In sending copies of Dr. Henrietta M. Larson's Jay Cooke—Private Banker to its members, the Business Historical Society has taken a definite step forward. For the first time in its eleven years' existence, the Society has, with this presentation, been instrumental in distributing a significant historical volume prepared by a trained business historian and dealing with the business career of an important business man.

While “higgling” always occurred to some degree in most country stores, this article establishes evidence that, for many basic commodities, a system of standard prices existed in some country stores long before the Civil War.

This article provides an account of the development of the casino industry in Chile. For most of the 1930s up to the 1980s the industry remained stagnant and restricted to a few locations. From 1990 the industry grew, but in particular after 2005 following a new law that permitted the creation of new casinos in all regions, with the main aim of promoting tourism. The new casinos had to operate as part of an “integral project,” which included sizable investments in the tourism sector. This was a novel business development strategy. The new industry attracted old and new investors, including foreign operators, who often associated with Chilean business groups, providing the resources needed to finance these developments and enjoying healthy profits for most of the period.

In this study of lending in the emergence of a modern steel industry in the United States, I analyze the evolving interaction between borrowers and lenders in historical context. I show how “relationship lending” (that is, credit allocation in which personal contacts play a major role) can go wrong, despite good intentions at the outset, and that institutional conditions exert an important influence on how lenders and borrowers negotiate conflicts. Particularly important in the case of Moses Taylor and Joliet Iron & Steel Company were the uncertain jurisdictions and political maneuvering that stemmed from structural peculiarities of the U.S. legal system, peculiarities that belie claims of its efficacy for protecting creditor interests. Although this failure of relationship lending might seem to imply negative consequences for economic development, I show that, at least in this case, the opposite interpretation is more compelling.