Some later observers, impressed perhaps by rapid progress of the art after 1900, showed disdain for nineteenth-century methods. Five principal factors, however, produced a steady evolution and made accounting an element of importance in the nineteenth-century American business world.

The steel industry has been criticized for unnecessarily provoking the lengthy 1959 strike that allowed steel imports to penetrate the United States market. The industry demanded from the union the revision of a collective bargaining clause that protected local working practices. Historians have viewed the clause as inconsequential and the industry's demand for revision unnecessary. This article explores the US Steel Corporation's history of cost reductions and modernization during the 1950s in relation to this contract clause. It argues that the corporation's 1959 bargaining stance, although tactically flawed, made strategic sense given US Steel's decision to cut costs through crew reductions and incremental technological changes at its older mills.

Focusing on the Caigo Fleet Iron Company and its local competitors in Britain's Northeast, this article examines one company's response to changes in the steelmaking environment. By providing data at the firm level, the article is able to highlight specific contributing factors that are often invisible when scholars discuss Britain's industrial decline in the aggregate.

British investors, whose support was of importance to American railroad development, fluctuated between enthusiasm and dismay. Low investment per mile, the performance of certain blue chip carriers, and the native growth potential all stimulated the vital flow of foreign capital. Rate wars, overcapitalization, stock price fluctuations, imprudent reorganizations, and low business morality had an inhibiting effect. In most cases American investments offered little opportunity to exert control. By the late 1890's, British investors had largely outgrown their enchantment with the American railroad bonanza.

An industry may fail to adopt or to extend new technology for many reasons other than lack of entrepreneurial vision. In the following article, Professor Newell considers the halting and incomplete diffusion of mechanization and continuous-process technology in the salmon-canning industry of the Pacific Northwest. She shows that the fragile and cyclical character of the natural resource, the labor system employed, and the remote and isolated locations of individual production units all affected cannery operators' decisions about technology adoption, and that the persistence of manual labor reflected rational, not reactionary, business choices.

In the following article, Professor Derickson examines the motivation for and the results of employee medical screening of workers in a midwestern mining community. He argues that, contrary to the goals of the associative state as envisioned by Herbert Hoover and others, government and mine operator efforts to determine the extent of respiratory disease among mine workers in the Tri-State were neither impelled by a concern for workers' welfare nor conducive to the amelioration of their problems.

Between 1890 and 1930, Argentina's manufacturers invested in imported machinery. Although they aligned with political allies to advance and protect their companies, their dependence on imported machinery, raw materials, fuel, and expensive skilled labor were obstacles to their success. Two factors slowed the progress of these entrepreneurs: their lack of technological capabilities and the absence of government policies to address the problems entailed in importing foreign machinery. Several political factions supported industry's efforts to reduce dependence on imported products and to diversify the economy. While these supporters hoped to promote industry through the passage of legislation to raise the tariff rate, their strategy represented a compromise that stifled the drive to innovate that is so necessary for long-run economic growth and industrial development.

Nearly sixty years have passed since the publication of A Concept of Agribusiness by John H. Davis and Ray A. Goldberg. The book, which circulated widely among agricultural policymakers, business leaders, and academic economists, cemented the neologism “agribusiness” in the English lexicon. By opening up a new discourse for understanding the political economy of agriculture, Davis and Goldberg introduced a potentially revolutionary strategy for exploring the workings of a food and fiber economy anchored by large corporations. After briefly exploring how the book was received (and often misunderstood) in its own time, this essay will consider whether recent historical work has effectively revived the crucial insights Davis and Goldberg offered more than half a century ago.

Much thought has been accorded to the evolving nature of business history. It is only relatively recently, however, that attempts have been made to articulate methodological issues in a more epistemologically explicit and reflexive fashion. This article contributes to this burgeoning agenda by examining the methodology underpinning an intensive archival study of the British interwar management movement (1918–1939), a major force in British management education between the wars. We explicate the methodology employed and question what this material tells us about the interwar management movement, in terms of its determination to modernize management, encourage openness between firms, and extend a new spirit of partnership. We show that the interwar management movement was characterized by organized cooperation and methodological openness. Our main contribution is to demonstrate that interpretations themselves can become entrenched and prone to inertia, inviting us to revisit these periodically and, if appropriate, recast them.

This article looks at the implementation of food standards of identity by the U.S Food and Drug Administration from the 1930s to the 1960s, a period in the FDA’s history wedged between the “era of adulteration” of the early twentieth century and the agency’s turn to “informational regulation” starting in the 1970s. The article describes the origin of food standards in the early twentieth century and outlines the political economy of government-mandated food standards in the 1930s. While consumer advocates believed government standards would be important to consumer empowerment because they would simplify choices at the grocery store, many in the food industry believed government standards would clash with private brands. The FDA faced challenges in defining what were “customary” standards for foods in an increasingly industrial food economy, and new diet-food marketing campaigns in the 1950s and 1960s ultimately led to the food standards system's undoing. The article concludes by looking at how FDA food standards came to be framed cynically, even though voluntary food standardization continued and the system of informative labeling that replaced FDA standards led to precisely the problem government standards were intended to solve.

