In the late eighteenth century, the competitive position of French industry was seriously undermined by the sudden influx of inexpensive English goods—the products of the First Industrial Revolution. Responding to this challenge, French government officials established trade fairs—such as the Paris Industrial Exposition of 1806—to promote the introduction of commercially viable technologies. In this article, Professor Hafter takes a close look at this 1806 exposition. She discovers that, in addition to praising English-style machinery, the exposition's judges also praised traditional French production methods—a choice, she suggests, that reflected the uneven pattern of French industrialization.

In this essay, Professor Gitelman draws upon new primary source materials to help clarify the outlook of American business leaders in the years immediately preceding U.S. entry into World War I. He shows how business leaders brooded, at periodic private conferences, over the profound loss in public esteem they believed business had suffered. This “crisis of confidence,” he concludes, precipitated defensive associational efforts. The creation of conference boards—the brainchild of Magnus W. Alexander—provided an institutional base for these efforts, and pointed the way to the creation of the National Industrial Conference Board.

Transportation, especially inland transportation, has played a more important role in the economic development of the United States than that of any other nation. After a long, slow start in which it faced the necessity of dealing across 3,000 miles of open ocean, the young nation found itself expanding westward across an equally vast land mass, without much idea of how its people might conveniently get to the Promised Land or how they would send its fruits back to market. Until the problem of inland transportation began to be solved following the War of 1812, America remained just another of the important maritime nations of the world, tied to a coastline and the few miles of coastal plain that bordered it. Such areas of the world had been virtually synonymous with “civilization” for many centuries; but in a generation or two after about 1815, the ancient domination of the sea was emphatically erased.

In this article, Professor Chandler compares and contrasts the emergence of managerial capitalism in the United States, Great Britain, Germany, and Japan. Though he observes that large firms tended to evolve according to a common pattern, he is equally impressed by international differences in the pace, timing, and character of change.

An important factor in the poor performance of the British economy in the twentieth century is the low level of investment by British firms in research and development. In this article, Professor Mowery compares the development of industrial research in Great Britain and the United States between 1900 and 1950, focusing on the reasons for the much lower levels of industrial research investment in Britain. He concludes that the substantial British lag can be attributed to differences in corporate structure, educational systems, and government policy.

By systematically analyzing ship registry documents it is possible to illuminate shipholding practices at major American ports in the early national era. In this article, Professor Gilbert focuses on shipholding in Baltimore in the period just prior to the late eighteenth century European war-induced shipping boom. He finds the port's foreign trade to be largely controlled by Baltimore residents. Merchants owned by far the largest percentage of the shipping, while mariners constituted an important, albeit secondary, investor group. Sole ownership of vessels was more extensive in Federalist Baltimore than in colonial Boston or Philadelphia. More detailed comparisons of shipowning practices among the major United States ports, Gilbert concludes, await further research.

The years following the Civil War witnessed a rapid expansion in the power of the federal judiciary. In this article, Professor Merkel reveals that the construction of the transcontinental railroad played an important role in this development. Beginning in 1868, the management of the federally chartered Union Pacific Railroad sought legislation that would authorize the company to remove lawsuits from hostile state courts to more sympathetic federal forums. Congress was accommodating, passing laws that expanded the jurisdiction of the lower federal courts. Consequently, these courts resolved many questions of transportation law, often in ways that benefitted the railroads.

Though Canada was, in the opening decades of the twentieth century, a net capital importer, Canadian-based companies dominated the Mexican public utilities industry. In this article, Professors Armstrong and Nelles explain how this “curious capital flow” came about. Their explanation stresses the personal ties linking Canadian businessmen to the maverick American engineer-entrepreneur F.S. Pearson. In addition to detailing these ties, they describe the methods used to finance the promotions, speculate about the insiders' rates of return, and estimate the origins and magnitude of the capital involved.

The factors responsible for Latin American economic “dependency” have long been debated by economic historians. In this article, Professor Guy considers the example of Argentine industrialization between 1870 and 1940. Argentine reliance upon foreign capital, she concludes, was due much more to local Argentine institutions — the commercial law, the stock market, and the government inspection bureau — than to any pressures from abroad. She adds that, though dependency theory has its limits, by focusing attention on local institutions, it remains a valuable tool for understanding Third World development.

