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Aluminium was one of most cartelised industries in the international economic panorama of the 20th century. Born following the discovery of electrolytic smelting process in 1886, this industry, even in its infancy, established a cartel which characterised its history until nearly 1980. Managers of the aluminium industry from various historical eras and countries shared the same vision about the development of their industry: to keep prices as stable as possible in order to encourage expansions and to provide return on investments. Price instability, which characterised the trade of other commodities, was unknown to the aluminium industry. This book neither argues that cartels are fundamental...
This volume provides a genealogy of global economic governance through the history of contracts, examining how and by whom they were designed and legally validated. It will appeal to lawyers, economists, and historians interested in the globalization of markets over the past century.
This book is the first attempt to bridge the current divide between studies addressing "economic nationalism" as a deliberate ideology and movement of economic 'nation-building', and the literature concerned with more diffuse expressions of economic "nationness"—from national economic symbols and memories, to the "banal" world of product communication. The editors seeks to highlight the importance of economic issues for the study of nations and nationalism, and its findings point to the need to give economic phenomena a more prominent place in the field of nationalism studies. The authors of the essays come from disciplines as diverse as economic and cultural history, political science, bu...
The volume shows that neoliberalism concerns a tradition carried by a network of people, who understood themselves as liberals (and at times as neoliberals) and who sought to create societies based on individual freedom and a free market economy. It also shows that neoliberalism emerged as a transnational and multilingual phenomenon and that it cannot be reduced to one doctrine or practice. The book will enrich the reader’s knowledge of the political-ideological landscapes and developments in various European regions and countries, in addition to transforming the overall picture of European (neo)liberalisms in the twentieth century.
Although modern neoliberalism was born at the “Colloque Walter Lippmann” in 1938, it only came into its own with the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society, a partisan “thought collective,” in Vevey, Switzerland, in 1947. Its original membership was made up of transnational economists and intellectuals, including Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Karl Popper, Michael Polanyi, and Luigi Einaudi. From this small beginning, their ideas spread throughout the world, fostering, among other things, the political platforms of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan and the Washington Consensus. The Road from Mont Pèlerin presents the key debates and conflicts that occurred among ...
An authoritative and comprehensive survey of the major themes, thinkers, and movements in modern European intellectual history.
Cartels, trusts and agreements to reduce competition between firms have existed for centuries, but became particularly prevalent toward the end of the 19th century. In the mid-20th century governments began to use so called ‘cartel registers’ to monitor and regulate their behaviour. This book provides cases studies from more than a dozen countries to examine the emergence, application and eventual decline of this form of regulation. Beginning with a comparison of the attitudes to regulation that led to monitoring, rather than prohibiting cartels, this book examines the international studies on cartels undertaken by the League of Nations before World War II. This is followed by a series o...
As the key component in aluminum production, bauxite has become one of the most important minerals of the last one hundred years. To some it brought economic and political advantage, but for many others, its development left a legacy of exploitation. Aluminum Ore explores the history of bauxite in the twentieth century and the global forces that this history represents, from its strategic development in the First World War to its role in the globalization of markets as companies from the northern hemisphere vied for the resources of the south. Featuring essays by scholars from around the world, this wide-ranging collection is a history of one essential mineral and a new perspective on a time of change.
When Charles Martin Hall patented the process for refining the metal in 1886, it was far from self-evident that the new technology would be a business success. Problems involving the technology had to be solved. Capital and a labour force were needed. The most pressing entrepreneurial dilemma was the need to develop markets for what was then a novelty product. George David Smith examines how Alcoa met these problems, with special attention to innovation, from Alcoa's beginnings through its development into one of the most successful monopolies in American history. By World War II, no other American corporation had developed its industry's markets more dramatically and then dominated them more completely. The book then analyzes the undoing of Alcoa's monopoly by war and antitrust, and examines how the firm adapted to evolving forms of oliogopolistic and global competition.
Research on the international transfer of technology in economics and management literature has primarily focused on the role of countries and that of companies, in particular multinational enterprises (MNEs). Similarly, economic and business historians have tended to view international technology transfer as a way for economically ‘backward’ countries to acquire new technologies in order to catch up with more developed economies. This volume provides a more in-depth understanding of how the international transfer of technologies is organized and, in particular, challenges the core-periphery model that is still dominant in the extant literature. By looking beyond national systems of inno...