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Book review of: “Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History: British Multinational Companies in Ghana and Nigeria” By Stephanie Decker (Routledge, cop. 2023). Book review of: “Postcolonial Transition and Global Business History: British Multinational Companies in Ghana and Nigeria” By Stephanie Decker (Routledge, cop. 2023).

In recent years, scholars have explored the pivotal role Jewish merchants played in feeding and arming European armies from 1500 to 1800. Yet they have ignored the problems these merchants faced when they cast outside national borders to urban centres far from the battlefield, a multi-national mobilisation of resources known as the ‘fiscal-military system’. This article uses a case-study of one Jewish merchant, Jacob Levi, from the port of Genoa to explore the essential brokerage role of ethnic-religious minorities in the early modern fiscal-military system. With knowhow built through his private businesses as well as a network of his co-religious, Levi became one of the most important suppliers of grain for the Bourbon army of northern Italy from 1702 to 1706. But foodstuffs did not transit alone; as Levi’s records show, other war matériel accompanied grain, none more volatile than the at-least 17,000 barrels of gunpowder that Levi transited through the port in these years.

We analysed the process of construction and connection to the electrical grid of four Spanish nuclear power plants with different financial and technological foreign partners: those of Zorita (PWR by Westinghouse), Garoña (BWR by General Electric) and Vandellós I (GCR by EDF) (belonging to the first generation of atomic plants and producing electricity from 1969–72) and that of Trillo I (PWR by KWU, connected in 1988). These four examples allow us to observe how the learning curve of nuclear engineering and the acquisition of skills by Spanish companies evolved. Progressively the domestic industry achieved higher levels of participation, fostered by the Ministry of Industry and Energy. When the atomic plants under construction were paralysed by the nuclear moratorium of 1984, and several other projects were abandoned by the utilities along the way, Spain had developed an industrial sector around the fabrication of service components and engineering for nuclear power plants to compete internationally. The authors wish to acknowledge the financial support of the Spanish Government through research grants HAR2014-53825-R and HAR2017-86086-R. Additionally, Rubio-Varas and De la Torre received funding from the Euratom research and training programme 2014–2018 under grant agreement N°662268.

This study demonstrates the emergence, subsequent diffusion, and early demise of Ottoman agricultural credit cooperatives, called Memleket Sandiks (OMSs), as they represent unique hybrid forms that blend state, community, and market logics in a single organizational configuration. The study narrates how changes in the Ottoman Empire's institutional order during the Tanzimat era enabled conditions that led to the emergence of OMSs. Subsequently, the practices of the form transformed, especially after the Russian-Ottoman War, concomitant with further changes in Ottoman society's institutional order. Although OMSs initially enjoyed legitimacy granted by the Ottoman State, the shift towards dominating state logic in the Hamidian era led to the erosion of practices animated by market and community logics. The form was discontinued as the increasingly autocratic state levied taxes and preyed upon the accumulated surplus, which disabled agglomerative capacity of sandiks and diminished the solidarity among cooperative members.

Domestic western-style banks emerged as China’s leading financial sector during the Republican era, an environment characterized by economic and political uncertainty and weak property rights. We document that these modern banks nevertheless flourished, especially during the Nanjing decade in the 1930s, with strong social and commercial relationships throughout the sector. Focusing on interlocking directorates we trace the shape, structure and development of the network of cooperation between these banks. This network shows a dominating central cluster, indicating that the sector was characterized by internal cooperation rather than competition. Similarly, new entrants were strongly linked to existing banks, indicating that entry was driven by the expansion of existing banks rather than the rise of new competition. Finally, central locations of public banks within the cluster indicate that the government gained influence over the sector through direct bank ownership. This paper shows that the domestic financial sector reactedsuccessfully to the threats of the external environment by weaving a close web of interdependence, including with the government.

Between the 1890 s and the 1920s, several leading Parisian couture businesses, spearheaded by the house of Paquin, expanded to London to exploit the idiosyncratic advantages of British commerce and...

International audience; Recent developments in the literature on financial architecture suggest that banks and markets not only coexist, but also coevolve in ways that are non-neutral from the viewpoint of optimality. This article aims to analyse the concrete mechanisms of this coevolution by focusing on a very relevant case study: Belgium (the first Continental country to industrialize) at the time of the very first emergence of a modern financial system (the 1830s). The article shows that intermediaries played a crucial role in developing secondary securities markets (as banks acted as securitizers), but market conditions also had a strong feedback on banks’ balance sheets and activities (as banks also acted as market-makers for the securities they had issued). The findings suggest that not only structural, but also cyclical factors can be important determinants of changes in financial architecture.

International audience; Neuromarketing’ designates both a developing industry and an academic research field. This study documents the emergence of neuromarketing through the first mention of the term in traditional and new media until the stabilization of the field. Our main interest is to establish whether neuromarketing developed separately as an academic field and as an industry (with knowledge transfer from the former to the latter), or whether it was an act of co-creation. Based on a corpus gathered from a systematic search on the Web, we trace the multiple forms of engagement between academic and commercial communities, echoed but also shaped by reports in traditional and new media. We find that neuromarketing developed an identity through a set of practices and a series of debates which involved intertwined communities of academic researchers and practitioners. This result offers an alternative to the narrative of ‘knowledge transfer’ between academia and the industry and offers a contribution on how to use new kinds of digital sources in business history.