Business History Research Articles

British overseas railway investment and economic development: The Colombian National Railway Company and its impact on the Colombian interior

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 performance of the company, and the economic impact within different sectors of the local economy. The article implements existing methods such as financial analysis, internal rate of return, social savings, counterfactual 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. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1844665.This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Back to the Sources: Practicing and Teaching Quantitative History in the 2020s

This article elaborates on our experience of teaching quantitative methods to historians and writing an introductory book on this topic. We promote respect for principles of source criticism as the cornerstone of the constitution of data from historical sources, and argue that a conversation on this constitution is as important for new historians of capitalism as it is for economic historians and business historians, among others. The first part of the article explains what led us to promote constructivist, small-scale, experimental quantitative history. In terms of teaching, this choice translates into a learning-by-doing approach focused on the construction and categorization of data from sources. The article then presents practical methods of teaching and research, borrowing examples from economic history and beyond, as well as from the history of capitalism. The second part also addresses the transformation of sources into quantifiable data, while the third part discusses data categorization and analysis.

The Business of Taxes, the Taxation of Business and the Question of Democracy

Shirley Tillotson’s Give and Take: The Citizen-Taxpayer and the Rise of Canadian Democracy provides an opportunity to examine this important work’s approach to taxation and business, even if the book’s focus is not primarily focused upon business taxes, businesspeople, or the role of business in taxation policy over the period that that book addresses. This article looks at how Give and Take explores business and taxation, and at how Tillotson engages with some of the key elements and themes in Canadian business history. While not a business historian, Tillotson provides important insights into how we understand the intersection of business and taxation.

Prussian blue: From early modern pigment to modern high-tech material by Alexander Kraft

Reviewed by: Berliner Blau: Vom frühneuzeitlichen Pigment zum modernen Hightech-Material [Prussian blue: From early modern pigment to modern high-tech material] by Alexander Kraft Agustí Nieto-Galan (bio) Berliner Blau: Vom frühneuzeitlichen Pigment zum modernen Hightech-Material [Prussian blue: From early modern pigment to modern high-tech material] By Alexander Kraft. Diepholz: GNT-Verlag, 2019. Pp. 312. Berliner Blau: Vom frühneuzeitlichen Pigment zum modernen Hightech-Material [Prussian blue: From early modern pigment to modern high-tech material] By Alexander Kraft. Diepholz: GNT-Verlag, 2019. Pp. 312. The history of a single dyestuff, pigment, or color could be considered a specific genre in the history of science and technology, but also in economic and business history. Indigo, cochineal, madder, sugar, tobacco, cacao, and many other materials have circulated for centuries across the continents on a global scale and have progressively acquired the status of historical actors themselves. However, this genre is not an easy one. Histories of the main sources of red, as explored by Jacqueline Jacqué, Dominique Cardon, et al. in Andrinopole. Le rouge magnifique (Éditions de la Martinière. Musée d'impression sur étoffes, 1995) and Robert Chenciner in Madder Red (Curzon, 2000)—and blue, as Jenny Balfour-Paul did in Indigo (British Museum Press, 1998)—were pioneering examples in the history of a single natural dyestuff. In the same way, mauve attracted the attention of historians as a pristine synthetic and artificial color, as demonstrated by Anthony Travis, The Rainbow Makers (Lehigh Associated University Press, 1993) and Simon Garfield in Mauve (Faber and Faber, 2000). In spite of their uneven scholarship, these histories provide new, rich, sound data on the different dyestuffs, but also, and most importantly, on inventors, chemists, entrepreneurs, trade companies, and merchants who circulated the colors across the globe. Likewise, the famous Berliner Blau or Prussian blue, a new source of blue that revolutionized the art of dyeing and painting from the early eighteenth century, also deserves its place in the Olympus of the histories of single dyestuffs. This is a major achievement of Alexander Kraft's Berliner Blau, which will help historians of dyestuffs and colors to add new actors to the play. Exploiting new archival material and assembling a good part of the research already published in previous articles, Kraft meticulously describes the complexities of the discovery of that "mysterious" blue as a subtle collective endeavor. Supposedly originated in an accidental discovery from animal blood by dye maker John Jacob von Diesbach and alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel in Berlin—probably in 1705–6, as described by German physician George Ernst Stahl some years later in 1732—Kraft brings other relevant actors to the fore. Johann Leonard Frisch is a key figure for the commercial success of the new dye as a pigment for painting, as described in his correspondence with Leibniz. Kraft also stresses the key role of apothecary Caspar Neumann in the transfer of the recipe to physician and naturalist John Woodward, and its publication in Philosophical Transactions, in 1724. [End Page 644] Kraft also attempts to write an ambitious, long-term history of Prussian blue through its changes in production methods; its application as a dyestuff for textiles in competition with indigo; its trade across the world to become a global commodity that reached America, China, and Africa; its later utility, in the nineteenth century, in photography and analytical chemistry; and its transformation into other commercial products. Finally, the narrative reaches the present, with a description of the role that the old Prussian blue—the modern ferric hexacyanoferrate (II)—plays today as a high-technology material. Berliner Blau is a meticulous, erudite work by a chemist-historian. It provides useful, sound data and a long-term account of the color. Nevertheless, the result of the exploitation of new manuscript and printed primary sources should be situated/placed/elaborated in the framework of the historiography of chemistry and technology. Also, it does not consider other histories of single dyestuffs, such as those mentioned above. Issues such as the technological competition between Prussian blue and indigo; the construction of the blurred boundaries between natural and artificial dyes; a more detailed account of the transfer of the seminal Berliner...

