ABSTRACT
The purpose of this chapter is first to provide some context to the development of international business with reference to how organisations changed, the processes of decision making and identification of issues surrounding international business. In other words the emphasis will be on the processes that lead to the generation of archives. Of necessity, there will be limits to such an introductory approach: the chapter is necessarily British ‘centric’ because of the expertise of the authors, but this is less of an issue as the role of Britain in the internationalisation of business has been significant and she continues to be in the forefront of international trade and commerce. Second, we will outline the development of transport and communications that has facilitated the development of an international economy by reducing the cost of transacting, while increasing its geographical scope, making it easier for instance to arrange finance internationally. Such background will hopefully prompt curiosity about the organisational and informational context that generates the archive. Inevitably there are limits: increasingly, what a nation is constantly changes, both temporally (in terms of time) and spatially (in terms of geography). Further, as well as commercial organisations there is the potential to explore other kinds of international organisations, which have had a global influence, including sporting bodies such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA, or religious bodies such as the Catholic Church or the Anglican Communion. We limit our coverage in this chapter to those organisations directly engaged in international business – the delivery of goods, services and commodities across national boundaries as these are the best understood. However, it should be recognised that there is research being conducted on a wider range of international organisations and that our understanding of industries such as sport, should improve (Tennent and Gillett, 2015). Finally, this chapter focuses on the business side of international management and business history as a foundation and introduction, although there are also areas of political, social and cultural history that will be informed by the study of international business. We justify this by our belief that a basic knowledge of how such organisations and transactions were managed is a necessary prerequisite to understanding how the archival record should be used.
