Industrial historians have generally failed to note the importance of the technical standards that have been developed through intercompany agreements in the automobile industry. While they have studied the changing institutional character of American industry and have chronicled the mechanical developments of recent technology, they have undertaken but few explorations into die complex interrelationships between mechanical technology and business structure. In relating the growdi of intercompany technical standards' in the automobile industry up to about 1930, this study attempts to show the influence of changing business conditions on standardization and hence on the mechanical technology of the automobile.

The Industrial Revolution had begun to affect the Austrian textile industry by the beginning of the nineteenth century. First to feel the effects were the woolen industry and the new cotton industry, which soon had copies of the new English spinning machines in operation. In England adaptation of these machines to flax had been made by John Marshall at Leeds as early as 1793, so that flax was spun dry in successful competition with hand-spun yarn, but only in the coarser yarns up to No. 16. However, similar attempts were not successful in Austria. The machines and processes were not so efficient as the English and could not compete with the cheap domestic hand-spun yarn. Because flax fibers are held together by a gum, they cannot be spun like cotton without excessive waste. Special treatment and machines had to be devised in order that flax might be spun in the range of numbers demanded by the market, and profitably. In the second decade of the new century efforts were being made in Austria, as elsewhere, to solve these special problems. Production of linen goods led all other industries in the monarchy. It provided a livelihood, wholly or in part, for thousands of families in town and country and constituted an important export. But the severe blows dealt by the Napoleonic Wars were followed by growing competition from more progressive linen industries in western Europe and especially from the rapidly growing and more easily mechanized cotton industry. The importance of the introduction of machinery in the Austrian linen industry as a means of meeting these threats to its very existence thus becomes apparent.

Historians have taken it for granted that the Revolutionary, debt was fairly well concentrated before it was funded in 1790, but they have not been able to support this view with concrete evidence. Most of the people living at the time thought the same thing but were likewise unable to prove it. The truth could not be known until Hamilton's funding operation assembled the securities that made up the debt. Under the act of 1790 a new federal loan was instituted. Various kinds of securities representing unpaid claims against the government were taken as subscriptions and the possessors given new federal stock. As nearly all the old securities came in, the government had full information about the transfer and ownership of the Revolutionary debt. The details, however, were not made public. Later, a succession of fires in the treasury destroyed nearly all the central records. Documents now existing, though voluminous, are scattered, incomplete, and hard to interpret. Historians have not made much use of them. For this reason, the ownership of the debt, which was a question in 1790, is a question still.

The purpose of this note is to examine the method by which N. S. B. Gras establishes his thesis concerning the evolution of the English grain markets. According to his book, grain, markets evolved through several distinct stages, culminating in the “metropolitan market.” Although the influence of the London market by the sixteenth century can be demonstrated without reference to the existence of the early stages, it is nevertheless they that constitute the essential novelty of Mr. Gras's approach and, presumably, the main contribution of the book to the study of economic history. It will be contended below that the existence of certain of these early stages is at least doubtful and that, in any case, their economic significance is either negligible or not provable.

Nineteenth-century romanticism and the hardships of capitalist individualism have caused scholars to emphasize collectivistic social and economic institutions i n the Middle Ages. Carried to extremes by the English socialists, this attitude tended to ignore or even to deny the competitive aspects of medieval production. Church authorities and guild ordinances were often cited in support of the thesis that the era was noncompetitive. Even Sombart was able to see in the medieval craftsman and tradesman a petit bourgeois who typically held to the morals prescribed by church authorities.