State regulators played a large part in constructing the American regulatory system from the late nineteenth century to the midtwentieth. They faced an adversary relationship not only with businesses but also, beginning with passage of the Interstate Commerce Act in 1887, with national regulators. Shaping a process of “pragmatic federalism,” the state regulators forged a cooperative regulatory regime in which they and national regulators controlled the nations's railroads. In the 1930s and 1940s, state regulators extended the cooperative approach to numerous other regulated industries. These findings challenge the argument that the Shreveport case ended meaningful state regulation and suggest that the rise of big government included a continued commitment to the federalist framework of the U.S. Constitution, at least to the mid-twentieth century.

This paper uses the examples of three nineteenth-century cities—London, Philadelphia, and New York—to explore both what is permanent about the problem of water provision (that consumers want it clean, accessible, and free) and what is mediated by the forces of government policy and economic constraints. In some cases, municipal authorities first claimed control over water supplies before figuring out how to pay for their works. In others, they calculated that such arrangements were both too expensive and too risky to bear alone. Both approaches were complicated by the high costs of providing water to urban areas and by urban dwellers' belief that water should flow from their taps without charge. The result was, and remains, a market in which price is largely dictated by political demand, set by what the government, rather than the market, will bear.

From its beginnings in sixteenth century southern Germany, Professor Landes traces the development of the personal timepiece industry to France, where the design of watches as items of personal adornment reached its peak; to England, where precision in timekeeping and rationalization of manufacture were developed to new heights; to Switzerland, where manufacture on a mass scale for a highly diverse market was attained; and, finally, to America, where the technique of assembling mechanical devices from precision-machined interchangeable parts was applied to watchmaking with the same success it had achieved in less demanding applications. He discusses the sociological factors that produced the Swiss industry in a region of seemingly little promise, and demonstrates how these factors made the Swiss more successful than the Germans, French, or English.

Assaults on the “money power” had a profound influence on public policies in twentieth-century America. Tracing the history of the “money trust” controversy through the first half of this century, Professor Carosso concludes that the attacks were largely unjustified, either on economic or legal grounds.

It is a truism of American constitutional history that the federal judiciary was expected to facilitate interstate commerce. The right of individuals to remove cases to a federal court from locally prejudiced state courts was recognized under a wide range of circumstances. But it seemed less and less natural, as more and more of the nation's business came to be transacted by the “trusts” on a national basis, for corporations to be accorded the same rights. Professor Freyer shows that a major campaign, which had some success in the 1880s, was mounted to deny corporations the right of escape to federal courts. In the end, however, the nation's lawmakers recognized that the problem of the growing concentration of capital would have to be solved by something more sophisticated than frontier justice.

The curious fusion of business failure and evangelical Christianity that initiated the United States' largest credit-reporting agency is explored in this portrait of The Mercantile Agency's founder, Lewis Tappan.

Although early British aircraft manufacturers attempted to exploit the private, civil aviation, and export markets for their products, the military market became the most important one by World War I. Mr. Fearon shows that the aircraft industry was largely dependent on military orders, but that government policy in this area tended to retard rather than promote progress and growth. It was only the optimism of the pioneer firms about the future which made the expansion of the industry possible.

In analyzing the evolution of the modern Japanese system of industrial labor relations, Professor Evans argues that Japan's culture and history played dominant roles in the formation of employer-employee relations, and that convergence with western practices was Largely absent.

Although lawyers made crucial contributions to the development of business, scholars have said little about their role. As the following article explains, lawyers fought restrictions on business growth, worked to make laws uniform, and helped to establish legal rules in the areas of corporate reorganization, finance, and regulation. Pioneering a new type of organization—the large firm—they moved beyond the realm of legal doctrine and acquired the political influence, local knowledge, and community connections needed to reform the nation's decentralized legal system in ways that fit the demands of national-scale business.

For much of the twentieth century, the petroleum industry of Peru was dominated by the International Petroleum Company (or IPC), a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey. Yet IPC never obtained a monopoly. Other firms, such as Lobitos Oilfields Limited, a concern founded by British merchants, produced a significant amount of Peru's output. In this article, Professor Miller examines Lobitos's development from the time of the company's founding in 1900 through the pivotal year of 1934. Although the fortunes of Lobitos were closely linked to the pertubations of the international market and the shifting policies of the Peruvian government, corporate management enjoyed an unusual flexibility not only because the firm's interests were sometimes identical with those of its powerful rival IPC, but also because its merchant founders had established a vast trading network throughout South America. These additional factors allowed Lobitos to survive as a relatively small, unintegrated independent in an age of giant, fully-integrated multinationals.

