The German Yearbook on Business History contains a wealth of articles on corporate and business history in the 19th and 20th centuries. The authors are scientists and businessmen.

Contents: Practical Corner: The Evolution of the Exchange Rate from "Sacrosanct" Parity to Flexible Monetary Policy Instrument.- Historical Studies: The Society for Business History: A Decade of Work. The Bankers Simon and Abraham Oppenheim 1812-1880. The Private Background to Their Professional Activity, their Role in Politics and Ennoblement. Russian Business in the Brüning Era.- Reviews of Literature: A Review of the New Literature on Business History.- A Review of the New Literature on Banking History. Reports on Conferences. The German Yearbook on Business History is a source of insights into the entrepreneurial economy of the 19th and 20th centuries. It contains translations of topical journal articles and informative reviews of results and trends in business history research. As in the previous Yearbooks, the authors of this volume are experts in economic theory and practice whose contributions cover a wide spectrum.

This volume approaches the history of Japanese-German relations from a business history perspective. Starting with an overview of Japanese-German relations which focuses on the environment, strategies and forms of inter-firm relations, Akira Kudo then uses case studies to provide a broader picture, before finally considering strategy, organisational strategy and technology and management transfer in the light of problems identified earlier.

This work presents eleven studies in the field of Russian/Soviet economic and social history, which have been specially commissioned as a tribute to Professor R.W. Davies. Each chapter highlights a particular area of controversy, and illuminates the process of policy formation in this critical period of Soviet development. Together they provide an overview of the period 1917-1953.

A ground-breaking 2005 exploration of multinational corporations that differs from other books on the subject by offering the reader a totally global perspective of multinationals without portraying them simply as economic entities. Written by experts on various aspects of the history, development, cultural and social implications of the multinational corporation, the book paints a compelling and coherent picture of the way these businesses affect almost all areas of our existence. As we might expect, the multinational company is shown to play a major role in the globalization that is reshaping so much of our lives.

German unification evoked ambivalent reactions outside its borders: it revived disquietingmemories of attempts by German big business during the two world wars to build an economic empire in Europe in conjunction with the military and the government bureaucracy. But thereare also high hopes that German finance and industry will serve as the engine of reconstruction in eastern Europe, just as it played this role in the postwar unification of western Europe.

International Arms Trade has always been a powerful and multi-functional constituent of world politics and international diplomacy. Sending military advisors abroad and promoting arms sales, each legitimizing and supporting the other, became indispensable tools of alliance-making starting from the eve of the First World War until today. To the German Empire, as a relative latecomer to imperialistic rivalry in the struggle for colonies around the word in the late 19th century, arms exports performed a decisive service in stimulating and strengthening the German military-based expansionist economic foreign policy and provided effective tools to create new alliances around the globe. Therefore, from the outset, the German armament firms' marketing and sales operations to the global arms market but especially to the Ottoman Empire, under the rule of Sultan Abdülhamid II, were openly and strongly supported by Kaiser Wilhelm II, Bismarck and the other decision-makers in German Foreign Policy. Based on extensive multinational archival research in Germany, Turkey, Britain and the United States, Arming the Sultan explores the decisive impact of arms exports on the formation and stimulation of Germany's expansionist foreign economic policy towards the Ottoman Empire. Making an important contribution to current scholarship on the political economy of the international arms trade, Yorulmaz's innovative book Arming the Sultan reveals that arms exports, specifically under the shadow of personal diplomacy, proved to be an indispensable and integral part of Germany's foreign economic policy during the period leading up to WW1.

Gunpowder studies are still in their infancy despite the long-standing civil and military importance of this explosive since its discovery in China in the mid-ninth century AD. In this second volume by contributors who meet regularly at symposia of the International Committee for the History of Technology (ICOHTEC), the research is again rooted in the investigation of the technology of explosives manufacture, but the fact that the chapters range in scope from the Old World to the New, from sources of raw materials in south-east Asia to the complications of manufacture in the West, shows that the story is more than the simple one of how an intriguing product was made. This volume is the first to develop the implications of the subject, not just in the sense of relating it to changing military technologies, but in that of seeing the securing of gunpowder supplies as fundamental to the power of the state and imperial pretensions.The search for saltpetre, for example, an essential ingredient of gunpowder, became a powerful engine of sea-going European trade from the early seventeenth century. Smaller states like Venice were unable to form these distant connections, and so to sustain a gunpowder army. Stronger states like France and Britain were able to do so, and became even more powerful as the demand for improved explosives fostered national strengths - leading to a development of the sciences, especially chemistry, in the former case, and of manufacturing techniques in the latter.

First Published in 1991. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.