IBM Rebuilds Europe: The Curious Case of the Transnational Typewriter

Abstract

In the decade after the Second World War IBM rebuilt its European operations as integrated, wholly owned subsidiaries of its World Trade Corporation, chartered in 1949. Long before the European common market eliminated trade barriers, IBM created its own internal networks of trade, allocating the production of different components and products between its new subsidiaries. Their exchange relationships were managed centrally to ensure that no European subsidiary was a consistent net importer. At the heart of this system were eight national electric typewriter plants, each assembling parts produced by other European countries. IBM promoted these transnational typewriters as symbols of a new and peaceful Europe and its leader, Thomas J. Watson, Sr., was an enthusiastic supporter of early European moves toward economic integration. We argue that IBM’s humble typewriter and its innovative system of distributed manufacturing laid the groundwork for its later domination of the European computer business and provided a model for the development of transnational European institutions.

Gender, Race, and Entrepreneurship

“…Often these studies show how networks of experts, including businessmen, built links through the construction of transnational infrastructure projects (Van der Vleuten and Kaijser 2006;Lagendijk 2008;Badenoch and Fickers 2010;Högselius et al 2015). Coming full circle in the historiography, Paju and Haigh (2016) draw inspiration from this approach to elaborate IBM's approach to Western Europe after the Second World War and show how IBM embraced European integration 'by engineering its own networks of interdependence among European nations' (268). We are beginning to see more clearly the ways in which MNEs contributed towards European integration both directly and indirectly and were affected by it too.…”