Historians of various “schools” have seen quite different things in the United States’ long years of business activity in China. The “realists” as Professor Hunt calls them, deny that significant business opportunities existed for Americans and point to obstacles that the Chinese put in the way of trade; the “Wisconsin school,” he says, emphasizes the public rhetoric of officials and businessmen who saw China as an outlet for capitalist surpluses. Citing three case histories — kerosene, cigarettes, and textiles — Professor Hunt shows that generalization is dangerous; that success depended more on businessmen's own skill, resources, and control of their domestic industry than on help derived from an imperialistically minded government.

Students of the innovative process in American manufacturing have emphasized the scarcity of labor and the consequent need for labor-saving machines. In the late nineteenth century one of the country's largest manufacturing industries was the production of carriages, which, in its most important center, Cincinnati, was organized on a mass production basis. But Professor Duggan finds that problems of the quantity and quality of labor were secondary in carriage factories, compared to other factors such as fuel costs, factory space, and the need to stabilize the quality and price of vehicles marketed by the industry as a whole.

Whatever the shortcomings of “no-fault” employee compensation laws, such as the one passed in Massachusetts in 1911, Professor Gersuny shows that such laws were a great improvement over what had prevailed. Working with formerly confidential files, he shows that an “adversary relationship” had existed between the employer and his insurance company, on the one hand, and often pitifully maimed employees on the other. With few exceptions, all of the advantages were on the side of the employer, and the rights of employees to more than token compensation were routinely trampled upon.

For the first few years of this century, Brazil was the major supplier of rubber to the world. However, the Amazonian wild rubber industry was unable to compete, in either price or quality, with the Asian plantation rubber that began to appear on world markets after 1906. Development of a successful plantation culture in the Amazon seemed imperative, but even with public subsidy, plantations remained an economic impossibility. By 1945 the Brazilian rubber industry, overwhelmed by Asian production, had virtually disappeared.