The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business by Karolina Hutková

Reviewed by: The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business by Karolina Hutková Aparajita Mukhopadhyay (bio) The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business By Karolina Hutková. London: Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. 275. The English East India Company's Silk Enterprise in Bengal, 1750–1850: Economy, Empire and Business By Karolina Hutková. London: Boydell Press, 2019. Pp. 275. Karolina Hutková's book is a welcome addition to our understanding of technology transfer in colonial context and its wider consequences on the colony and the metropole. The book focuses on English East India Company's (hereafter EEIC) "silk enterprise" in Bengal from 1750 to 1850. The book sits at the intersection of global history, history of technology transfer, and business history in the eighteenth century and beyond. The narrative reflects overlapping strands of these distinct historiographies. The introduction situates EEIC's silk enterprise in the wider debates about the role and impact of EEIC's policies on Bengal's economy—and the history of EEIC and British political economy. The first chapter is an overview of the early modern silk industry across the globe. It also contextualizes EEIC's silk enterprise in Bengal. Next, the book shows how Britain's inability to produce raw silk necessitated the search for potential sources of supply (ch. 2). This need, Hutková argues, was underpinned by principles of mercantilism. Consequently, Britain preferred a region within their expanding empire. Bengal [End Page 593] became a "natural" choice, especially after the failed experiments with silk production in the Atlantic. The book then discusses how EEIC embarked on its silk enterprise in Bengal (ch. 3, 4) and why the peculiarities of silk production in Bengal made raw silk production a profitable venture (ch. 5). The last two chapters focus on metropolitan Britain. The author argues that the aforementioned advantages were lost in the nineteenth century as laissez-faire became the preferred economic principle and EEIC lost its monopoly rights to trade in Asia (ch. 6). She then shows how disinclination in investing in raw silk production forced a formerly profitable sector to eventually disappear, with deleterious consequences for Bengal's economy (ch. 7). The book makes an important contribution to the ongoing and contentious debates among historians and non-academics about the impact of imperial policies on economic fortunes of colonies. It also throws light on an instance of successful technology transfer in a colonial setting. Nevertheless, it is important to ask what is new about underlining how imperial policies did not have salutary impact on the economies of colonies. This is a lesser-known story, but there is no denying the idea of "deindustrialization" as a consequence of imperial policies is time-worn. At a related level, there is an important inconsistency in the central hypothesis of the book. Hutková claims the "research challenges the perception that deindustrialization was the outcome of exploitative British institutions" (p. 4); yet in the same page she writes how the nineteenth-century decline in raw silk production was an unintended result of the shift to laissez-faire policies in Britain. Unless the operative word here is "unintended"—and the author proffers evidence that is absent from the book—it is difficult to balance two such radically opposite views. Technology transfer is an equally important theme of the book. Yet, there is little use (except Ben Marsh's work on the United States) of the wider historiography of the subject—especially the recent literature about technology transfer in colonial South Asia, which focuses on limits (or lack thereof) of the process, including highlighting interactions between imported technologies and local societies. The absence of historiography in this book is particularly surprising, as some of the themes repeatedly underlined in the chapters (such as learning by doing, reliance on local knowledge, and resistance by silk farmers) show how even successful technology transfer in a colony was underpinned by more than financial investment and the desire for profit in the metropole. Also, the discussion is primarily about Britain and India, with a smattering of information about silk in the early modern world—a rather diminutive outcome for a book...

