Historians of various “schools” have seen quite different things in the United States’ long years of business activity in China. The “realists” as Professor Hunt calls them, deny that significant business opportunities existed for Americans and point to obstacles that the Chinese put in the way of trade; the “Wisconsin school,” he says, emphasizes the public rhetoric of officials and businessmen who saw China as an outlet for capitalist surpluses. Citing three case histories — kerosene, cigarettes, and textiles — Professor Hunt shows that generalization is dangerous; that success depended more on businessmen's own skill, resources, and control of their domestic industry than on help derived from an imperialistically minded government.

In the waning decades of the age of mercantilism, Great Britain intensified her efforts to keep at home the new industrial technology—technicians and machines—that the inventiveness of her people had produced. From his researches in the records of the Board of Trade, which played a major role in coordinating these efforts, Mr. Jeremy shows that as time wore on the policy of prohibiting emigration and exports became more and more internally contradictory and incapable of enforcement despite great ingenuity on the part of those responsible.

Taking issue with such earlier theorists as Schumpeter, who believed that the rise of bureaucratic structures would stifle the innovative process that lies at the heart of capitalism and thus lead on to socialism, Professor Livesay discusses the careers of three innovative leaders who used the bureaucratic form of organization to keep innovation alive and to realize its implications. He argues that with shrewd leaders like Andrew Carnegie and Henry Ford II (and less well-known ones like Howard Stoddard) at the helm, bureaucratic organizations have been the mechanism of highly dynamic policies rather than the agency of socialistic stasis.

Developmental investment abroad was an integral part of the industrialized nations' foreign policies in the decades before World War I. A notable case was the German Empire's investment in the Anatolian Railway. Inspired by the astounding success of North American railroad development in settling vast untilled areas and creating great quantities of cheap food grains, the Germans built a railroad into the thinly populated central plain of Turkey. But the hoped-for revolution was limited by social and political factors that overrode the purely economic, as Professor Quataert demonstrates in a study with broad implications for present-day development programs in third-world countries.

Herbert Hoover's seven years as Secretary of Commerce raised that department to a level of prestige and influence it has not known since. In the prosperity of the 1920s, real wages rose rapidly, the wage-earners' standard of living began to resemble that of white-collar groups, and all that remained, it seemed, was to replace the traditional antagonism between employer and worker with a system that would give the latter a voice in plant decisions. In this climate, “welfare capitalism” and company unions, encouraged by Hoover's department, flourished for a time. Professor Zieger shows that Hoover never realized that the wage-earner could have no effective representation through company-sponsored schemes. By the late 1920s, some academic experts posited the virtual demise of the labor movement unless it found a means of transcending the limitations that the circumstances of the New Era and its own weaknesses imposed.

Students of the innovative process in American manufacturing have emphasized the scarcity of labor and the consequent need for labor-saving machines. In the late nineteenth century one of the country's largest manufacturing industries was the production of carriages, which, in its most important center, Cincinnati, was organized on a mass production basis. But Professor Duggan finds that problems of the quantity and quality of labor were secondary in carriage factories, compared to other factors such as fuel costs, factory space, and the need to stabilize the quality and price of vehicles marketed by the industry as a whole.

As a personnel policy that would assure the country's rapidly expanding railroad system the best grade of employees, centralization of discharge data within a company and interchange of such data between companies struck some executives as a useful practice. Others disagreed and, as Professor Black shows, their wisdom prevailed. The problem centered upon reliability of such key operating employees as brakemen and conductors, and responded better to institution of controls that would minimize the two most important misfeasances: drinking on the job and petty embezzlement.

Nowhere was the postwar growth of multinational corporations more dramatic than in the petroleum industry. The major oil companies of the western nations were soon banded together in a complex of joint exploration, producing, refining, and marketing organizations. But efforts to advance criminal prosecution of the American companies under the antitrust laws soon ran head-on into overriding considerations of national security. The hardening of the Cold War, complicated by internal political weaknesses in Iran, persuaded both President Truman and President Eisenhower to soft-pedal litigation. In the end, criminal prosecution of joint production enterprises became civil suits against marketing and pricing agreements, which were settled by consent decree. This, according to Professor Kaufman, amounted to attacking “the tail but not the head or body of the energy tiger.”

