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This examination of the social processes that inform cultural production asks how tastes are formed, transmitted, embedded, and reproduced across generations. These questions are explored through a study of William Morris, his working methods and products, and their impact on the decorative arts in Victorian Britain and beyond. Through the exercise of cultural leadership, Morris gave physical expression to the ideals and sentiments of Romanticism, and this in turn gave rise to a community of taste reaching across class boundaries and generations. Morrisian products and designs, through the agency of his disciples, became institutionally embedded, emblematic of refinement and good taste. A process model of taste formation is deployed to explore the economic and social dynamics at work in the Morris case and more generally. more...

This article is based on a prosopographical study of comparative business elites in France and Britain, drawing on the work of social theorists Pierre Bourdieu and Ezra Suleiman. The re is ev ide nce to sugge st that c rossshareholdings, at the heart of French capitalism since the 1960s, have begun to unravel, under pressure from globalisation. Yet the cultural substrata that underlie French busine ss practice s are pow erful. M ore likely than the complete undoing of cross-shareholdings is the adaptation of the national system to suit international structures. The authors argue, at least provisionally, that French shareholdings are being ceded for a stake in a wider international game, in an attempt to enable French management elites to maintain hegemonic control of leading domestic and European enterprises, in this way pre-emptively and proactively engaging with the structural logic of globalisation. more...

The Taff Vale Railway strike of 1900 stands as a landmark in the history of industrial relations in Britain. There is a substantial literature dealing with the strike and resulting court case. Yet relatively little attention has been paid to the underlying pressures and tensions which gave rise to the strike nor to its wider consequences: the focus hitherto has been on labour, politics and labour law rather than the dynamics of the struggle between capital and labour which raged throughout the railway industry. The strike resulted from a clash between an assertive labour movement and a beleaguered management with little financial room for manoeuvre. Victory for capital paved the way for far-reaching changes in technology and working methods without conceding the gains to labour through the agency of trade union action. more...

This issue of Business History not only marks 50 years since the journal's inception; it also sees the end of Charles Harvey's editorship. Charles took over as editor from Richard Davenport-Hines i... more...

(1990). Issues in the History of Mining and Metallurgy. Business History: Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 1-14.

(1990). The City and International Mining, 1870–1914. Business History: Vol. 32, No. 3, pp. 98-119.

Managerial revolutions - which witness the appropriation of corporate power by professional managers - come in different shapes and sizes. This article builds upon existing critiques of Chandler's universal theory of the managerial revolution through reference to the French national business system, arguing that the concept of the managerial revolution is best understood within specific cultural contexts, elite ideologies and national business systems. It demonstrates, through the inclusion of original data, and a business historical case study, that the French model of capitalism is distinguished by continuing links between the state and business, by the density of its corporate networks, and the large number of elite actors with experience of working in an executive capacity in both the public and private sectors, in stark contrast to the UK. more...

The last few years have witnessed a growing appreciation among students of international business of the extensive British involvement in overseas mining in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In examining the leading role of the City of London in mining finance and speculation, van Helten has shown that between 1880 and 1913 some 8,408 companies were registered in Britain for mining and mine exploration abroad. Many of these companies were of little consequence, and it is hard to estimate with any precision the amount of cash actually invested, as Harvey and Taylor have demonstrated in their work on foreign direct investment in Spain.^ Nonetheless, it is clear that the overseas mining investment boom was of great consequence and that Australia, Africa, Europe, Asia, North America and South America all proved attractive to British mining entrepreneurs and investors. British-owned companies, for example, accounted for 60 per cent of the world's output of gold in 1898, and by 1914 '20 of the world's largest copper mines, a quarter of the tin output of the Straits Settlement and Malay States and 60 per cent of the Chilean nitrate industry was owned and controlled by British-based firms.'"* McCarty estimates the rate of investment in companies operating overseas to be around £9 million a year in the 1880s, £20 million a year in the 1890s, and £10.5 million a year in 1902-14.'* The thrust of scholarship has been towards explaining why British mining entrepreneurs and investors moved overseas so vigorously. However, while considerable attention has been paid to the resource needs of British industry and to finance, speculation, and the activities of prominent businessmen, relatively little attention has been paid to the people whose technical skills made possible expansion on a global scale. Much remains to be said about the activities of British mining engineers abroad: about their training, recruitment, movements, careers, rewards, and professional standing. This article explores these topics, and in particular focuses on the emergence. more...

(1986). William Morris and the Marketing of Art. Business History: Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 36-54.