Whither the History of Capitalism?: Reconsidering Finance’s Place in the American Democratic Experiment

Whither the History of Capitalism?: Reconsidering Finance’s Place in the American Democratic Experiment Elizabeth Tandy Shermer (bio) Sarah L. Quinn, American Bonds: How Credit Markets Shaped a Nation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019. xiv + 279 pp. Figures, notes, and index. $35.00. Benjamin Wiggins, Calculating Race: Racial Discrimination in Risk Assessment. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 160 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $74.00. Destin Jenkins, Bonds of Inequality: Debt and the Making of the American City. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. ix + 230 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00. “In History Class, Capitalism sees Its Stock Soar” was a surprising headline to find on the front page of a Sunday New York Times. That April 2013 feature alerted readers to the spread of a “new history of capitalism” on college campuses. That splashy feature covered upper-division classes on “deeply unsexy topics” like insurance, just-released books, t-shirts designed for a scholarly “boot camp,” and new programs “drawing crowds—sometimes with the help of canny brand management.”1 “Well-advertised” seemed a fitting description of the supposedly “new” history of capitalism early in the millennium. Columbia University Press launched a new book series billed as “not your father’s business history,” campuses started or continued to run centers dedicated to capitalism studies, and the Journal of American History eventually published a lengthy 2013 online scholarly interchange including some of the historians profiled in The New York Times as well as the author of this essay. That discussion delved deeper into scholarly issues only hinted at in the news: reconsiderations of slavery and finance; questions about how new this attention-grabbing field was; and fears that people of color, especially women, would be left out of a sub-discipline promising to cover broad stretches of time from the bottom all the way to the top.2 [End Page 452] Those worries seem especially salient almost a decade later, when a pandemic disproportionately ravaged low-income communities of color and pushed women out of the workforce amidst Black Lives Matter protests, #MeToo revelations, efforts to disenfranchise voters of color, and a violent assault on the Capitol. Yet the history of capitalism “brand” appears to have faded. Well-known capitalism scholars were not the headline names working on the New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, which controversially put slavery at the center of U.S. history. Capitalism scholars also didn’t participate in the Trump Administration’s Presidential Advisory 1776 Commission, whose report included no mention of Indigenous people.3 Historians have, of course, continued to ask questions about power and probed the sources of systemic inequality, which suggests that the once-headline-making self-proclaimed new history of capitalism may best be understood as a political-economic turn within the historical profession in particular and the academy in general. Dissertations, books, and articles (some in the new journal Capitalism: A Journal of History and Economics) grappling with political economy remain numerous, befitting two decades marked by global economic catastrophes and worldwide threats to democracy. There seems to have been a need to understand the historic business behind everything, as evidenced by the dissertations on farming,4 mining,5 fast food franchising,6 and the commercial sex trade7 as well as the monographs devoted to gay magazines,8 banking fees,9 Christian oil men,10 high-tech entrepreneurs,11 defense contractors,12 early paper money,13 private beaches,14 and Fordism’s global reach.15 Recent work on the history of finance indicates that this political-economic turn has offered a potent challenge to assumptions about the late-twentieth-century financialization of the country’s economy and emergence of a neoliberal world order. Capitalism scholars—including those in disciplines other than history—have painstakingly revealed how important financial products (like mortgages, bonds, and insurance policies) have always been to the economy, politics, and social fabric of the U.S. A lot of this research has emphasized finance’s historic complicity in worsening inequality, particularly racism and segregation. Yet these eye-opening accounts of pernicious federal policies and private banking practices have often been top-down. As such, the conflict, resistance, and struggle for power, when...

