No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

The Norwegian merchant fleet expanded dramatically during the second and third quarters of the nineteenth century. Between 1850 and 1880 alone it increased more than five-fold, making it not only the fastest-growing but also the third largest fleet in the world by tonnage." This growth also reflected the increasing orientation by Norwegian shipowners towards international freight markets; by 1875, seventy-eight percent of the fleet's earnings came from the cross-trades. 3 The expansion of the Norwegian fleet was part of a broader change in the maritime sector in the second half of the nineteenth century. As a response to improved access to international shipping markets after the repeal of the British Navigation Acts, fleets from nations such as Canada, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Sweden and Greece all experienced periods of expansion that were more rapid than the growth of world tonnage as a whole, thus reducing the lThe authors would like to thank Even Lange, Skip Fischer and the participants at the European Business History Association's Congress in Bergen, Norway, in August 2008 for comments. We are indebted to Professor Robert Lee for access to the Liverpool Mercantile Database and to Kati Nurmi for excellent assistance.

to publisher formatting) in a repository, with non-commercial reuse rights, with an Embargo period from date of publication of the final article. The embargo period for journals within the Social Sciences and the Humanities (SSH) is usually 18 months http://authorservices.taylorandfrancis.com/journal-list/ Time for a Nordic business history initiative?The current state of Nordic business history is by certain estimates better than ever. Nordic business historians publish extensively in leading international journals and have a strong presence at international business history conferences. Still, in this discussion article we raise a yellow flag of warning for the future of Nordic business history. We argue that the subject field is challenged along three important dimensions: (i) lack of relevant teaching, (ii) continued reliance on commissioned history and (iii) limited recruitment. The article discusses these challenges and seeks to place them in a historical perspective. For each challenge, we develop a set of concrete proposals to address the problems identified. A common theme in our proposed solutions is to intensify Nordic collaboration, particularly through the establishment of common, externally funded Nordic research projects. To create meeting grounds for the development of such projects, The Scandinavian Society for Economic and Social Historythe formal collaborative body for Nordic economic historians and the owner of Scandinavian Economic History Review should be reinvigorated.