ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how business enterprises have been powerful actors in the two waves of globalization since 1840. Emerging out of the industrialized Western economies, global firms created and co-created markets and ecosystems during the first global economy through their ability to transfer a package of financial, organizational and cultural assets, skills and ideologies across national borders. They were major drivers of trade growth, which they often organized within their own boundaries. Global firms were also actors in periodic de-globalization waves during the middle decades of the twentieth century and more recently. This was because they functioned as re-inforcers of gaps in wealth and income rather than disrupters of them. Business enterprises proved disappointing institutions for knowledge and technology transfer. Firms reinforced rather than disrupted institutional and societal norms which restricted growth in many countries outside the West. During the more recent globalization era, linkages and spillovers to local economies have remained disappointedly low. The chapter argues that business historians have concentrated far too much on the drivers of global business, and far too little on its impact. They also need to shift to studying the growth of firms whose homes were in China, India, the Arab Gulf and elsewhere.