The Becoming of the Past: an Exploration of Temporal Tension Enactments in a Historical Café

The uses of the past are the subject of a stream of research at the intersection of organization studies and business history, which highlights the importance of the past as a “tool” for organizations, but also acknowledges its potential being an “arena of struggle” among organizational actors. However, most contributions in this literature study the uses of the past quite statically, at a given moment in time. Adopting a temporality perspective - i.e. considering the past as constantly (re)negotiated in the present and in relation with the future -, and employing a retrospective study based on historical sources, this paper aims at understanding how the past becomes past and how it informs future outcomes. The empirical case used to explore this research question is the Caffe Pedrocchi, an historical cafe in Padua (Italy), which the founder’s heir left as a bequest to the Municipality, explicitly positing a past-future tension in the use of its past. We found out that in the history of the cafe there was no such thing as “the” past to be projected for the future, but four main forms that the same cafe’s past took (legacy, burden, constraint, enabler), varying along two dimensions: the past’s positive/negative value, and the active/passive role assigned to it. Also, every form of the past came with at least two possible future outcomes: continuous future (the maintenance of the status quo) and discontinuous future, occurring whenever some actor intervened influentially, also creating a new form of the past. By disentangling the role of the past beyond being just a tool or an arena of struggle, we provide a processual view on how the past shifts its forms according to the actors’ interventions and future outcomes.

ПРОМЫШЛЕННЫЕ КОРПОРАЦИИ ДОРЕВОЛЮЦИОННОЙ РОССИИ В НОВЕЙШЕЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ИСТОРИОГРАФИИ (1990–2010-Е ГОДЫ)

Given the growing need for a better understanding of the history of Russian business, the author suggests that a comprehensive historiographic analysis that logically combines theoretically developed conceptual findings and micro indicators obtained empirically is a particularly useful prospect for studying industrial corporations. Based on the capitalist modernization concept, the author studies how factors at the level of production, ownership, management, and the environment are combined into distinct institutional and organizational forms that spur industrial business. The goal of the article is to (1) highlight the utility of using a complex approach in advancing industrial firms research and (2) promote the use of such an approach to foster a better understanding of the interests of business owners and how these interests may relate to important economic, institutional, organizational and sociocultural characteristics of large joint stock companies. With these goals in mind, the article is a survey of research in extant business history literature that used conceptual characteristics and archival research to describe industrial corporations. Engaging recent studies, the author demonstrates how the analysis of firms helps illuminate the dynamics of economic life in pre-revolutionary Russia. Using the proposed subject-chronological approach to the historiographic study, the article confirms that the academic developments of the 1990s – the 2010s were thematically broader than previously described. Thus, the history of industrial corporations is important for understanding various aspects of Russia’s economic development in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The author presents suggestions for future research using macro- and microanalysis and their applications to the history of industrial corporations.

РАЗВИТИЕ НАУЧНО-ИССЛЕДОВАТЕЛЬСКОЙ ДЕЯТЕЛЬНОСТИ В МУЗЕЯХ ОМСКОЙ ОБЛАСТИ В 1960–1980-х гг.

Today, there are a number of scientific publications devoted to specific aspects of the activities of Omsk museums in the period of 1960-1980. However, their availability did not lead to the solution of the problem of comprehensive study of Museum development in the Omsk region. The author of the article set the goal – to trace the development of research activities in museums of the Omsk region over a whole stage in the history of museum business. This manifested the scientific novelty of the study. The basis of the sources involved was the documents of the historical archive of the Omsk region (record-keeping and reporting documentation), state and party regulatory documents, the results of studies of predecessors in this matter, museographic sources. The analysis was based on the local-historical method, which made it possible to specify historical circumstances that influenced quantitative and qualitative changes. The historical-typological method allowed to systematize data on types of research activities on the types of research activities that is practiced in the museums of the region in 1960–1980-ies. The article focuses on the period that can be described as the most dynamic in the development of museums and museum network of the country. The museums were given the status of scientific institutions at the state level, measures have been taken to improve the organization of research work. It is found that the main types of research work in museums of the Omsk region in 1960–1980s were the development of scientific topics according to the thematic-expositional plans of the expositions and exhibitions; compilation of museum guides for exhibitions and expositions; development of texts of excursions, lectures, and texts for television and radio programmes; preparation of scientific articles by results of the conducted research; preparation of materials of methodological nature; organization and participation in scientific conferences; expeditionary trips to the districts of Omsk region; study of museum collections. The article reveals the specifics and directions of development of this activity, specify the reasons influencing its intensity. The conclusion is that the research activity was carried out deliberately and systematically turned into a basis that is firmly associated with all activities of the museum. Thanks to the productive activity and attention from the management and staff of the museums to research work was able to bring it to a higher level of development.