The French inter-war steel cartels were characterized by contemporaries as powerful trusts, restricting output and raising steel prices. The cartels were cited as a cause for the length of the French depression, the low productivity of the 1930s, and the rapid rise in steel prices after 1936. This paper shows that the formation and development of the French steel cartels was problematic and argues that the French industry was not structurally conducive to widespread collusion and was further harmed by governmental policies. Steel cartels were unable to police their arrangements effectively among members and were unable to stop outsiders from undercutting prices. It is not at all clear that firms in the cartel achieved higher profits. The increase in prices that did occur after 1936 was not due to firms colluding and profiting from the increased demand for steel due to the anticipation of Nazi aggression; rather, these price increases occurred because of input price increases caused by government action that raised the costs of production.

Intimate cooperation between American investment bankers and the diplomats of the Department of State occurred in the early 1920s because both groups shared similar goals and interests in Mexico. The resulting exercise in dollar diplomacy achieved some immediate ends but proved very short-sighted and self-defeating in the end.

This article analyzes the creation of the Fundo Crescinco, a mutual fund that Nelson Rockefeller started in Brazil in the 1950s as part of a larger effort to continue, using private means, the Good Neighbor policy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. Fundo Crescinco reflected both the liberal assumptions of many academicians of that era about the importance of the middle class to economic development and the concerns of business people about placating Latin American nationalism. The fund's history provides insight into the complex and often contradictory nature of U.S.-Latin American relations following the Second World War, and it demonstrates the limits of entrepreneurship as an extension of diplomacy.

Chambers of commerce were the main pressure groups serving as intermediaries between the business elite and the government in Great Britain and Brazil in the nineteenth century. The most important problem they faced in both nations was promoting a legal and institutional framework that would facilitate economic expansion. In both nations, the critical factors affecting this task were the need of the state for the expert advice that business pressure groups could offer, the traditional relationship between business and government, and especially the attitude of a historically dominant landed elite.

Chicago's large, diverse automotive industry specialized in truck, bus, and taxicab assembly, as well as automotive-parts manufacture, in the first decades of the twentieth century. From having just a handful of companies before World War I, by the mid 1920s Chicago grew to include more than 600 firms that were producing a wide assortment of automotiverelated products. This large, successful industry emerged out of two sets of advantages: First, Chicago's well-developed production factors—ranging from relatively advanced transportation and industrial facilities to a large labor force and an effective entrepreneurial business class—promoted industrial growth. Second, the automotive industry's production practices, elaborate division of labor, and intense set of interfirm relations encouraged metropolitan expansion. Even though the city's firms functioned both regionally and nationally, they were also deeply embedded within a local world of innovation, interaction, networks, financing, and servicing. Further adding to these advantages was Chicago's distinctive geography, which enabled a dense complex of linked, interrelated firms to flourish and contributed to the automotive industry's success before 1930.

The present policies and problems of government-business relations in India are examined by Professor Varshney against the background of his nation's historical experience.

At the end of World War II, by far the most significant pressure for integrating the aviation industry into national defense planning came neither from the major aircraft firms nor from the military. Instead, the Truman administration played the leading role in forging an important link in what later came to be called the “military-industrial complex.” Smaller businessmen and local politicians proved constant and eager supporters of that policy.

The production of jewelry offers a lens through which to examine the nature of creativity in a capitalist economy. The fashioning of decorative goods for wider sections of society in the second half of the nineteenth century allowed manufacturers to expand the size of their businesses, but only by sustaining strong connections with consumers and keeping track of buyers' changing desires. The outcomes of decisions affecting their enterprises were determined by the degree to which producers understood what their customers wanted. Entrepreneurial activity was critical to the formation of strategies for coping with the problem of scarce or imperfect information and limited market power. These strategies induced a process of creative destruction, whereby old ways of making things changed, and technology, labor, skills, and capital were recombined.

This article examines the politics of airline deregulation in the 1970s, and the events that led to the passage of the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978. It links the antibureaucratic, antiregulatory policies of the 1970s to ideas closely connected to the New Left, the counterculture, and other left-wing subcultures that dominated high and low thought in the 1960s. By linking this source of antibureaucratic sentiment to the politics of airline deregulation, this article suggests a new direction for historians who study the American state in the last decades of the twentieth century. As they focus their attention on the rise of market-based, neoliberal regulatory policies, they should look for their origins not only in the growing strength of the intellectual and political right, but also in the political thought and practice of the 1960s left.