In 1947 and 1949 statutory monopolies were established over the export of all major agricultural products from British West Africa. This device was justified chiefly on the ground that it would serve to stabilize the incomes of the peasant producers. This justification is not supported either by economic analysis or by history. The statutory monopolies seem rather to have emerged from a confluence of events and opinions in the preceding decade: the widespread belief that middlemen are socially unproductive, the search by the members of a trade association for some way to restrict competition and safeguard their profits, the formation of export control boards as a wartime measure and the resultant creation of influential administrative positions, the predilection of the administrators for tidiness, the recent emphasis on compulsory saving as an instrument for development of backward areas and the opinion that socialization of peasant saving would contribute to that development.

Generalizations about the merger movement in America at the turn of the century have too open been predicated upon inadequate information about the motives and mechanisms involved and the results achieved. This has been particularly true of those combinations in which the firm of J. P. Morgan & Company was involved. The International Mercantile Marine Company merger of 1902 has hitherto been misrepresented as a promotion of Wall Street. The subsequent course of this venture shows how even a combination of the world's most astute bankers and shipping men could be misled in analysis and held powerless to affect their own destiny by the march of economic and political events. Not all the grand combinations of the early twentieth century yielded lush promotional profits; neither should the evidence of overcapitalization in such combinations always be accepted at face value.

In 1914 the United States had tess than 5 per cent of the merchant shipping tonnage of the world; in 1952 it had 32 per cent of a vastly larger world tonnage, although its basic competitive disadvantages had probably increased in the intervening years. This enormous growth of the American fleet resulted from the changes in public policy which accompanied a new view of the American role in world affairs. This article analyzes the major developments in the American merchant marine, both deep-sea and coastwise, since World War I.

The great expansion of American blast furnace capacity since 1938 has worked significant changes in the geographical distribution of the industry. Many persons have assumed that the furnaces erected at new locations have abnormally high costs for their mineral raw materials, and that their survival, like their origin, is dependent on the boom market of wartime and postwar, Federal financing, and accelerated amortization for tax purposes. This analysis is not correct. From the viewpoint of raw materials cost, the furnaces at relatively new locations in Utah, California, and northeast Texas, are lust as efficient as the furnaces at older locations such as Chicago and Pittsburgh. The data for the cost analysis which follows were collected directly from the firms involved.

The decision of the U. S. Supreme Court in the Cement Institute case (1948) had the effect of outfowing the system of basing point pricing used in the steel industry. But until 1953 the decision had relatively little effect on steel price competition because a strong sellers' market prevailed. In the future, as idle capacity continues, steel executives almost certainly will evolve a new method of securing uniform delivered prices. This objective for pricing policy is dictated by two broad sets of factors: the organizational structure of the industry (fewness of firms, an undifferentiated product, and inelastic demand), and the geographical distribution of the phnts of the largest producers. This article analyzes the multiple basing point system used up to 1948, the temporary expedients employed from 1948 to 1954, and the probable pricing policies of the future.

A heal tithing office or bishop's storehouse was found in every Mormon settlement of the Mountain West during the nineteenth century. Besides functioning as collector of revenue for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the tithing house played a major role in the economic life of the community. It served as communal receiving and disbursing agency, warehouse, weighing station, livestock corral, general store, telegraph office, employment exchange and social security bureau. These functions carried it into banking, the fixing of official prices, and bulk selling. Thus the history of this institution shows, in a much different setting, counterparts of many procedures and problems open regarded as distinctly modern.

The study of business history should not be restricted to investigating the development of internal administration in specific firms. The history of business is indivisibly linked to the history of mankind, and business historians should aim at understanding the interplay between the actions of individual companies and changes in the total society. This topic can be illuminated by studying a group of firms in the same industry, by studying business in a certain region, or by relating business policies and methods to such characteristics of the population as the American willingness to work hard in pursuit of a higher standard of consumption.

A half century ago the conflict over state regulation of railroads was the chief issue in Alabama politics. Two staunch advocates led the rival forces. Both leaders were in agreement on the need to develop the industrial capacities of the state, but each sponsored violently opposing concepts of how this could best be done. The present article, by presenting the two sides of the Alabama controversy, provides us with insights into the national dilemma over government regulation of business which developed after the Civil War.

At a time when American shipping generally was finding it difficult to compete in international trade, certain American shipping groups were profiting largely. The strength of the American-Hawaiian Steamship Company derived from conservative financial policy, bold but not reckless expansion, astute analysis of trading opportunities, skillful handling of competition, and decisive adaptation to emergencies. A closely knit group of owner-managers held the reins of control. Internal strength permitted optimum realizations from a favorable commercial environment and even helped to make that environment favorable.

