Ferry de Goey

Port of Rotterdam: land-use policy during the twentieth century

The transhipment of goods in the port of Rotterdam was able to grow by several per cent each year in the twentieth century, thanks to the renting of land to commercial firms specialising in the mechanized (sometimes even automated) handling of bulk goods. The selection of firms was connected with the way in which the port was organized and exploited. The main argument of this paper will be that there was a close causal link between the management and expansion of the port, policy on land use, and the increase in transhipment1. Figure15.1. provides a basic outline of the complex economic relationship between port expenses and revenues. This relationship will be explored in this contribution.

Testing the Chandler Thesis: Comparing middle management and administrative intensity in Dutch and US industries, 1900–1950

This article tests Alfred Chandlers thesis that the managerial revolution, that is, the building of managerial hierarchies, clustered in a selected set of industries where the need for co-ordination was particularly high. These fast-growing, capital-intensive, and high-volume producing industries are denoted as Chandlerian industries. We compare the latter with the other industries in the Netherlands and the USA using census data covering the first half of the twentieth century. The comparison reveals that administrative intensity, measured by the proportion of administrative employees to production workers (A/P-ratio), was clearly higher than average in the US Chandlerian industries in the sample used only from c. 1920, considerably later than Chandlers account suggests. In the Netherlands, the A/P-ratios of Chandlerian industries were considerably higher in all three reference years, but the more specific middle managers to workers ratio (MM/W-ratio) only in the middle one (1930). We conclude that differences in the need for co-ordination between industries in the Chandlerian sense are relevant for explaining the pattern in administrative intensity, but suggest that – given the high variety in scores on the A/P- and MM/W-ratios within the category of Chandlerian industries – one should take into consideration additional criteria in further exploring the ‘logic’ of the managerial revolution. Finally, in particular outside the USA, more consistent differences in administrative intensity between Chandlerian and non-Chandlerian industries are perhaps to be found only in the period after World War Two.

Western Merchants in the Foreign Settlements of Japan (c.1850–1890)

Before 1800, Western trade with East Asia was either strongly regulated by the state or absent, as was the case in Korea. In Siam, China and Japan, foreign trade was limited to only one port in each country: respectively Bangkok, Canton and Nagasaki. Attempts to open up more ports and introduce free trade remained largely unsuccessful up to the 1840s, when Western economic power and naval superiority inaugurated the era of gunboat diplomacy; ushering in new commercial treaties on more favourable terms. These treaties introduced a new type of port city in East Asia: the ‘treaty port’. These acted as bridgeheads between Western merchants and Asian markets.1 The treaty ports functioned as the main gateways to the hinterland or simply as commercial hubs and entrepots. In most cases, they were important ‘zones of contact’ between Westerners and natives.2

A Case of Business Failure

In late December 1880 the Nederlandsche Handel-Maatschappij N . V . (Netherlands Trading Company Ltd. hereafter: N H M ) closed its last remaining sales office in Japan. The N H M was probably one of the largest and most successful Dutch trading houses from the mid-i 850s. W h y did the N H M fail and decided to pull out of Japan? I will argue that the failure was mainly due to the loss of old and profitable networks after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and the inability of the N H M to establish the same kind of links with the new Japanese government. T h e exit of the N H M mirrors the decline of Dutch economic relations with Japan after 1859. The once prominent position of the Dutch was lost to other western countries, notably Great Britain, the United States, France and Germany. The failure of the N H M can hardly be attributed to only exogenous or endogenous factors. The revolutionary changes introduced after the Meiji Restoration could not have been foreseen by any businessmen. The N H M sales offices may have failed in Japan, but the company as a whole continued to prosper in the Dutch East Indies and other markets. Business history is mainly concerned with investigating and explaining the successes o f entrepreneurs and shows relatively little interest in business failures creating an unbalanced view of the history of business. The history of the N H M in Japan provides an opportunity to investigate a case of business failure and the many factors that influence entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs often try out new products and probe new markets. When the results are disappointing, they pull out. Failed investments can provide valuable lessons and a company may try to enter the same market again as the N H M did successfully in the 1920s when it opened offices in Kobe, and after the Second World War in Osaka and Tokyo .