Socialist Entrepreneurs? Business Histories of the GDR and Yugoslavia

This book breaks new ground, taking business history where it has only reluctantly gone in the past. The introduction reviews the small, but growing, literature, based on fresh archival materials, which investigates the history of business organisation in the Global East, or the Second World in the Cold War. It argues that there is already a great variety of approaches that go beyond the view of the Soviet-style firm as primarily a production function. Focusing on East Germany and Yugoslavia, seven chapters showcase new directions in the field, and demonstrate that the combination of business history with other historical and disciplinary approaches can help unpack the diversity of historical experiences, explain geographical variances, and offer new avenues for synthesis. The volume’s exploration of different historical eras, including those of postwar reconstruction, through globalisation, to transformation, also shows that the Global East should not be treated as disconnected from the rest of the world, but as part of wider, global trends. As such, the volume makes a plea for the utility of studying the Global East to business history and the utility of business history to the study of the Global East.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Business History.