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Business History and Legal History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 June 2012

Morton Keller
Morton Keller
Affiliation:
Spector Professor of History, Brandeis University
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Extract

It may well be that the present will stand as a golden age in the historiography of American business and American law. Both fields have flourished – indeed, flowered – in recent years. Perhaps the best measure of this is the fact that the 1978 winners of the Bancroft Prize in American History were Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business and Morton J. Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860, each a notable work in its own right, each a summation of sorts of the recent evolution of its field of historical inquiry.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 53 , Issue 3: Legal and Business History , Autumn 1979 , pp. 295 - 303
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1979

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References

1 Chandler, Alfred D. Jr, The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar; Horwitz, Morton J., The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977)Google Scholar.

2 Hurst, James Willard, Law and the Conditions of Freedom in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Madison, 1965).Google Scholar See also Hurst, , Law and Social Order in the United States (Ithaca, 1977)Google Scholar; Keller, Morton, “Hurst's History,” Reviews in American History, 6 (March 1978), 1–6.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Horwitz, Morton, “The Rise of Legal Formalism,” American Journal of Legal History, 19 (October 1975), 251–264.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 Jaffin, George H., “Prologue to Nomostatistics,” Columbia Law Review, 35 (January 1935), 7.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

5 Lowi, Theodore, “American Business, Public Policy, Case-Studies, and Political Theory,” World Politics, 16 (1964), 677–715.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also Galambos, Louis, “The Emerging Organizational Synthesis in Modern American History,” Business History Review, 44 (Autumn 1970), 279–290CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Berkhofer, Robert, “The Organizational Interpretation of American History: A New Synthesis,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies, 4 (1979), 611–629.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 I have tried to do so in Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977).

7 See, for example, Keller, Morton, “The Judicial System and the Law of Life Insurance, 1888–1910,” Business History Review, 35 (Autumn 1961)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, which attempts to link changes in insurance law to alterations in life insurance business practices. Cf. also Keller, , The Life Insurance Enterprise, 1885–1910: A Study in the Limits of Corporate Power (Cambridge, Mass., 1963)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hurst, James Willard, Law and Economic Growth: The Legal History of the Lumber Industry in Wisconsin, 1836–1915 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).Google Scholar

8 Heckman, Charles A., “The Relationship of Swift v. Tyson to the Status of Commercial Law in the Nineteenth Century and the Federal System,” American Journal of Legal History, 17 (1973), 246–261.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On court structure, see Hurst, James Willard, The Growth of American Law: The Law Makers (Boston, 1950)Google Scholar, Part III.

9 Scheiber, Harry N., “American Federalism and the Diffusion of Power: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives,” University of Toledo Law Review, 9 (Summer 1978), 619–680.Google Scholar

10 Keller, Affairs of State, 431.

11 Scheiber, Harry N., “At the Borderland of Law and Economic History: The Contributions of Willard Hurst,” American Historical Review, 75 (1970), 744–756.CrossRefGoogle Scholar