{"title":"Smuggler States: Poland, Latvia, Estonia, and Contraband Trade Across the Soviet Frontier, 1919–1924","authors":"A. Shlyakhter","doi":"10.1017/eso.2022.42","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.42","url":null,"abstract":"What happens to an imperial economy after empire? How do economics, security, and ideology interact at the new frontiers? Who governs the border? The eastern borders of Poland, Latvia, and Estonia comprised much of the interwar Soviet state’s western frontier—the focus of Moscow’s revolutionary aspirations and security concerns. These young nations paid for their independencewith the loss of the Imperial Russian market. Lodz, the “Polish Manchester,” had fashioned its textiles for Russian and Ukrainian consumers; Riga had been the empire’s busiest commercial port; Tallinn had been one of the busiest—and Russians drank nine-tenths of the potato vodka distilled on Estonian estates. Eager to reclaim their traditional market, but stymied by the Soviet state monopoly on foreign trade and impatient with the slow grind of trade talks, these countries’ businessmen turned to the porous Soviet frontier. The dissertation reveals how, despite considerable misgivings, their governments actively abetted this traffic. The Polish and Baltic struggles to balance the heady profits of the “border trade” against a host of security concerns, the dissertation argues, profoundly shaped state policies and everyday lives on both sides of the Soviet frontier. My dissertation forms a first book, the initial part of a larger study of contraband trade across the early Soviet borders. A planned second bookwill focus on how smuggling and the struggle against it both reflected and shaped the Soviet experience, from the frontier to Moscow. However, the dissertation looks at the Soviet frontier from the other side. It uncovers how contraband trade was seen and managed from Warsaw, Riga, and Tallinn; supplied from Lodz and the American South; financed from London and Antwerp; and administered and practiced from the towns and shtetls lining the western side of the Soviet frontier. The payoffs for taking this distant detour fromMoscow are bothmethodological and substantive.","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41839807","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Born in Flames: Arson, Racial Capitalism, and the Reinsuring of the Bronx in the Late Twentieth Century","authors":"Bench Ansfield","doi":"10.1017/eso.2022.40","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.40","url":null,"abstract":"During the 1970s, a wave of landlord arson coursed through cities across the United States, destroying large portions of neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Despite its massive toll — hundreds of thousands of housing units were lost in these years — historians have neglected the burning of the nation ’ s cities, and popular memory has confused the 1970s arson wave with the less destructive urban uprisings of the 1960s. How was it possible that urban areas across the United States, all within the same years, experienced such unprece-dented levels of arson? The answer hinges not on insurrection but rather indemnification, and at the center of this project is the untold history of the racially stratified property insurance market, a key force in the making of U.S. urban inequality. Born in Flames: Arson, Racial Capitalism, and the Reinsuring of the Bronx in the Late Twentieth Century positions the 1970s arson wave as a singular window into late twentieth century transformations in racial capitalism, or the entanglement between racial hierarchy and the imperatives of capitalist accu-mulation. The project is propelled by three questions that I ask in sequence: Why did cities go up in flames in these years? How were their fires extinguished? And what arose in their ashes? Together, these seemingly simple lines of inquiry cast new light on the restructuring of the built environment, the business environment, and American capitalism over the past five decades. This project is grounded","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45626408","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction","authors":"G. Jonker, S. Müssig","doi":"10.1163/22117954-bja10075","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/22117954-bja10075","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:The Bryant & May company is well known for its operations in Britain. Historians have paid less attention to the actions of the company overseas. The opening of a new Australian subsidiary factory in 1909 marked an early venture in multinational manufacturing within the British Empire. This article uses business records and newspapers from both the British and Australian archives to examine the day-to-day operations of this multinational, with a particular focus on the human dimension of the interactions between London and Melbourne. The Bryant & May case study reveals the evolving, sometimes tense, relationship between the “home” and “subsidiary” branches in the context of British imperialism and Australian federation in the years preceding World War I. Business, personal, and imperial relationships intertwined. While business historians have developed theoretical frameworks to understand why companies embark on multinational operations, work remains to be done on the longer-term operations of companies in particular political, social, and cultural contexts. We examine the building of the Empire Works match factory in Melbourne, the nature of transnational management, labor relations, and key production challenges up to the Interstate Commission of 1914. We reveal how Melbourne managers, sometimes against the inclinations of the London directors, were prepared to drive a hard bargain with local politicians and workers. Bryant & May successfully, and sometimes controversially, gained competitive advantage as a “local” company with access to preferential tariffs. This placed the firm in an ideal position to prosper when international trade was disrupted during World War I.","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-11-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42494919","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Globalization from Below: Labor Inequality in the German Shipbuilding Industry, 1960–2000","authors":"Katharina Bothe, Carolin Decker-Lange","doi":"10.1017/eso.2022.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.27","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article examines how globalization shaped work and employment in the German shipbuilding industry in the second half of the twentieth century. Official documents show that, as a response to global competition, originally large and labor-intensive shipyards in the northwest of Germany evolved into lean and nimble high-technology companies across four decades. Oral history interviews with former migrant and nonmigrant staff of two leading shipyards reveal that this large-scale industry transformation is a hitherto hidden history of labor mobility, migration, and evolving dimensions of diversity in the workplace. Migration is a lens through which to understand how corporate responses to global developments led to persistent patterns of social exclusion and inequality between and within groups of workers with and without migrant backgrounds that have not been documented before, namely: social divisions, unequal access to vocational training and retraining programs, unequal career opportunities, unfair redundancies, and unequal impact of precarious work.