The article starts with examining the origins of the conference which was probably unique in its character. The conference, which took place in an English country house, was called at short notice and was due to a private British initiative. The background to the meeting was the economic and political rapprochement between France and Germany which was supposed to have harmful effects on British trade and industry. The formation of the International Steel Cartel from which British industry was excluded caused particular concern in Britain. Whereas German industry showed little enthusiasm for the conference the German foreign ministry welcomed the idea in order to improve relations between both countries and to dispel British fears of a continental bloc led by France and Germany. The discussions of the conference are then analysed. The participants exchanged their views on national and international combines and agreements, on the prospects and possibilities of \'cooperation\' or ententes between German and British industries as well as on European trade and tariffs. Agreements were not concluded at Broadlands. The conference was also a social event amply reported on in the press and the article tries to reconstruct the atmosphere of the meeting. Whereas the Reichsverband der Deutschen Industrie welcomed the outcome of the conference as a contribution to better Anglo-German relations, reactions in Britain were mixed and rather critical as is shown by the attitude of the Federation of British Industries. Besides a meeting at Leverkusen in June 1927 there were no further private \'Broadlands meetings\' whereas the industrial federations of both countries were to have several \'official\' conferences from 1926 onwards.

Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) PLC, a wholly Nigerian business enterprise, founded in 1990, blazed the trail in the banking sector of Nigeria in many respects. By 1995, it had become the fourth most profitable bank in Nigeria and the first indigenous bank to attain a profit-before-tax of one bn naira, and by 2002 had expanded into several West African countries. The significance of the bank is attested by several scholarly studies of its founding, growth, performance and impact. This paper examines a neglected aspect of the history of the bank: its successes and failure in complying with standards of corporate governance and business ethics in a notoriously opaque industry. Specifically, it focuses on the GTB’s relations with statutory regulatory bodies – the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the National Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) – as well as its shareholders, who kept the bank on its toes on matters of its business operations. Relying on previously unexploited sources, including minutes of the bank’s board of directors, annual reports and oral evidence provided by members of the board, management and staff, and former top employees of the bank, as well as snippets from the reports of the regulatory bodies (which are not to be cited), this paper highlights issues raised by stakeholders about how the bank managed its affairs, and how it dealt with the queries and questions raised by the external regulators and internal stakeholders in the first 15 years of its existence.

The relationship between business strategies and legal institutions is important for understanding the historical dynamics of modern capitalism. While legal history and economic history have remained distinct disciplines, a growing number of studies now populates a vibrant «borderland» between the two. Building on frameworks of legal history, organization studies, and «new entrepreneurial history», our contribution systematizes the relation of entrepreneurship and the law from a historical perspective of change. This paper explains how an analysis of this specific relation contributes to our understanding of economic change and addresses the question of synthesis and interdisciplinary connectivity by offering a conceptual triad that focuses on the problems of agency and change at the intersection of businesses and the law. This paper argues that economic actors have used, sought, and avoided laws to transform their legal and economic environments. Each of these interactions combined a distinct set of variables conceptualized as legal business creativity, legal-institutional entrepreneurship, and Schumpeterian rule-breaking.

The relationship between business strategies and legal institutions is important for understanding the historical dynamics of modern capitalism. While legal history and economic history have remained distinct disciplines, a growing number of studies now populates a vibrant «borderland» between the two. Building on frameworks of legal history, organization studies, and «new entrepreneurial history», our contribution systematizes the relation of entrepreneurship and the law from a historical perspective of change. This paper explains how an analysis of this specific relation contributes to our understanding of economic change and addresses the question of synthesis and interdisciplinary connectivity by offering a conceptual triad that focuses on the problems of agency and change at the intersection of businesses and the law. This paper argues that economic actors have used, sought, and avoided laws to transform their legal and economic environments. Each of these interactions combined a distinct set of variables conceptualized as legal business creativity, legal-institutional entrepreneurship, and Schumpeterian rule-breaking.

This article aims at contributing to a better understanding of the root causes for he competitiveness of the Japanese camera industry on the world market before the electronics revolution. It takes the example of the company Canon, one of the main camera manufacturers in Japan, and focuses on technological issues. The main result of this article is to demonstrate that Canon was able to establish itself as a competitive firm on the world market thanks to a particular production system, which incorporated the design of high-quality 35 mm cameras and mass production methods. The technological facilities developed during World War II for manufacturing armaments (training of engineers in niversities, optical instruments made by Nikon for the Navy) played a key role in the development of Canon after 1945.

This article focuses on Carl von Siemens, the youngest of three brothers and the driving force behind the internationalization of Siemens & Halske. In 1852, he founded the Berlin-based firm’s first foreign subsidiary in Paris. In the following decades, Carl von Siemens established St. Petersburg as the firm’s «financial home», as his older brother Werner called it. In the 1870s, he turned the company’s subsidiary Siemens Brothers in London into a global player in submarine telegraphy. When Siemens & Halske went public in 1897, Carl von Siemens, by then a Russian citizen, became chairman of the supervisory board of one of the world’s largest electrotechnical corporations. I argue that as an immigrant entrepreneur in Russia and England Carl von Siemens was able to mobilize resources specific to transnational migrants, including economic, social and cultural capital, that were crucial to the firm’s rapid growth. In the beginning of his time in Russia, he was identified as a German patriot and benefited from being known as a «Prussky Ingener». After having lived abroad for over four decades, however, his identity became more complex and hybrid, shaping his transnational entrepreneurship and strategic vision of Siemens & Halske as a global player.

