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Today, black-owned barber shops play a central role in African American public life. The intimacy of commercial grooming encourages both confidentiality and camaraderie, which make the barber shop an important gathering place for African American men to talk freely. But for many years preceding and even after the Civil War, black barbers endured a measure of social stigma for perpetuating inequality: though the profession offered economic mobility to black entrepreneurs, black barbers were obliged by custom to serve an exclusively white clientele. Quincy T. Mills traces the lineage from these nineteenth-century barbers to the bustling enterprises of today, demonstrating that the livelihood offered by the service economy was crucial to the development of a black commercial sphere and the barber shop as a democratic social space.Cutting Along the Color Linechronicles the cultural history of black barber shops as businesses and civic institutions. Through several generations of barbers, Mills examines the transition from slavery to freedom in the nineteenth century, the early twentieth-century expansion of black consumerism, and the challenges of professionalization, licensing laws, and competition from white barbers. He finds that the profession played a significant though complicated role in twentieth-century racial politics: while the services of shaving and grooming were instrumental in the creation of socially acceptable black masculinity, barbering permitted the financial independence to maintain public spaces that fostered civil rights politics. This sweeping, engaging history of an iconic cultural establishment shows that black entrepreneurship was intimately linked to the struggle for equality.

American society today is shaped not nearly as much by vast open spaces as it is by vast, bureaucratic organizations. Over half the working population toils away at enterprises with 500 or more employees--up from zero percent in 1800. Is this institutional immensity the logical outcome of technological forces in an all-efficient market, as some have argued? In this book, the first organizational history of nineteenth-century America, Yale sociologist Charles Perrow says no. He shows that there was nothing inevitable about the surge in corporate size and power by century's end. Critics railed against the nationalizing of the economy, against corporations' monopoly powers, political subversion, environmental destruction, and \"wage slavery.\" How did a nation committed to individual freedom, family firms, public goods, and decentralized power become transformed in one century? Bountiful resources, a mass market, and the industrial revolution gave entrepreneurs broad scope. In Europe, the state and the church kept private organizations small and required consideration of the public good. In America, the courts and business-steeped legislators removed regulatory constraints over the century, centralizing industry and privatizing the railroads. Despite resistance, the corporate form became the model for the next century. Bureaucratic structure spread to government and the nonprofits. Writing in the tradition of Max Weber, Perrow concludes that the driving force of our history is not technology, politics, or culture, but large, bureaucratic organizations. Perrow, the author of award-winning books on organizations, employs his witty, trenchant, and graceful style here to maximum effect. Colorful vignettes abound: today's headlines echo past battles for unchecked organizational freedom; socially responsible alternatives that were tried are explored along with the historical contingencies that sent us down one road rather than another. No other book takes the role of organizations in America's development as seriously. The resultant insights presage a new historical genre.

This volume presents a collection of interrelated essays by international scholars working on the relationship between commerce and culture from c. 1750 to the early-twentieth century. Considerable attention has recently been focused on the importance of social networks and business culture in reducing transaction costs, both in the pre-industrial period and during the nineteenth century, and these essays underline the centrality of this across a broad international setting. As such the volume provides an important addition to the available literature in this field and will attract a wide readership amongst business, cultural, maritime, economic, social and urban historians, as well as historical anthropologists, sociologists and other social scientists whose research embraces a longer-term perspective.

In the mid nineteenth century a process began that appears, from a present-day perspective, to have been the first wave of economic globalization. Within a few decades global economic integration reached a level that equaled, and in some respects surpassed, that of the present day. This book describes the interpenetration of the German economy with an emerging global economy before the First World War, while also demonstrating the huge challenge posed by globalization to the society and politics of the German Empire. The stakes for both the winners and losers of the intensifying world market played a major role in dividing German society into camps with conflicting socio-economic priorities. As foreign trade policy moved into the center stage of political debates, the German government found it increasingly difficult to pursue a successful policy that avoided harming German exports and consumer interests while also seeking to placate a growing protectionist movement.

Recent and increasing interest in art market studies—the dealers, mediators, advisors, taste makers, artists, etc.—indicate that the transaction of art and decorative art is anything but linear. Taking as its point of departure two of the most active agents of the late nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Bode and Stefano Bardini, the essays in this volume also look beyond, to other art market individuals and their vast and frequently interconnected, social and professional networks. Newly told history taken from rich business, epistolary and photographic archives, these essays examine the art market, within a broader and more complex context. In doing so, they offer new areas of inquiry for mapping of works of art as they were exchanged over time and place.

This pioneering work comprehensively examines the history of female entrepreneurship in the Russian Empire during nineteenth-century industrial development. According to Russian law, women enjoyed the same property rights as men, so the principle of separate personal property in marriage made it possible for a woman to be independent in business matters. Ulianova uses statistical information on female entrepreneurs from 1814 to 1900, and sociologically analyzes the data on a wide range of enterprises, from cottage industries to large-scale manufacturing operations. The study also includes lively case histories which reveal the background to a number of family fortunes including instances of bankruptcy and property litigations between close family members.

