Merely by existing, the United States and the Western world as a whole bring to bear … a constant cultural pressure. But even though the idea of industrialization, expanded consumption, and political egalitarianism may pour forth equally for all … countries, what is absorbed varies widely from one to another. How and why and toward what ends each nation moves is conditioned by its own traditions and appreciations as well as by the historical course of its particular set of involvements with the industrially advanced nations.

The above was the subject of a joint session of the American Historical Association and the Business Historical Society which was to have been held at Columbus, Ohio, on the morning of December 30, 1942. Mr. John W. Higgins was to have presided at this meeting, an especially fitting arrangement because he is a business administrator as well as president of the Society. Several ten-minute addresses were planned to present different issues and varying points of view. Following these, the subject was to have been opened for discussion from the floor, to be continued at a luncheon session.

While the growth of American railroads and textile mills from their beginnings through the Civil War has been extensively studied, much less attention has been given to smaller manufacturing firms which grew at the same time from job-shops to major units in the industrial structure. This paper studies one such firm, whose growth was a function of the skills of its proprietors, the benefits of its location, and the demand for manufactured items created by the growth of agricultural and transport sectors of the economy.

Voltaire's words about the London Royal Exchange, quoted by Francesca Trivellato in her important new book The Promise and Peril of Credit, represent pars pro toto a view of finance and trade—as peaceful, tolerant, antagonistic to the old segregations and brutalities of religion, and ultimately emancipatory—that entered the philosophical mainstream in the eighteenth century, that seems to at least partly form the foundations of liberal modernity, and that continues to shape the way we think about business and capitalism today (p. 139). Yet Voltaire himself was an anti-Semite who obsessed about the Jews and trafficked in old clichés about cunning Jewish merchants precisely in order to make his case for commerce as a vehicle of toleration. This and similar ironies or contradictions lie at the heart of Promise and Peril, which traces from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth century what Trivellato calls a “legend,” because it is both patently false (we now know), and was once widespread, that Jews in the Middle Ages or Renaissance invented the bill of exchange (and sometimes also marine insurance).

Professor Gressley recounts the escapades of domestic and international promoters in the history of the Salt Creek oil field, demonstrating that fraud and chicanery can play indispensable roles in the process of economic development.

The process of mutual accommodation between government and business in the United States is well illustrated in this study of the strategy and tactics of a key twentieth-century business association.

Drawing on corporate materials from the Banque de France, this article reveals a fact that is rarely raised in the study of foreign investment in France: among American investment in France, there are many cases in which French companies took the initiative in seeking American investment. Not all French companies were hostile to U.S. enterprises, even during the upsurge of French anti-Americanism, and the French Fifth Republic's restrictive policies toward American investment were not as rigorous as they might have appeared. Their major objective was to increase French competitiveness.