Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • 2019
  • Chapter
  • The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business

Origins and Development of Global Business

By: Geoffrey Jones
  • Format:Print
ShareBar

Abstract

This chapter explores how business enterprises have been powerful actors in the spread of global capitalism between 1840 and the present day. Emerging out of the industrialized Western economies, global firms created and co-created markets and ecosystems through their ability to transfer a package of financial, organizational, and cultural assets, skills, and ideologies across national borders. They have been major drivers of trade growth, which they often organized within their own boundaries. They have been shapers of, as well as responders to, globalization waves. They were also actors in periodic de-globalization waves, mainly because they functioned as reinforcers of gaps in wealth and income rather than disrupters of them. They were disappointing institutions for knowledge and technology transfer. In recent decades, the domination of global markets by Western and Japanese firms have shifted to a situation in which they competed as equals with firms based in China, India, the Arab Gulf, and elsewhere in the non-Western world. This trend is likely to accelerate as the growing fragility of institutional structures in the United States and the European Union further weakens the competitiveness of firms based in those regions.

Keywords

Global Business; Multinational; Globalization; Business History; Strategy; Africa; Asia; Europe; Latin America; Middle East; North and Central America; Oceania

Citation

Jones, Geoffrey. "Origins and Development of Global Business." Chap. 2 in The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business, edited by Teresa da Silva Lopes, Christina Lubinski, and Heidi J.S. Tworek, 17–34. New York: Routledge, 2019.
  • Find it at Harvard

About The Author

Geoffrey G. Jones

General Management
→More Publications

More from the Author

    • 2025
    • Faculty Research

    Institutional Entrepreneurship and Climate Change

    By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Geoffrey Jones
    • February 2025
    • Asian Business & Management

    Deep Responsibility, SDGs, and Asia: A Historical Perspective

    By: Geoffrey Jones
    • 2025
    • Faculty Research

    Sustainability and Green Business in Latin America

    By: Geoffrey Jones
More from the Author
  • Institutional Entrepreneurship and Climate Change By: Ann-Kristin Bergquist and Geoffrey Jones
  • Deep Responsibility, SDGs, and Asia: A Historical Perspective By: Geoffrey Jones
  • Sustainability and Green Business in Latin America By: Geoffrey Jones
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College.