Business and Corporate History

A printer's rise in colonial America and his chart for practising thirteen virtues.

Ownership of big US firms had split from control, which passed to managers.

How DuPont, GM, Standard Oil and Sears built the multidivisional firm.

Twelve New Yorker stories of business, from the Edsel's failure to the 1962 crash.

How salaried managers replaced markets in coordinating US business, 1840 to 1920.

A Data General team races to design a 32-bit minicomputer in about a year.

Why big industrial firms in the US, Britain and Germany rose or lagged, 1880 to 1940.

The Morgan banks from 1830s London to J.P. Morgan and Morgan Stanley in the 1980s.

How Chicago and its western hinterland grew together as city and frontier.

Running the Washington Post through the Pentagon Papers, Watergate and a strike.

How shared fictions such as money, nations and gods let humans cooperate at scale.

How Vanderbilt, Gould, Rockefeller, Morgan and others built 19th-century fortunes.

The standard mid-century Franklin biography; Munger's model of a working life

How American life changed between 1900 and 1950.

What the corporation did to the people inside it, written at its peak.

The decentralised structure and financial controls that ran General Motors.

A century of US regulation through four figures, from Charles Francis Adams to Kahn.

How Britain, Germany, Japan and the US each built their own form of capitalism.

Franklin's life as printer, scientist, diplomat and founder.

A short history of the joint stock company, from trading charters to multinationals.

Carnegie, Rockefeller, Gould and Morgan and the economy they built

Samuel Zemurray rose from selling ripe bananas to taking over United Fruit.

Joseph P. Kennedy's life in banking, film, the stock market and politics.

A global history of cotton used to trace how capitalism developed.

Why the first merger wave happened and why most of it disappointed.

Sears in the mid-1980s, trying to reinvent itself after losing its lead in retail.

How electricity spread through everyday American life and commerce.

Memoir of a hedged-equity pioneer's seven decades on Wall Street

Seymour Cray and the supercomputer business he built and lost

Scottish Enlightenment as the source of modern commercial and economic thinking

Founder's account of building Firestone; business sense from the tyre trade

Franklin's reinvention from imperial gentleman into American businessman

How A&P became the world's largest retailer and the political fight it set off.

Narrative of the American West's mining and railroad fortunes

Entrepreneur's memoir of building and selling successive companies