The development of industry in South Carolina to 1860 is analyzed carefully, using information culled from manuscript census returns and the correspondence of businessmen. The failure of manufacturing to grow more rapidly is ascribed to a shortage of capital and skilled management, an unfortunate geography, competition for factors of production by local agriculture, and competition in the product markets by Northern industry.

In 1906, nine important lumber firms set up a jointly owned company to sell their cut-over lands in northwestern Wisconsin to potential farmers. The land company learned, from its experience with various classes of buyers, that the most reliable was the owner-occupant who had made a substantial down payment. Even when a settler fell behind in his payments, the company did not foreclose unless the debtor left his land or was obviously making no effort to pay. Competition from other land companies tended to lower the price of land and also to inflate sales costs, but at its dissolution in 1940 the company showed a moderate profit. Thus the policy adopted by the nine lumber firms, of holding the cut-overs for sale to settlers rather than letting the land revert to the state for taxes, found a commercial justification.

The effects of religion on business have inspired much schohrly inquiry, but the effects of business on religion have yet to be studied systematically. The following article draws several themes from a study of commercial periodicals, the religious press, and biographies. The indifference to theology of many businessmen furthered the interdenominational movement. This influence, coupled with a demand for “efficiency in religious affairs, stimulated a movement to merge churches. Some businessmen and religious leaders urged that such business techniques as advertising be adapted to the use of churches. A substantial body of literature arose which sought to transform religious prophets into businessmen and religious texts into manuals explaining how to succeed in business.

Skilled textile workers migrated from Scotland to Massachusetts in the 1850's because of a large wage differential and low steerage rates for the transatlantic passage. For each one of 56 women weavers in the Lyman Mills, expenditures on current consumption took less than 75 per cent of income. But the circumstances were unusual, so this sample does not permit any conclusions about the role of wage-earners' savings in the accumulation of capital in New England. In this mill, two-thirds of the labor force in 1860 had been working there less than three years. The impact of this high degree of labor mobility on labor relations and on the technology of the industry is tentatively assessed.

When American railroad promoters, in the years immediately after 1830, had to look beyond their own regions for capital, they turned first to Broad Street in Philadelphia, where Nicholas Biddle and his associates served as the agents for marketing vast amounts of sterling bonds in London. This mechanism was disrupted by the failure of the Bank of the United States of Pennsylvania in 1841. Then State Street in Boston became the center, and common stock became the chief instrument, of American railroad finance. The sharp recession of 1847 showed that the Boston capitalists had already made long-term investments in excess of the liquid capital available to them. New York merchants, bankers, and brokers now took up the task of financing the railroads of the South and West, and Wall Street became the undisputed financial center of the country.

Russell & Co., the Boston partnership which had long been prominent in the China trade, found its business as commission agent in a state of serious decline by 1861. Therefore Edward Cunningham, a junior partner resident in Shanghai, conceived the idea of founding a steamship line to operate up the Yangtze River. This venture would require a capital far exceeding that used by Russell & Co. in its commission business. The head of the firm, Paul Sieman Forbes, who lived in New York and Newport, spurned the project in favor of more lucrative and secure investments in the United States. Cunningham then showed his promotional abilities by raising the necessary capital in China. Not only was the resultant Shanghai Steam Navigation Company profitable in itself, it also brought much commission business to Russell & Co. This article, based mainly on the manuscript records of the Forbes family, contributes to a more realistic estimate of the amount of American capital in the Far Eastern trade and to a greater appreciation of the administrative problems and methods involved.

Historians have recorded some of the more spectacular failures in American business, but the subject of business failure in itself has not been intensively studied. To lay the groundwork for such a study, the experience of individual firms should be examined in detail and attention should be directed to small as well as large business units. The history of Smith & Griggs provides an example of “discontinuance” which came about not as a result of a single catastrophic event but by a process of long-time attrition involving every phase of the company's operations.

The development of the administration of business firms has been studied by many scholars in the last 25 years. By comparison, the history of the administration of trade unions is an untouched field; most historians of the American labor movement have dealt only summarily with administrative changes. But efficient internal organization was crucial, in the years after 1873, to trade union survival and growth. Under the prodding of Samuel Gompers, the Cigarmakers' International Union pioneered several improvements. Its major innovations were: centralized control, especially of strikes; benefit payments for sickness, unemployment, and death; high dues and high initiation fees.