This study of the history of a large group of merchants directing Anglo-American commerce from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century analyzes major long-run changes in the organization and functions of mercantile institutions in that important period.

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.

Between 1921 and 1926, Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover took an active role in shaping the relationship between the federal government and the fledgling commercial aviation industry. In this article, Professor Lee shows how Hoover, drawing largely on a form of American corporatism, prompted the industry to formulate answers to its own problems through trade associations, groups which would then cooperate with government to implement those solutions. Such thinking was an important ingredient in the Air Commerce Act of 1926, the first federal law regulating commercial aviation.

How well did the American business traditions of domestic “self-regulation” and foreign “dollar diplomacy” fit the economic and diplomatic environment of the Eisenhower era? Professor DiBacco suggests that the issue of foreign aid — in particular, economic assistance — provided an opportunity for articulately testing old and new business creeds.

Notwithstanding the importance of maintaining soundness, commercial banks in early ante-bellum America still strove to maximize profits, according to Professor Adams, who cites Stephen Girard's conservative private bank as an example. Using internal data from Girard's bank, of the kind that is seldom available for banks, he shows that a flexible policy of shifting from government and quasi-government securities, as they became scarcer, to business debt, both long- and short-term, kept bank profits from declining. So long as Girard lived, his bank remained fully competitive with the growing number of chartered institutions.

An analysis of the aircraft industry's public relations campaign suggests that individuals' thoughts and feelings about airplanes and atomic weapons, domestic politics, and international events had greater influence on public opinion and political action than the PR program. However, the industry's public relations program did bring together many groups interested in air power. By linking these groups and capitalizing on the domestic and international situation, the public relations firm Hill and Knowlton of New York helped to create a climate in which air power was an acceptable solution to national defense and budgetary problems.

As Secretary of the Interior and Petroleum Administrator for War, Harold Ickes played a significant, albeit hitherto largely overlooked, role in the formulation of United States foreign petroleum policy planning during World War II. As Petroleum Administrator for War, Ickes worked closely with oil company personnel who shared his commitment to planning and government-industry cooperation. In addition, as a firm believer in the need for a coherent national petroleum policy, Ickes played a major role in broadening the mandate of the ill-fated Petroleum Reserves Corporation. While business groups generally opposed this broadened mandate, business opposition was by no means monolithic and was, in fact, reinforced by considerable opposition from within the government itself.

As the twentieth century opened, numbers of American businessmen, spurred in part by the forceful persuasions of American diplomats, hoped to profit from the legendary China market by taking on Chinese partners. At the same time, groups of Chinese entrepreneurs, struck by the success and wealth of the United States, hoped to take advantage of American capital by launching joint ventures with the Americans. Such enterprises generally proved difficult to form, however, and once organized, tended to see the Americans predominate and the Chinese relegated to distinctly secondary roles. But there were exceptions, as Professor Pugach points out in this essay on the Chinese-American Bank of Commerce. While the founding of this firm provides ample proof that joint Sino-American companies had to overcome large hurdles to come into being, the formation of the bank suggests that mutual self-interest, ideal circumstances, and perhaps good luck could overcome the problems inherent in creating joint ventures in which both sides could share roughly equal positions.

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.

Reform spokesmen, believing that fundamental issues of social control were involved, hailed the refusal of the judiciary to intervene in the 1880's against state regulation of corporate power. The progressive triumph was short-lived. Reversing the earlier trend, the courts retreated into economic conservatism, but in so doing generated the fierce pressures that were later to explode into new outbursts of legal and social revolt.

As a notable instance of British investment in protectionist Meiji Japan, the history of the Takashima coal mine well illustrates the complications of foreign capital commitments in the Far East during the nineteenth century.

The safety of workers and the costs to employers and the economy as a whole became a serious problem in industrializing nations. Workplace safety in the Ontario manufacturing industry deteriorated at the end of the nineteenth century. In response, the province legislated to regulate safety standards and factory inspection. However, this strategy failed to reduce accident rates. As in the United States, it was the enactment of workers' compensation legislation that generated the economic incentives for Ontario's employers to invest in safety. Yet in contrast to the United States, where safety was predominantly organized inside firms, employers in Ontario developed a comprehensive institutional framework to organize a range of safety actions.

