This paper explores the vertical integration of oil-producing countries. Attempts at vertical integration were prominent among oil-producing countries throughout most of the twentieth century, but particularly following the surge of resource nationalism in the 1970s. Vertical integration attempts have largely been regarded as a sideshow in the history of global oil. This article argues that vertical integration was a crucial aspect of producer country strategies into the 1970s and 1980s, and that it affected the organization of national oil industries in important ways. It does so by exploring the Norwegian case. The article demonstrates the importance of vertical integration to the long-term development of the Norwegian oil industry. It discusses the implications of these findings for the study of vertical integration in other oil-producing countries.
{"title":"Vertical Integration Among Oil-producing Countries","authors":"Eivind Thomassen","doi":"10.1017/eso.2023.45","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.45","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper explores the vertical integration of oil-producing countries. Attempts at vertical integration were prominent among oil-producing countries throughout most of the twentieth century, but particularly following the surge of resource nationalism in the 1970s. Vertical integration attempts have largely been regarded as a sideshow in the history of global oil. This article argues that vertical integration was a crucial aspect of producer country strategies into the 1970s and 1980s, and that it affected the organization of national oil industries in important ways. It does so by exploring the Norwegian case. The article demonstrates the importance of vertical integration to the long-term development of the Norwegian oil industry. It discusses the implications of these findings for the study of vertical integration in other oil-producing countries.</p>","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":"74 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138531191","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article analyzes the AFL-CIO’s international economic policy activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the context of the collapse of Bretton Woods monetary system. It shows that AFL-CIO economists developed a far-reaching critique of multinational corporations that encompassed not only concerns about import competition and capital flight but also charges that multinational firms contributed to the United States’ balance of payments woes. Fighting charges that union wages drove inflation, labor leaders maintained that private capital outflows and intracompany transactions exacerbated U.S. payments deficits. They therefore advocated for capital controls and import restrictions as alternatives to fiscal and monetary restraint. Their efforts to preserve the expansionary policies underpinning postwar liberalism, however, ultimately failed. By calling attention to the AFL-CIO’s failed activism in international monetary politics, the article offers a new vantage point for understanding organized labor’s declining influence in the last third of the twentieth century.
{"title":"The AFL-CIO, the U.S. Balance of Payments, and the End of the Post–World War II Liberal Order, 1965–1973","authors":"Melanie Sheehan","doi":"10.1017/eso.2023.31","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.31","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article analyzes the AFL-CIO’s international economic policy activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s within the context of the collapse of Bretton Woods monetary system. It shows that AFL-CIO economists developed a far-reaching critique of multinational corporations that encompassed not only concerns about import competition and capital flight but also charges that multinational firms contributed to the United States’ balance of payments woes. Fighting charges that union wages drove inflation, labor leaders maintained that private capital outflows and intracompany transactions exacerbated U.S. payments deficits. They therefore advocated for capital controls and import restrictions as alternatives to fiscal and monetary restraint. Their efforts to preserve the expansionary policies underpinning postwar liberalism, however, ultimately failed. By calling attention to the AFL-CIO’s failed activism in international monetary politics, the article offers a new vantage point for understanding organized labor’s declining influence in the last third of the twentieth century.</p>","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138542117","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“Building Blocs” charts a global history of the last great crisis of globalization—the transwar decades from the 1880s through the 1940s—by centering strategic minerals needed to make steel. Little studied, but critically important, alloying minerals like tungsten and manganese were only needed in small amounts, but they were essential to the foundations of both national prosperity and security: steel and military production. Herein lay a fundamental problem: none of the industrial powers possessed adequate domestic deposits of these minerals, which were concentrated in remote locations such as central India, the Caucasus, southern China, Brazilian jungles, the Australian outback, and southern Africa. In a world in which steel was power, “Building Blocs” shows that resource anxieties motivated interwar quests for autarky and autonomy in the form of self-contained blocs. The scramble for strategic minerals escalated tensions and put rivals on the road to war, reshaping the forms and structures of geopolitical entities and international institutions throughout the transwar period.
{"title":"Building Blocs: Raw Materials and the Global Economy in the Age of Disequilibrium","authors":"Rob Konkel","doi":"10.1017/eso.2023.41","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.41","url":null,"abstract":"“Building Blocs” charts a global history of the last great crisis of globalization—the transwar decades from the 1880s through the 1940s—by centering strategic minerals needed to make steel. Little studied, but critically important, alloying minerals like tungsten and manganese were only needed in small amounts, but they were essential to the foundations of both national prosperity and security: steel and military production. Herein lay a fundamental problem: none of the industrial powers possessed adequate domestic deposits of these minerals, which were concentrated in remote locations such as central India, the Caucasus, southern China, Brazilian jungles, the Australian outback, and southern Africa. In a world in which steel was power, “Building Blocs” shows that resource anxieties motivated interwar quests for autarky and autonomy in the form of self-contained blocs. The scramble for strategic minerals escalated tensions and put rivals on the road to war, reshaping the forms and structures of geopolitical entities and international institutions throughout the transwar period.","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":"200 9","pages":"977 - 986"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139254544","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s essay “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” attempts to provide more structure to the field known as the new history of capitalism (NHOC) by defining martial capitalism as a new variant. In contrast, this essay asserts that the lack of definitional precision within the NHOC is not a bug, but rather one of its key features. To define capitalism would be to delimit where it was and was not present historically. If part of the argument of the NHOC is that capitalism pervaded—indeed infected—all aspects of American life, then defining the term would be self-defeating. In the end, martial capitalism suffers from the same shortcomings of the NHOC more generally, in that it places all “warlike activities” of the state under the undefined umbrella of something vaguely called “capitalism.”
