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Aggregative Business History

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2012

Arthur H. Cole
Arthur H. Cole
Affiliation:
Professor of Business Economics, Emeritus, Harvard University
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Abstract

One of the pioneers in the historical study of business and entrepreneurship recalls the origins of the two fields and suggests a synthesis as a basis for further research and analysis. The Editors and Dr. Cole welcome comments and discussion of these ideas.

Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 39 , Issue 3 , Autumn 1965 , pp. 287 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © The President and Fellows of Harvard College 1965

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References

Editors' Note: Professor Cole writes from the unique perspective of an early and influential leader in the study of business history. He is a former professor of economics and librarian of Baker Library at the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration and from 1948 to 1958 he headed the Research Center in Entrepreneurial History. His publications include studies of the wool and carpet industries in the United States and of commodity prices and economic fluctuations, and the widely quoted Business Enterprise in Its Social Setting (Harvard University Press, 1959).

1 Gay's increasing interest in business history a decade or more earlier than the establishment of its formal teaching at the Business School may be illustrated by the episode of the Middlesex Canal records. As early as 1915, Gay was announcing to his Harvard College class in economic history, perhaps more in jest than in earnest, that he would give an A in his course to any of his students who could discover the location of the canal company's corporate remains. Within a year or so, an undergraduate student appeared with information on this topic. He was a lad named Harper who chanced to live in Billerica, a town that lies directly on the route of the old canal running between Charlestown and Chelmsford (opposite Lowell on the banks of the Merrimack River). And much to Gay's discomfiture, Harper could state that the documents lay safely in the court house of Middlesex County in East Cambridge! I believe that Gay kept his promise to the young man — who, as far as I know, never led Harvard to regret this technical infraction of its rules — and Christopher Roberts' excellent study of the career of this early canal company was an indirect, if somewhat delayed consequence of Harper's discovery.

2 The argument between Gay and Gras that led in 1931 to the former's resignation as editor was concerned with acceptance or rejection of a certain case study solicited by Gras or offered to the Journal. However, the dispute, at least according to Gay's assertions to me, pertained to the quality of the piece, not to its intrinsic character — and there is evidence pointing to the support of Gay, i.e., his own solicitation of the Dennison item above mentioned. It does seem quite possible that Gay, safe fiscally in the resources of the Arts and Science sector of the university, and Gras, fighting for the continued existence of his young section of a financially hard-hit (and financially independent) school within the whole university, could well place differing values in an appraisal of a manuscript which was really marginal in quality.

3 Although the matters have no near relevance to the present argument, one could in strict logic go forward to contend (a) that the economist's notions about quanta of capital and of labor are clearly his own ideational constructs and could — as well as not — consist merely of the capital goods and the working staffs that entrepreneurs have themselves gotten together and that the economist chooses imaginatively to add up; and (b) for purposes of short-run analysis — and using a more homely analogy — that farmers caused the stocks of wheat or that stocks of wheat caused the farmers.