Among the factors that have assured the success of units of “multinational” firms like the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, according to Professor Little, is the willingness of the parent's home government to use its diplomatic strengths to assure that a host government lives up to its contractual obligations, even after radical changes in its leadership. Using diplomatic correspondence of the United States with ITT and the Spanish Republic of the 1930s, he demonstrates the vital nature of these strengths at a time when the tensions between “communism” and “fascism” were new and vigorous, and reaches a startling conclusion about the sameness under the skin of the two ideologies where the rights of foreign concessionaries are concerned.

From its beginnings in sixteenth century southern Germany, Professor Landes traces the development of the personal timepiece industry to France, where the design of watches as items of personal adornment reached its peak; to England, where precision in timekeeping and rationalization of manufacture were developed to new heights; to Switzerland, where manufacture on a mass scale for a highly diverse market was attained; and, finally, to America, where the technique of assembling mechanical devices from precision-machined interchangeable parts was applied to watchmaking with the same success it had achieved in less demanding applications. He discusses the sociological factors that produced the Swiss industry in a region of seemingly little promise, and demonstrates how these factors made the Swiss more successful than the Germans, French, or English.

It may well be that the present will stand as a golden age in the historiography of American business and American law. Both fields have flourished – indeed, flowered – in recent years. Perhaps the best measure of this is the fact that the 1978 winners of the Bancroft Prize in American History were Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business and Morton J. Horwitz's The Transformation of American Law 1780–1860, each a notable work in its own right, each a summation of sorts of the recent evolution of its field of historical inquiry.

Against the widely accepted view of the nineteenth-century Mexican peon as a hapless individual caught in perpetual debt bondage to the “company store” of the hacienda on which he spent his short life of drudgery, Dr. Cross places some unique hard evidence drawn from the account books of one such hacienda. He finds that, in this case at least, the number of peons in debt at any one time was very small and the debt well within their ability to repay, thanks in no small part to a system of payment of a large part of their wages in kind. The exceptions reflected in most cases debts incurred either to pay the local priest's stiff fees for administering such sacraments as baptism and marriage, or for funds to invest in the peasant's own agricultural enterprises.

The rise of heavy industry and its managerial elite in the German Empire and in the United States provides stimuhting parallels and contrasts. Professor Spencer discusses the social constraints under which a professional management class developed in the German coal, iron, and steel industry during the generation before World War I. Ranking distinctly below the landed aristocracy and the governmental bureaucracy (both of which they would gladly have emulated), and preoccupied with the maintenance of order in the midst of rapid economic and social change, German managers used their power and influence to sustain and manipulate existing systems of authority, and came to play no broader role in the development of their commonwealth than did their American counterparts.

No conviction has been more a part of the standard interpretation of American history in the twentieth century than the belief that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of late-nineteenth-century decisions bearing on government-business relations, reflected the conservative reaction that seemed to mark the depression of the 1890s. But Professor McCurdy demonstrates that in its 1895 decision in the case of United States v. E. C. Knight Company, which drew a distinction between manufacturing and trade in defining interstate commerce, the Court was not trying to shield a vast, monopolistic aggregation of wealth (Henry O. Havemeyer's “Sugar Trust”) from the will of the people that it be broken up under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The decision, in fact, was not the beginning of a conservative reaction, but the last effort in a thirty-year attempt to maintain a role for state jurisdiction over the behavior of chartered enterprises.

The road to merger is strewn with fortuitous events, surprises, and disappointments for most firms even under ordinary circumstances, but the airline industry following World War II faced special problems of postwar readjustment, rapid technological change, and government intervention by a Civil Aeronautics Board that was determined to shape the future of American commercial aviation. Congruence with federal regulatory policy was a key element in the success of the merger with which this essay deals.

Only a few years before Juan Trippe of Pan American Airways successfully established an international commercial air carrier based upon the flying boat, Inglis M. Uppercu, with apparently ample financial and managerial resources, failed to do so. In telling why, Professor Leary demonstrates the overwhelming importance of timing and a knowledge of the exact nature of market opportunities in the entrepreneurial process.

It is a truism of American constitutional history that the federal judiciary was expected to facilitate interstate commerce. The right of individuals to remove cases to a federal court from locally prejudiced state courts was recognized under a wide range of circumstances. But it seemed less and less natural, as more and more of the nation's business came to be transacted by the “trusts” on a national basis, for corporations to be accorded the same rights. Professor Freyer shows that a major campaign, which had some success in the 1880s, was mounted to deny corporations the right of escape to federal courts. In the end, however, the nation's lawmakers recognized that the problem of the growing concentration of capital would have to be solved by something more sophisticated than frontier justice.

Where virtuoso talents were required by the courts, great and small, of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the protectionist system of guilds was suspended, according to Dr. Stürmer. In a society where status had to be attested to by conspicuous consumption, of which the sovereign himself was the most avid practitioner, the finest artisans in the fields of interior decoration and furnishings often attained the status of “court artisans,” in which they enjoyed many of the freedoms of laissez-faire that members of the guilds denied themselves as well as their competitors. In the end, however, the Revolution that swept away the guild economy also destroyed this expedient whereby excellence and entrepreneurship had been fostered.

Do variations in the circumstances under which heavy industry was developed in different regions account for the kinds of “entrepreneurs” those regions attracted? In this note on his current research, Doctor Pierenkemper concludes that varying circumstances do, indeed, account for varying backgrounds of entrepreneurs, and offers evidence from two contrasting regions in early German heavy industry. He offers the further hypothesis that as circumstances affecting growth — such as finance, market stability, and the need for professional management — change, certain kinds of backgrounds may become more applicable while others become less so.

“Gold is where you find it,” said the old prospector. It has long been recognized, in one way or another, that it belongs to him who can find it and extract it, and that the rules of land tenure and use formed in an agrarian society would serve poorly to define legal rights. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the demand for gold was particularly high. Its vital significance to American economic growth is revealed in the fact that the chronic foreign trade deficit of the United States in these years was balanced by two main elements: capital imports and gold exports. Professor Libecap shows just how pragmatic Americans could be about the impact of economics upon law under such circumstances, and draws a picture of a land use code that proved as malleable as the glittering metal it called forth.

As is generally known, the 1790s was the first decade in which the American banking system expanded. Professor Klebaner has taken the trouble to ascertain the fate of the state-chartered banks founded in that decade. He has put his material into lists that we are glad to publish as a unique source of banking history.

Prompted by a 1974 article by Professor Klaus H. Wolff in the Business History Review, Dr. Gittins considers the economic factors that influenced the introduction of technical changes in textile bleaching.

Last December the Manuscripts Department of Baker Library issued a new edition of its collections guide entitled, Manuscripts in Baker Library, A Guide to Sources for Business, Economic and Social History. Although this is the fourth edition of its List of Business Manuscripts, the changed title reflects what is felt to be the broadened scope of the collections and their more varied use. Earlier editions appeared in 1932 (minus an index), 1951, and 1969. As before, the new volume is a complete listing of holdings, not just a supplement covering additions since 1969. Even with a few removals, additions come to an even 100 collections, for a total of 1403, as compared with 1303 in the previous edition.

The Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Revolution, and our emergence as an independent trading nation all worked profound changes upon the British marketing enterprise, but it is an oversimplification, according to Dr. Chapman, to conclude that manufacturers quickly or entirely replaced traditional British merchant banking houses even down to World War I. He develops three phases of a long-drawn-out process of change that served Britain's needs poorly throughout the nineteenth century.