Ville
Biographic Data
| ID | 21613 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ville |
| FAMILY NAME | Ville |
| SIGNATURE | VILLE |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wollongong |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8314-6002 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 87 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 87 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1981 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Managerial ownership and firm performance in interwar Australia
Whether patterns of ownership and control affect firm performance is unresolved in the conceptual literature, which balances agency costs against efficient management. We investigate the question for a sample of 90 firms in Australia in the 1930s, a critical period for the growth of its capital markets and in a distinctive setting. We confirm the conclusions reached by a limited range of historical studies that little or no relationship existed b…
The Ownership and Control of Australian Companies in the Interwar Period
We examine corporate ownership and control using a sample of 90 Australian companies in the 1930s. The interwar period was formative in Australia for the growth of corporations and share ownership, although investor protections and information lagged. We estimate the ownership share of the Board, separately the CEO/Chairman, and other significant blockholders. Our sources enable us to account for shares controlled indirectly through family owners…
Shining a light
A developing literature points to the growing significance of women in the Australian colonial economy, particularly through their role as business owners. We are interested to know whether they were also active company investors, as evidence from other countries such as Britain and America has revealed to be the case. We investigate the Australian Gaslight Company, one of Australiaâ€TMs oldest and largest enterprises and which has extensive surv…
Value, knowledge and reputation
The burgeoning nineteenth-century public-museum sector built a significant part of its natural-history specimen collections through extensive international trading. The early 2020s has seen an upsurge of scholarly interest in this largely overlooked trade. Exchange was a distinctive aspect of the natural-history trade that reveals much about the diverse practices and motives of the institutional collectors. Economic-geographic benefits included c…
Share ownership and the introduction of no liability legislation in nineteenth-century Australia
The no liability company – where investors are not liable for uncalled parts of their shares – is unique to Australasia. Deploying a large dataset, we provide the first empirical examination of the effects of this new corporate type on company formation and shareholding. Victorian gold mining was the earliest and most pervasive user of no liability. No liability companies largely replaced limited liability within a decade of the legislation in 18…
No gold-diggers here
We draw upon an extensive database of investors in colonial Australian mining, during the 1850s-80s, to provide the first historical analysis of the nature of women's share investing in Australia. Women were a minority of investors by number and value of holdings and faced a series of obstacles, yet their presence grew throughout the period. Most women invested independently neither drawing on male relatives nor other women. Many opted for only a…
Media tone and trading activity on the Sydney Stock Exchange 1901–1950
We examine how media reports influenced trading volumes and order imbalances on the Sydney Stock Exchange (SSX) from 1901 to 1950, focusing on wool market reports as a substitute for broader financial advice in the absence of a specialised investment press. Given wool's status as Australia's primary export and its integration with various sectors, we construct a weekly media sentiment index based on news about wool sales and auctions from the Syd…
International Business in Australia before World
Marketing the Multinational in Shenbao , Shanghai, 1872–1889
Foreign multinational enterprises (MNEs) operating in China, especially during the nineteenth century, have attracted less interest from historians than Chinese firms and expatriate merchant houses. However, in this period, MNEs shaped advertising in Shenbao , China’s most vital modern Chinese-language newspaper. Through our examination of the advertisements they placed during the newspaper’s first phase of publication, 1872–1889, we argue that M…
Researching the natural history trade of the nineteenth century
The archives of the Australian Museum and the Macleay Museum are deployed to analyse the global trading networks of two important Australian natural history collectors in the mid-nineteenth century. The evidence reveals much about the challenges they faced transacting in heterogeneous specimens over long distances. It also uncovers some of the solutions they pursued, particularly in choosing the appropriate type of transaction, forging trust-base…
Coping with Climate Extremes
Transport networks can play an important role in responses to extreme climate events, especially when governments own the network and intervene directly. Railways occupied a central place in Australian rural development by the late nineteenth century, a topic that has been discussed widely by scholars of economic history. Much less is known about their contribution during the severe drought crises faced by rural communities. We investigate the ro…
Investing in a Wealthy Resource-Based Colonial Economy
The article is a rare investigation into multinational activity in a wealthy resource-based colonial economy toward the end of the first wave of globalization. It challenges the conventional wisdom that multinationals had a limited presence in pre-1914 Australia, where government loans and portfolio investment from Britain into infrastructural and primary industries dominated. Our new database of nearly five hundred foreign firms, from various na…
