In this article Dong-Woon Kim continues his investigation of the multinational activities of the British thread-making company, J. & P. Coats. Dr. Kim previously published “J. & P. Coats in Tsarist Russia, 1889-1917” in the winter 1995 edition of this journal (pp. 465-493). Here he explores the experiences of J. & P. Coats in the United States. Coats began selling its thread in the U.S. soon after the company's founding in 1830. From a modest start, it established a system of agencies to sell its own “Coats” brand and, in 1869, began local manufacture of thread in Rhode Island. Through a careful series of direct investments and the development of a flexible managerial structure, Coats eventually came to dominate the American cotton thread market.

Until recently, students of the Industrial Revolution of the 18th and 19th centuries concentrated on technological changes or on labor and social problems but neglected capital and the capitalist. Mantoux gave 160 pages to technology, 100 to labor, and only 34 to capital. Mrs. Knowles devoted 8½ pages out of 392 to capital, companies, and combinations. The Hammonds have given us volumes on the town laborer, the skilled laborer, and the village laborer, but we still lack the book Unwin once hoped they would write on the working life and ideals of the entrepreneur.

The striking problem faced by the labor administrator in the early Connecticut button industry was the shortage of native skilled artisans. While unskilled laborers, bookkeepers, and even managers could be drawn from sources in this country, highly skilled artisans were usually available only in England. The shortage of skilled labor thus truly constituted the bottleneck to quality production. In the correspondence of Alexander Hamilton, for the year 1791, there is a letter from one John Mix, pewter buttonmaker of New Haven, reporting that he was going to produce diverse kinds of buttons. This was possible “because we have a person lately from Europe who has the skill perfectly who is a gentleman who is able and has engaged to instruct and teach us everything necessary in the making of them.”

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.

Many real estate developers in the United States consciously attempted to shape residential neighborhoods, but their success in determining the spatial and social structure of communities was mixed. This article describes the methods available to land developers and realtors and examines the application of these tools to a section of Columbus, Ohio. It demonstrates that the intentions of deed restrictions and other private means of land use control were often undermined by construction delays, general economic conditions, and outmoded requirements, as well as by the timing of annexation and the subsequent application of public zoning ordinances.

The pragmatic origins of government policy toward business are well illustrated in this study of the reduced-rate provisions granted to certain American railroads during the 19th century.

As production workers in late-nineteenth-century American heavy industry moved towards regular use of concerted action, including the strike, to gain their demands, employers generally adopted rigid policies of opposition. That it was a frightening period for manufacturers, with prices for their goods steadily falling and widespread business failure, has been emphasized by Edward C. Kirkland and others. But lack of scholarship in business archives has improverished labor-management history on this point. Professors Skaggs and Ehrlich offer one case history, based on a study of the “inner truth” of such a conflict in the 1880s. It confirms the suspicion that it was not practical economic imperatives but a long-run policy to maintain the principles of paternalism that often accounted for the intransigence of management.

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.