For the clerks who worked in British life-insurance companies during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occupational mobility was both an opportunity that motivated effort and a generator of wide disparities in pay and status. Ambitious clerks learned math in the hope of becoming actuaries. By the end of the nineteenth century, this pattern had changed, owing to the rise of branch networks and accompanying bottle-necks in the promotion process. Insurance companies tried to divert clerks’ ambition by offering them opportunities to engage in sports and other leisure activities, and by enhancing their financial security through staff pension schemes. Although these strategies only succeeded in retaining around half of all entering clerks for more than a few years, the activities added meaning to the lives of those clerks who stayed on and made vital contributions to the rapid growth of one of Britain's most important financial services.

The glamor of the American whale fishery has tended to obscure its economic outlines and significance. For certain areas one of the first successful efforts at natural resources exploitation, the fisheries developed centers of highly specialized technical and administrative skills. Capital amassed in whaling was a far from inconsequential economic force when it was shifted into other channels of investment. The shifting process itself highlights the circumstances surrounding a dying industry and provides an example of variant national investment patterns.

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.

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.

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.

The process of mutual accommodation between government and business in the United States is well illustrated in this study of the strategy and tactics of a key twentieth-century business association.

Professor Filante examines data on the patterns of trade and revenues on the Erie Canal during its first thirty-five years of operation.

This paper will take the following form:

a) a brief discussion of Erie Canal operations in the period 1825–1835, when neither rails nor other canals were competitors.

b) a discussion of the period 1835–1860 with specific attention turned to the sources and destinations of freight shipments, the composition of those shipments, and changes in the canal itself.

c) a discussion of rail-canal competition centering on the division of the market between the two along value of product and length of shipment criteria.

Of the myriad end products of the steel industry, none played a more strategic role in the evolution of the modern, vertically integrated enterprise than barbed wire. A unique solution to America's unique agricultural problem, the product attracted numerous manufacturers in the 1870s and 1880s. Profit margins, despite efforts to limit production and fix prices by means of pools, declined steadily, and firms that were not integrated backward into the production of rods (from which wire is drawn) had difficulty competing. Excess capacity and depressed prices convinced industry leaders like John W. Gates, Isaac L. Ellwood, and Charles F. Washburn that what was needed was a modern, fully integrated corporate holding company embracing every barbed wire manufacturer of consequence. The result was the formation of American Steel & Wire Co. in 1899 which, two years later, became an important component of the U.S. Steel Corporation.

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.