The origins of the market are obscure, but substantial documentary evidence survives from the eleventh century onward, when chartered markets and new towns were established across Western Europe. The expansion of the market system is important for business history because it created new opportunities for business growth. There has been no systematic literature review on market evolution since Henri Pirenne and Raymond de Roover, and this article attempts to fill the gap. It shows that successful markets were regulated–often by civic authorities–to maintain a reputation for reasonable prices and quality control. Markets were located at both transport hubs and centers of consumption, even when the latter were quite remote. However, as transport and communication costs declined, shakeouts occurred and only the larger markets survived.

Economics and history both strive to understand causation: economics by using instrumental variables econometrics, and history by weighing the plausibility of alternative narratives. Instrumental variables can lose value with repeated use because of an econometric tragedy of the commons: each successful use of an instrument creates an additional latent variable problem for all other uses of that instrument. Economists should therefore consider historians' approach to inferring causality from detailed context, the plausibility of alternative narratives, external consistency, and recognition that free will makes human decisions intrinsically exogenous.

Edith Penrose's work on the multinational enterprise and the political economy of globalization and development is assessed as it relates to her views on business history. This essay was written on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of Penrose's classic 1959 book and her 1960 prize-winning paper on Hercules Powder, which was published in the Review. Penrose came close to providing a theory of “internalization,” compared foreign direct investment to market-type contracting relations, and even discussed transaction costs–related arguments. However, she largely accepted the existence of fi rms and did not examine why firms exist vis-à-vis alternatives, such as markets. Her views on the political economy of globalization, relations between multinational enterprise and the state, and development have proved to be incisive, mostly accurate, and ahead of their time.

Between 1870 and 1910, big business established itself as a prominent feature of the American economy. American economists paid close attention to its rise and confronted the difficulties of integrating large firms into economic theory. The result was a theory that emphasized the importance of entrepreneurship, that enlarged the scope of competition, that distinguished profit from other forms of income, and that was compatible with large-scale enterprise. The insights of earlier American economists have been lost to modern economic theory, which extols the virtues of small firms.

Before 1914, London had a stock exchange that was larger and qualitatively more developed than New York's. Yet the London Stock Exchange has received a bad press from historians, while the New York Exchange has achieved star billing. This forensic reexamination of J. P. Morgan–a player in both markets–suggests that such a historiography is egregiously biased. Morgan's higher profi ts in New York derived partly from insider deals and partly from monopolistic exactions that U.S. protectionism facilitated but that proved more problematic in the U.K.'s open, competitive markets. Morgan's contributions to the impressive catch-up process by the New York Exchange are more plausibly viewed as successful emulation of European securities-market precedents on routine matters than of the allegedly path-breaking “information-signaling” innovations of more Panglossian accounts.

The market types that were the subject of an earlier essay in the Review are resurveyed in order to examine the changes that have occurred over the past fifty years. The entrepreneurial typologies identified then–one based on a market orientation, another that relies on state support, and a third, hybrid, approach–are still valid today. The liveliest components of the modern Italian economy, which operate as a fourth type of capitalism (mainly based on industrial districts), share features of the market typology, while, in southern Italy, the state's failure to support business is linked to the rise of organized crime. The more recent hybrid type features a new kind of actor, exemplified by Silvio Berlusconi, the central figure on the Italian political scene for almost two decades.