Who today can be compared with Robert Owen, the “great manufacturer with a bent for benevolence” who rebelled against the crudities of a vigorously expanding industrial organization? The difference between Owen and our great modern benefactors is perhaps that they are always manufacturers with a bent more or less accentuated for benevolence, while Owen's bent became a fanatical passion to redeem a hostilely suspicious world which ultimately repudiated him.

The failure of the Potomac Company—the first interregional internal improvement project attempted in the United States—has been largely neglected by historians. From the mid 1780s to the 1820s, this company struggled unsuccessfully to link the East Coast with the Old Northwest by enhancing the navigability of the Potomac River. In this article, Mr. Littlefield examines this little-known episode, describing how the project was overwhelmed by a combination of factors that included an unstable American economy, unreliable government aid, and interstate rivalries. He concludes that the Potomac Company's failure demonstrated how the absence of federal support could cripple a large-scale internal improvement project, and suggests that its example spurred the U.S. government to become directly involved in the economic development of the young republic.

While the growth of American railroads and textile mills from their beginnings through the Civil War has been extensively studied, much less attention has been given to smaller manufacturing firms which grew at the same time from job-shops to major units in the industrial structure. This paper studies one such firm, whose growth was a function of the skills of its proprietors, the benefits of its location, and the demand for manufactured items created by the growth of agricultural and transport sectors of the economy.

It has been a long time since clichés like “cotton was king” have satisfied historians as an answer to the question of why the American South did not develop a manufacturing industry at least as vigorous as that of the Midwest in the antebellum years. Professor Cohn thinks that the South may well have done just that, and presents an analysis based on location theory that supports such a conclusion.

From its beginnings as a supplier of lamps for bicycles in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Professor Church follows Joseph Lucas Ltd., through three generations of management and several revolutions in the character of its trade, to its emergence as the largest supplier of components to British automobile manufacturers. Shrewd but rigidly upstanding business policies, a clear-headed view to the future, and conservative financing methods gave Lucas's the strength and flexibility to survive and eventually dominate a field that was constantly changing, and in which both domestic and foreign competition was an important factor. Lucas's management, watching the rise and fall of firms that were, as Professor Church says, “young, inventive, and financially weak,” might have agreed with Andrew Carnegie that “pioneering don't pay.” But Lucas's, like Carnegie, pioneered with great success where increased productivity, lower prices, and growth were the rewards.

Development of the North American continent was a halting process, characterized by use and misuse of latent opportunities. The Hudson's Bay Company, giant in fur trade and northern exploration, proved by trial and error experiments that abundant natural assets were not in themselves the magic key to wealth.