During the early Industrial Revolution, the discovery and widespread commercial adoption of crucial technological advances permitted enormous productivity increases in the finishing of textiles and also marked the beginnings of the modern chemical industry in Europe.

European multinationals followed a different path of development from that pursued by United States firms, but European multinational manufacturing began even earlier than did American, and its story is no less significant. Dr. Franko offers a range of relevant data and analysis about the evolution of direct foreign investment by Western European manufacturers.

A survey of insurance records covering eighteenth-century manufactories in three branches of the British textile industry reveals much about the gradual evolution of factory production in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Professor Chapman suggests that neither size, power source, nor the supervision of work constitutes a useful criterion by which to identify the modern, Arkwright-type factory. The essential characteristic of that institution was that it was specifically designed for flow production, rather than the batch production methods of earlier modes of manufacturing.

Utilizing data from a single state, Professor Keehn examines a number of important hypotheses about banking history and the role of banking in the process of economic growth and development in America from the Civil War to the creation of the Federal Reserve System.

Offering a significant revision of prevailing views, Professor Nelson examines the actual implementation of scientific management in industry and finds that it bore only a superficial resemblance to the system described by Taylor and his disciples. Rather than a “partial solution of the labor problem,” the Taylor system was a comprehensive answer to the problems of factory coordination, a refinement and extension of the earlier ideas known as systematic management.

Professor Madison examines the formative decades of an important new industry in the nineteenth-century American economy. Overcoming a wide range of problems and challenges, firms such as the Bradstreet and the Dun agencies became established enterprises by the end of the century primarily because they effectively met new needs in a changing business environment.

Professor Stopford explores the patterns of British direct investment in overseas manufacturing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paying special attention to the quality of Victorian entrepreneurship and the opportunities and problems presented by the Empire and then the Commonwealth.

Focusing on developments of the last twenty years, the author analyzes the achievements and the shortcomings of business history in Germany and offers some suggestions for its future.

In the years following World War I, British and American diplomats and businessmen fashioned a cooperative approach to the problems of international oil rivalries, building an informal entente which was institutionalized at the private level, surrounded with the mystique of enlightened capitalism, and masked behind tortured concessions to competitive symbols.

Arguing that the American bituminous coal industry suffered from “excessive competition,” this study traces the industry's repeated failures to control output or prices, whether by various kinds of trade associations, mergers, or by attempts to secure government sanctions for cooperation. Although an over-zealous Department of Justice must bear some responsibility for the industry's “sick” condition, Professor Graebner concludes, the fundamental problem lay in the basic economic conditions in the industry.

This study of the history of a large group of merchants directing Anglo-American commerce from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century analyzes major long-run changes in the organization and functions of mercantile institutions in that important period.

This examination of the role of foreign enterprise in Russian and Soviet industrial development from 1632 to the present indicates that it was a significant one. Tsarist and Soviet Russia used foreign enterprise to their own advantage very skillfully by periodically acquiring advanced industrial technology and thereby reducing their own “backwardness” relative to the West. In doing so, they succeeded in remaining firmly in control of their own economic affairs, an achievement that often eluded other countries.

Professor Gilbert examines the impact of the corporate form of organization upon the utopian thinking of American intellectuals of the progressive era, using the ideas of Charles Steinmetz as an example of the way in which collectivist assumptions were brought to bear on descriptions of society.

Professor Petrowski examines the question of promoters' profits from the building of the Kansas Pacific and the Denver Pacific railroads.

Professor Yoshino traces the evolution of direct investment in overseas manufacturing by Japanese enterprises in the postwar era. Much of that expansion is of very recent origin, and the prospects are for the spread of considerably more Japanese investment abroad in the future.

At the end of World War II, by far the most significant pressure for integrating the aviation industry into national defense planning came neither from the major aircraft firms nor from the military. Instead, the Truman administration played the leading role in forging an important link in what later came to be called the “military-industrial complex.” Smaller businessmen and local politicians proved constant and eager supporters of that policy.

Most analyses of American direct investment abroad focus on the post-World War II era, and on manufacturing. Professor Kindleberger examines United States direct investment in a range of undertakings in France — finance, insurance, trade, marketing, services, and manufacturing — and concentrates on pre-1950 developments.

Professor Filante examines data on the patterns of trade and revenues on the Erie Canal during its first thirty-five years of operation.

This paper will take the following form:

a) a brief discussion of Erie Canal operations in the period 1825–1835, when neither rails nor other canals were competitors.

b) a discussion of the period 1835–1860 with specific attention turned to the sources and destinations of freight shipments, the composition of those shipments, and changes in the canal itself.

c) a discussion of rail-canal competition centering on the division of the market between the two along value of product and length of shipment criteria.