</p>","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-26","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138545595","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Marcia Chatelain. Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America. New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2020. 336 pp. ISBN 978-1-63149-394-2 $28.95 (cloth).","authors":"Marlene H. Gaynair","doi":"10.1017/eso.2022.24","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.24","url":null,"abstract":"Carl Stokes lovedhis hometownofCleveland. Born and raised in thisMidwest city, hewon the 1967 mayoral election, becoming the first African American mayor of a major municipality. Formany Black voters, their support for Stokes also supported visions of Black capitalism and “their desires to see themselves reflected in positions of power and authority” in Cleveland (91). Stokes realized that he needed to “assume a probusiness stance” to survive his mayoral term, while he supported the Black electorate that looked towards a brighter future (91). Thus, the new mayor supported Black businesspeople such as Ernest Hilliard, who desired one of the lucrative McDonald’s franchises in East Cleveland’s Black community. These four restaurants owned by threewhite businessmen, “exceeded the national average of profits each year” (94). Many community activists wondered wondered if any of the profits remained in the neighborhood, decided to boycott the four restaurants to compel McDonald’s into extending franchise opportunities to African American investors. Under immense pressure, the three East Side locations closed from a lack of sales and forced the last franchisee to sell to Hilliard, who shortly enjoyed profits exceeding more than 84% over the previous year (94). Unlike some sit-ins and boycotts at which activists fought racial segregation in restaurants and lunch counters, the Cleveland boycotts aimed for ownership, investment, and economic prosperity for a meaningful amount of African Americans in the city (120). In the 2020 Pulitzer Prize–winning book Franchise: The Golden Arches in Black America, Marcia Chatelain examines the role of McDonald’s, one of the world’s most successful fastfood brands, and the “hidden history of the intertwined relationship between the struggle for civil rights and the expansion of the fast-food system” (3). Starting with foundersMaurice and Richard McDonald in the 1940s and then moving into the twenty-first century, Chatelain highlights the “contemporary conversation about race and fast food” and how “other fast-food chains followed McDonald’s path as they identified and cultivated a Black consumer market and franchise corps” (11). AsMcDonald’s began to franchise locations across the country, and embedded itself intoAmerican history, the scholarship on this restaurant ignored the \"Golden Arches\" connection and their relationship to BlackAmerica. In a clear intervention, Chatelain argues that when denied access and citizenship to what Lizabeth Cohen calls the “consumer republic,” African Americans used “the marketplace to make claims for their rights” (12). Therefore, McDonald’s had no other choice but to acknowledge the significance of their black customers and franchisees, after decades of social, political, economic, and cultural actions to hold the corporation accountable. Chatelain’s interventions, the critical analysis on Black","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45929254","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Historical Social Network Analysis of John Pinney’s Nevis–Bristol Network: Change over Time, the “Network Memory,” and Reading Against the Grain of Historical Sources","authors":"Peter Buckles","doi":"10.1017/eso.2022.19","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.19","url":null,"abstract":"Social network analysis is an increasingly common tool for historians seeking to understand the interrelations between individuals. A significant concern, however, is how we might measure changes within networks over time and between periods. Historians have favored examining the network as it stands at particular points in time. However, this approach fails to capture the instability within networks and does not incorporate the perceptions of contemporaries. One solution is to integrate network data into a time series that is built around conceptualizations of the “network memory.” In a case study on John Pinney’s late eighteenth-century Nevis–Bristol network, I use a two-year moving total to model the lingering nature of ephemeral interactions on the memories of those involved in the plantation trade. Using this historical social network analysis as the basis for an iterative approach to the primary material, I explore what being a part of this network meant for the enslaved people on Pinney’s plantation and for the women in his family. This article demonstrates the value of the approach and highlights the ways in which historians can use it to contribute to the historiography of early modern business networks.","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46632983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Trees of the Forest: Uncovering Small-Scale Producers in an Industrial District, 1781–1851","authors":"J. Lane","doi":"10.1017/eso.2022.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2022.7","url":null,"abstract":"This article uses trade directories and notifications in the London Gazette to reconstruct the Potteries industrial district at the firm level for 1781 to 1851, a dynamic period of growth for a knowledge-intensive industry. It cuts across the organizational spectrum of the district in terms of the scale and scope of firms traditionally examined by including both the larger lead-firms and the smaller firms for which limited or no business records survive. It addresses difficulties associated with analysis of early clusters before the late nineteenth century. Directories offer a consistent series of records that, when cross-referenced with the Gazette and local newspapers, allow for detailed examination of firm behavior and the structure of the district during a formative growth period. Analysis highlights patterns of cooperative competition in an industry in which tacit knowledge played a crucial role as a source of competitive advantage, raises questions for future research, and provides an empirical base on which to consider further investigation of the trees that made up the forest.","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2022-05-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46686153","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}