By early 1933 President Roosevelt's advisors concluded that the United States Government would have to play a direct role in the Cuban economy. That nation, economically dependent upon the North American sugar market and politically dependent through the Platt amendment that gave the United States the right to intervene in its internal affairs, was economically prostrate and on the verge of civil war. The United States proceeded to abandon both the free trade and protectionist doctrines that had divided the President's advisors for a program that structurally integrated United States-Cuban trade and employed federal funds to support cooperative Cuban leaders. All of this, Professor Benjamin believes, foreshadowed the massive foreign trade and lending programs so common to American foreign policy after World War II.

Whatever the shortcomings of “no-fault” employee compensation laws, such as the one passed in Massachusetts in 1911, Professor Gersuny shows that such laws were a great improvement over what had prevailed. Working with formerly confidential files, he shows that an “adversary relationship” had existed between the employer and his insurance company, on the one hand, and often pitifully maimed employees on the other. With few exceptions, all of the advantages were on the side of the employer, and the rights of employees to more than token compensation were routinely trampled upon.

Taking a fresh look at the factors bearing on profitability of carrying coal from Newcastle to London in the eighteenth century, Professor Hausman finds that average ship loads rose and technology improved during the period. He notes that this is consistent with Adam Smith's dictum that England's effort to monopolize the colonial carrying trade, through the Navigation Acts, would divert capital from domestic to colonial shipping, thereby raising rates of return in the former and lowering them in the latter.

One of the most durable theories explaining the remarkable rise of German industry in the generation before World War I was that of the critical role of the Kreditbanken, the great commercial and investment banks of which the Deutsche Bank was the most prominent. Recently, however, historians have begun to question the power of the banks, and even to suggest that they were a drag on German economic development. In this brief study of how Georg Siemens, of the Deutsche Bank, kept the peace between the two leading German electrical equipment manufacturers, Professor Neuburger shows that the crucial factors were not merely the financial strength or weakness of the Bank, but also the diplomatic skill with which its leaders navigated the rapidly shifting currents of the era.

For the first few years of this century, Brazil was the major supplier of rubber to the world. However, the Amazonian wild rubber industry was unable to compete, in either price or quality, with the Asian plantation rubber that began to appear on world markets after 1906. Development of a successful plantation culture in the Amazon seemed imperative, but even with public subsidy, plantations remained an economic impossibility. By 1945 the Brazilian rubber industry, overwhelmed by Asian production, had virtually disappeared.

The advent of high-technology industries around the turn of the century created the modern industrial research department and placed a new emphasis upon the search for patentable innovations. While some of this research led to advances in basic scientific knowledge, and much of it produced product or process improvements that were directly applicable to a firm's business, a great deal was undertaken to enhance firms' bargaining powers with each other in order to preserve monopoly positions. In the early years of radio, the structure of the industry changed repeatedly with every innovation in apparatus or circuitry, a situation that led, as Professor Reich shows, to heavy investment in “non-productive” research.

That restrictions on real-estate-mortgage lending by banks chartered under the National Banking Act of 1864 seriously restricted availability of long-term financing before 1913, has long been accepted. Professors Keehn and Smiley explain some ways in which resourceful national banks could circumvent this restriction. They find that lending within the letter but outside the spirit of the Act of 1864 was greater than published figures on direct lending indicate.

“All books are dead in twenty-five years,” Mr. Justice Holmes wrote to Sir Frederick Pollock. An example of Holmes’ mastery of the art of over-statement, the dictum has its notable exceptions, as even a relatively young discipline such as economic and business history reveals. Professors Scheiber and Salsbury make the case for the permanent impact of one such exception. At the Editor's discretion, communications like the following may be published in the future about other milestones.