This article investigates the history of the Progressive Era effort to develop new techniques and technologies of control over American business and corporations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A revolution in Progressive economic regulation was rooted in the intellectual work of the so-called institutional economists—particularly in the context of what economists and lawyers like Richard Ely, John Commons, and Walton Hamilton ultimately talked about as the movement for the “social control” of business, with distinct emphasis on the legal and regulatory “foundations” of modern capitalism. With increased attention to dynamics rather than statics, the real social economy rather than ideal rational actors, and historical and institutional rather than theoretical and abstract renderings of business, industry, and the market, the institutionalists were directly concerned with problems of control, particularly those mechanisms of control available through law, politics, the state, and new technologies of legislative and administrative regulation.

The career of this influential accountant illuminates, with colorful Victorian overtones, the beginnings of the investment trust movement and the heyday of British international investment.

This article rethinks the relationship between trade and industry in the development of Indian capitalism, focusing on Tata, pioneers in textile and steel production. It shows how two little-known affiliated trading companies, R.D. Tata & Co. in Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Kobe, and Tata Limited in London, played a crucial intermediary role in securing financing and market access for the parent firm in Bombay while simultaneously increasing its exposure to the effects of global crises. Tata's ultimately dominant position in a protected national economy was due to the contingent failure of these trading companies rather than a foregone conclusion.

The problems and experiences of the largest American powder producer form an interesting case study of the effects of the Civil War upon business.

When attention is shifted from individual entrepreneur to the socio-economic group of which he is a part, new historical perspectives are opened to view. This study of a group of bankers in frontier Cincinnati considerably sharpens the historical concept of the “Western Banker” and provides insight into the nature of the banking function in a developing economy. The data employed yield significant conclusions about the nature of the bankers' backgrounds and about the importance both of those backgrounds and of the frontier environment in shaping the bankers' function and role.

The development of banking in Utah advanced by stages, each of which marked an increase in the degree of specialization practiced by institutions performing banking functions. After the first settlement of the territory in 1847, banking functions were assumed principally by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon). With the inauguration of mining activity in the Mountain States in the early 1860's, formalized banking institutions were established in Salt Lake City. These miners' and merchants' banks predominated until the early 1880's when commercial banks were established in most of the settlement centers of the territory.

The ability of some New York businessmen to exploit the war economy of the Revolution is suggested in this study of their pursuits and profits.

From the mid-nineteenth century, raw wool became a global commodity as new producing countries in the Southern Hemisphere supplied the world's growing textile industries in the North. The selling practices of these big-five exporters—Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, and Uruguay—ranged from auction through a hybrid of auction and private sale to exclusively private sale. We explore why these countries persisted with different marketing arrangements, contradicting two streams of literature on institutions: isomorphism and the new institutional economics. The article makes several important contributions through blending distinct branches of theory and by focusing on the international constraints to convergence in an earlier period of globalization.

In this study of Philadelphia merchants in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Thomas M. Doerflinger subjects to critical scrutiny some heretofore accepted interpretations of the transition from general merchant to specialist. Specifically, he finds a surprisingly large degree of specialization in the period under study. In the course of this investigation, Dr. Doerflinger develops important ideas concerning the forces encouraging and inhibiting this transition.

James Forten (1766–1842) was in business in Philadelphia for almost half a century. A sailmaker by trade, he invested the profits from his sail-loft in real estate, bank stock, and shares in various ventures, including railroads. He was also a money-lender. Throughout his long career in business, Forten struggled to be accepted as an astute and successful member of the business community who happened to be a man of color. As this essay demonstrates, that was how some of his white peers saw him. To others, however, he was a man of color first and a man of business second.

As the American economy, for the second time since the end of World War II, seemed about to falter in late 1953, the nation watched closely to see what economic policy the first Republican administration in twenty years would adopt. A new factor was the Council of Economic Advisers, whose professional economists, mild conservatives though they were, had long since adopted Keynesian compensatory spending as the new orthodoxy. Government spending was increased very moderately and once again the severe postwar downturn that Americans had been expecting for nearly a decade failed to develop. The credit went to Keynesianism and the Council but, as Professor Engelbourg emphasizes, whether another policy or no policy at all would have produced different results, is beyond our knowing.

The Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History offers rich opportunities for business historians. In this essay, Mr. Fleckner and Mr. Crew describe the holdings and facilities of the recently established Archives Center and examine in detail the museum's extensive and extremely valuable holdings in advertising history.

A great deal has been written about the perception of time before the invention of mechanical timepieces, but the nature of the evidence has led much of this literature to take on an impressionistic, even metaphysical, cast. In the following article, Professor Epstein uses specific data gleaned from the cartularies of thirteenth–century Genoese notaries to investigate more concretely the uses of time and the structure of the business day in Genoa. He concludes that, in this early center of Western commercial activity at least, an impulse toward greater precision in marking the time of day preceded the arrival of the clock.