The paper focuses on the history of an entrepreneurial family, member of the local élite of Verona in between the old typographical regime and the modern publishing industry. It also describes the rise and fall of a family company with large interests in the field of printing, cardboard...

This paper examines the pivotal role of Nicola Miraglia in steering the Banco di Napoli through a tumultuous period of economic crisis and institutional decay in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Miraglia undertook the daunting task of managing a bank on the brink of bankruptcy due to the...

While several studies have shed light on the emergence of consumer society in Western Europe and the Atlantic world, our knowledge on the spread of new consumption patterns in regions beyond the core areas of European economic development is still limited. To gain insights into patterns of...

This article proposes to take a fresh look at Germany’s colonial past and its key players in order to trace the particular influence of economy in colonial contexts. It presents the Gutehoffnungshütte (GHH) as a colonial actor outside the sectors typically explored in the context of the...

By providing a working definition of an expatriate colonial business, this article examines the role of the Woermann group's integration into and support of colonialism through trade, plantations, and logistics. Focusing on its activities in Cameroon and the pivotal role of the Woermann Linie...

This study presents a process narrative of how cooperatives emerge during periods of economic disruption. Cooperative organizations are pluralistic and embedded in existing local economic contexts. Yet, the role that such organizations play can be pronounced when economic disruption occurs in...

In the second half of the twentieth century, the car industry became a lightning rod for debates about human contributions to climate change. Widespread motorisation galvanised the green movements of the 1960s and 1970s, regulators increasingly demanded the use of pollution and climate...

The climate crisis is at the core of attention to the need for an energy transition at a scale resembling a new 'low carbon' industrial revolution. As energy transitions are relatively exceptional and prolonged processes, social scientists have increasingly turned their attention to historical...

The audio compact disc (CD) has been a common item in most households ever since its introduction in the early 1980s. A pioneer format in digital music, it captured the imagination of many at the time of its inception. In this article, I present the CD as a business history case, from being a...

In the early twentieth century, predominantly white union barbers in Arkansas implemented voluntary regulations that dictated business practices to create a voluntary cartel. Black and other minority barbers who often had more success than white barbers prior to unionization tended to ignore...