This paper is an autobiographical reflection on the early history of internalization theory, first developed by Buckley and Casson (1976). The author, Alan Rugman, was a colleague of theirs at Reading University, and he subsequently published a large number of articles in refereed academic journals both extending and testing internalization theory. This article places a set of 25 of the most influential articles by Rugman on internalization theory into the intellectual, institutional and personal context within which they were conceived, presented and published.