This article provides a critical examination of the way in which Britain's trading firms coped with radical changes in local business conditions. Recent work by Jones has shown that a small number of such companies successfully 'reinvented' themselves in the post-war period. Using evidence drawn...

This article traces the development of BAT's cigarette distribution network in China. It demonstrates that BAT utilised the connections that expatriate managing agencies had developed with Chinese merchants in the treaty port economy of Shangai during the late nineteenth century, and shows how...