This chapter reviews the historic development of cooperative business in the two countries prior to 1950, focusing especially on the respective relationships enjoyed by Co-operative Wholesale Society (CWS) and Kooperativa Förbundet (KF) with the local and regional societies they served. It assesses the main developments affecting the movements as the period unfolded, identifying key factors that determined the similarities and differences between the two cooperative businesses. The Swedish movement entered the postwar era better placed than its British counterpart to deal with the increased competition and changing consumer demand that would emerge in the ensuing decades. Implementing effective reorganization was always going to be problematic, especially given the devolution of power to the organizational structures that ran these different activities. The political environments in both countries played insignificant roles in fashioning these responses, a situation that reflects the primacy of commercial dynamics as the essential catalyst that drove through change.