The history of a company will be included in a company's annual report or on a company website.  Local newspapers, journals as well as memoirs and personal papers can be very useful when researching the history of a company. 

Go to the Business Library's Company & Financial Information section for links to useful resources including a link to the following suggested resources.

Business Insights Essentials:  Provides company history profiles for thousands of the “world’s largest and most influential companies.”  Go to the Companies tab which links to the International Directory of Company Histories for a detailed history on a company. 

Mergent Online:  Provides a brief company history under the Company Details tab as well as historical data broken out by year.  You can screen on the data by selected event topics.  The Reports tab provides the company's Annual Report Collection for a number of years. Data on both active and inactive companies is available.

ProQuest Historical Annual Reports 

ProQuest Central:  Provides historical newspaper articles. 

You may also want to use WorldCat to search for memoirs, company histories, personal papers, and other publications and archival collections relevant to the history of a company.