Finding convergence
Capitalism in Australia
Capitalism is back. Three decades ago, when all alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets appeared discredited, talk of capitalism seemed passé. Now, after a decade of political and economic turmoil, capitalism and its temporal critique of progress and decline again seems an indispensable category to understanding a world in flux. Among the social sciences, historians have led both the embrace and critique of this 're-emergent' concept. …
Dynamic paths of innovation in natural resource industries in Australia and Norway since World War Two
This paper challenges Ed Barbier’s influential contribution to the resources and economic development debate and extends our understanding of the process of resource-based development in two relevant economies since World War Two. We argue that: the expansion of resource-based industries remained a viable path of economic development in the ‘contemporary era’ since the 1950s; nations have modernised their economies while continuing to invest in r…
Quotidian Routines
Cooperative corporate behavior has often been explained through the social anatomy of business leaders and structural ties among firms. Our alternative approach investigates how quotidian interactions built trust and routines among a group of major firms in the Australian wool trade—a sector that required regular interaction to be effective. Deploying extensive archives of their meetings, we use social network analysis to examine interactions amo…
Buzz and Pipelines
This paper provides a historical analysis of an urban services district through its examination of the Melbourne wool trade precinct in the 1920s. It is a study of both a local and global community whose social and spatial interaction facilitated large-scale trade of a complex commodity that has rarely been examined. Geographic mapping of the local and global connections of the precinct has been combined with archival evidence. It reveals the “bu…
Australia
Business groups have been limited in number and influence for most of Australia’s modern history. Several entrepreneurs managed a diversified portfolio of interests, and business families often cooperated with one another, but this rarely took the form of a business group. When the Australian economy diversified into manufacturing from its initial narrow resource base, multinational corporations formed a dominant presence. Governments built infra…
Firm Performance and Market Behaviour
David Merrett's academic career as an economic historian began in the 1960s as a teaching fellow and master of economics candidate at Monash University. The social sciences were experiencing their postwar expansion (Macintyre, 2010); economic history was as an important component of this growth with an array of subjects offered, new appointments made, and a recently established (1967) specialist journal, the Australian Economic History Review. Th…
The university tea room
Informal spaces encourage the meeting of minds and the sharing of ideas. They serve as an important counterpoint to the formal, silo-like structures of the modern organisation, encouraging social bonds and discussion across departmental lines. We address the role of one such institution – the university tea room – in Australia in the post-WWII decades. Drawing on a series of oral history interviews with economic historians, we examine the nature …
The drivers of firm longevity
Why do some firms last longer than others? This question has attracted considerable interest among scholars from business history, management and economics. Our article combines the business historian’s macro view of the relationship between size, longevity, and economic development with quantitative modelling. We apply survival analysis to data relating to size, age and profitability, three first-order explanations of longevity, for Australian s…
The Evolution of an Intellectual Community Through the Words of Its Founders
Analysing the dynamic evolution of a scholarly field requires an understanding of the social interactions within its community as well as the impact of the written word. Influence might diffuse through mentoring, graduate supervision, seminar discussion, and management roles. To date, our knowledge of the growth of economic history in Australia after 1945 draws heavily upon the impact of a number of key publications. We interview a broad selectio…
When commerce, science, and leisure collaborated
Natural history products formed an important, but little studied, component of the globalization of trade in the mid nineteenth century. The trade, specifically in zoology, occurred in the face of considerable challenges. It penetrated some of the more remote areas of the globe; its products were heterogeneous and difficult to price; and exchange occurred among scientists, commercial traders, and collectors, each of whom had their own particular …
Neither a Discipline nor a Colony
After years in the wilderness, economic history is becoming fashionable once more. Intellectual shifts by its parent disciplines of history and economics, the failed experiment of economic history as a separate discipline, and the impact of major economic events have conspired to produce a renaissance in the field of study in the last decade and a half. We explain these changes and show that economic history derives its main strength from its rol…
Workers’ Capital
Workers’ Capital: Industry Funds and the Fight for Universal Superannuation in Australia." Australian Historical Studies, 48(4), pp. 607–608
Efficient Transactors or Rent-Seeking Monopolists? The Rationale for Early Chartered Trading Companies
