Editor’s Introduction

With this issue, Enterprise & Society embarks on its tenth year of publication. It seems (to me, at least) a very long time ago when, a bit before the turn of the century, Will Hausman (William and Mary) and Pat Denault (Harvard) commenced the process of designing a fully refereed quarterly journal to build on the foundations Business and Economic History had developed. BEH was for decades the Business History Conference’s annual proceedings volume, which in its last seven print years enlarged to two sections. With so many new themes and approaches that enriched business history in the 1990s, Will (who edited BEH in his capacity as BHC secretary-treasurer) and Pat (who did a great deal of work on the journal) outlined their scheme to a number of university presses in 1997–1998. Several professed interest in reply, and after the BHC’s trustees selected Oxford University Press, the founders convened a meeting at the Hagley Library to move forward with organizing the journal’s startup. Glenn Porter, then Hagley’s director, offered institutional support; Roger Horowitz agreed to assume Will’s duties as BHC Secretary-Treasurer; and I volunteered to be E&S’s initial book review editor, with Will wearing the first Enterprise & Society editor-in-chief hat. A remarkable first issue appeared in March 2000, “Flexibility in the Age of Fordism,” coordinated by Jonathan Zeitlin and including David Hounshell’s durably valuable article on automating complex assembly technologies. Now we have reached a milestone, have cleared a six-figure debt to Oxford, appear to be running in the black, are renewing our association with OUP for another five years, and are welcoming an ever-morediverse, international flow of submissions. It has been a long, at times nerve-wracking, but on the whole, satisfying run.

At this juncture, having been “promoted” to editor starting with Volume 9, I’d like to acknowledge the extraordinary efforts put forward by Will Hausman, Pat Denault, Roger Horowitz, and Carol Lockman at Hagley, Ken Lipartito (Florida International University) and David Sicilia (University of Maryland, College Park), the second editorial tandem, and our hundreds of referees and book reviewers. The journal’s success has been the product of collective labors. At the close of 2008, David’s successor as Reviews Editor, Richard Greenwald (Drew University) ended his service to the journal, having accepted a deanship, which squeezed all the free space out of his schedule. Our thanks to him are deep and sincere. We thus welcome Marcelo Bucheli (Illinois, Urbana–Champaign) to the book reviews chair with pleasure, following an international search conducted by the BHC’s Print Media Oversight Committee. Changes too have come to our Editorial Advisory Board. Those departing after completing terms of service are: Hubert Bonin (Bordeaux), Carter Eckert (Harvard), Riita Hjerppe (Helsinki), Akira Kudo (Tokyo), Chi Kong Lai (Queensland), Mary Rose (Lancaster), and Keetie Sluyterman (Utrecht). Their assistance to the editorial team over the years has been invaluable. New board members commenced their terms as of January 2009: Gerben Bakker (London School of Economics), Hartmut Berghoff (German Historical Institute), Paul Duguid (UC-Berkeley), Claire Lemercier (CNRS, Paris), Francesca Polese (Bocconi, Milan), and Kazuo Wada (Tokyo). We look forward to their advice and commentaries over the next four years.

And now to business. Volume 10’s first installment leads off with an article by one of our new board members, Paul Duguid, who has excavated the legal history of trademarks back through the 18th century, exposing their French rather than Anglo-Saxon roots, a finding that has fascinating implications. Christopher Kobrak next offers a long-term overview and analysis of private banking in Europe (chiefly Germany) and the United States, an assessment that proves remarkably salient in these volatile times for financial institutions. Then we present a special section on American transportation history, originally suggested by David Sicilia and here introduced by Mark Rose, our current BHC president, who has shepherded three insightful essays through detailed revisions. Albert Churella, Shane Hamilton, and Marc Levinson present fresh and critical views of surface transportation’s complexity, interlaced as it was (and is) with politics and state regulation.

As ever, readers who have...