The success of Balfour, Guthrie and Company in mobilizing British and American capital for productive investment contributed importantly to the economic development of the Pacific-coast region of the United States. The changing economic patterns of that region emerge through Professor Rothstein's analysis of the firm and its managers' actions and responses, from which a broader understanding of the problems and direction of foreign investment in the American West is possible.

For Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., in Scale and Scope, “the British story provides a counterpoint, an antitheses, to the American experience.” Chandler shows that fewer of the largest firms appeared in Britain. British companies preferred to retain family or family-like control and management; he terms this “personal capitalism.” Firms were reluctant to recruit professional managers, and if they did so, they did not like them to have received much formal education. There were no business schools in the pre-1945 U.K. These personal capitalists on the whole preferred personal income to making the 3-pronged investments in manufacturing, marketing and management in the capitalintensive industries of the Second Industrial Revolution. The more complex the technical and managerial skills required in an industry, the worse these personal capitalists performed and the greater the missed opportunities. For Chandler, Britain stands as a warning of the unpleasant consequences of not adopting managerial capitalism.

At the close of the Napoleonic era, the banking business of France except in one respect had not advanced much over what it had been in 1789. At that time it had been dominated by Protestant Swiss, the best known of whom was Necker. Some of them like the Mallets, Delesserts, and Thélussons, descended from French Huguenots who had fled to Geneva and other places and in a later generation returned to France as Swiss. The business of these bankers consisted in lending their own funds and those entrusted to their care to worthy applicants for loans, probably merchants as well as noblemen. They administered fortunes for their owners, which is especially true of the court bankers who were charged with the financial affairs of the king and his family. In addition, like all eighteenth-century bankers they had a flourishing business in bills of exchange, including the accepting of drafts of bankers and merchants in other cities and countries. Necker is said to have organized these bankers and their foreign correspondents so as to provide by a system of short-term drafts the funds for French participation in our Revolutionary War.

In contrast to older views of the passive role of London houses in the American trade, the active influence of a leading English merchant on the business decision-making of his colonial counterparts emerges from this case study.

By the 1930s, the American Locomotive Company (ALCo) and the Electromotive Company (EMC) controlled the diesel locomotive industry. Although ALCo enjoyed sound financial status, decades of experience in steam locomotive production, and close ties with its customers, it quickly lost ground to the newly established EMC. Electromotive's founder, Harold Hamilton, emphasized the importance of marketing, including post-sales support services, and his strategy helped Electromotive to surpass ALCo's diesel locomotive production by 1935. ALCo continued to neglect its marketing capabilities, and remained a poor second to Electromotive until it ceased production altogether in 1969. ALCo failed in large part because it could not modify its corporate culture, which was superbly equipped for steam locomotive production but ill-suited to the diesel locomotive industry.

This paper sketches the formation and expansion of a Scottish company engaged in the Indian trade, and follows its attempts to formulate policies to meet the changing demands of an overseas market known only through long delayed and often conflicting reports from abroad.

The idea to construct a pipeline from Suez to the Mediterranean (SUMED) was initially raised before the 1967 War. With the closure of the Suez Canal following the war, the pipeline could offer a less expensive route for Gulf oil. However, the pipeline was inaugurated only in 1977, following three wars and debilitating negotiations between Egypt and foreign institutions. This article analyzes the motives for the project as well as the reasons for the long delay in its implementation. Anticipated financial profits were a major consideration for both the governments concerned and the oil companies. Yet the project was launched only after the parties involved realized that its construction also entailed significant political advantages and after the security risks were eliminated. In recent years, SUMED and the Suez Canal have become major transportation routes for crude oil, transforming Egypt into an actor in the oil market.

The voyage of a small ocean-going trading vessel, of a type known as a snow, provides a window into the world of wartime commerce in the late colonial period. In March 1760, the snow Recovery, which was owned by a consortium of North American and Irish businessmen, traveled from New York City to Belfast, Ireland, and from there to the tiny Dutch island of Curaçao. From Curaçao, the snow sailed north to the Bay of Monte Cristi in Spanish Santo Domingo, where it loaded French sugar and coffee, mostly purchased through Spanish intermediaries, for sale at the German port of Hamburg. Upon leaving the bay for a brief stopover in New York, the Recovery was seized by a British warship and carried to Jamaica for condemnation in the court of vice-admiralty. This trading venture tells us much about mid-eighteenth-century Atlantic markets, their fluidity, adaptability, and responsiveness to change, as well as their integration into a single system of production, commerce, and finance.

This article analyzes the evolution of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), America's oldest stock exchange, from 1950 through 2000. PHLX was able to compete against the much larger New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) because it exploited loopholes created by fixed minimum trading commissions prior to 1975. After the liberalization of commissions, the PHLX competed against the NYSE by offering automated executions that met the needs of discount brokers. It also moved early to trade equity options and developed the first exchange-based market for foreign currency options.

The widespread advent of money-back guarantees and one-price policies were symptomatic of a major transition in merchandising history. As trade grew and retail stores multiplied, standardization of terms and practices became apparent. Before 1864 Champaign-Urbana merchants had made little progress in developing a policy of standard prices. The postwar years brought increasing competition at the retail level, and the use of the money-back guarantee spread. When this practice became widespread, a one-price-to-all policy became essential. Some old-time merchants continued to haggle with customers, and barter trade in country produce created complications, but by the early 1870's the integration of one-price policies and money-back guarantees had been generally accomplished and the way paved for the advent of mass distribution.

By building retail and wholesale market halls in the 1880s, the city of Berlin rationalized the distribution of food while maintaining public control of commerce. In designing the market hall system, technological improvement and public orderliness emerged as top priorities, while the interests of consumers and small retail dealers who had relied on the traditional outdoor public markets remained secondary. The emphasis on order reflected the interests of the city's economic and cultural elite, the Bürgertum, who sought to make Berlin fit their image of a world-class city.

In this article Professor Shmanske examines the history of the wire service industry with special attention to two economic peculiarities: the “public good” nature of news dissemination and the different ownership structures of the competing firms. By focusing on the interplay of the nonprofit, cooperative organizational structure of the Associated Press and the public good characteristics of news, the author provides a new and economically sound explanation for the AP's relative success. In addition, he demonstrates that many unusual institutions in the news-providing industry, particularly pricing structures, can be understood by analyzing the economic and marketing problems associated with private-sector production of a public good.

Recent studies of the progressive era by Gabriel Kolko and Robert Wiebe have proven that much reform legislation was supported by many of the interests against which the bills were ostensibly written. Professor Caine shows that, in at least one important state, railroads fought reform bitterly, accepting the principle of regulation only when conservative administration of the Railroad Regulation Act of 1905 offered them unexpected protection from progressive reformers.

Concluding his sophisticated analysis of the Pennsylvania Railroad's organizational structure (cf. BUSINESS HISTORY REVIEW, Summer, 1961), the anonymous reporter for the RAILROAD GAZETTE described in a supplementary article, reproduced here following Professor Jenks' interpretative comments, the decentralized management of the Pennsylvania's western divisions.