Trademark theory implicitly assumes that laws favoring the interests of the producer will inevitably serve the interests of the consumer. Such a claim justifies the way that trademark law privileges the voice of the producer in the marketplace. Historical work has tended to endorse this view, explaining the development of trademarks and trademark law in terms of the information needed for consumers in the modern marketplace. Taking both a historical and “informational” perspective, this essay argues that the producer’s and the consumer’s interests do not so easily align. It speculates that a less varnished history of the mark shows more of a struggle between producers, who seek to have their voice heard without dissent, and consumers, who often want to find alternative yet informed voices to endorse or qualify the information provided by the mark. This alternative view would help explain why, as the paper seeks to show, despite conventional evolutionary narratives, the history of trademarking in the United States is in fact far from linear.

This article takes criticisms of employment discrimination in the aftermath of the creation of workmen’s compensation legislation as a point of entry for arguing that compensation laws created new incentives for employment discrimination. Compensation laws turned the costs of employees’ workplace accidents into a risk that many employers sought to manage by screening job applicants in a manner analogous to how insurance companies screened policy applicants. While numerous critics blamed insurers for discrimination, I argue that the problem was lack of insurance. The less that companies pooled their compensation risks via insurance, the greater the incentives for employers to stop employing people they would have previously been willing to hire.

This article argues that an information ecosystem emerged rapidly after World War II that made possible the movement of knowledge about computing and its uses around the world. Participants included engineers, scientists, government officials, business management, and users of the technology. Vendors, government agencies, the military, and professors participated regardless of such barriers as languages, cold war politics, or varying levels of national economic levels of prosperity.

The future matters to business history, because the adoption of new technology and new organizational forms has often been driven by acceptance of a collective sense of what the future will be. Investments are made and strategies set on an industry-wide basis, influenced by the predictions of business consultants, industry groups, and futurists. To explore the part played by the future in shaping the past, we focus on the establishment and early acceptance of the idea of a rapid and inevitable transition to a “cashless society” in the US retail financial services industry during the 1960s and 1970s. Our aim is thus to advance a methodological point rather than to arrive at a definitive conclusion about the future of money.

This article provides an analysis of the impact of the abolition of individual resale price maintenance (irpm) in 1964 on the relationships between retailers and suppliers and, wider, on defining features of the UK economic structure. It describes the role of irpm prior to 1964 in a complex competitive environment that existed across a range of goods and services. A key feature of this environment was the influence manufacturers had over retail margins and pricing. It shows how the 1964 Resale Price Act both unraveled this system and provided the legal prerequisite of today’s dominance by large retailers, as oligopolists and oligopsonists. The study delineates how a different set of business relationships came to dominate the retailing sector: in place of retailing as a manufacturer’s marketing strategy, conditions of supply were determined by the business strategies of multiple retailers. Retailing was further characterized by mutual dependencies among multiple retailers, commercial property investors, and the financial sector. In tracking this shift in business relationships, a historical analogy suggests itself that the Act has parallels with the Repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, for both changed the balance of economic power between two key business sectors in Britain.