ГРУНТОВНЕ ВИДАННЯ З ІСТОРІЇ КНИГИ ТА КНИЖКОВОЇ СПРАВИ

The authors wrote a review of I. V. Dovzhuk’s textbook «Book Science Basics». It is noted that the peer-reviewed educational publication is relevant, timely and in demand, because it examines the history of book business from ancient times to the early XXth century on a broad historical background and using unique sources, both known and little known. It is emphasized that the generalization and comprehension by I. V. Dovzhuk of the available material on the researched problem significantly expand the available knowledge on the history of books and book science. It is concluded that the peer-reviewed textbook «Book Science Basics» in general makes a positive impression, and the research, creative and analytical-practical work carried out by the researcher deserves positive approval.

“Own Name,” “No Name,” and “The Plague of Fancy Names”

Within popular narratives of the nineteenth century, branded commercial remedies—with their hyperbolic advertisements—are often cast in an unsavory light. This article reconsiders branded medicines and draws on scholarship from business historians to show that brands in the British marketplace were redefined during the late nineteenth century as a result of trademark legislation, particularly the Trade Marks Registration Act 1875. Concentrating on advertisements and commentary from the trade and professional press between c. 1875 and c. 1920, this article explores how trademarks were used as a regulatory and communicative device within a chain of distribution. Pharmacists, however, were wary of the “plague of fancy names,” as <i>The Pharmaceutical Journal</i> wrote on May 12, 1906, and many retail chemists did not want their own name usurped by a manufacturer’s brand within their own retail space. Mindful of this concern, manufacturers and wholesalers began to offer a range of “No Name” or “Own Name” preparations. This article will highlight that some brands could hold great value in certain local areas, but it also draws on the archives of Burroughs Wellcome &amp; Co. to outline trademark legislation’s impact on the sale and understanding of commercial remedies on a global scale.

From Business to Central Planning: Cooperatives in Czechoslovakia in 1918-1938 and 1948-1960

The paper focuses on cooperatives — seen as business enterprises — in the First Czechoslovak Republic (1918-1938) and the period of 12 years after the communist putsch (1948-1960). It compares the functions of cooperatives, the limits placed on their (semi-)independent business activities, and their chances to decide for themselves in the market economy and the centrally planned economy. Drawing on the methods of business history and economic history, the study seeks to answer the following questions: 1. Were the cooperatives in the First Czechoslovak Republic really fully independent companies running their business on a free market? 2. Were the cooperatives in the Stalinist and early post-Stalinist Czechoslovakia really subordinated subjects in a centrally planned economy? 3. Are there any real connections in the functioning of cooperatives in these two eras? In other words, is it possible that something of the independent cooperatives survived and that the traditional interpretations (according to which the two eras were completely different and even contradictory) can be seen in new and more accurate ways?

Review of Selected Books on Business History Published in Japan in 2020

Review of Selected Books on Business History Published in Japan in 2020

SOAPOLOGY - A BUSINESS COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS REPORT ON TWO LEADING INDIAN SOAP MANUFACTURING BRANDS

In order to acquire knowledge outside the classroom and widen my horizons in the field of reallife business development activities, I conducted a comparative analysis report on two prominent Indian soap manufacturing brands namely - Dabur India Limited a national soap brand &amp; Raj Industries a regional soap brand. The main focus of the study was to gain an insight into the business histories of these firms, examine their business strategies and marketing techniques, learn about their multiple product ranges and then finally I self-designed a SWOT analysis for the market brand assessment. I had the opportunity to interview the Managing Partner of Raj Industries and learn through his varied professional experiences. I transcribed and compiled the interview inputs into this research paper. This white paper concludes with a section that highlights my learning related to this study.

An overview on entrepreneurial development and its antecedents

Entrepreneurship is a constant process of being inspirational, adventurous, and prepared it is crucial to economic growth and brings about major changes in market economies. In light of the shifting business landscape, previous research has identified a number of variables that influence entrepreneurial growth. The purpose of this research is to investigate the variables that influence entrepreneurial growth in the context of changing business conditions in India. The goal was to investigate these variables in order to provide a foundation for future study. Many studies have looked at entrepreneurial orientations, entrepreneurial behaviours, personality characteristics, and leadership styles. Exogenous variables influencing entrepreneurial orientations (innovativeness, risk-taking capacity of entrepreneurs, proactiveness, and info-seeking behaviours) such as cultural/ethnic background, family business history, and emotional intelligence (EI) are also researched. However, the bulk of these findings come from research done mostly in industrialized countries such as the United States, Europe, Japan, and China. In underdeveloped nations, a few studies have been found. The vast majority of Indian research is focused on a few specific subjects. Indian views, on the other hand, were judged to be lacking. This literature evaluation may serve as a springboard for future research in the Indian context.

