How do we measure Alfred Chandler's achievement? What forces shaped his vision? What is his place in the pantheon of historians and social scientists? Might he rank with sociologists such as Talcott Parsons or even Max Weber? Economists such as Kenneth Arrow or even Joseph Schumpeter? With political scientists such as Louis Hartz, Robert Dahl, and Seymour Martin Lipset? It's too early to make these kinds of judgments, but some answers are certainly possible about his place among historians.

Unlike most contemporary New England banks, early commercial banks of the Middle Atlantic region were widely owned and frequently traded corporations. They lent to a broad segment of the business community, including artisans, farmers, and women. Banks lent widely, first, because their large capitalization made it difficult for a few privileged insiders to control a substantial percentage of loanable funds and, second, because banks were able to acquire reliable credit information on a variety of customers in an efficient manner. As a result, small enterprises had access to bank credit.

Mrs. Kujovich examines the impact of technological innovation upon the beef industry and the railroads. Utilization of the refrigerator car disrupted the old order in the relationship between the industry and the railroads, exploiting the competition between railroads to make possible the nationwide expansion of the western dressed beef industry.

Professor Gitelman suggests that the causes of industrial violence were similar in the United States and Europe, and that the apparently higher incidence of strike violence in this country was due to the greater willingness and/or ability of American management to utilize strategies of replacing striking workers and deploying armed men.

This article analyzes the German dye business in India before 1947 as an example of expanding German-Indian commercial relationships. German dye manufacturers showed great interest in India's economic potential in the absence of discriminatory tariffs, while Indian elites were interested in non-British Western partners, which could support their struggle for industrial self-reliance. This particular alignment of interests facilitated cooperation and shows that the so-called European experience is more diverse than research has shown so far. The analysis highlights global trading networks beyond the political boundaries of formal empire and offers an alternative perspective on Indian business history, which reveals more competition between multinationals of different origins and more strategic choices available to Indians.

This reassessment of the importance of trademarks in business during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reveals that the focus by business historians on the beverage and processed-foodstuff industries has resulted in comparative neglect of the textile and metal-fabrication industries. The trademark histories of the latter two show that they followed their own paths, which resulted in their adopting three solutions to trademark issues that differed sharply from the approaches taken by the former two. The textile and metalfabrication sectors participated heavily in the evolution of an international regime to protect intellectual property; featured prominently in the development of patents in trademarks and trade names; and devised unique institutional solutions to the emerging problem of conflicting private marks in the Lancashire cotton-textile and Sheffield edge-tool industries. The history of these two industries indicates that trademark protection was not sufficient to ensure international competitiveness and long-run survival.

Two differing managerial philosophies competed for the support of American businessmen around the beginning of the twentieth century — the “scientific management” of Frederick W. Taylor and a general set of practices known as “welfare work.” This study examines the experience of a Brandywine River textile firm which tried to employ both approaches at the same time.

In the history of personnel management and salesmanship in the United States, the concepts and techniques developed by Professor Walter Dill Scott of Northwestern University have been pervasive. As an introduction to Scott's ideas and to his activities, Professor Lynch summarizes his contributions in the application of psychology to business problems.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, fueled largely by a deal with General Motors' international operations, opened thirty-four branch offices in Europe, the Middle East, South Africa, India, Australia, and South America. The overseas branches allowed the agency to sharpen its methods of quantitative research. They also enabled J. Walter Thompson to establish lasting understandings of European markets that proved beneficial for its long-term health.

In the early 1970s, a few computer companies began to form partnerships with other firms in the international computer industry for the purpose of sharing research and development (R&D) resources. This trend did not take hold in a meaningful way until the beginning of the 1980s. Our study focuses on this particular sector because it represents a major industry in which interfirm R&D partnering occurs.

The opening decades of the twentieth century saw various advertisers embark on a concerted effort to create professional instruction at American universities. They had two objectives. They thought that such instruction might help individual firms determine precisely how advertising worked in the marketplace — and thereby create a science of advertising — and they hoped that university education would transform their business into a full-fledged profession. Yet these efforts brought mixed results. As such instruction came into being, advertisers found that they had little influence over the education they had sought to promote, and they found that such training had chosen to follow one of two divergent paths, neither of which the industry thought wholly acceptable. Even more to their dismay, advertisers found that this education did not in fact convert their business into a profession.