Untertitel: the Rhenish Westphalian Coal Syndicate and the Coal Trade Association, 1918 to 1925The article focuses on the transnational business relationship between the German RWKS (Rheinisch-Westfälisches Kohlen-Syndikat, Essen) and the Dutch SHV (Steenkolen Handelsvereeniging, Utrecht), which was a successful sales relationship in the 1896 to 1945 period. On the one hand the importance of the export market for the RWKS is shown, and on the other hand it is reflected on the importance of a sales organization for a syndicate in general. Whereas the RWKS depended on the SHV for its sales organization, its distributions apparatus and its knowledge of the local market, the SHV depended on the RWKS for the sole selling rights for Ruhr coal on the Dutch market. World War I did not end this interdependent transnational cooperation, but created considerable leeway for tactical and strategical moves on both sides of the border that led to a new balance of power by the middle of the 1920s.

In the early 1930s, the trained beautician Charlotte Meentzen founded a company in Dresden based on naturopathy with the three pillars of a cosmetics institute, production and school. The foundation, financed by her father Theodor Meentzen, a professional speaker and publicist as well as trade union and SPD member, took place at a time of upheaval that affected the prevailing image of women as well as economic and political conditions. Charlotte Meentzen and her sister Gertrud, who joined the company early on, belonged to a close circle of professional women who ventured into self-employment in an industry that was still controversial at the time. The essay focuses on Charlotte Meentzen as a person, the circumstances surrounding the founding of the company in terms of female entrepreneurship, the cosmetics industry in general and natural cosmetics in particular against the backdrop of the final years of the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era in the Saxon metropolis. At the time, Dresden was considered a stronghold of naturopathy and was proclaimed the «Stadt der Volksgesundheit» («City of Public Health») under the Nazi regime. Using (advertising) examples such as the guide published by Meentzen in 1941, «Heilkräfte im Dienste der Schönheit» («Healing powers in the service of beauty»), the actions of the company management between adaptation and self-assertion become clear. This applied not least to the years of reconstruction in the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR, whereby the sisters always remained true to their convictions regarding individual health and beauty on the basis of natural remedies.

This paper focuses on the subject of the cocoa transfer agreements and the transformation of rural agrarian livelihoods in the cocoa belt of South West Nigeria under the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP). The paper maps the trajectory and career of three dominant agricultural entrepreneurs in the cocoa produce trade in South West Nigeria during the 20th century. The paper demonstrates that while the cocoa business in Nigeria has received considerable scholarly attention, the impact of moneylenders, public letter writers (PLWs) and cocoa transfer agreements on cocoa business, rural livelihoods and entrepreneurship in the aftermath of SAP is yet to be fully investigated. Analysing the accumulative strategies and contributions of Emmanuel Akintan, Isaac Adegbuyi Akingboye and Rufus Orosundafosi to rural capital formation, the paper highlights the impacts of liberalisation policies on African rural businesses in the aftermath of SAP. The paper combines primary sources, such as oral interviews, personal observation and ethnography, with information collected from the archives, newspapers, diaries, and extant literature to analyse the dynamics of rural accumulation in the cocoa producing South West Nigeria during the 20th century. The paper argues that the acquisition of wealth and the thin line between standard procedures and clandestine deals stimulated accusations of dispossession of peasant farmers by the capitalist moneylenders and merchants in the post-SAP era.

Untertitel: Neue Aspekte der historischen RationalisierungsforschungThe Bedaux system was a specific programme of rationalization with elements of Taylorism and Fordism. Based on the consulting of extra-firm Bedaux engineers the system represented a method of time and motion studies with both aspects of wage management and business management. Concerning wage management the system was a simple premium system based on guaranteed hourly wages. Regarding business management however the Bedaux system emerged to be a rather modern system of managing and accounting. Bedaux started as a special system for work measurement and wage determination but turned out to be effective above all as general system for the management of business organization, manufacturing and cost controlling. It covered both blue and white collar workers, especially of the middle management. During the 1920s and 1930s worldwide there were about thousand companies in 21 countries that were run according to Bedaux, mainly in the USA but also in Great Britain and France. In Germany however the Bedaux system was carried through only in the rubber and tire industry. The reason was that on the one hand German business leader were reluctant to adopt this new American system\' and preferred the German Rate system, ignoring that the rationalization effects of the Bedaux system were much more far-reaching than only the reduction of labour costs. On the other hand there was strong resistance of the German labour movement against the Bedaux system. Continental, the leading rubber company in Germany, was open minded against that American system and did heavily profit from it, thus overcoming relatively undamaged the Great Depression and improving its competitive capabilities.