An examination of the manuscript censuses of manufacturing in 1850 and 1860 indicates the forthcoming revision of many traditional interpretations of American industrial development. This study suggests that large-scale manufacturing in the South and West was quite similar in the decade before the Civil War and that antebellum manufacturing was sufficiently concentrated to imply that the model of perfect competition is as inappropriate a description of mid-nineteenth century industrial structure as it is of twentieth century industry.

In the late nineteenth century, American shipyards started building modern metal ships, a sector dominated by the British. But, they faced a challenge: a shortage of domestic workers with the skills to fabricate large metal ships. Using census of population data, this article describes how one important U.S. shipyard, Newport News Shipbuilding, overcame the shortage of skilled domestic workers to assemble an effective labor force. The results show that skilled immigrants, mainly from Britain, played an important role in the shipyard's early life while, over time, native workers were trained to fill skilled occupations.

Multinational enterprises faced new political risks after World War II in the context of decolonization and the Cold War. The risks were particularly high in Asia between 1945 and 1970. Although the relevant literature has focused essentially on organizational innovation and strategic choices in explaining how firms dealt with these new political risks, this article explores the informal roles that governments of small, neutral countries played in supporting their multinationals abroad. Looking at the case of Nestlé in Asia, the article argues that the backing of the Swiss federal authorities was crucial for the company to overcome various kinds of risks and ensure a long-term presence in the region.

The Age of Electricity was foreshadowed by the “battle of the currents.” This almost forgotten controversy had important technological implications, but it is also a macabre chapter in the history of marketing tactics. Westinghouse's superior alternating current system was ingeniously attacked by proponents of direct current. Exploiting contemporary evidence from the penitentiary, the direct-current adherents declaimed against use by the public of a system employed by the state to rid itself of its most dangerous criminals.

Professor Gersuny examines discipline and punishment of the workforce in two New England textile mills separated in time by almost a century and a half. He finds that, despite dramatic changes in the technological, social, and cultural context, the constraints governing factory discipline have shown remarkable continuity.

As the westward movement gained momentum after the Civil War, the demand for farm mortgage credit grew rapidly. At the same time, the supply of lendable funds in the East and especially in Europe, although continuing to grow, turned away from U.S. government securities and American railroad bonds. The time seemed ripe for Eastern capitalists to expand their non-bank financial services to include intermediation between lenders and borrowers. Using the United States Mortgage Company and the Mercantile Trust Company as examples, Mr. Brewer shows that the opportunity was lost due to poor organization and management, faulty communication, and most of all to an innate conservatism and mistrust of the unfamiliar that caused the companies to disapprove the bulk of the mortgage loan applications that energetic field agents brought in.

Do variations in the circumstances under which heavy industry was developed in different regions account for the kinds of “entrepreneurs” those regions attracted? In this note on his current research, Doctor Pierenkemper concludes that varying circumstances do, indeed, account for varying backgrounds of entrepreneurs, and offers evidence from two contrasting regions in early German heavy industry. He offers the further hypothesis that as circumstances affecting growth — such as finance, market stability, and the need for professional management — change, certain kinds of backgrounds may become more applicable while others become less so.

A growing number of black men and women attempted to establish businesses in the Jim Crow South of the early twentieth century. These enterprises, which ranged from small shops and retail establishments to more substantial banks and insurance companies, were organized primarily to increase the economic self-sufficiency of black Americans. In this article, Professor Henderson chronicles the efforts of Heman Perry to develop a complex business organization in Atlanta. Although Perry failed to achieve all of his entrepreneurial goals or to sustain the businesses that he founded, his endeavors nevertheless had a significant impact on the city's later development as an important center of black business activity.

In this wide-ranging article, Professor Yonekawa identifies and examines in detail the burst of cotton spinning company formation that occurred in the late nineteenth century among the major cotton-producing nations of the world. His comparative approach allows him to focus on key local factors responsible for the company flotation booms in the areas discussed. He is also able to compare the effects of more general circumstances in the industry, such as trends in the price of raw cotton and the disruption during the American Civil War, on the various locations. Finally, his multinational approach brings to light many intriguing questions and illuminates areas for productive future research.

This study of the chief executives of large corporations over the period from 1900 to 1950 introduces specific evidence both to support and explain the thesis, hitherto vaguely entertained by many students of business, that administration of such corporations is rapidly becoming a profession.

