This research reconstructs the business dynamics behind the evolution of the European mutual fund industry, which led Luxembourg to become its main international gateway since the 1960s. We analyze this local industry to understand how political and financial élites influence the economic specialization of small states. We argue that a closely-knit community of local professionals and politicians, well-versed in corporate and European legislation, leveraged the Grand Duchy’s small state status within the nascent European Community to become a financial hub specializing in mutual funds within an emerging network of international financial centers. This position was achieved through bifurcation of sovereignty strategies on the basis of two main premises. First, on the systematic acceptance of conflicts of interest within local financial and political leadership, comprising overlapping roles, revolving-doors, and familial ties in business relationships. Second, on regulatory engineering practices, such as the dynamic interpretation of laws, and the strategic planning of directive assimilation to advance Luxembourg’s interests as opposed to its EU counterparts. The analysis uses archival material from nine archival collections and oral history interviews.

Just before World War I, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) geographically expanded its trade in the Canadian Arctic to derive profits from Arctic fox fur and secure its position in a global value chain (GVC) delivering fur to metropolitan consumers. The “problem of nature” challenged the company’s business venture. Furthermore, “nature” was made and remade by the HBC’s own capital investments. The fox trade itself changed human ecology. Technology transfers to Inuit modified their hunting regimes to increase the company’s returns of polar bear skins. Though these skins had high potential market value, modes of production introduced by the HBC to the Arctic precluded the company from sending high-quality products to metropolitan dressers. Within a changing Arctic human ecology, the HBC produced one highly valued commodity for the market while producing another from which it could derive only modest profit. The HBC’s fox and polar bear trade at the onset of the last century suggests ways that business empires can set off complex and unanticipated changes in human ecologies and, therefore, the dynamics of nature and business at their very peripheries.

Business-led conservation of wildlife based on private property rights and formal governance has often yielded inconsistent results. In pursuit of alternative approaches that prioritize long-term sustainability in wildlife exploitation, this paper studies the novel case of the Nivkh people’s bear hunting enterprise, which functioned in the Lower Amur Basin and Sakhalin from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century. I demonstrate that the Nivkh ran their bear enterprise sustainably via a conglomeration of traditional ecological knowledge, religious beliefs, and informal social institutions, satisfying their personal demand for the animal while successfully selling bear furs and gallbladders to foreign merchants. Such developments were also supported by the regional political economy in which the Nivkh retained a large degree of autonomy. The paper highlights the productive impact that ideas of sacrality, human–animal kinship, and reciprocity exert on sustainability in wildlife enterprises while also stressing the importance of careful government policy in relation to Indigenous conservation systems. The study validates its claims through field notes, expeditionary journals, state reports, and historical and ethnographic research.