It has been a long time since clichés like “cotton was king” have satisfied historians as an answer to the question of why the American South did not develop a manufacturing industry at least as vigorous as that of the Midwest in the antebellum years. Professor Cohn thinks that the South may well have done just that, and presents an analysis based on location theory that supports such a conclusion.

Who today can be compared with Robert Owen, the “great manufacturer with a bent for benevolence” who rebelled against the crudities of a vigorously expanding industrial organization? The difference between Owen and our great modern benefactors is perhaps that they are always manufacturers with a bent more or less accentuated for benevolence, while Owen's bent became a fanatical passion to redeem a hostilely suspicious world which ultimately repudiated him.

As Spanish mercantilism sagged in the late eighteenth century, a host of “foreign” traders probed her colonies. This account of one North American group is illustrative of the process of change.

The long, slow decline of the handicraft industries in Western Europe was attended by protracted hardship and misery for the artisan classes, short-term exploitative opportunities for crass merchants to whom the old medieval communal values were outdated cant, and confusion and eventual rout for the town fathers who attempted to maintain such values in the face of ineluctable economic change. Professor Friedrichs draws these conclusions from his research on woolen cloth weavers in the German town of Nördlingen in the seventeenth century and shows how, once the old values were no longer useful, the state itself took the initiative in the eighteenth century in facilitating the conversion of handicraft industry to the modern wage-labor system.