Jonathan C. Brown

Entrepreneurship, networks and modern business

Part 1 Entrepreneurial and business culture: the entrepreneur - the central issue in business history?, T.A.B. Corley entrepreneurship and business culture, Mark Casson business education and managerial performance - a study comparing Japan and America to France, Germany and England, Robert Lockie engineers as functional alternatives to entrepreneurs in Japanese industrialization, Kenichi Yasumuro. Part 2 Entrepreneurial success and failure in family firms: Quakerism, entrepreneurship and the family firm in North-East England, 1780-1860, Maurice Kirby beyond Buddenbrooks - the family firm and the management of succession in 19th-century Britain, Mary B. Rose entrepreneurship and the growth of the firm - the case of the British food and drink industries in the 1980s, V.N. Balasubramanyam. Part 3 Entrepreneurship and alternatives to the firm: cartels and internalization in the 18th-century copper industry, Robert Read entrepreneurship and product innovation in British general insurance, 1840-1914, Oliver Westall. Part 4 Uncertainty and innovation: success and adversity - entrepreneurship in agricultural engineering, 1800-1939, Jonathan Brown full steam ahead? the British arms industry and the market for warships, 1850-1914, John Singleton.

Workers' control in Latin America, 1930-1979

The years between 1930 and 1979 witnessed a period of intense labor activity in Latin America as workers participated in strikes, unionization efforts, and populist and revolutionary movements. The ten original essays AEMDNMOin this volume examine sugar mill seizures in Cuba, oil nationalization and railway strikes in Mexico, the attempted revolution in Guatemala, railway nationalization and Peronism in Argentina, Brazils textile strikes, the Bolivian revolution of 1952, Perus copper strikes, and the copper nationalization in Chile--all important national events in which industrial laborers played critical roles. Demonstrating an illuminating, bottom-up approach to Latin American labor history, these essays investigate the everyday acts through which workers attempted to assert more control over the work process and thereby add dignity to their lives. Working together, they were able to bring shop floor struggles to public attention and--at certain critical junctures--to influence events on a national scale. The contributors are Andrew Boeger, Michael Marconi Braga, Jonathan C. Brown, Josh DeWind, Marc Christian McLeod, Michael Snodgrass, Andrea Spears, Joanna Swanger, Maria Celina Tuozzo, and Joel Wolfe.

Domestic Politics and Foreign Investment: British Development of Mexican Petroleum, 1889–1911

Business historians and students of political economy quite often analyze the success of foreign investors in the periphery in terms of the entrepreneurs competitive advantage and of the host countrys beneficial economic policies. One cannot explain the extraordinary success of British engineer Sir Weetman Pearson in Mexicos early oil history according to such criteria, however, for his American competitors had experience in the technologically advanced U.S. petroleum industry and should have prevailed. Sir Weetman succeeded because Mexican politicians, pursuing their own internal political interests, willed and nurtured his success.

What Historians Reveal about Labor and Free Trade in Latin America

How can the study of experiences of workers in previous free-trade regimes inform scholars about the likely outcomes for labor in todays market reforms? This article explores labor during the second of four distinct periods of trade reform, that of the late eighteenth century. Tighter integration of Latin America into the world economy resulted in the enlarged demand for labor, the highest slave imports in the colonial period, a resurgence of forced labor mechanisms, and proletarianization. However, workers also influenced the expanding economy. They pressed for higher wages, resisted work discipline, and eventually contributed to the end of export expansion by attacking plantations during the Independence Wars. The article also compares the eighteenth century reforms to the current ones, explaining why unemployment is more widespread today.

The Genteel Tradition of Nineteenth Century Colombian Culture

Economic progress of the late nineteenth century afforded the upper class of Colombian society the opportunities to pursue new business goals and to improve its standard of living. Exports of coffee, steam navigation on the Magdalena River, the fitful building of railways, growth of urban populations, and the heightened tempo of foreign and domestic commerce all converged to the economic and social benefit of Colombias landed and educated elite. Economic progress supported not only new elite professions in commerce and engineering but also traditional pursuits in medicine, law, and notably literature. In fact, nineteenth century Colombia witnessed a proliferation of cultural affectation which, because it was so divorced from reality, may be described as “the genteel tradition.”

Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World

Argentina remains an attractive subject to historians and analysts who puzzle over how things went wrong economically, for the nation seems to have gone from rags to riches and back again to rags. Not long ago, the neoclassicists and structuralists commanded the debate, arguing over the long-term impact of exporting primary products. Now scholars are questioning the institutional legacies by which Argentina has grown into stagnation. Nobel Laureate Douglass C. North provides the point of departure with the New Institutional Economics (NIE). In 1997, some of the most prominent Latin Americanists attending the International Economic History Association meeting in Madrid devoted a plenary session to evaluating Latin American development according to the NIE. Others have put out a volume of essays on Mexico and Brazil with the purpose of ascertaining How Latin America Fell Behind, a reference to North’s comparison between England’s institutional arrangements that promoted economic growth in its American colonies and the bureaucratic legacy that stifled Spain’s colonial economies. Now the NIE has come to Argentina. In Republic of Capital, Jeremy Adelman utilizes the framework of the “new institutionalism” more rigorously than any other historian of Latin America. The book displays both the virtues and the problems of this paradigm. Adelman sets out to analyze how Argentina made the institutional transformation from “a colonial mercantile economy” in the late eighteenth century to one of commercial capitalism in the late nineteenth century. He deals with matters of political economy, such as competing ideas and interests, the economic impact of civil strife, and the process of nation-building. Adelman is particularly interested in the evolving institutional arrangements for debts, property rights, and monetary emissions. The author uses the new institutionalism for its heuristic value in identifying problems, posing questions, and suggesting the importance of investigating the institutional framework of economic exchange. In effect, Adelman accompanies others in “bringing the state back in” to economic history, and not totally as a negative factor in development. The investigation of the state as an agent of “third party enforcement” in commercial contracts fits nicely into North’s prescriptions.

Oil and Revolution in Mexico.

This study describes how the dynamic growth of the Mexican oil industry resulted from both the domination of foreign capital and Mexicos own economic restructuring, conditions similar to those under which free-market reforms are being adopted throughout the world today. Research into the operations of British and American oil companies in Mexico between 1880 and 1920 reveals their involvement in the events that led the country to revolution in 1910. The author explores the actions of oil men, politicians, diplomats and workers in a period of massive social upheaval.

A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776-1860

1. Silver and contraband in the colonial Rio de la Plata 2. Buenos Aires in the Golden Age: the viceregal economy 3. Industrial markets for Argentine raw materials 4. Buenos Aires as outpost of world trade 5. Buenos Aires as emporium of regional trade and processing 6. Expanding the frontiers of production on the pampa 7. Expansion of pastoral society on the pampa 8. Formation of the Anchorena cattle business 9. Depression and renaissance of commerce in the Interior provinces.