In the years between 1913 and 1928 public accounting evolved from a relatively obscure and limited practice to full maturity as a respected and flourishing profession. The present article deals with these years in some detail, expanding a shorter survey published in the Business History Review in June, 1956. The period from 1928 to 1951 is dealt with in detail in an article in the December, 1956, issue.

A leading business archivist provides insights into the difficulties of selecting, organizing, and preserving corporate records. Dr. Ernst reflects on the future needs and responsibilities of the business archivist in a changing economic and social environment.

The story of George Gunton is that of an astonishingly accurate economic prophet whose viewpoints have found wide acceptance a half-century after they were enunciated. Gunton is shown in this article not as a paid defender of big business but as an apostle of compromise, standing in the No Man's Land of a vast battleground. With equal fervor Gunton declared, “It is our industries that make us great,” but that laborers' wages were “as elastic as human wants … capable of as much expansion as the social character of man.” His numerous commentaries are a lucid clue to the relative importance of contemporary issues, and those commentaries are enhanced by Gunton's instinctive sense of history. Out of the confusion of contradictory evidence recorded at the Chicago Conference on Trusts, before the Industrial Commission, and elsewhere on the business and political stage Gunton framed his thesis of the essential interdependence of big business and organized labor. His convictions were, in total, unique, and his judgment and reconciliation of conflicting viewpoints have meaning and utility today.

By systematically analyzing ship registry documents it is possible to illuminate shipholding practices at major American ports in the early national era. In this article, Professor Gilbert focuses on shipholding in Baltimore in the period just prior to the late eighteenth century European war-induced shipping boom. He finds the port's foreign trade to be largely controlled by Baltimore residents. Merchants owned by far the largest percentage of the shipping, while mariners constituted an important, albeit secondary, investor group. Sole ownership of vessels was more extensive in Federalist Baltimore than in colonial Boston or Philadelphia. More detailed comparisons of shipowning practices among the major United States ports, Gilbert concludes, await further research.

A case study of two ventures undertaken by a Belgian company in Russia focuses upon several of the major problems experienced by foreign entrepreneurs under the Czars at the turn of the century.

The Revisionist trend in American business history has been shaped by values, premises, logic, and procedure that bear certain striking similarities to Marxism, most clearly seen in the Revisionists' acceptance of the inevitability of abuse in capital accumulation.

Of the innumerable types of business enterprise that flourished in nineteenth-century America, none was more important than the railroads. For the first time in the national experience they provided relatively cheap, dependable transportation into the heartland and created a national market that prompted the growth of so many other aspects of national endeavor. As railroad leaders built what became America's first big business, they also developed a new self-image and with it a vocabulary drawn from their conception of competition as war. It is this new self-image and the lexicon that went with it that form the subject of this article by James A. Ward.

As part of its centennial celebration, Harris commissioned a historical survey of the 1994 list of Fortune 500 companies, inquiring as to when they were founded and what their initial names, products, or services were. Harris then sent this list to several historians, including Professor Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and the editor of this Review. We believe the Harris compilation to be a potentially valuable research tool. We are pleased to present it here, along with the following brief introduction, which is a composite of observations by the Harris researchers, Professor Chandler, and the Editor and Assistant Editor of the Review.

The origins of an American zinc-miners' trade association and its experiments with cooperative price controls illustrate several of the supply and demand problems of an industry characterized by many sellers and few buyers.

On October 27–28, 1961, the Harvard Business History Group sponsored a conference devoted to the theme “Business History as a Teaching Challenge.” The purpose was simple enough — get experienced, active practitioners in business history together with newcomers to the field in the expectation that interaction between the two groups would be mutually beneficial. This hope was realized, though the specific results were somewhat different — and perhaps more valuable — than those originally anticipated. The 50 participants found themselves more involved with a discussion of the appropriate subject matter of business history, past accomplishments, and future possibilities, than with current teaching problems and techniques. This development was not totally unanticipated, but the enthusiasm with which it was embraced came as a pleasant surprise. It therefore seems appropriate to precede the papers given at the conference with a brief summary of the present status and future prospects of business history in the light of the discussion and the written comments later submitted by participants.

This article rethinks the relationship between trade and industry in the development of Indian capitalism, focusing on Tata, pioneers in textile and steel production. It shows how two little-known affiliated trading companies, R.D. Tata & Co. in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Kobe, and Tata Limited in London, played a crucial intermediary role in securing financing and market access for the parent firm in Bombay while simultaneously increasing its exposure to the effects of global crises. Tata's ultimately dominant position in a protected national economy was due to the contingent failure of these trading companies rather than a foregone conclusion.

This article investigates the history of the Progressive Era effort to develop new techniques and technologies of control over American business and corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A revolution in Progressive economic regulation was rooted in the intellectual work of the so-called institutional economists—particularly in the context of what economists and lawyers like Richard Ely, John Commons, and Walton Hamilton ultimately talked about as the movement for the “social control” of business, with distinct emphasis on the legal and regulatory “foundations” of modern capitalism. With increased attention to dynamics rather than statics, the real social economy rather than ideal rational actors, and historical and institutional rather than theoretical and abstract renderings of business, industry, and the market, the institutionalists were directly concerned with problems of control, particularly those mechanisms of control available through law, politics, the state, and new technologies of legislative and administrative regulation.

Most analyses of American direct investment abroad focus on the post-World War II era, and on manufacturing. Professor Kindleberger examines United States direct investment in a range of undertakings in France — finance, insurance, trade, marketing, services, and manufacturing — and concentrates on pre-1950 developments.

To what extent did the search for solutions to problems of labor management mold the development of large-scale business? The history of the Imperial Tobacco Company (ITC) is instructive, because its managerial structures have been heavily criticized. Yet many of the organizational improvements that were implemented after the company's founding in 1901 have been overlooked, particularly in the realm of labor management, which emerged as an important component of the company's increasing capabilities and growth. In contrast to U.S. tobacco firms, ITC implemented labor policies that responded to arising difficulties in size, legislation, trade unionism, and social attitudes. Its development reveals how the variety of factors influencing the management of labor stretch beyond the narrow concern for models of internal administrative structures.