Between 1850 and 1880, enthusiasm for horticulture swept the nation, particularly the Upper Midwest. Nursery owners and seed traders welcomed the escalating demand for trees and flowers but soon faced consumer complaints about their questionable business practices. Customer dissatisfaction had many sources, ranging from unethical entrepreneurs to faltering industry infrastructure and underhanded dealing. The nurserymen and seed dealers worked diligently to overcome these criticisms, sharing information to improve industry methods and attempting to deflect responsibility for fraudulent practice onto disreputable competitors or inexperienced customers. The conflicts between commercial horticulturists and their broadening customer base reflected tensions within America's rapidly expanding consumer culture and suggested that traditional restraints on industry practice based on personal ties and shared values would no longer suffice when dealing with a newly diversified and seemingly intractable clientele.

In the half-century following the American Revolution, journalists and promoters of economic activities wrote paeans to the independence movement, celebrating its release of economic energies and anticipating that it would enable citizens to improve, produce, and consume more and thus sustain their virtuous republican character as a people. Writers predicted that imminent prosperity would result in the construction of mills, forges, and retail networks throughout the hinterlands; they envisioned boldly experimental internal improvements and expanding commerce under the independent auspices of the newly formed states and locales. Liberated Americans could look forward to blending certain kinds of regulatory protections and government encouragements, such as they had experienced under the rule of the empire, and to the aggressive pursuit of economic opportunities: creating new kinds of taxation and currency systems, expanding commerce to foreign ports, extending agriculture to the limits of available technologies and capital, and testing modest manufactures. For two generations following the Revolution, until at least the panic of 1819, many optimists were confirmed in their expectations of a bright future for the new nation's economy, and they embraced the risks involved in mobilizing tremendous amounts of human energy and capital because they believed that economic development would resolve foreign nations' doubts about the new republic and obliterate the crushing debts and dislocations of the revolutionary war.

In the first half of the twentieth century, the United Fruit Company, based in Boston, Massachusetts, created an impressive network that produced bananas in Colombia for distribution to the U.S. market. The company grew its own fruit but relied as well on local entrepreneurs. United Fruit imposed draconian contracts on the growers, forcing them to trade on terms that were very favorable to the company. These practices set the standards for other exporters operating in the country, even those based in Colombia.

The British dominated the world's submarine cable business over the second half of the nineteenth century, but they encountered significant challenges in the 1880s and 1890s—especially from James Scrymser, an upstart entrepreneur from New York. Scrymser exploited a strategic gap in the cable system in the Western Hemisphere and became locked in a confrontation along the west coast of South America with John Pender, the leading British cable magnate. Scrymser gained the upper hand in Chile by outmaneuvering Pender and used this victory to expand his operations with the telegraph network that linked South America, North America, and Europe.

In the century since its founding, the Ford Motor Company of Canada has evolved from a relatively independent entity within the Ford empire, with a strong element of minority ownership and its own overseas subsidiaries, to a fully integrated and wholly owned part of Ford's North American operations. The unique emergence and transformation of Ford-Canada among Ford's foreign enterprises is explained by Canada's changing automotive trade policies, the personal relations of the Ford family with its Canadian offspring, and a corporate strategy pursued by Henry Ford's successors and the American Ford company, which sought to bring Ford-Canada more directly under Detroit's control.

This article examines how the marketing and advertising of toothpaste brands evolved in the twentieth century, particularly from the 1950s to the 1980s. During these decades, the promotional strategies employed by leading toothpaste manufacturers were at odds with general developments in consumer product marketing. As branding strategies were being revolutionized by the discovery of a “Pepsi Generation,” the toothpaste market was itself being transformed by a technical innovation that was to have far-reaching consequences for the marketing of leading brands.

During a career that stretched from the Progressive Era through the 1950s, Gilbert H. Montague served businesses as a lawyer and lobbyist, managing relations between companies and the government. In this capacity he had a significant impact on the evolution of regulation, particularly antitrust law. Just as important, his career provides valuable insight into the activities and attitudes of the class made up of corporate lawyers and lobbyists, which constituted an important part of the system of regulated capitalism that emerged in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century.

