This essay is a business and cultural history of Wrigley marketing in North America from the 1890s until the early 1930s. Wrigley relied on wholesalers at a time when consumer goods makers were expanding their sales forces. A prolific advertiser, Wrigley provided favorable terms to retailers carrying chewing gum, countering the view that advertising, by enabling direct communication between manufacturer and consumer, diminished retailer clout in the chain of distribution. Wrigley advertising constructed meanings on multiple levels, discussed here with the theoretical tools of liminality and semiotics. The text of Wrigley ads championed relief for two modern conditions: indigestion and stress. The imagery, mainly that of the liminal “Spearman,” evoked notions of unworldly escape and infantile nostalgia. The ads were richly polysemic. Accordingly, Wrigley's widespread popularity and market dominance by 1930 should be assessed in terms of both marketing function and representational process.

Foreign markets largely shaped the business strategy of Les Films Albatros, a medium-sized, internationally networked specialty producer of films in interwar France. Depending more on foreign revenues than did the Hollywood studios, Albatros also realized higher gross returns. Because films were capital goods providing a perishable product (seats at a specific time), their price depended on both expected performance and the threshold ticket-selling capacity necessary to recoup cinema fixed costs; some films could not be sold at any price. Given the small potential market for its films, Albatros had to find an intricate balance between producing at low cost and delivering films with at least threshold ticket-selling capacity. It did so by differentiating its films, entering film distribution in France, coproducing internationally, and cooperating with Pathé and Gaumont, the two largest French film companies. While its larger European rivals were obsessed with operational effectiveness vis-à-vis Hollywood, Albatros, by adopting a distinct strategic position, hardly had to pay attention to operational effectiveness at all. It was making a differentiated product for needs unserved by Hollywood.

Most business histories of the nineteenth-century southern upcountry focus on the shift from a protocapitalist, yeoman-oriented antebellum period to the rapid commercialization and industrialization of the New South era. These studies generally argue for a sharp break in the economic leadership of the region either through the rise of a new business elite, or the reorientation of an agrarian regime. Through a study of Spartanburg, South Carolina, my work challenges this notion of a sharp break and instead finds a vibrant, town-based entrepreneurial elite in both the antebellum and postbellum periods. The revolution that occurred was in the nature of South Carolina's political economy. Spartanburg's entrepreneurs, who struggled to achieve their goals in the antebellum era, found new opportunities as a result of post-war political realignments and the racial politics of Reconstruction. This business history at the community level adds an important chapter to our understanding of the political economy of the Old and New Souths.

For over a century in Egypt, the Suez Canal Company reflected the role of the concession in European economic expansion overseas. Concession was a European business practice widespread in Egypt; it was an institution inherited from a system of privileges for Europeans since the Middle Ages. It promised a way for Egypt to adopt modern infrastructures and receive needed European help for digging the canal. The results of the Suez Company are indisputable: the desert of the Suez Isthmus became a lively economic region with active ports, growing cities, and an expanding labor force. And the region was linked to the rest of the country by a new road network. At the same time, however, the concession system denied Egypt full benefit of this infrastructure. The canal served the financial and strategic interests of the company, not the interests of the local economy. This outcome embodied all the contradictions of the concession system: on the one hand, concessions were a necessity for modern infrastructure development in Egypt; on the other, they were a hindrance to further national economic development.