How is --- or was --- business organized over borders? The book offers an historical background. It explores the history and development of the 'free-standing company'. These were compannies, distinct from the classic multinational enterprise, established to organize and to manage business abroad for a European or North American parent company. These firms proliferated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period of extraordinary globalization. Leading international scholars --- economists and historians --- provide evidence on and analysis of the operations of free-standing companies in different parts of the world from 1830 to 1996.