The history of modern brands depends to a significant degree on the history of trademark law, but there are reasons to doubt how comprehensive standard versions of the latter history are. Business, economic, and even legal historians tend to accentuate the importance of the Anglo-Saxon common-law tradition and assume that the continental, civil law tradition followed in its wake. Yet the historical sequence of events suggests that almost exactly the opposite is true. Not only did the French have robust trademark law long before Great Britain and the United States, but the latter two countries only adopted trademark law after signing trademark clauses in diplomatic treaties with France. Drawing on newspaper accounts, public debates, specialist and general newspapers, as well as court cases and diplomatic negotiations, this paper argues that, to a certain degree, Anglo-Saxon trademark law was international before it was national. The evidence suggests that some of the easy verities on which arguments about modern brands, the “second industrial revolution,” and institutional economics are based may be more complex than is generally assumed.

As Mira Wilkins has argued, there is a curious disconnect between business and financial history (Wilkins 2004). Whereas business history literature has rediscovered the importance of family business in many countries and in many sectors of contemporary commercial life, for example, little has been written about family banking as an alternative to joint-stock, management-run financial institutions. This lacuna is odd for many reasons. First, family banking is one of the best-known examples of family business in history. Second, family banks once played a much greater role in international investment banking than it does today. Third, some family financial institutions are still active (dominant) in certain market segments and countries. This paper will focus on how, when and why family banking lost its position in international (multinational) banking during the first few decades of the twentieth century. Although political upheaval and a widespread movement to reduce the power of private financial institutions undermined their businesses, family banks suffered, too, from America's maturing as a financial center. I will argue that this shift is connected with the increased importance of American markets and financial regulations, which, in the 1930s, deliberately steered financial transactions away from private dealings and toward transparent impersonal exchanges and capital markets with new forms of aggregated capital and individual investors, in which private banks were ill-suited to manage or at the least for which they had no special competitive edge. Using concepts drawn from an earlier paper on family businesses and relying mostly on secondary sources, this paper will further argue that in markets or market segments, such as Leveraged Buyouts, where uncertainty forms a greater part of the transactional environment, family banking still plays a significant role.

Throughout its history, the free market system has been held back, not so much by its own economic deficiencies as Marxists would have it, but because of its reliance on political goodwill for its infrastructure.

During the first third of the twentieth century, U. S. railroad executives offered local collection and delivery trucking operations. Railroad managers claimed, with justification, that these services were necessary to reduce congestion at urban freight terminals, and to increase the operating efficiency. Yet, executives also employed collection and delivery practices to discriminate against shippers and communities, and to draw business away from rival carriers, in violation of the 1887 Interstate Commerce Act, the 1903 Elkins Act, and the Transportation Act of 1920. During the 1920s, as competition from independent truckers became more intense, railroad managers used their inherent advantage in line-haul service to cross-subsidize local delivery services, to the detriment of independent motor carriers—an issue of considerable concern to Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) commissioners, following the passage of the 1935 Motor Carrier Act. The railroads' emphasis on the productive efficiency associated with local trucking operations conflicted with the allocative efficiency advocated by federal courts and by the ICC. Commissioner Joseph B. Eastman, in particular, emphasized both the potential benefits and the potential dangers associated with coordinated rail-truck service. More broadly, the status of that service, as one of the few forms of transportation that lay beyond the ICC's authority, stemmed from a complex interaction, over several decades, between all three branches of the federal government. By 1938, the ICC commissioners had concluded that the railroads' local delivery operations occupied a nebulous region between rail and truck regulation. While lawful, they did not serve as a model for post-1945 efforts to achieve integrated, multi-modal transportation services.

After spending a decade as an independent trucker hauling milk, watermelons, and paper across the United States, Mike Parkhurst sold his tractor-trailer in 1961 and used the proceeds to establish Overdrive magazine—the “Voice of the American Trucker.” Believing “truckers were ready for a magazine that would pull no punches,” Parkhurst launched a decades-long editorial assault on transportation regulations that he believed bound American enterprise in the chains of corporate control, government malfeasance, and brutish boss unionism. By the mid-1970s, Parkhurst became one of the nation's most outspoken advocates of transportation deregulation. As he told a reporter for Time in 1975, he hoped “to wake the truckers up to the fact that they're slaves to a monopoly”—a monopoly on freight transportation maintained by corporate trucking firms, abetted by the Teamsters Union, and sanctioned by corrupt government officials. In the summer of 1979, Parkhurst helped to orchestrate a nationwide strike by tens of thousands of independent truckers, in which drivers demanded, according to William Scheffer of the Overdrive-sponsored Independent Truckers Association, “the dismantling of a giant Federal bureaucracy that has grown to govern the trucking industry since the mid-1930's.”

Nondiscrimination was the bedrock of U.S. transport regulation for nearly a century. The Interstate Commerce Act of 1887, the federal government's first major regulatory initiative, barred “unreasonable discrimination” in rates and service to keep railroads from aiding one businesses or community over another. As regulation developed, similar obligations were imposed on ship lines, truck lines, and air carriers. Most freight transportation companies were forced to operate as “common carriers,” publishing a rate applicable to each commodity and applying that rate to every shipment. Equal treatment of all customers, based strictly on posted prices and terms of service, was widely considered essential to keeping the transportation market “fair.”