The scholarship on international cartels in business history has often been studied from the perspective of case studies. In the economics literature, by comparison, the focus has been on cartels’ economic impact. These two approaches provides important insights into cartel behavior However, in a new project examining international cartels in historical perspective, our aim is to place the international cartels and their activities into a broader societal, political and economic context. The intention is to draw out frequently overlooked interactions between the cartel members and other actors to throw new light on the behavior of cartel members.
In this paper, we re-examine one frequently overlooked question: Why do individual firms/national cartels decide to become members of an international cartel? It is usually assumed that firms are eager to collaborate or collude. It is also assumed that international cartel members’ motivations are akin and therefore they are always eager participants. There is, however, evidence from historical studies that firms and/or national cartels could be reluctant to join an international cartel, but were forced to join by the state, financiers or larger firms. In other cases the otherwise reluctant members might join to enhance their national reputation, or because this was the only way to obtain access to technology or raw materials or to reach a specific market.
Our point of departure is that in the same way that forms of collaboration range over a wide spectrum of agreements: from loose association to single monopoly, the willingness of members to enter an international cartel can vary from eager participation to great reluctance (but eventual acquiesce) by members. In this paper, we demonstrate this variation using specific historical examples. We will use some soon to be published cases studies and in addition a variety of printed and original sources.