The changing attitude toward railroad regulation of reformer John H. Reagan tells much about the validity of the objections raised by railroadmen of the 1880's to such regulation. In tracing Reagan's career thus, a question of historiography is raised. Can careful utilization of contemporary attitudes toward business situations compensate for the subjectivity of the historian himself?

The first third of the twentieth century completely transformed the practice of industrial relations in American business. Three principal motivating forces may be identified. These not only fluctuated in time, place, and influence, but have received unequal and less than impartial historical attention.

Labor policies based on age have been variously explained as benevolent, maliciously anti-union, rational, or prejudicial. Nineteenth-century devices to stabilize the work force set the stage for the Pennsylvania Railroad's 1900 program of age limits, mandatory retirement, and pensions, but its immediate cause was the conviction that the seniority system already in place seriously reduced the efficiency of older workers. As the following article shows, this economic calculation remained appealing to some executives in the twentieth century, even as the actual costs of pensions became painfully apparent. For others, the old fear of workers' unrest reappeared as a justification for ignoring the impending crisis of the 1930s.

It is perfectly correct to place the work of Alfred Chandler at the center of a discussion of globalization as seen by business historians. No other author in our field of studies has offered us so much both in terms of research results as well as tools for the analysis and definition of the global characteristics of the modern large enterprise. It is enough in this respect to consider his last book, Scale and Scope, where the author examined the history of six hundred firms (the top two hundred in the U.S., the U.K., and Germany) for the period from the 1880s to the 1940s.

Rapid changes in the relationship between business and government from 1890 onwards brought a growing desire for a better exchange of ideas and information and, particularly, for a national organization that would facilitate this exchange. While the United States Chamber of Commerce has been viewed almost universally as the outcome of efforts by businessmen, Professor Werking shows that it was a few government bureaucrats, notably in the relatively new and ambitious Department of Commerce and Labor, who, with the support of the Secretary and the White House, became the decisive factor in the birth of the Chamber in 1912.

Fisheries are paradigmatic of renewable resources because of their ecological delicacy, their vulnerability to the indirect effects of economic activity, and, above all, their nonexclusive or “common-property” nature. In this article, Professor McEvoy shows how the California fishing industry, drawing upon some of the most fertile renewable resources in the world, underwent massive, thoroughgoing modernization in the first quarter of this century, triggered by the mechanization of fishing and the coincident opening of worldwide markets to local fish processors. Public agencies charged with the oversight of the industry and the conservation of fishery resources made valiant efforts to keep pace with new problems thrust upon them by the sudden industrialization of fishing. Their failure to do so effectively illustrates in stark relief the nature of twentieth-century problems in the management of wildlife, air, water, and other shared resources in a competitive economy.

The now-famous merger movement that highlighted the economic cross-currents of the late nineteenth century created no more controversial enterprise than James B. Duke's American Tobacco Company. From the time of its incorporation in 1890, Duke's firm dominated the cigarette business, for which it is so justly renowned, but this controlling position by no means extended into other branches of the industry, particularly the manufacture and marketing of chewing tobacco, or what was known as plug. Yet with almost ineluctable force, Duke and his associates gradually extended their domination to this segment of the business, albeit by a much more uncertain course that included the “plug war” of the mid-1890s and some questionable securities transactions later on. While Dr. Burns takes no side in the still-simmering controversies of the day, in this essay he examines the historical events through which American Tobacco acquired its dominant position in chewing tobacco; equally important, he brings economic theory and new empirical evidence to bear on the contentious issue of predatory pricing as a strategy of monopolization, and from that emerges his surprising conclusion.

Professor Cuff casts a critically dissenting eye at one of American history's most cherished myths: Bernard Baruch's role in United States' mobilization during World War I.

Students of the efforts of western maritime nations to improve conditions aboard their merchant ships, and to tighten regulations in general, are aware that one result was the emergence of the “flag of convenience,” whereunder a nation exploits the need of operators for a haven from high standards. One such nation was Panama, but by the end of World War II its officials had come to demand such private tribute that a new flag of convenience was needed. Providing such a registry under the flag of Liberia became a major service of the development company formed by former U. S. Secretary of State Edward R. Stettinius, Jr., in the late 1940s.