Although the modern multinational corporation is usually regarded as a product of changes in the scale and nature of business that have occurred since the middle of the nineteenth century, there are examples of large, integrated firms dating back to the sixteenth century. Perhaps the most celebrated of these are the English and Dutch East India companies, established in 1600 and 1602, respectively, with a national monopoly of trade with Asia. Oth…
Rent Seeking or Market Strengthening? Industry Associations in New Zealand Wool Broking
This paper builds on recent conceptual work about associations that is drawn from the new institutional economics. It uses evidence from New Zealand wool broking to indicate the circumstances in which industry associations can operate effectively and in the broader public interest. Through their strong associative capacity and effective specialization of function, wool-broking industry associations developed flexible routines for managing wool au…
When commerce, science, and leisure collaborated
Natural history products formed an important, but little studied, component of the globalization of trade in the mid nineteenth century. The trade, specifically in zoology, occurred in the face of considerable challenges. It penetrated some of the more remote areas of the globe; its products were heterogeneous and difficult to price; and exchange occurred among scientists, commercial traders, and collectors, each of whom had their own particular …
Defending productivity growth in the English coal trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Industry associations as facilitators of social capital
Relocation of the selling of Australia's wool clip from London to cities in Australia in the late nineteenth century led to the creation of wool selling industry associations, such as the Melbourne Woolbrokers Association (MWA). Highly successful in fostering competitive collaboration that improved market efficiency, the Association rested on the social capital brought to it and further developed by the participants, individuals with extensive co…
Total Factor Productivity in the English Shipping Industry
Investing in a Wealthy Resource-Based Colonial Economy
The article is a rare investigation into multinational activity in a wealthy resource-based colonial economy toward the end of the first wave of globalization. It challenges the conventional wisdom that multinationals had a limited presence in pre-1914 Australia, where government loans and portfolio investment from Britain into infrastructural and primary industries dominated. Our new database of nearly five hundred foreign firms, from various na…
Financing Growth
An expanding economy, new technologies, and changing consumer preferences provided growth opportunities for firms in interwar Australia. This period saw an increase in the number of large-scale firms in mining, manufacturing, and a wide range of service industries. Firms unable to rely solely on retained earnings to fund expansion turned to the domestic stock exchanges. A new data set of capital raisings constructed from reports of prospectuses p…
An Historical Geography of Europe, 1800-1914
The drivers of firm longevity
Why do some firms last longer than others? This question has attracted considerable interest among scholars from business history, management and economics. Our article combines the business historian’s macro view of the relationship between size, longevity, and economic development with quantitative modelling. We apply survival analysis to data relating to size, age and profitability, three first-order explanations of longevity, for Australian s…
The Development of Large Scale Enterprise in Australia, 1910–64
This essay explores the development of large scale enterprise in Australia, an economy in which resource industries were unusually important and with a very small domestic market. Using asset size as a yardstick, the authors construct a series of the 100 largest firms operating in the years 1910, 1930, 1952 and 1964. These lists allow the identification of firms by industry and whether they were foreign-owned. Cross-country comparisons are also m…
Theory and Evidence
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The growth of specialization in English shipowning, 1750-1850
Wages, Prices and Profitability in the Shipping Industry during the Napoleonic Wars
Capitalism in Australia
Capitalism is back. Three decades ago, when all alternatives to liberal democracy and free markets appeared discredited, talk of capitalism seemed passé. Now, after a decade of political and economic turmoil, capitalism and its temporal critique of progress and decline again seems an indispensable category to understanding a world in flux. Among the social sciences, historians have led both the embrace and critique of this 're-emergent' concept. …
Quotidian Routines
Cooperative corporate behavior has often been explained through the social anatomy of business leaders and structural ties among firms. Our alternative approach investigates how quotidian interactions built trust and routines among a group of major firms in the Australian wool trade—a sector that required regular interaction to be effective. Deploying extensive archives of their meetings, we use social network analysis to examine interactions amo…
Buzz and Pipelines
This paper provides a historical analysis of an urban services district through its examination of the Melbourne wool trade precinct in the 1920s. It is a study of both a local and global community whose social and spatial interaction facilitated large-scale trade of a complex commodity that has rarely been examined. Geographic mapping of the local and global connections of the precinct has been combined with archival evidence. It reveals the “bu…