A content analysis of two major rail journal leads the author to conclude that too many historians have overestimated the radicalism of state regulation and have also operated on the questionable assumption that rail managers wanted the elimination of patchwork state controls in favor of uniform national regulation. Further, he maintains that the Transportation Act of 1920 was more a reversal than a continuation or logical culmination of Progressive regulation.

Historical accounts of the Internet's origins tend to emphasize U.S. government investment and university-based researchers. In contrast, this article introduces actors who have been overlooked: the entrepreneurs and private firms that developed standards, evaluated competing standards, educated consumers about the value of new products, and built products to sell. Start-up companies such as 3Com and Cisco Systems succeeded because they met rapidly rising demand from users, particularly those in large organizations, who were connecting computers into networks and networks into internetworks. We consider a relatively brief yet dynamic period, from the late 1960s to the late 1980s, when regulators attacked incumbent American firms, entrepreneurs flourished in new market niches, and engineers set industry standards for networking and internetworking. As a consequence, their combined efforts forged new processes and institutions for so-called open standards that, in turn, created the conditions favorable for the “network effects” that sustained the formative years of the digital economy.

As in other countries, textile and apparel production in Germany is considered a victim of globalization. Domestic production and employment declined dramatically after its postwar peak in the late 1950s. Research has often attributed this trajectory to the trade liberalization policy of the German governments. However, this interpretation is puzzling. German trade policy was not as liberal as is claimed, nor did the industry disappear. This article addresses the issue using statistical evidence as well as archival material. The West German textile and apparel industry was using outward processing strategies comparatively early and was supported in that by German politicians starting in the early 1960s. As a result, the industry moved up the global value chain of textile production.

Present-day advocates of antitrust reform referred to as “New Brandeisians” have invoked history in pressing the case for change. The New Brandeisians bemoan the upending of a mid-twentieth-century “golden age” of antitrust by an intellectual movement known as the Chicago School. In fact, mid-twentieth-century enforcement of antitrust was uneven and large corporations exercised substantial market power. The Chicago School also was not as decisive an agent of change as the New Brandeisians suggest. Doubts about the efficacy of government regulation and concerns about foreign competition did much to foster the late twentieth-century counterrevolution that antitrust experienced.

The automobile industry was a leader in Germany's economic recovery after World War II. In the 1950s and 1960s, carmakers found a ready market for their products as mass motorization created a manufacturing backlog. But, by the 1970s, rapid changes in sales and the arrival of new competitors in the German market marked a transition from a seller's to a buyer's market. Additionally, the energy crisis intensified existing consumer reluctance to spend and altered buying preferences. German car manufacturers adjusted to the changing market conditions after 1973 by adopting different strategies. In order to generate economic success, they developed new marketing-management instruments that supported a fundamental change in the business paradigm, leading them to shift from their earlier emphasis on production to a stronger focus on consumers.

Enrique C. Creel was Mexico's leading banker, an innovative industralist, venture capitlist, and representative of the nation's largest land and cattle owner; he was also the political boss of the state of Chihuahua and the key conciliator of the conflicting intersts of the north and the national regime of dictator Porfirio Díaz. In this essay, Professor Wasserman describes Creel's activities, showing how he and his family built the greatest business empire in Mexico before 1910, survived the decade-long destruction of the revolution (1910–20), and rebuilt their empire in the 1920s. Better than any of his contemporaries, Creel combined managerial talent and vision with a mastery of the interplay of politics, regional interests, and foreign capital that comprised his economic entrepreneurship and the special nature of economic entrepreneurship and the intimate relationship between business and politics in pre-and post-revolutionary Mexico.

To the literature on social mobility and the question of earned versus inherited fortunes, Professor Jaher and Dr. Ghent add findings for the city of Chicago in the late nineteenth century that are in strong contrast to simuar studies for other cities. From the Civil War to the turn of the century, Chicago's rate of economic growth far exceeded the national average, and out of 1186 members of the Chicago business elite whose careers were embraced by the years 1830 to 1930, fully two-thirds made their own fortunes. This phenomenon was especially strong in manufacturing and the aggressive young industries of meatpacking and railroading.