How History Shaped the Innovator's Dilemma

In 1993, four years prior to the publication of Clayton Christensen's highly influential book, The Innovator's Dilemma, the Business History Review published an article by Christensen titled “The Rigid Disk Drive Industry: A History of Commercial and Technological Turbulence.” The article relates the theory of disruptive innovation to Alfred D. Chandler's work on large vertically integrated enterprises. It was published during a pivotal era of scholarship on innovation, management practice, and industry evolution, much of which used the history of firms, industries, and technologies to build theory. I survey the impact and critiques of Christensen's research agenda, highlighting how it illustrates where the boundaries associated with the “lessons of history” should be drawn.

A Business History of the Bicycle Industry: Shaping Marketing Practices by Carlo Mari

A Business History of the Bicycle Industry: Shaping Marketing Practices by Carlo Mari

History of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway by Keith L. Bryant and Fred W. Frailey

Reviewed by: History of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway by Keith L. Bryant and Fred W. Frailey Theresa A. Case History of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway. By Keith L. Bryant and Fred W. Frailey. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2020. Pp. 432. Illustrations, notes, bibliographic essay, index.) History of the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railway is now available in a new edition that elevates and expands the original volume, first published [End Page 104] in 1974 by Keith L. Bryant Jr. The 2020 version, with the help of the same abundance of maps (twenty) and illustrations (eighty-seven), delineates the business history of the ATSF. Its chief addition is an examination of the period 1970 to 1995, when, one might assume (wrongly), circumstances would have doomed the railroad. Like the earlier version, the new edition should have a broad readership. Railroad nostalgists will appreciate the attention to the ATSF's distinctive features: its long association with Harvey House eateries and the Native American motifs that dominated its advertising campaigns, for example. Businesspeople may delight in various dramatic accounts, such as the one about the railway's machinations, legally and on the ground physically, to secure a route into New Mexico via Ratón Pass, or, more recently, about the bidding war and unexpected boardroom clash that accompanied the ATSF's merger with the Burlington Northern Railroad. Students of Texas history will value its in-depth descriptions of the railway's extension into the High Plains, Panhandle, eastern and central regions, and Gulf Coast. The authors make a convincing case for the ATSF's unique character, namely, its leaders' largely successful efforts to maintain the system's independence, the railway's relatively positive popular reputation (compared to the Southern Pacific), and its tradition of judiciousness on the financial front. Bryant and Frailey combine biographical sketches of ATSF officials with thorough explanations as to how each one made a mark on the railroad's development. The new section on the ATSF's final twenty-five years highlights, for instance, president Michael Haverty's significant expansion of the railway's intermodal business and the highly strategic cost-cutting measures of Robert Krebs. The preface to the first edition promises attention to the relationship between the ATSF and the towns and cities it served. In this edition's telling, the symbiosis was mutually beneficial, as the ATSF contributed to the Southwest's booming population and economy, while the proceeds from passenger ticket sales and freight traffic in cotton, coal, timber, cattle, the hard red wheat of Mennonite farmers, and oil allowed the ATSF to invest in modern equipment, new construction, improved locomotive design, and diesel technology. While they claim that the book is not an "official" history (xvi), Bryant and Frailey rely heavily on the ATSF's massive corporate archives. They do not reference recent scholarship, like Richard White's Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (W. W. Norton, 2011), which questions the depiction of railway giants as a civilizing, progressive force. Likewise, although one stated aim is to relate ATSF "managers and workers" beyond "numbers and names" (xvi), ATSF employees are largely anonymous, marginal actors in their story. Far more ink is spent on the décor of parlor cars and railroad-owned hotels, the evolution of steam engines, and elegant Harvey House menu items than on the experiences and perspectives of the workers who made the wheels turn. The chapter [End Page 105] on dieselization devotes pages to the evolution and fate of machinery but only one paragraph to the mortal blows that diesel dealt many railroad towns. In other words, although the book acknowledges the ATSF's managerial missteps, it conveys the world of the ATSF chiefly from the vantage point of its executives, who saw "loyal" employees and abandoned roundhouses in the periphery of their vision and Populists and unionists as noisy, deluded obstacles in their path. One hopes the corporate archives are open to historians who wish to move beyond Bryant and Frailey and seek to understand the broader human dimensions of the ATSF story. Theresa A. Case University of Houston-Downtown Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association...

