It is with great sadness that we announce the recent death of this journal’s founding editor, Will Hausman. Will was not only Enterprise & Society’s first editor, but he was also central to its foundation. Will, then editor of the Business History Conference (BHC) annual proceedings volume, Business and Economic History, was at the core of a small group of BHC officers and members, including but not limited to Pat Denault, Glenn Porter, Phil Scranton, and Roger Horowitz, who recognized the potential to establish “a new journal that was dedicated to expanding the interactions between traditional business history and fields that might have seemed peripheral, but which had much to offer the study of business and its wider relationships.”1 Will not only helped to shape a vision of what the new journal should be but, as first editor, for Volumes 1 through 4 did much of the very heavy lifting involved in getting a new journal off the ground and underway. In addition to his work with Enterprise & Society, Will undertook many other roles on behalf of the organization, not least as President from 2006 to 2007. Will was also a very fine scholar in his own right, publishing extensively, especially in the history and economics of electricity and other power utilities. We will carry a fuller appreciation of Will’s life and career in a future issue. For now we wish to extend our deepest sympathies to Will’s family and friends. He will be very much missed by many.

In 2023, Princeton University Press published Richard Langlois’s The Corporation and the Twentieth Century: The History of American Business Enterprise. It is a book of comparable mass to Alfred Chandler’s 1977 The Visible Hand and equally ambitious.1 The erudition is vast. (The bibliography alone runs 78 closely-printed pages. There are 122 pages of equally closely-printed footnotes to the 522-page main text whose own font is not large.) A production such as this seemed worth more than the usual traditional-form reviews, and in the September following its publication, the Penn Economic History Forum put on a symposium to discuss it. Interest was widespread: attendance in the room was agreeably substantial and came from far beyond the seminar’s usual catchment area, and there were requests for the Zoom link to the proceedings from around the world. (The expense was not vast and the ratio of impact to expense was almost certainly favorable relative to ordinary seminars. The economic history community might not suffer from putting on more such events when suitable occasions arise.)

This paper demonstrates tensions between national environmental policies and international free trade rules and traces business reactions to environmentalism through a study of the Can War, a controversy over a Danish ban on beverage cans from 1970 to 2002. At its core was a conflict between Denmark and the European Economic Community (EEC, later the European Union, EU) over free trade versus environmental objectives. This study of the Can War demonstrates how environmental concerns were entangled with national and economic interests, but also how brewers, retailers, and packaging producers used environmental and economic arguments in pragmatic ways and adapted to changing political and economic environments. Thus, the paper adds to the literature on the formative years of environmental politics, with a focus on business interests and a conflict between a nation-state and the EEC in a period when environmental concerns gained political momentum yet remained contested in a system based on free trade. This study also adds to the literature on waste-handling by demonstrating how the Danish return system changed from one based on reuse to one based on recycling; it further shows how beverage cans went from banned to uncontested, everyday objects. Through a comparison with Sweden, the case shows how national businesses influenced the design of new deposit and return systems for single-use packaging, wherein refillable glass bottles became marginalized. Overall, the study offers an understanding of the intricate relationships between environmental policies, business interests, consumer habits, and competing container materials, with aluminum as the winner.

This article has two primary aims: first, to provide a non-sectorial history of business interest associations in Italy from 1861 to 1914, and second, to introduce a novel interpretation of the logic behind their collective actions. The study identifies three distinct periods in the evolution of these associations in liberal Italy, each defined by a unique collective action logic: the homogeneity phase (1861-1881), the fragmentation phase (1881-1898), and the conflict phase (1898-1914). In the homogeneity phase, there was a general unity among Italy’s political and economic elites, particularly among landowners who favored an antiprotectionist stance to support Italy’s agricultural export economy. This period was characterized by a relative uniformity of interests despite some conflicts. The fragmentation phase began in 1881, driven by the agricultural crises and the rise of new economic elites in the agrarian and industrial sectors. These new players challenged the traditional landowners and existing policies, leading to a diversification of economic interests and the splintering of their organizational representations. The final conflict phase occurred during the Giolittian Era, marked by the rapid development of organizations amid growing class struggles in both the industrial and agricultural sectors. This period saw significant adaptation within capitalist structures to counter the rising labor movement. The article ultimately examines the changing nature, scale, and scope of business interest organizations in response to the evolving phases of Italian capitalism from 1861 to 1914. It highlights how the transformation of these organizations reflects broader shifts in the relationships between the economy, state, and society.

Using Alabama as a case study of the beauty industry, this paper will demonstrate how licensing laws and regulations affected barbers and beauticians as they struggled to gain more clientele than their competitors. In the early twentieth century, white men dominated the market for cutting hair. Though the process started mid-century, by 1980, that relationship was inverted as women found themselves far outnumbering men. This research helps explain the gendered inversion of labor market trends while providing more general insights into the role of licensing laws in labor markets. Importantly, this work explores how race shaped labor market regulations, which affected and continue to affect labor markets and individual businesses in important ways.

This article explores the dynamics of court practice with regard to mercantile preinsolvency in later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Belgium. In 1883, the Belgian legislature introduced the proceeding of concordat préventif, making it possible for insolvent entrepreneurs to remain outside the liquidation-oriented procedure of faillite. Instead, they could declare their financial problems and propose a scheme of payment to their creditors. Despite this goal, however, the 1883 law, along with subsequent laws of 1885 and 1887, imposed high majority voting requirements. Accordingly, in the Antwerp commercial court, the shortcomings of the legislation were amended to ameliorate its procedural and judicial practice. The new practices of the court resulted in higher rates of acceptance of applications. However, these success ratios were not evenly distributed among the groups of debtors who applied. Perceptions shared by both creditors and judges may have advantaged merchants, brokers, and entrepreneurs who belonged to the higher strata of the city’s business world.

In this article, I argue that leaders of the U.S. Department of War and U.S. Army developed the organizational form and management practices of the modern corporation, decades before the advent of the railroads. Following Mark R. Wilson’s call to “bring the military in” to organizational analysis, I show how leaders of the U.S. military developed modern management practices and organizational structures as a way of maintaining control over officers, soldiers, and workers over long distances, as they provided the organized violence necessary for domestic imperialist expansion. By the time that elite merchants and real estate interests in the Atlantic port cities of the U.S. became interested in building railroads, in the late 1820s and 1830s, the U.S. Army already evidenced the key characteristics of modern business enterprise as defined by Alfred Chandler: a multi-unit organization coordinated by a hierarchy of professional, salaried, career-oriented middle and top managers. All the characteristic coordination mechanisms of the corporation: staff and line hierarchies, divisional and departmental structure, and bureaucratic systems of information gathering, surveillance, and control, were developed by the state in the course of building a continental empire.

This article looks at a unique form of American rural industrial development in the early 20th century: rural farming machinery companies producing gas-powered washing machines during the off season. Prior scholarship on the washing machine industry in North America has tended to focus on the mass dissemination of electric washing machines into suburban and urban homes, spreading from urban centers to rural fringes. In contrast, this article portrays the rise of washing machines as substantially rural in character. Case studies of three companies in Iowa and rural Ontario challenge our standard understanding of both consumption and production patterns, refocusing on rural technological innovation and capitalism. These machines allowed rural communities to engage with modernity on their own terms, purchasing gas-powered household appliances alongside gas-powered farm equipment.