• Digital Humanities and Cultural Heritage
• Publications close
• EU close
• The Business History Review close

Representatives of all nations gather for the utility of mankind; there, the Jew, the Mohammedan, and the Christian behave towards each other as if they were of the same religion, and reserve the word “infidel” for those who go bankrupt.—Voltaire, letter VI, Lettres Philosophiques (1734)Voltaire's words about the London Royal Exchange, quoted by Francesca Trivellato in her important new book The Promise and Peril of Credit, represent pars pro toto a view of finance and trade—as peaceful, tolerant, antagonistic to the old segregations and brutalities of religion, and ultimately emancipatory—that entered the philosophical mainstream in the eighteenth century, that seems to at least partly form the foundations of liberal modernity, and that continues to shape the way we think about business and capitalism today (p. 139). Yet Voltaire himself was an anti-Semite who obsessed about the Jews and trafficked in old clichés about cunning Jewish merchants precisely in order to make his case for commerce as a vehicle of toleration. This and similar ironies or contradictions lie at the heart of Promise and Peril, which traces from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century what Trivellato calls a “legend,” because it is both patently false (we now know), and was once widespread, that Jews in the Middle Ages or Renaissance invented the bill of exchange (and sometimes also marine insurance).

Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practices used by Medici entrepreneurs were first theorized by Giovanni Botero and others as what would become an “Italian model” in political economy, a model that had a profoundly wide-ranging impact, and that puts the lie to the commonplace in the history of ideas that the Italian Renaissance, so precocious in other fields, was silent on the topic of political economy.

This article discusses the complex issues behind the relation between national and global economic histories and the challenges of a comparative approach. On examining different national approaches (Italian and English) to the management of the early modern maritime sector, it will argue that this comparison allows a privileged view into different varieties of capitalism, highlighting fundamental differences in attitudes toward wage labor and risk management that still influence different approaches to economic activities today.

Using internal debates and surviving account books, this article traces the eighteenth-century history of the Norwegian glass industry, created to exploit Norway's immense natural resource wealth, and of the chartered company that would later become Norway's iconic Christiania Glasmagasin. The investors in the company, many of them among Norway's “founding fathers,” were individually responsible for its losses and it operated, remarkably, at an annual loss for nearly five decades. The article asks why, beyond the anticipation of a royal import ban on foreign glass, private investors might have continued to accept such losses. It focuses on tensions between cameralist and liberal ideologies in the creation of an important national industry, and on older (and perhaps more sustainable) ways of thinking about profitability.

In the nuclear sector, turnkey projects can be considered an investment in obtaining information through “learning by doing” to capture rents from the next generation of reactors. As the first U.S. turnkey export project, the first Spanish nuclear power plant served that purpose and paved the way for the subsequent growth of the nuclear sector, for both Spanish and U.S. firms. Making use of archival material, we analyze the networks created by the government, experts, and business leaders, which sought to obtain, accumulate, and learn from the scarce and conflicting information about atomic technology that was available at the time. We also discern how firms on both sides of the Atlantic acquired and perfected the specific capabilities required to build a commercial nuclear reactor.