistic assumptions about business behavior also enabled business history to be highly creative and, at times, to exercise a huge impact on management studies more generally, especially strategy and the study of entrepreneurship.

Keywords: Economic History; business history; History;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Friedman, Walter A. and Geoffrey Jones, eds. Business History. Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2014.

Examines the global strategy of Singer, one of the world's first multinationals, before 1914. Singer, a U.S. pioneer of the modern sewing machine, established its first foreign factory in Scotland in 1867. Investments followed in manufacturing and marketing in other countries, especially Russia. By 1914, Singer held a remarkable 90% share of all sewing machine sales outside the United States and was the seventh largest firm in the world. Examines why sewing machines became one of the world's first global products and the entrepreneurial and organizational factors behind Singer's international success. Taught as the first case in the MBA elective Evolution of Global Business.

The case describes the growth of Guggenheim Brothers as one of the largest mining companies in the world in the early twentieth century. Global expansion led the firm to Chile, first in copper and later in natural nitrates. Chile's economic growth was driven by the profits from mining, especially its world monopoly of nitrates. The Guggenheims invested in Chilean nitrates after synthetics were developed by German chemists. Their strategies to modernize the industry collapsed with the outbreak of the Great Depression, during which Chile experienced the greatest fall of incomes of any country. The case serves as a vehicle to explore the devastating economic and political impact of the Great Depression on the countries of the South, such as Chile, which had specialized in primary commodities, and on mining and financial capitalists such as the Guggenheims.

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