Led by James J. Hill, a group of businessmen expanded the use of coal as a fuel in the Northwest by monopolizing the market, apportioning the business among a limited number of people, maintaining prices, profit margins, and profit flow, thereby establishing a reputation of dependability for the fuel and a source of risk capital for further investment in the industry. This, Professor Martin argues, was a clear case of “constructive monopoly.”

Department stores are often seen as transformative of both retail and wider social practices. This article offers a comparative analysis of department stores in early twentieth-century Britain and Japan to assess the extent to which there were universal qualities defining the operation, practices, and experience of department stores and to explore the ways in which they might be seen as transforming retailing in the two countries. Despite similarities in their origin, organization, and service to customers, we highlight the greater diversity of British department stores and their incremental development. Japanese stores were a far more powerful force for change because they formed part of a concerted and conscious program of modernization.

Professor Braeman evaluates historians' current assessment of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, finding a new consensus emerging among scholars of that important era in American history.

Despite political pressure from their Congressional champions, small businesses were never effectively utilized in the American mobilization for World War II. The Roosevelt administration followed an ambivalent policy designed to placate the proponents of small business while giving the lion's share of contracts and scarce raw materials to big business.

This article analyzes recent developments in a burgeoning American consumer industry in the light manufacturing sector during the 1970s and 1980s. In terms of demand, soft-toy, or “plush,” production provides insights into impulse buying by a variety of income groups in a postindustrial economy, and it suggests the volatile nature of American consumer interest in low-value, disposable commodities. On the supply side, plush offers a particularly good example of an industry that has been sensitive to changes in cost, moving production around Third World countries while using information technology to improve distribution and to retain design control at home. The industry thus illustrates the response of American entrepreneurs to the internationalization of both supply and demand.

Viewing the evolution of business through the unique perspective of the student of fashion behavior, this essay recasts many traditional generalizations and seeks a meeting ground for fashion study and business history.

This article examines how, starting in the 1870s, food manufacturers in the United States began to use standardized color, achieved by synthetic dyes, as part of their marketing strategies. The emergence of the synthetic dye industry paralleled the growth of mass production and mass marketing in the American food industry. It provided food manufacturers with an economical means to standardize their products and helped establish brand identities through consistent appearance. By 1938, food dyes had achieved such widespread use, and had raised such public concern, that the federal government amended the 1906 Pure Food and Drug Act to implement more stringent measures to regulate the industry.

From professional baseball to legal services, discrimination against sellers became widespread in the late 1800s and early 1900s. This article examines the means by which African American inventor-entrepreneurs overcame discrimination against them by consumers. It makes use of data from the advertising records of Garrett Morgan, who invented the modern gas mask and the traffic light. Both the deliberate use of measures, such as disguises and surrogates, and serendipity (the result of the racial neutrality of patents) were critical in facilitating sellers' anonymity and in promoting desirable economic outcomes.

This article describes the features of the international mercury market during the first half of the twentieth century. It analyzes the various market agreements made, their effectiveness, and their consequences. The period studied is little understood, although it was one in which mercury production greatly increased. It was also one that saw persistent efforts at market manipulation, owing to a series of agreements between Spanish and Italian producers that proved very effective until the arrival of shipments of mercury produced by Soviet bloc members and by some developing countries.

In this study of a neglected topic, Dr. Channon examines the attempts of British railway leaders to regulate competition among routes. Drawing illustrative material from the management of Anglo-Scottish traffic and making comparisons with the American railroad industry, Dr. Channon concludes that pooling agreements did not provide the long-term stability and savings that railway managers sought. Changes in traffic patterns led to dissatisfaction with pool allocations, and competitive pressures from outside, as well as legal and political uncertainties, undermined cconfidence in the pools. In contrast to the United States, where railroads were able to turn to consolidation after pooling had failed, in Britain this strategy was not a politically viable option.

The incidence of churches as forerunners of merchant colonies in the Mediterranean is suggested in this exploratory study of medieval business and religion.

The global expansion of British insurers in the nineteenth century has been a feature of insurance history that has highlighted the strategic nature of the multinational enterprise (MNE). The growth of the Australian colonies from the mid-nineteenth century attracted the interest of these overseas insurers. This article considers the challenges these firms faced and the way in which these trials were overcome. Effective networks were important in establishing a market presence in the Australian colonies. A combination of enterprise, luck, and resilience assisted in building these links. The experience of British insurers in the colonies sheds light on the processes of MNE expansion into markets beyond their range of tacit knowledge and expertise.

The stock market boom and bust of the late 1920's has been closely associated by scholars and public alike with the great changes in American life that followed closely thereafter. Actually, the interrelationship is far from clear, and a better understanding of the capital market is needed. Historical evidence points to the absence of effective market regulation and to the violation of accepted norms of monetary policy, but the only clear-cut causal connection between levels of economic activity and the stock boom lies in the effect of security inflation on the psychological climate of the business community.

Professor Aitken reveals a distinctive pattern of government-business relationships against the background of Canada's defensive economic development and its government's active role in the maintenance of national economic unity.

In this essay, Professor Gitelman draws upon new primary source materials to help clarify the outlook of American business leaders in the years immediately preceding U.S. entry into World War I. He shows how business leaders brooded, at periodic private conferences, over the profound loss in public esteem they believed business had suffered. This “crisis of confidence,” he concludes, precipitated defensive associational efforts. The creation of conference boards—the brainchild of Magnus W. Alexander—provided an institutional base for these efforts, and pointed the way to the creation of the National Industrial Conference Board.

The organization of economic activities differs among countries and over time. Differences between nations have been highlighted in academic discussions about national business systems and the varieties of capitalism. This group of articles about the Dutch business system contributes to these debates by offering new empirical research from the perspective of a small, open economy and highlighting changes that have occurred during the second half of the twentieth century. While they discuss developments in the Netherlands, the articles also explore general themes, including corporate governance, cartels, and the organization of multinational companies. While the articles show that business systems are in constant flux, comparisons between the Dutch and U.S. systems seem to suggest that each moves at a different pace. A particularly striking aspect of the Dutch stories is the large impact of developments abroad.

Little has been known of the role of Nuremberg in the international economy of the Middle Ages. In this pathbreaking study, Dr. von Stromer details the acquisition of the city's extensive trade privileges and economic influence and reveals that it came as the result of a conscious economic policy, planned and executed by the leading families of the city.

Based on Italian and foreign archival sources, this study shows how Italy's active assistance to its industrial apparatus soon included the newly born aircraft industry, including the Caproni Group. However, after World War II the Group went bankrupt along with most aircraft manufacturers. The suspension of aircraft development, the preference for importing allied (American and British) aircraft for civil airlines, and the denial of international assistance were the ensuing political and economic costs of defeat. In the end, Italy nationalized what was left of its aviation firms. Also, nationalization was consistent with its industrial history and represented the only way to help this sector survive.

The forests and fields of the early American republic teemed with individually varying seedling fruit trees. American nurserymen stabilized both this chaotic landscape and their trade by promoting named fruit “varieties” gleaned from domestic orchards and from a global network of botanical gardens. Developing strategies to regulate the production of names and descriptions, they altered both texts and organisms, replacing a profusion of “wild” trees with a negotiated list of “named varieties.” Examining this process reveals intersections between commercial and scientific credibility and illuminates the alternative business forms built around living goods.