David Overshadows Goliath: Specializing in Generality for Internationalization in the Global Mobile Money Industry

We investigate the emergence of a global industry based on digital innovation by studying how the international expansion of pioneering firms relates to their characteristics and strategies for capability development and deployment. Using detailed archival data on mobile money, we classify pioneers that internationalize based on whether they were multinational diversifying entrants, developed country startups, or developing country startups. Our quantitative evidence suggests developing country startups that internationalize have the highest impact on the industry through subsequent platform launches. Digging deeper into the business histories of each firm, we uncover why: these startups “specialize in generality” by developing and deploying “bundled knowledge” capital consisting of technology, problem-solving and alliance management capabilities, thereby offsetting their physical capital scale and scope disadvantages relative to multinational diversifying entrants.

Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance

Reviewed by: Rodeo: An Animal History by Susan Nance Jeannette Vaught Rodeo: An Animal History. By Susan Nance. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2020. Pp. 320. Illustrations, notes, works cited, index.) Rodeo as a sport and longstanding constellation of American cultural iconographies is receiving a serious scholarly reappraisal. Just last year, Rebecca Scofield's Outriders: Rodeo at the Fringes of the American West (University of Washington Press, 2019) re-evaluated various human histories and impacts of rodeo by carefully analyzing its fringes and margins. Now, historian Susan Nance presents a fresh accounting of rodeo from its very center. Her focus, on the overlooked and under-analyzed equines and bovines without whom there would be no rodeo, makes this book, Rodeo: An Animal History, true to its title. Following a formula that she employed in her history of elephant exhibitions, Entertaining Elephants: Animal Agency and the Business of the American Circus (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013), Nance here provides a thorough business history of rodeo—infused with environmental history and insights from animal welfare science—to reconstruct the histories and experiences of animals involved in rodeo. She ranges from rodeo spectacles themselves to a mosaic of the ranches, feedlots, and slaughterhouses of the beef industry; rodeo schools; breeding farms; and thousands of rural backyards across the United States and Canada, without which rodeo could not happen. Nance's broad central argument is that rodeo is a resiliently effective mediator of the entwined social and environmental changes that accompanied western American settler colonialism and the often dire consequences of those changes on people, land, and animals. "Rodeo's animals," she argues, "become surrogates for the trials of rural life in the West and the violence of its history" (6). By paying attention to the environmental and animal histories of rodeo, Nance shows that "rodeo has been both a stubborn celebration of that rural quarrel with the land and a coping mechanism for dealing with the limits of people, animals, and the land" (15). Throughout, Nance foregrounds the oppositional mentality embedded in western settler histories and how it plays out in rodeo culture. Her analysis spans the long century from early cowboy tournaments of the 1880s to the formation and success of the Professional Bull Riders tour in the 1990s and 2000s. In six chronological chapters, Nance relies on a formidable collection of archives, including myriad organizational [End Page 360] records and periodicals. She also provides a thorough bibliography of source material pertaining to rodeo, animals, and their diverse allied subjects. Each chapter focuses on a particular equine or bovine rodeo participant, whose stories reveal the back stage, as it were, to readers. Nance pairs readings of human historical records with on-the-hoof accounts of what animals experienced, and her account is straightforward about the brutality that animals and humans experience. The difference, she asserts, is that humans involved in rodeo and rodeo-adjacent pipelines choose to put themselves in the difficult and dangerous positions that construct the complex web of considering oneself "western" or rural. Animals do not. Nance grounds her analysis of human-animal rodeo relationships in the concept of the "myth of animal consent," a phrase she borrows and expands upon from the writer Jonathan Safran Foer. As Nance shows, this concept frequently manifests as an acknowledgement of animal intelligence and consciousness, characteristics that animal welfare and rights advocates have long considered a reason to care for animals. However, in rodeo and its allied conduits, it also serves as proof that nonhuman animals are making informed and free choices about their actions. This absurd logic, Nance explains, appears in totemic rodeo clichés like animals who "love to buck" and in pervasive narratives about animals that are glad to perform in rodeos because they know the alternative is the slaughterhouse. This twisting of animal intelligence into a myth about their consent accompanies Nance's analysis of many layers of rodeo performance, from race and masculinity to environmental degradation and economic pressures to which rodeo responds and adapts. Even for those who are used to thinking of rodeo as a problematic space for human and other animals, a sobering thought surfaces: improving the lives of all species in rodeo performances...