In this article, Dr. Newbury focuses on the technical and financial reasons for amalgamation at the Kimberley mines in South Africa, drawing on primary records to account for the rise of De Beers as the world's major diamond mining company in the 1880s. He finds that prior experience in local government and on the mining boards prepared company directors for competition in joint stock enterprise, while differences in production policies and performance influenced the pattern of mergers within and among the four Kimberley mines. De Beers's close relationship with diamond merchants and private banks in London, particularly N. M. Rothschild & Sons, was central to its position as a prime mover toward consolidation. Dr. Newbury views De Beers as a firm that relied for its success less on its renowned chairman, Cecil J. Rhodes, than on a combined managerial expertise that reflected the interests of both mining producers and merchant buyers.

In this article Professor Blanchard examines the Associated Press antitrust suit of the early 1940s in terms of its protagonists, Chicago newspaper leaders Robert McCormick and Marshall Field. The analysis avoids traditional antitrust terms and instead examines the suit as part of an effort by the federal government to use the antitrust law to implement a public-interest interpretation of the First Amendment. Professor Blanchard also looks at McCormick's attempt to obtain special legislation from Congress to void the Supreme Court's decision in favor of Field. She concludes that, although the government's efforts to use the First Amendment to force the news agency to serve a broader public interest were successful, the Associated Press emerged from the suit stronger than before the legal action.

British free trade has been variously attributed to the importuning of business interests, to the advanced state of manufacturing, to politicians acting on improper or unworthy motives, or to imperialism. Professor Grampp examines a critical event in the history of free trade: Parliament's declaration in 1820 that future commercial policy should be guided by that principle. By 1850, all major restrictions had been abolished. The decision of 1820, according to Thomas Tooke, a principal in the event, was made by the Tory Government with the concurrence of the Whig Opposition, both of which had come to believe free trade would increase per capita real income: that is, both acted in what they and others since have understood to be the public interest.

Although historians have thoroughly discussed the impact of transformations in the workplace and the corporate structure that accompanied the rise of modern business enterprises, Professor Santos argues that they have ignored the traditional firms that continued to exist amid these changes. Constituting a significant portion of companies operating in the industrial economy, firms like Byers employed simple systems of managerial control based on the entrepreneurs' personal authority and property interest in the business. While labor policy at modern corporations was shaped by the managers' need to establish administrative control over the production and distribution systems, Byers's labor policy was defined by family attitude and the company's history.