Visualising the Interdisciplinary Research Field
Accounting for Nonconvergence in Global Wool Marketing before 1939
From the mid-nineteenth century, raw wool became a global commodity as new producing countries in the Southern Hemisphere supplied the world's growing textile industries in the North. The selling practices of these big-five exporters—Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and Uruguay—ranged from auction through a hybrid of auction and private sale to exclusively private sale. We explore why these countries persisted with different marke…
Does the military turn men into criminals? New evidence from Australia’s conscription lotteries
Social Capital Formation in Australian Rural Communities
Data from the Australian stock and station agent industry can be used to examine several unresolved issues concerning how to characterize and measure social capital. The evidence reveals two distinct types of social capital-one long-term and innate to a community and the other more volatile, subject to individual decisions. The two types are causally linked, the inherent strain providing propitious conditions for particular kinds of investment. S…
The Expansion and Development of a Private Business
English Shipowning during the Industrial Revolution
This study reveals how early English shipowners developed the size and structure of their business, the types of vessels they used, the cargoes they carried, the freights they paid and the profits they earned. Broader conclusions also emerge about the development of the shipping industry as a whole in this critical period of the Industrial Revolution, such as the structure of firms, the manner in which entrepreneurs responded to the wartime econo…
Note
In this note, Dr. Ville expands upon an analysis of the English coal trade in the eighteenth century made by William J. Hausman in the Winter 1977 issue of the Business History Review . Drawing upon the recently discovered papers of Michael Henley and Son, London shipowners between 1775 and 1830, Ville contends that Hausman underestimated both the underlying level of the trade's profitability and its highly volatile nature. Central to Ville's arg…
Share ownership and the introduction of no liability legislation in nineteenth-century Australia
The no liability company – where investors are not liable for uncalled parts of their shares – is unique to Australasia. Deploying a large dataset, we provide the first empirical examination of the effects of this new corporate type on company formation and shareholding. Victorian gold mining was the earliest and most pervasive user of no liability. No liability companies largely replaced limited liability within a decade of the legislation in 18…
Wages, Prices and Profitability in the Shipping Industry during the Napoleonic Wars
West Country Maritime and Social History
The Deployment of English Merchant Shipping
Note
In this note, Dr. Ville expands upon an analysis of the English coal trade in the eighteenth century made by William J. Hausman in the Winter 1977 issue of the Business History Review . Drawing upon the recently discovered papers of Michael Henley and Son, London shipowners between 1775 and 1830, Ville contends that Hausman underestimated both the underlying level of the trade's profitability and its highly volatile nature. Central to Ville's arg…
An Historical Geography of Europe, 1800-1914
Total Factor Productivity in the English Shipping Industry
Defending productivity growth in the English coal trade during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Shipping in the Port of Newcastle, 1780–1800
English Shipowning during the Industrial Revolution
This study reveals how early English shipowners developed the size and structure of their business, the types of vessels they used, the cargoes they carried, the freights they paid and the profits they earned. Broader conclusions also emerge about the development of the shipping industry as a whole in this critical period of the Industrial Revolution, such as the structure of firms, the manner in which entrepreneurs responded to the wartime econo…
The Problem of Tonnage Measurement in the English Shipping Industry, 1780–1830
Rise to Pre-Eminence
Transport and the Development of the European Economy, 1750–1918
Transport and industrialization road systems inland waterways the shipping industry the railways the motor vehicle industry.
The Shipping Industry
Shipping was the most important and effective mode of transport in the eighteenth century. It required no man-made path and its energy source was free. The extensive coastlines of Britain, France and Scandinavia provided an ideal environment for the development of coastal communications before the railways broke the bottleneck of overland transport. A network of rivers and canals linked coastal shipping with many inland areas of Britain and Franc…
Sunderland Shipbuilding
Shipping in the Port of Sunderland 1815–45
(1990). Shipping in the Port of Sunderland 1815–45: A Counter-Cyclical Trend. Business History: Vol. 32, No. 1, pp. 32-51
Innovations in Shipping and Trade
Trade and Shipping
Liverpool Shipping, Trade and Industry
The Expansion and Development of a Private Business
The growth of foreign trade and shipping at New Zealand’s major seaports during the nineteenth century
Craig on Sunderland Shipbuilding
Transport and the Industrial Revolution
Transport and the Development of the European Economy, 1750-1918
Transport and the Development of the European Economy, 1750-1918
An Historiographical Assessment of New Zealand Business History
Business (57 works) · Economics (55 works) · Australian History and Society (36 works) · Political science (34 works) · History (29 works) · Economy (27 works) · Historical Economic and Social Studies (23 works) · Geography (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Law (17 works)