In Scale and Scope, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., sets out a complex and sustained interpretation of “the dynamics of industrial capitalism.” His work, the culmination of decades of study, spanning three major economies (the United States, Great Britain, and Germany) from the 1880s to the 1940s, will undoubtedly be a central point of reference for all business historians for a very long time to come. More than that, it also makes contributions to, and has wide implications for, a great variety of fields of scholarship, research, and debate. It is hard to imagine any single book review that could do justice to the scale and the scope of Chandler's work.

A survey of insurance records covering eighteenth-century manufactories in three branches of the British textile industry reveals much about the gradual evolution of factory production in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Professor Chapman suggests that neither size, power source, nor the supervision of work constitutes a useful criterion by which to identify the modern, Arkwright-type factory. The essential characteristic of that institution was that it was specifically designed for flow production, rather than the batch production methods of earlier modes of manufacturing.

In fifteenth– and sixteenth–century Europe, international trade was often conducted by family partnerships. Commonly, one partner remained in the family's native land, while one or more family members established themselves temporarily or permanently abroad. In this article, Professor Mathers describes the mercantile activity of three families from the Spanish city of Burgos who profited from family partnerships that linked trade from northern Spain to England and France. She also examines the ways in which family inheritance practices and alternative family investments and expenditures affected the capital and continuity of the partnerships.

The history of the International Institute for Management Development (IMD), one of the most prestigious business schools in the world, highlights the role of multinationals in establishing business education in Europe and the problem of legitimacy. The creation of IMD's predecessors CEI and IMEDE by Alcan and Nestlé also illuminates the role of Harvard Business School in their development and the reciprocal influences of American and European management education after World War II.

This article examines the history of the Royal Dutch Shell scenarios, from the first horizon scan exercise in 1967. It proposes that forward-looking scenarios were integrated in planning at Shell as tools for managing uncertainty in global time and space relations of oil after 1967. Specifically, the article proposes that Shell strategically used the scenarios to respond to arguments, emanating both from OPEC and from the Club of Rome, of oil as a limited resource. Shell used the scenarios to create images of a future oil market dominated by innovation, creativity, and sustainable solutions.

Common misperceptions notwithstanding, Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in Europe has a long history. Such investment first penetrated European markets in the 1870s, and it has since evolved through a number of important historical phases. In quality, sectoral composition, location, motivation, and several other characteristics, Japanese FDI in Europe exhibited striking continuities during its first century of development. In more recent years, however, each of these characteristics has undergone substantial change as compared to earlier times.

This essay analyzes the changing configuration of black-owned businesses in the South over nearly a century. It divides the region into two sections—the Lower South and the Upper South—and examines changes that occurred prior to 1840, during the late antebellum era, and as a result of the Civil War. It uses a “wealth model” to define various business groups, and then creates business occupational categories based on the listings in various sources, including the U.S. censuses for 1850, 1860, and 1870. The article compares and contrasts the wealth holdings among various groups of blacks in business, and it analyzes, within a comparative framework, slave entrepreneurship, rural vs. urban business activity, color—black or mulatto—as a variable in business ownership, and slave ownership among blacks engaged in business.

As perhaps the first comprehensive historiographic and bibliographic essay on real estate history to be published, this essay casts a wide net, offering a review of the literature and suggestions for research opportunities in the many and varied streams of academic endeavor that flow into the new specialty of real estate history. Moving away from anecdotal personal and company biographies, the field is maturing and expanding toward more sophisticated and analytical studies that intersect a variety of disciplines. The exhaustive analysis of both traditional and innovative work provided in the text is complemented by a selected bibliography of the publications discussed in the article.

We provide an analytically structured history of Enron's involvement in the California energy crisis, exploring its emergence as a corrupt organization and its use of an interorganizational network to manipulate California's energy supply markets. We use this history to introduce the concept of network-enabled corruption, showing how corruption, even if primarily enacted by a single dominant organization, is often highly dependent on the support of other organizations. Specifically, we show how Enron combined resources from partner firms with its own capabilities, manipulating the energy market and capitalizing on the crisis. From a methodological point of view, our study emphasizes the growing importance of digital sources for historical research, drawing particularly on telephone and email records from the period to develop a rich, fly-on-the-wall understanding of a phenomenon that is otherwise hard to observe.