Volume 70, Issue 2

This article reviews the International Executive Service Corps program. The IESC program, initiated in 1964, aimed to send experienced American business executives to client companies and organizations in «underdeveloped» or «developing» countries for a project assignment. US policymakers backed the idea that the United States should rely on «private enterprises» to promote the American business management culture. David Rockefeller, along with many other leading businessmen of the time, initiated the IESC program and encouraged «ambassadors of American business», who prioritized «free enterprise» and «efficient rational management», to serve in developing societies. The program eventually helped build a new global network of managers and companies, who knew each other, in particular sectors. Based on a detailed investigation of the IESC collections in the Rockefeller archives this article primarily presents a structural review of the IESC. It then discusses how American business culture expanded across the «developing world» and how a global network of managers has emerged through the IESC program since the 60s.

Boyles Brothers Drilling Company was a Canadian diamond drilling firm primarily engaged in mineral exploration. At the end of the Second World War, it was well positioned to take part in the resource-based expansion of the Canadian economy. Headquartered in Vancouver it expanded operations across Canada. Its expertise was sought out in other parts of the world where mineral exploration was occurring, and the company became a multinational. The company was vertically integrated, manufacturing both diamond drill bits and drilling equipment. Its operations were, for the most part, undertaken on the frontier fringe characterized by an absence of transportation and communications infrastructure. Distances were vast, electronic communication non-existent and the work transient. This paper delves into how to manage a firm that spanned the globe in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. There appears to be two aspects of the management strategy: (1) treating the firm like an extended family and (2) having head office personnel on the ground in the geographically diverse operations as much as possible. The managerial style and strategy made Boyles Brothers an early successful Canadian-based multinational.

The history of commercial insurance in West Africa has been determined by the need to cover the risks of the colonial infrastructure and economy. This drove the expansion of European insurance companies in the 20 th century, first via agencies and later via branches. This article examines how the insurance industry in Nigeria and the CICA zone changed after the country’s declaration of independence from British rule. The analysis focuses not only on the companies’ so-called Africanisation strategies, but also on other challenges that shaped how insurance companies transformed their products, sales strategies, and target groups before and after independence. While multinational insurers and their technical expertise largely dominated these markets even after independence, their business prospects in the local markets had already changed in the course of the colonial infrastructure campaign. Nevertheless, even after independence, the insurance business in Nigeria and the CICA zone remained shaped by the colonial legacy and underlying elitist and Eurocentric ideas, some of which were accentuated after independence and came into conflict with changed sociopolitical realities. Some forms of international cooperation and state intervention aimed to make insurance products more accessible or even mandatory for the general population, but even such projects encountered substantial difficulties. Based on the sources from holdings of authorities, companies, and organisations, a picture emerges of a local insurance system in West Africa that only towards the end of the 20 th century strove to offer insurance products that were data-based and designed for the broad population, their needs, and economic realities. With these findings, the article aims to contribute to a better understanding of why this region has historically had one of the lowest insurance densities and penetration rates in the world.

At the turn of the century, the German rubber industry mostly obtained its rubber from specialised raw material traders. Using the example of the Traun Rubber Works in Hamburg, it can now be shown that some companies also organised their rubber supply themselves. The article examines how they did it and what problems they had to contend with. It becomes clear that the rubber industry was more directly involved in colonial resource extraction than previously thought.

Founded since the late 18th century, savings banks were marketed and perceived as political organizations, propagating social values such as thriftiness. Early on, communists like Karl Marx heavily criticized them as pillars of the bourgeois order. During the Third Reich, they expanded further and presented themselves as «the most völkisch banks». Despite this considerable baggage, the communist regime in East Germany regarded savings banks as valuable and wanted to harness their inherent potential for system-stabilizing. Re-founded locally immediately after the Second World War with heterogenous personnel, the process to transform savings banks into «democratic financial institutions» was complex, in many respects improvised, and it concentrated on personnel politics. The denazification occurred quite swiftly, and it was rather extensive and long-lasting – especially in comparison to West Germany. Denazification was of course connected to a counter-politicization, but the processes were not as closely linked in banks and in the financial sector in general as they were in other areas more central to the authority of the emerging dictatorial regime. Among the most important secondary effects were a de-professionalization and a feminization of the staff. The latter soon reached such dimensions that it redefined the traditionally male dominated banking business as «women’s work».