Editor’s Introduction

As several organizational changes at Enterprise & Society are taking place this summer, I’m using a page in this issue to share them with you. After serving four-year terms as Associate Editors, Lisa Jacobson (University of California, Santa Barbara), Francesca Carnevali (University of Birmingham), and Andrea Lluch (University of San Andres, Buenos Aires, formerly, Harvard Business School) have retired from attending symposia, chasing authors, and critiquing essays for Enterprise & Society. We all are in their debt for their service to the Journal, to the Business History Conference and to the profession. With the concurrence of the Trustees’ oversight committee, I am delighted to welcome two new associate editors as their successors: Andrew Popp (University of Liverpool) and Francesca Polese (Bocconi University, Milan). Well known to BHC members, each of them has graciously agreed to add Enterprise & Society editorial work to their considerable array of existing tasks. Recently, Associate Editor (and BHC past-president) Mark Rose, as dedicated an advocate for young scholars as there is, has notified us that he will not continue for a second term. This is very sad news indeed, but Sharon Ann Murphy (Providence College) has agreed to replace him on the editorial team. The final associate editor position will remain vacant until 2012; I expect to be able to recommend a candidate to the Trustees early next year.

Second, the following editorial board members have accepted our invitation to serve another term as senior advisers to the Journal: Peter Coclanis, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Patrick Fridenson, EHESS, Paris; Les Hannah, London School of Economics; Will Hausman, College of William and Mary; Richard John, Columbia University; Geoffrey Jones, Harvard Business School; Ken Lipartito, Florida International University; Chris McKenna, Said Business School, Oxford; Brett Sheehan, University of Southern California; Richard Sylla, Stern School of Business, NYU; Mary Yeager, University of California, Los Angeles; and Madeline Zelin, Columbia University. Their precise, often extensive commentaries on essays submitted to the Journal, particularly those by junior scholars, represent the best of collegiality.

Finally, given the size of our March issue (five articles, plus an introduction and afterword to the Military–Industrial Complex section), we will be offering just four articles in the June and September issues, not least to help catch up on the backlog of book reviews Marcelo Bucheli has carefully enlisted. Still, the articles we present this month provide critical and comparative perspectives well worth readers’ attention. To start, Giovanni Favero, Università Ca’ Foscari Venezia, delivers a rare inside analysis of how statistical indices were constructed, practically and politically, in nineteenth century Italy. Then, Bianca Murillo, University of California, Santa Barbara, escorts us through colonial enterprises’ efforts to cultivate consumption in West Africa, before Pierre-Yves Donzé, Osaka University, invites our attention to the elaborate steps through which Japanese entrepreneurs and engineers created a modern watchmaking industry, in the face of powerful competition from Switzerland and the United States. Neil Rollings, University of Glasgow, rounds out this quartet of engaging studies by analyzing British and American governments’ attempts at regulating investment outflows in the 1960s. I hope you find reviewing these contributions as engaging as your editors did, when preparing them for publication.