This paper builds on recent conceptual work about associations that is drawn from the new institutional economics. It uses evidence from New Zealand wool broking to indicate the circumstances in which industry associations can operate effectively and in the broader public interest. Through their strong associative capacity and effective specialization of function, wool-broking industry associations developed flexible routines for managing wool auctions, mediated disputes, mitigated opportunism, addressed major market disruptions, and served as a communication channel with government. External pressures and monitoring from other business interests, governments, and a competitive wool market constrained rent-seeking behavior, preventing members from benefiting at the expense of others.

It is a truism that government regulation of business, like all institutions of the political economy, has been evolutionary in nature. Yet few regulatory programs have metamorphosed quite so completely as that of the Federal Trade Commission, which converted itself in the period covered by this article from a watchdog of “competitive practices” that might militate against preservation of atomistic industrial organization, to an agency bent on protecting the interests of consumers. Professor Tedlow shows how this process worked itself out in the important case of truth in advertising.

Increased state participation in the economy has been a basic trend in twentieth-century Latin America. In the process, however, once-protected private interests may fall—as in this case-study from Mexico.

The British dominated the world's submarine cable business over the second half of the nineteenth century, but they encountered significant challenges in the 1880s and 1890s—especially from James Scrymser, an upstart entrepreneur from New York. Scrymser exploited a strategic gap in the cable system in the Western Hemisphere and became locked in a confrontation along the west coast of South America with John Pender, the leading British cable magnate. Scrymser gained the upper hand in Chile by outmaneuvering Pender and used this victory to expand his operations with the telegraph network that linked South America, North America, and Europe.

Women have been important contributors to Greek mercantilism since the time of the economic migration that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century, and they were deeply involved in Greek capitalist development. Their role was particularly pronounced due to the predominance of the family in Greek society and business. Diaspora women operated as keepers of the internationally dispersed Greek clan, while their counterparts in mainland Greece perpetuated and strengthened the local family network.

U.S. shipping to Bordeaux, France, once minimal, increased dramatically after 1793, the year that marked the beginning of the French Wars. The conflicts compelled merchants to adopt new patterns of trade, as the policies of the belligerent parties increasingly determined the evolution of neutral shipping. Merchants on both sides of the Atlantic strove for closer connections across political boundaries and tried to bypass the difficulties created by warfare. This examination of U.S. commerce with Bordeaux explores the impact of war on transatlantic trade and analyzes the strategies adopted by merchants of that period to minimize the impact of new risks. These merchants tended to rely on personal acquaintances, and they traveled frequently across the Atlantic in order to build and fortify relations of trust. Turning to older, established modes of doing business enabled them to respond rapidly to changes that occurred in the international situation and to anticipate the sudden shifts in policy that were inevitable in times of war.

In the late 1800s, Latin American modernizers faced major obstacles to economic growth. In the Dominican Republic, elites embraced concessions as a policy to attract foreign capital to infrastructure, industry, and cash-crop agriculture. In contrast to Mexico, where concessions were public and impersonal but failed to create viable firms, Dominican concessions were public, yet corrupt, formally opposed to monopoly, yet prone to convey exclusive privileges. Dominican modernizers recognized that concessions created “monopolies that are always a hateful tyranny,” yet found no better way to attract investment. Only after the United States took control of Dominican finances in 1905 were the “burdensome” contracts canceled as an “impediment to future progress.”

In the early 1890s, financial crises occurred in many countries, most of which were connected to international capital flows. Australia, a major importer of capital, had difficulty borrowing after the Baring crisis of 1890. This article argues that local factors shaped the consequences of the banking crash in early 1893. A fortuitous legislative change averted a calamity by allowing for reconstruction rather than liquidation of banks, economic activity was depressed as banks became more conservative lenders, and the reconstructions reduced the wealth of domestic bank creditors and shareholders. The article concludes by noting that there was no targeted policy response in the short or medium term to prevent a recurrence of such an event.