林赛·沙肯巴赫·雷格勒(Lindsay Schakenbach Regele)的文章《资本主义历史简史与美国新变种》(A Brief History of Capitalism, and A New American Variety)试图通过将军事资本主义定义为一种新变种,为资本主义新历史(NHOC)这一领域提供更多结构。相比之下,本文断言,在NHOC中缺乏定义精度并不是一个错误,而是它的关键特征之一。要给资本主义下定义,就要划定它在历史上曾经存在和不存在的地方。如果NHOC的部分论点是资本主义渗透——实际上感染了——美国生活的方方面面,那么定义这个术语将会弄巧成拙。最后,军事资本主义更普遍地遭受着与NHOC相同的缺点,因为它将国家的所有“战争活动”置于某种模糊地称为“资本主义”的不明确的保护伞下。
{"title":"How to Define (or Not to Define) the New History of Capitalism","authors":"Sharon Ann Murphy","doi":"10.1017/eso.2023.37","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.37","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Lindsay Schakenbach Regele’s essay “A Brief History of the History of Capitalism, and a New American Variety” attempts to provide more structure to the field known as the new history of capitalism (NHOC) by defining <span>martial capitalism</span> as a new variant. In contrast, this essay asserts that the lack of definitional precision within the NHOC is not a bug, but rather one of its key features. To define capitalism would be to delimit where it was and was not present historically. If part of the argument of the NHOC is that capitalism pervaded—indeed infected—all aspects of American life, then defining the term would be self-defeating. In the end, martial capitalism suffers from the same shortcomings of the NHOC more generally, in that it places all “warlike activities” of the state under the undefined umbrella of something vaguely called “capitalism.”</p>","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":"36 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"138531192","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In this essay, I reflect on the growing political obstacles to doing business history in China and how, in my doctoral dissertation research, I attempted to overcome them. More specifically, I discuss how I drew on unconventional historical sources and novel data to examine the relationship between informal entrepreneurial activity and economic change in Maoist China (1949–1978). Through the quantitative analysis of thousands of case files of individuals prosecuted as “speculators and profiteers”—discarded administrative documents that were recovered from Chinese flea markets—I reassessed the scale and scope of informal entrepreneurial activity in Maoist China. I then went on to triangulate these data with evidence found in other sources to illustrate how, over time, informal entrepreneurial activity became more collusive, encompassing, and impossible to contain. Ultimately, I argued that China’s “Reform and Opening Up” was not the state-led watershed event that it is often made out to be; rather, economic and institutional change was, at least partly, the result of a bottom-up transformation, decades in the making. This essay thus suggests that the use of unconventional sources and mixed methods presents opportunities both for doing research in contexts where history is being actively securitized and for producing countervailing narratives that decenter the state.
{"title":"History from the Dustbins","authors":"Adam K. Frost","doi":"10.1017/eso.2023.38","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1017/eso.2023.38","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, I reflect on the growing political obstacles to doing business history in China and how, in my doctoral dissertation research, I attempted to overcome them. More specifically, I discuss how I drew on unconventional historical sources and novel data to examine the relationship between informal entrepreneurial activity and economic change in Maoist China (1949–1978). Through the quantitative analysis of thousands of case files of individuals prosecuted as “speculators and profiteers”—discarded administrative documents that were recovered from Chinese flea markets—I reassessed the scale and scope of informal entrepreneurial activity in Maoist China. I then went on to triangulate these data with evidence found in other sources to illustrate how, over time, informal entrepreneurial activity became more collusive, encompassing, and impossible to contain. Ultimately, I argued that China’s “Reform and Opening Up” was not the state-led watershed event that it is often made out to be; rather, economic and institutional change was, at least partly, the result of a bottom-up transformation, decades in the making. This essay thus suggests that the use of unconventional sources and mixed methods presents opportunities both for doing research in contexts where history is being actively securitized and for producing countervailing narratives that decenter the state.","PeriodicalId":45977,"journal":{"name":"Enterprise & Society","volume":"49 1","pages":"965 - 976"},"PeriodicalIF":1.0,"publicationDate":"2023-11-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139267511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}