From 1900 to 1905 the United States government, working with a small group within the emerging profession of economics, developed—for the first time—a financial policy toward foreign dependent areas. The policy devised and carried out by this first generation of experts in foreign currency reform—who included Charles Conant, Jeremiah Jenks, and Edwin Kemmerer—sought to bring nations onto a gold-exchange standard, with their gold funds deposited in New York and their coinage denominated on American money. In this article, Professor Rosenberg describes this gold standard diplomacy, suggesting that it reflected the nation's growing economic power; its increasing stake in maintaining an integrated, stable, and accessible international order; the emergence of a new profession of foreign financial advising; and the government's new desire to play a leading role in international currency matters. She concludes that policymakers and economists would build on this foundation in developing the gold-exchange standard and currency stabilization programs of the 1920s.

The history of management-labor relations has in recent years become a central concern for business historians. In this article, Dr, Rodger and Mr. McKenna consider management-labor relations in the British building industry in the years preceding the First World War. They demonstrate that a variety of factors—not the least of which being the industry's notorious volatility—constrained management's ability to discipline the work force, and conclude that whatever success it attained proved transitory, accompanied as it was by the advent of government-financed municipal housing.

Although the American contribution to business education is well-known, that of other nations has been largely overlooked. In this article, Professor Locke reviews the very different history of business education in Germany, which he traces from its early twentieth-century origins to the present. He concludes that, while the German model no longer has the international reputation it did before World War II, it continues to promote solid economic growth.

The oil industry in Nazi Germany provides an excellent focus for studying the interplay between economics, politics, and government policy in the Third Reich. In this article, Mr. Stokes brings to this subject a comparative approach, making comparisons both within the oil industry and with the industry's major industrial counterparts. He concludes that a variety of factors—including the degree of shared interest between individual firms and the government, the size and concentration of a firm's production facilities, and the political position of key firm personnel—explain the success as well as the eventual collapse of a given industrial sector.