This special issue of the Business History Review has as its theme the business of trade in the Atlantic World of the eighteenth century. It has as its purpose to highlight the rich and diverse work that is being accomplished by business historians, including people like the four authors—Kenneth Morgan, Silvia Marzagalli, Linda Salvucci, and Thomas Truxes—whose essays constitute the substance of this issue. The articles have a common focus but reveal very different aspects of their shared theme in delightfully instructive ways. While both sides of the Atlantic Ocean are represented and the northern and southern regions are discussed, and while France and Spain and their colonies receive nearly as much play as Great Britain and its colonies (and one-time colonies), almost by the very nature of trade, the stories told are more about links and connections than they are about the limitations imposed by national and imperial boundaries. My contribution, as editor—an otherwise unknown tract written in the 1780s by a minor but influential British civil servant, Thomas Irving, and edited and newly presented here—implicitly argues the case put forth by the other contributors: it was the limitless bounds of eighteenth-century business that defined the Atlantic World.

In his last two major works, Inventing the Electronic Century and Shaping the Industrial Century, Alfred Chandler extended his well-known historical model put forth originally in Strategy and Structure, The Visible Hand, and Scale and Scope by drawing on insights from scholarship dealing with organizational learning and evolutionary economics. In the earlier works, he won high praise, as evinced by the awarding of the Bancroft and Pulitzer prizes for his contribution in advancing the understanding of history, economics, and sociology. His work presented a powerful alternative vision of businesspeople from the version usually communicated by the older Progressive school of history. Although practitioners of the latter brand of history generally acknowledged industrialization's material benefits, many worried that such change represented a Faustian bargain: they feared that concentrated economic power threatened the preservation of cherished democratic institutions and values.

The Johnson Company was initially innovative in both a technological and a managerial sense, but its technically-oriented inventor-managers proved unable to provide creative leadership once the enterprise had passed through its early, technologically creative period.

The earliest printers in Europe faced financial, storage, and marketing problems not unlike those of new industries today: how to attract operating capital for production and for carrying inventories, where to store a slow-moving and bulky stock, and how to overcome the prejudice against a new product, in order to create an extensive market. These were the three major difficulties that the first printers in Italy as well as elsewhere had to surmount.

In the Benedictine monastery, at Subiaco, south of Rome, in 1465, two German printers, Conrad Sweynheym and Arnold Pannartz, had set up a printing press, which two years later they moved to Rome. Other Germans introduced printing into Milan and Venice in 1469 and the following year into Foligno and Trevi. By 1472, Venice had over a half dozen competing printing offices established by German and by French printers. About fifteen other Italian cities had at least one printing office.

The autobiography of David Augustus Neal, of Salem, in a real sense epitomizes New England's business experience from the 1790's to the Civil War. Not that it is concerned with business only. It is rich in family history, in its picture of education and life in Salem, in travel observations, and in adventure, but it is singularly informative on business.

After initial widespread use of private cars under the “common road” concept of early railways, railroad-owned freight cars predominated from the 1840's through the 1860's, except for a short-lived boom in cars owned by “fast freight” lines. From this time on, however, the percentage of private cars has increased as railroads refused to build specialized freight cars because of high initial costs, rapid technological obsolescence, outside pressure, and managerial shortsightedness.

Were frontier land investments during the nineteenth century as unprofitable as most scholars have surmised? The history of one of the most significant land-investment firms serves as a useful case study in suggesting an answer.