One of the most difficult problems United States policymakers faced during the Marshall Plan years was balancing the national interest in European recovery with the private interests of U.S. companies with European markets. In this article, Dr. Painter describes how policymakers grappled with the often conflicting interests of the U.S. oil industry and war-ravaged Western Europe. In so doing, he provides a case study of the complex relationship of public policy and private power.

The Westinghouse air brake, a significant technical innovation in the railroad industry of the late nineteenth century, was applied to freight trains much more gradually than it was to passenger trains. In this article, Mr. Usselman explains why this was the case. Many factors, including the public movement for railroad safety, the organization of railroad brakemen, the rise of effective regulatory mechanisms at the federal level, and technical problems with the device, influenced the diffusion of the air brake and differentiated the freight and passenger cases. New administrative procedures for moving freight trains through the extensive national railroad system, which involved the interchange of equipment among many companies, presented obstacles to innovation that did not exist in the passenger branch of the industry. Individual companies seeking to adopt the air brake for freight service found that these procedures limited the independence they had traditionally enjoyed when assessing new technology. Most railroads equipped their freight trains with air brakes only after they developed new methods of coordinating industrywide action on matters of technological change.

In this article, Professors Dutton, Thomas, and Butler trace the sixty-year history of a major managerial technology—the progress function—from its discovery in post-World War I airplane manufacture to its post-World War II popularity among management consultants. By statistically analyzing the large number of progress function studies, they demonstrate that its investigation has become balkanized by academic discipline, and that applied researchers have frequently ignored the contingencies stressed in the leading theoretical studies. Their article is thus a revealing example of how social scientific concepts get translated into business practice.

Industrial standardization, when noted at all by historians, has usually been associated with the rise of large corporations in the late nineteenth century. In this article, however, Professor Seely contends that, in the highway industry, the introduction of uniform standards and specifications in the early twentieth century was spearheaded by federal engineers in the Bureau of Public Roads—the government's highway agency—through a variety of indirect and cooperative arrangements with state governments, trade associations, and professional organizations. Government leadership in the standardization of highway engineering practices and materials requirements, Seely concludes, suggests the significant role engineers played in the drive for uniformity. Linking nineteenth-century business-sponsored standardization efforts with the government-sponsored efforts of the twentieth century, engineers brought, despite a shift in institutional base, a singleness of purpose to the movement as a whole.

In this article, Professors Doucet and Weaver examine the North American shelter business between 1860 and 1920. Drawing upon the business records of the Hamilton, Ontario, real estate firm of Moore and Davis, they analyze the construction, ownership, and management of the North American shelter staple—the single-family detached dwelling. Since these activities had significant effects on the everyday lives of urban dwellers, they reveal significant social as well as business patterns. Doucet and Weaver conclude that this firm, and by implication the industry as a whole, preferred the prudent and routine to the innovative and daring, suggesting, in contrast to the work of recent scholars, that continuity rather than change typified urban development during these decades.

In this article, Dr. Pierenkemper investigates a new occupational category—the industrial white collar employee—in the late-nineteenth century Krupp Steel Casting Works in Essen, Germany. In contrast to previous historians, Pierenkemper demonstrates that white collar employees were far from homogeneous: differing among themselves, they were also largely isolated from the labor market as a whole. He concludes that widespread intrafirm occupational mobility underlay this distinctive work environment, and suggests that management may have consciously encouraged such moving about to segment its work force.

The failure of the Potomac Company—the first interregional internal improvement project attempted in the United States—has been largely neglected by historians. From the mid 1780s to the 1820s, this company struggled unsuccessfully to link the East Coast with the Old Northwest by enhancing the navigability of the Potomac River. In this article, Mr. Littlefield examines this little-known episode, describing how the project was overwhelmed by a combination of factors that included an unstable American economy, unreliable government aid, and interstate rivalries. He concludes that the Potomac Company's failure demonstrated how the absence of federal support could cripple a large-scale internal improvement project, and suggests that its example spurred the U.S. government to become directly involved in the economic development of the young republic.

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.