Early textile enterprises faced no trends with greater reluctance than the integration of operations within a single factory and, considerably later, the assignment of formerly family-dominated, entrepreneurial functions to hired factory agents. Samuel Slater, the classic pioneer of factory production of textile yarns, was slow to accept these trends, and only the obvious inability of either him or his family to cope with a rapidly growing and changing industry in the 1820s and 1830s forced him to integrate spinning, weaving, and finishing operations and to turn over broad responsiblity in individual factories to what is perhaps the earliest example of the professional manager.

Canadian lines that were spreading out over what would become the Province of Ontario looked forward, in the years before the American Civil War, to becoming important east-west carriers between the rapidly growing American cities of the eastern seaboard and the still-new cities of the American Midwest. Canada's small population and undeveloped industry would force her railroads to rely heavily on traffic going from one American city to another. Lines like the Grand Trunk and the Great Western struggled desperately therefore, to avoid American financial control. With the help of British capital, they succeeded. But America's contribution to Canadian railroading ran much deeper than money. Dominating the skilled engineers and experienced construction contractors who came from south of the border was more difficult for Canadian directors to manage. In the end, however, it was the early failure of top Canadian management to bury their rivalries, ignore their English creditors, emulate Americans like Vanderbilt, Thomson, and Garrett, and consolidate into an integrated line between New England, the Middle Atlantic seaboard, and the Midwest that doomed their railroads to becoming, as one Canadian put it, “side streets to the trade thoroughfare.”

Historians of modern, multinational, diversified industrial economies have learned that to deduce rigid, authoritarian control of subsidiaries, especially those in foreign countries, from the fact of over-all corporate ownership from afar, often leads to very inaccurate conclusions. The case of Canadian Industries, Ltd., a diversified Canadian chemical company jointly owned by the American and British giants, Du Pont and Imperial Chemical Industries, Ltd., reveals that a remarkable degree of independence was retained by the Canadian subsidiary even in such globally important policy matters as diversification, entry into new geographic areas, transfer of technology, and inter-company pricing of materials. Transnational ownership of industrial facilities, in short, produced advantages that were shared by both headquarters and local enterprises, leaving most of the anti-multinational movement to be explained as simpleminded nationalism.

In the second of two articles, Professors Aduddell and Cain take the story of the application of antitrust law to the large meatpackers from the 1920 consent decree to Judge Julius Hoffman's 1956 decision not to lift the decree. Despite fundamental changes in the technology and structure of the food distribution industry, and strong indications that the packers' proposed plan to sell at retail was no longer good business, Hoffman refused to remove the obstacle to forward integration. The decision, in the authors' opinion, does not bear scrutiny on economic grounds. The episode supports two important generalizations about antitrust prosecution as a tool for economic planning: that constant change in a dynamic society often renders antitrust decisions meaningless; and that regulation frequently deprives society of rational structural change.

The view of early British commercial banks as almost exclusive suppliers of short-term accommodation loans is further diminished by Dr. Hudson's intensive research in the surviving records of banks operating in the expanding wool manufacturing district of West Yorkshire from the turn of the century to the 1840s. By means primarily of the overdraft expedient, private banks and, after they were permitted by law, joint-stock banks, routinely made nominally short-term loans for such long-term capital purposes as construction of new plants and replacement of obsolete machinery. No laws and frequently little practical business acumen governed policies with respect to posting of collateral, holding of bank reserves against deposits, ratio of overdrafts to the borrower's level of profits, or even the special privileges granted stockholders and directors. It thus was not institutional rigidities that drove British investors to prefer overseas opportunities, Hudson theorizes, but the sheer excess of long-term capital sources, of which banks were an important one, in relation to opportunities to use them. Most striking, however, is the slowness with which old business habits gave way to new practices more appropriate to the maturing of a system of industrial finance.