British Business In Asia Since 1860

This 1989 book examines the experience of British business in Asia since 1860, with primary focus on the impact of British commerce in the region. Following an introduction by the editors, there are essays by leading specialist historians on British businesses in Iran, India, Thailand, Malaysia, China, Russian Asia and Japan.

Using archival materials newly available in China and records in Britain and the US, Robert Bickers paints a detailed portrait of the traders, missionaries, businessmen, diplomats and settlers who constituted "Britain-in-China." Bickers argues that the British presence in China was dominated by urban settlers whose primary allegiance lay not with any grand imperial design but with their own communities and precarious livelihoods. This brought them into growing conflict with the Chinese population and the British imperial government. Bickers goes on to examine how the British state and its allies brought an end to the reign of freelance, settler imperialism on the China coast. At the same time, other British sectors, missionary and business, renegotiated their own relationship with their Chinese markets and the Chinese state and distanced themselves from the settler British.

This book explores the limits of the idea of 'neo-colonialism' - the idea that in the period immediately after independence Malaya/Malaysia enjoyed only pseudo-independence, because of the dominant position of British business interests.

SAGE has unparalleled depth in journal back lists in the field of organization studies, and publishes several of the top journals in the field, including Organization, Human Relations and Organization Studies. This four-volume set brings together over sixty of the key papers published in SAGE books and journals since the turn of the millennium, many of which are not easily available in traditional library holdings. Professor Stewart Clegg is widely recognised as a preeminent scholar of organization studies, and together with an international editorial board of ten renowned scholars in the field, has arranged this selection to help the reader better understand the developments in the field from different perspectives. Emphasis is placed on the ′history of the present′ of organization studies, with articles that discuss contemporary issues and foreshadow further developments in the field, across popular theoretical perspectives such as discourse analysis, institutional theory and complexity theory.

Merchants to Multinationals examines the evolution of multinational trading companies from the eighteenth century to the present day. During the Industrial Revolution, British merchants established overseas branches which became major trade intermediaries and subsequently engaged in foreign direct investment. Complex multinational business groups emerged controlling large investments in natural resources, processing, and services in Asia, Latin America, and Africa. While theories of the firm predict the demise over time of merchant firms, this book identifies the continued resilience of British trading companies despite the changing political and business environments of the twentieth century. Like Japanese trading companies, they 're-invented' themselves in successive generations. The competences of the trading companies resided in their information-gathering, relationship-building, human resource, and corporate governance systems. This book provides a new dimension to the literature on international business through the focus on multinational service firms and its evolutionary approach based on confidential business records.

This 2003 book offered the first in-depth international survey of contemporary research and debates in business history. Over the two decades leading to its publication, enormous advances had been made in writing the history of business enterprise and business systems. Historians are documenting and analyzing the evolution of a wide range of important companies and systems, their patterns of innovation, production, and distribution, their financial affairs, their political activities, and their social impact. Each essay is written by a prominent authority who provides an assessment of the state and significance of research in his or her area. This volume is a reference work that will be of immense value to historians, economists, management researchers, and others concerned to access the latest insights on the evolution of business throughout the world.

This book examines the role of mercantile networks in linking Asian economies to the global economy. It contains fourteen contributions on East, Southeast and South Asia covering the period from 1750 to the present.

The Business of Decolonization serves to deepen our understanding of the end of the British empire, too often approached as if it was a process shaped and experienced exclusively by nationalist and imperial politicians and policy-makers. It explores British companies' experience of, and involvement in, developments leading to the transfer of power in Ghana, the former colony of the Gold Coast. The book demonstrates that businessmen developed strategies to cope with political change, reveals the extent of their involvement in nationalist politics, and highlights the contrasting responses of different companies to political and constitutional developments in the colony. Drawing on an extensive range of company, business association, personal, and official papers, the book focuses primarily on company activity. However, it also investigates relations between British firms and the colonial state on the eve of Ghanaian independence, and examines the place of British business interests in British policy.