Perspective on early internationalizing firms: Three decades of international entrepreneurship developments

Excerpt

Smaller internationally oriented firms have been indirectly competing in international markets with both the indigenous firms and larger international enterprises, mostly through indirect exporting for some time, but their direct and active presence was not documented until the late 1970s (McDougall 1989; Oviatt and McDougall, 1994, 1995; McDougall et al. 1994; Dana et al. 1999; Zahra and George 2002). However, international entrepreneurs’ participation in international trade, and presence in major national markets, goes back to some four centuries ago. For example, their international activities through the ancient trading route, later known as the “Silk Road” (Härtel and Yaldiz 1982; Liu 1997, 1998), spanned from the Far East all the way to Central Europe starting in Shanghai and Xian in the historic lands of the Chinese Dynasties, passing through few cities in present India, cities in the present Persian Empire (e.g. present Isfahan and Kerman), Aleppo in Assyria (present Syria), Istanbul in Anatolia (present Turkey), Gandhari (in Central Asia) and Athens in present Greece, amongst others cities, before reaching Central Europe for many centuries. There were also other international trading missions traveling through different routs starting and returning to certain ancient cities for trading with other national trading centers on the route for a long time, which suggests that there has been a long set of evolutionary international activity long before the early documentation of international entrepreneurship (IE) in the decades of 1970s and 1980s. The records of the above historical international entrepreneurial activities were documentations by religious missionaries. They indicate that ancient religious missionaries from India, the Middle East and Far East traveling to other regions used the ancient trading route, and documented the presence of the old trade infrastructure¹ (Liu 1997). Missionaries mostly traveled with the trading “Caravans” (e.g. the ancient international trade missions) that traveled mainly on the trade routes, relied on the postal and trade infrastructure and stayed at the “Caravan Saras”, which were initially constructed for overnight stays and support of the first Royal Postal Couriers, created by the Persian Achaemenian Dynasty in 140–145 BCE, which were later used by international traders as temporary accommodations to rest and to replenish their food, horses and camels used by traders. This postal infrastructure was gradually extended and used by trading missions that were popularized later on (in the fifteenth century AD) as the “Silk Road”.² …