Merchants to Multinationals

Merchants to Multinationals PDF Author: Geoffrey Jones
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191530468
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
Merchants to Multinationals examines the evolution of multinational trading companies from the eighteenth century to the present day. During the Industrial Revolution, British merchants established overseas branches which became major trade intermediaries and subsequently engaged in foreign direct investment. Complex multinational business groups emerged controlling large investments in natural resources, processing, and services in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While theories of the firm predict the demise over time of merchant firms, this book identifies the continued resilience of British trading companies despite the changing political and business environments of the twentieth century. Like Japanese trading companies, they 're-invented' themselves in successive generations. The competences of the trading companies resided in their information-gathering, relationship-building, human resource, and corporate governance systems. This book provides a new dimension to the literature on international business through the focus on multinational service firms and its evolutionary approach based on confidential business records.

Merchants to Multinationals

Merchants to Multinationals PDF Author: Geoffrey Jones
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191530468
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 415

Get Book Here

Book Description
Merchants to Multinationals examines the evolution of multinational trading companies from the eighteenth century to the present day. During the Industrial Revolution, British merchants established overseas branches which became major trade intermediaries and subsequently engaged in foreign direct investment. Complex multinational business groups emerged controlling large investments in natural resources, processing, and services in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While theories of the firm predict the demise over time of merchant firms, this book identifies the continued resilience of British trading companies despite the changing political and business environments of the twentieth century. Like Japanese trading companies, they 're-invented' themselves in successive generations. The competences of the trading companies resided in their information-gathering, relationship-building, human resource, and corporate governance systems. This book provides a new dimension to the literature on international business through the focus on multinational service firms and its evolutionary approach based on confidential business records.

The Globalization of Merchant Banking before 1850

The Globalization of Merchant Banking before 1850 PDF Author: Manuel Llorca-Ja?a
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351543938
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 179

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Book Description
London merchant bankers emerged during the 1820s in the wake of financial turmoil caused by the wars of American Independence, the Napoleonic campaigns and the Anglo-American war of 1812. Though the majority of merchant bankers remained cautious in their affairs, Huth & Co established an impressive global network of trade and lending, dealing with over 6,000 correspondents in more than seventy countries. Based on archival research, this comparative study provides a new chronology of early nineteenth-century commercial and financial expansion.Huth & Co. were truly market-makers and key intermediaries of commodities and capital flows in the international economy. This is an important example of a firm shaping globalisation well before the transport and communication revolution of the last quarter of the nineteenth century. But rather than a case study, this is a comparative study concerned with the commercial and financial activities of the leading merchant-bankers of the periodThis book will be of great interest to business and economic historians interested in the nature of the early decades of the first globalization.

Merchant Kings

Merchant Kings PDF Author: Stephen R. Bown
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1429927356
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 338

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Book Description
Commerce meets conquest in this swashbuckling story of the six merchant-adventurers who built the modern world It was an era when monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land, and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers, or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable, dictatorial political power over millions of people. The merchant kings of the Age of Heroic Commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger-than-life men who, for a couple hundred years, expanded their far-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India Company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged governor of the Dutch West India Company, whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive, who rose from company clerk to become head of the British East India Company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain; Alexandr Baranov of the Russian American Company; Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia; and George Simpson, the "Little Emperor" of the Hudson's Bay Company, who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records. Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises. A blend of biography, corporate history, and colonial history, this book offers a panoramic, new perspective on the enormous cultural, political, and social legacies, good and bad, of this first period of unfettered globalization.

Entrepreneurship and Multinationals

Entrepreneurship and Multinationals PDF Author: Geoffrey Jones
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
ISBN: 1782548181
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
Harvard Business School Professor Geoffrey Jones has long been a student of the history of multinational enterprise. He has taken a leadership role in the field. This volume reflects the extraordinary breadth of his historical research, spanning continents and industries. His focus is on the firm as an actor on the stage of the history of globalization. This book contains a selection of his unpublished and published articles. Of special interest is his updated previously unpublished 2006 talk that explores how firms and entrepreneurs fit into the scholarly debates on the Great Divergence between the West and the Rest. This is a splendid collection. Mira Wilkins, Florida International University, US This fascinating volume explores the roles played by entrepreneurship and multinational enterprises in the development of the modern global world. Through a combination of new and previously published essays charting business developments from the nineteenth century onward, the author demonstrates how multinational corporations have driven globalization through the transfer of innovation and cultural values. The selected essays cover a range of topics, including studies of global industries and major corporations including Beiersdorf and Unilever. Additional chapters explore economic and corporate development in specific countries, such as India, Iran and Turkey. Merging rich historical evidence with discussion of the current state of global business, this book reveals how examining entrepreneurial activity and multinational strategies deepen explanations of global patterns of wealth and poverty. It offers compelling new perspectives on current debates about globalization from one of the most prominent scholars in the field of business history. This volume will appeal to students and professors of economics, entrepreneurship, international business and history as well as anyone with an interest in understanding the past, present and future of globalization.

