Merchants to Multinationals: British Trading Companies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

By G. Jones. 2002

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e7cb306223fba14fe2bd9e91758f510098ff0ecb

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Citations in the corpus

Business Groups in Emerging Markets: Paragons or Parasites? (2007, background): “Jones (2000) makes this point in relation to British trading houses in the early twentieth century: one the primary functions of these early groups (which, like many venture capital funds today, were often organized as partnerships) was “identifying opportunities and placing potential British…”
Cross-border Market Co-creation, Dynamic Capabilities and the Entrepreneurial Theory of the Multinational Enterprise (2010, background): “The evolution of MNEs as documented by business historians, such as Jones (2002), is also supportive of our arguments.”
Institutions and the OLI paradigm of the multinational enterprise (2008, unknown): “The network MNE comprises many different types of cross-border organisation, from 19th century trading companies (Jones, 2000) and “traditional” business groups, such as those found in Latin America and Asia (Guillén, 2000b), to new cellular or network based forms of organisation, many of which have”
An evolutionary approach to understanding international business activity: The co-evolution of MNEs and the institutional environment (2010, unknown): “16See for example the work by Jones on the evolution of trading companies, and on the historical prevalence of the group or network structures of MNEs (Jones, 2000; Jones & Khanna, 2006).”