Worldwide ties: The role of family business in global trade in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries

This paper shows, through the example of the Swiss merchant house Volkart Bros, that many of the world's largest trading firms remained family businesses until well into the late twentieth century, thus challenging the Chandlerian dichotomy of small or medium-sized enterprises with family involvement on the one hand and large managerial firms on the other. This was a consequence of the specific features of their business: trading firms, unlike manufacturing companies, could finance their transactions with short-term credits and did not need to raise capital on the stock market. The paper will describe how far family ownership was able to reduce transaction costs at both the intra- and inter-organisational level. In addition, it will discuss what the concept of the corporate family means for the alleged distinctness of the economic and private spheres, which has been dominant in economic theory up to now.