Nineteenth-century Canada experienced two other revolutions apart from those of W.L. Mackenzie and Louis Riel: the transition to capitalism, and to responsible government. Union Is Strength argues that these major socio-political changes happened in Ontario without a revolutionary moment because of the intertwined relationship of reformers with capitalists. Examining a small, utopian socialist group named the Children of Peace, Albert Schrauwers traces the emergence of a vibrant democratic culture in the province from the decade before the Rebellions of 1837. Schrauwers shows how the overlapping boards of unincorporated joint stock companies managed by both Toronto reformers and the Children of Peace produced a culture of deliberative democracy in competition with the \"gentlemanly capitalism\" of chartered corporations. Noting the ways in which Ontario's capitalist and democratic revolutions were linked through cooperative joint stock operations, he also situates these revolutions in an international context and links them to the development of Owenite socialism and Chartism in the United Kingdom. Union Is Strength is an insightful study of both nineteenth century Canada and the ways in which regional political cultures arise.

Drawing on a wide range of sources in both English and Maori, this study explores the entrepreneurial activity of New Zealand's indigenous Maori in the early colonial period. Focusing on the two industries—coastal shipping and flourmilling—where Maori were spectacularly successful in the 1840s and 1850s, this title examines how such a society was able to develop capital-intensive investments and harness tribal ownership quickly and effectively to render commercial advantages. A discussion of the sudden decline in the \"golden age\" of Maori enterprise—from changing market conditions, to land alienation—is also included.

This book examines how Chinese family and business networks, focused around activities such as revenue farming, including opium, the rice trade, and pawnbroking, and related legal and labour organization activities, were highly influential in the process of state formation in Malaya. It shows how Chinese family and business networks were flexible and dynamic, and were closely interlocked with economic and social structures, around which government, and states, developed. It considers the crucial role of wealth and power in the process of state formation, and challenges accepted views of Chinese ethnicity and migration. 'The richness of both the thematic approaches as well as the breadth of the source materials used will surely make this book compelling reading. Readers interested in colonial history, state formation, social change, family business networks, and legal institutional development will all find challenging views and interesting description. Moreover, Wu Xiao An has shown us convincingly that these diverse issues not only can be analysed in an integrated fashion, but that they should be.' - Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 'The book is a major contribution to studies of nineteenth and twentieth century Malaysian history, studies of the overseas Chinese and studies of colonialism and it should be seen as an important complement to other works which show the role played by Penang in its neighbouring territories.' - Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1. Introduction 2. Settings 3. Networking Regional Interactions 1882-1889 4. Family and State 1889-1895 5. Old Framework and New Development 1895-1905 6. Transition 1905-1909 7. Confrontation and Accommodation 1909-1918 8. Another Round of Adjustment 1918-1928 9. A New Profile of Community and Business 1928-1941 10. Conclusion Wu Xiao An received his PhD from the University of Amsterdam. He held a lectureship at Xiamen University (1991-93) and was awarded fellowships at the University of Amsterdam (1993-99), The National University of Singapore (2000-1) and Kyoto University (2002). His research interests include the modern history of Southeast Asia and the Chinese overseas.

01 02 On the brightly-lit street corners of Piccadilly and in the dark alleyways of Stepney, in public parks and private flats, in nightclubs and cafes, prostitution was intertwined with London's society, culture, and landscape. As public and political attitudes toward commercial sex hardened, uneven and imperfect attempts to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. Common Prostitutes and Ordinary Citizens examines how laws, policies and attitudes toward prostitution were translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex navigated a climate of repression, and charts the complex dimensions of the underground sexual economy in the metropolis. Laite puts forward the controversial argument that laws directed against prostitution tended to do more harm than good; they encouraged the growth of vice syndicates, promoted illicit real estate and came down the hardest upon the women who worked as prostitutes. By examining the administration of the law and its consequences and by uncovering the lives and experiences of prostitutes, this book offers a compelling new look at the history of commercial sex in modern London. 02 02 Between 1885 and 1960, laws and policies designed to repress prostitution dramatically shaped London's commercial sex industry. This book examines how laws translated into street-level reality, explores how women who sold sex experienced criminalization, and charts the complex dimensions of the underground sexual economy in the modern metropolis. 31 02 First scholarly study of prostitution, including the criminalization of prostitution, in London during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries 13 02 JULIA LAITE Lecturer in Modern British History at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. She has published several articles on prostitution in Britain and is presently researching women's migration, sexual labour, and human trafficking in the twentieth century world. 19 02 First in-depth examination of prostitution in London in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and in Britain after 1914 Explores criminalization and the impact of the criminal justice system, as well as regulation Argues that criminalization increased the stigma and harm associated with prostitution Contributes to present-day debates about prohibition, regulation and decriminalization of the commercial sex industry 04 02 List of Figures Acknowledgements Introduction: Criminalizing Commercial Sex Selling sex: Women, Work, and Prostitution Buying Sex: Men and the Marketplace The Crusade Begins: The Criminal Law Amendment Act and London's 'Brothels' Before the First World War Women in Public and Public Women: Controlling Street Prostitution 1887-1914 'Down on Whores' and 'Living on the Earnings': Violence, Vulnerability and the Law after 1885 White Slaves and Alien Prostitutes: Trafficking, Protection, and Punishment in the Early Twentieth Century Making War, Taking Fingerprints, and Challenging the Law: Policy Changes and Public Debates after 1914 Behind Closed Doors: Off-Street Commercial Sex in the Interwar Years Sex, War, and Syndication: Organized Prostitution and the Second World War The Shame of London: Prostitution and Panic in the Post-War Metropolis Risking the Dangers: Reconsidering Commercial Sex in 'Permissive Britain' Conclusion Appendix Notes Bibliography Index