In the late eighteenth century, northern Virginia's grain-based slave economy prompted a thriving but risky overseas trade. The merchants who conducted this trade sought to manage their risks by purchasing marine insurance, initially from British and northern U.S. sources. After the American Revolution, however, the expense and inconvenience of obtaining insurance abroad prompted merchants to create local institutions modeled on northern practices. Most notably, in 1797 Alexandria merchants established the Alexandria Marine Insurance Company, an incorporated entity that helped manage the risks of overseas trade during the dangerous Napoleonic Wars, enlarged local sources of capital, and, in turn, played a significant role in stimulating regional economic development. The appearance of this marine insurance company (and others like it) reveals the significant role that financial intermediaries played in the development of the southern slave economies in the early republic.

Business historians have shown the importance of industrial research in the process of innovation. Most have focused on the industrial research departments themselves. Less attention has been paid to the position of these departments within research networks outside the firm. This article explores the story of networking at the Dutch company Philips & Co. during the interwar period. Gilles Hoist, director of Philips's Research Department at the time, became involved in an agricultural research network that comprised growers, university scientists, and the Dutch government. These networks were essential for Philips's success and provided an opportunity for the company's researchers to keep in touch with scientific circles.

This article analyzes the evolution of the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (PHLX), America's oldest stock exchange, from 1950 through 2000. PHLX was able to compete against the much larger New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) because it exploited loopholes created by fixed minimum trading commissions prior to 1975. After the liberalization of commissions, the PHLX competed against the NYSE by offering automated executions that met the needs of discount brokers. It also moved early to trade equity options and developed the first exchange-based market for foreign currency options.

The idea to construct a pipeline from Suez to the Mediterranean (SUMED) was initially raised before the 1967 War. With the closure of the Suez Canal following the war, the pipeline could offer a less expensive route for Gulf oil. However, the pipeline was inaugurated only in 1977, following three wars and debilitating negotiations between Egypt and foreign institutions. This article analyzes the motives for the project as well as the reasons for the long delay in its implementation. Anticipated financial profits were a major consideration for both the governments concerned and the oil companies. Yet the project was launched only after the parties involved realized that its construction also entailed significant political advantages and after the security risks were eliminated. In recent years, SUMED and the Suez Canal have become major transportation routes for crude oil, transforming Egypt into an actor in the oil market.

The risk of hurricanes made planting in the British Greater Caribbean, a region stretching from Barbados through South Carolina, an especially volatile and uncertain business during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The storms were a new experience for European colonists, and they quickly became the most feared element of the region's environment. Hurricanes routinely leveled plantations and towns, destroyed crops and infrastructure, and claimed hundreds of lives. The widespread destruction resulted in significant losses for planters and necessitated major reconstruction efforts. Most planters survived these economic shocks, often with the help of outside credit, but at times hurricanes were the breaking point for smaller or heavily indebted planters. The profits that came from sugar and rice kept planters rebuilding, but the threat posed by the storms shaped the experience of plantership in the region throughout the period.

This essay examines the origins of a managerial class in American business by exploring the dynamic economic and cultural milieu in which merchants and clerks forged apprenticeship and employment relations in eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury northeastern cities. Apprenticeship unraveled as an institution in countinghouses and stores throughout this period, a casualty of the Revolutionary-era narrative touting economic opportunity and independence through the cultivation of character. Increased competition for clerkships in the early republic led to the establishment of waged relationships shorn of traditional obligations. Yet in an uncertain economic climate, apprenticeship endured in idealized form within an antebellum cultural debate about the meanings of success and the ways to achieve it. As clerks' work tasks, social status, and economic prospects changed, many attempted to hitch their hopes for advancement to the coattails of merchants with capital instead of starting their own businesses, decisions that foreshadowed the formation of corporate hierarchies in the late nineteenth century.

Unlike U.S. and British steel firms, Spanish steel manufacturers did not integrate their operations with wholesalers and retailers or distribute their output through the market. Instead, from 1928 onward, Spanish steel firms imposed various forms of vertical restraints on wholesalers, including exclusive dealing, stock quotas, and resale price maintenance. These restrictions prevented the iron and steel wholesalers, who banded together to form a cartel in 1910, from establishing their own pricing policies. In addition, the restrictions limited competition in the industry. After 1928, when the independent steel firms found it impossible to distribute their products through the main iron wholesalers, they had no choice but to join the Spanish steel cartel.