Scottish Diaspora

Scottish Diaspora PDF Author: Tanja Bueltmann
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 0748648941
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
A history of the Scottish diaspora from c.1700 to 1945 Did you know that Scotland was one of Europe's main population exporters in the age of mass migration? Or that the Scottish Honours System was introduced as far afield as New Zealand? This comprehensive introductory history of the Scottish diaspora examines these and related issues, exploring the migration of Scots overseas, their experiences in the new worlds in which they settled and the impact of the diaspora on Scotland. Global in scope, the book's distinctive feature is its focus on both the geographies of the Scottish diaspora an.

Commerce and Culture

Commerce and Culture PDF Author: Robert Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317163907
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Considerable attention has recently been focused on the importance of social networks and business culture in reducing transaction costs, both in the pre-industrial period and during the nineteenth century. This book brings together twelve original contributions by scholars in the United Kingdom, continental Europe, and North America which represent important and innovative research on this topic. They cover two broad themes. First, the role of business culture in determining commercial success, in particular the importance of familial, religious, ethnic and associational connections in the working lives of merchants and the impact of business practices on family life. Second, the wider institutional and political framework for business operations, in particular the relationship between the political economy of trade and the cultural world of merchants in an era of transition from personal to corporate structures. These key themes are developed in three separate sections, each with four contributions. They focus, in turn, on the role of culture in building and preserving businesses; the interplay between institutions, networks and power in determining commercial success or failure; and the significance of faith and the family in influencing business strategies and the direction of merchant enterprise. The wider historiographical context of the individual contributions is discussed in an extended introductory chapter which sets out the overall agenda of the book and provides a broader comparative framework for analysing the specific issues covered in each of the three sections. Taken together the collection offers an important addition to the available literature in this field and will attract a wide readership amongst business, cultural, maritime, economic, social and urban historians, as well as historical anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists whose research embraces a longer-term perspective.

British Economic Development in South East Asia, 1880-1939, Volume 1

British Economic Development in South East Asia, 1880-1939, Volume 1 PDF Author: David Sunderland
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351573136
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 415

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Book Description
This collection focuses on the economic development of the areas of SE Asia with which Britain had a trading relationship. Covering 1880-1939, the economic growth of the region is revealed through a selection of rare primary resources organized thematically with sections dedicated to agriculture, mining, trade, labour, finance and infrastructure.

Global Brands

Global Brands PDF Author: Teresa da Silva Lopes
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139463713
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
In a world focused on science and new technology, brands help to explain why several of the world's multinational corporations have little to do with either. Rather they are old firms with little critical investment in patents or copyrights. For these firms, the critical intellectual property is trademarks. Global Brands, first published in 2007, explains how the world's largest multinationals in alcoholic beverages achieved global leadership; considers the predominant corporate governance structures for such firms; and looks at why these firms form alliances with direct competitors. Brands also determine the waves of mergers and acquisitions in the beverage industry. Global Brands contrasts with existing studies by providing a new dimension to the literature on the growth of multinationals through the focus on brands, using an institutional and evolutionary approach based on original and published sources about the industry and the firms.

Legacies of British Slave-Ownership

Legacies of British Slave-Ownership PDF Author: Catherine Hall
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1316061248
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 339

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Book Description
This book re-examines the relationship between Britain and colonial slavery in a crucial period in the birth of modern Britain. Drawing on a comprehensive analysis of British slave-owners and mortgagees who received compensation from the state for the end of slavery, and tracing their trajectories in British life, the volume explores the commercial, political, cultural, social, intellectual, physical and imperial legacies of slave-ownership. It transcends conventional divisions in history-writing to provide an integrated account of one powerful way in which Empire came home to Victorian Britain, and to reassess narratives of West Indian 'decline'. It will be of value to scholars not only of British economic and social history, but also of the histories of the Atlantic world, of the Caribbean and of slavery, as well as to those concerned with the evolution of ideas of race and difference and with the relationship between past and present.

Navigating Semi-colonialism

Navigating Semi-colonialism PDF Author: Anne Reinhardt
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684175860
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
"China’s status in the world of expanding European empires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has long been under dispute. Its unequal relations with multiple powers, secured through a system of treaties rather than through colonization, has invited debate over the degree and significance of outside control and local sovereignty. Navigating Semi-Colonialism examines steam navigation—introduced by foreign powers to Chinese waters in the mid-nineteenth century—as a constitutive element of the treaty system to illuminate both conceptual and concrete aspects of this regime, arguing for the specificity of China’s experience, its continuities with colonialism in other contexts, and its links to global processes. Focusing on the shipping network of open treaty ports, the book examines the expansion of steam navigation, the growth of shipping enterprise, and the social climate of the steamship in the late nineteenth century as arenas of contestation and collaboration that highlight the significance of partial Chinese sovereignty and the limitations imposed upon it. It further analyzes the transformation of this regime under the nationalism of the Republican period, and pursues a comparison of shipping regimes in China and India to provide a novel perspective on China under the treaty system."