The Italian fashion industry rose to a position of international prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. An important factor in the sector's global success was the opening up of the international, particularly the American, markets. The changes that occurred within the fashion industry after World War II, most critically the end of the Parisian monopoly, offered opportunities that were exploited differently by the various competitors. While cities like London and New York managed to promote themselves as alternatives to Paris, Italy was initially unable to create a single fashion capital. Florence, Rome, and Milan felt themselves equally entitled to become the staging ground for Italian fashion production, but Milan, benefiting from certain features of its productive structure, eventually emerged as the winner. The city's success was based on a long, steady accumulation of resources and the ability to harness its creative and managerial capabilities. The result was Milan's emergence as a fashion “superstar” in the 1970s.

In 1935 Fortune magazine published a series of articles on “Women in Business” whose true subject was the absence of women in business. Published anonymously but written by Archibald MacLeish, the articles distinguished between the relatively few women in “general business” or “business proper” and the greater number “engaged in the business exploitation of femininity.” MacLeish asserted that this was “not merely an arbitrary” distinction, for businesses dominated by men were “vital industries.” Vital is a significant adjective from a man known to choose his words carefully, with its connotations of fundamental, indispensable, robust, animate, and, not least, virile. Unlike men's efforts in business, said MacLeish, “feminine success in the exploitation of women proves nothing but the fact that women are by nature feminine.” That is, women's ventures in cosmetology, fashion and styling, department store buying, advertising to women, and the women's press resulted from a state of being, not a will to action. As MacLeish put it, “Elizabeth Arden is not a potential Henry Ford. She is Elizabeth Arden. It is a career in itself but it is not a career in industry.”

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. (KKR) played the lead role in pursuing large-scale leveraged buyouts in the U.S. market for corporate control in the 1980s by taking advantage of investment opportunities created by three decades of public policies regarding antitrust, pensions, corporate governance, and banking. KKR's innovations were its ability to overcome investors' collective action and monitoring problems by arranging takeovers through limited partnerships and by managing acquired firms through shared equity ownership with management. These organizational innovations, when combined with the financial changes of the 1980s, allowed KKR and its investor-controlled associations to challenge managerially controlled firms.

Readers who perused a 1904 issue of the Atlantic Monthly encountered an article with the intriguing title of “The Small Business as a School of Manhood.” Largely a diatribe against the growing dominance of large corporations, it lamented the presumably inevitable passing of smaller concerns. Curiously, its author, Henry A. Stimson, placed relatively little emphasis on the economic or even the political consequences of this development. Rather, he worried that the new order, which reduced would-be entrepreneurs to the status of corporate employees, represented “the loss of something fine in manhood.” Men who inhabited the newly-created ranks of middle and upper management might lead prosperous lives but faced the loss of their selfrespect, their dignity, their “intellectual stamina.” As Stimson saw it, they had been emasculated by the rise of the corporation.

The 1906 Food and Drug Act is widely believed to be an early example of federal legislation designed entirely to protect consumers. Professor Wood shows that in fact many Progressive Era food and drug manufacturers had substantial interests in achieving passage of such a law and that they worked actively toward this end. In particular, the desire of businesspeople to secure advantage over domestic competitors and to expand markets to interstate and foreign commerce played a significant role in businesses' support for federal food and drug regulations. The article shows that the strategic use of public policy by business—a relatively recent development in theories of business-government relations—is by no means a new development in practice.

From its inception in the 1940s the Advertising Council was part of a broad, loosely coordinated campaign by American business leaders to contain the anticorporate liberalism of the 1930s and to refashion the character of the New Deal State. In this campaign the Council generally aligned itself with the more liberal wing of the business community, usually identified with the newly organized Committee for Economic Development (CED), rather than with the older and more conservative National Association of Manufacturers (NAM). Like the CED, the Advertising Council often espoused a “corporatist” ideology which emphasized cooperation between business and government; and like the Business Advisory Council, the National Petroleum Council, and other quasi-public corporatist bodies, it sought to establish close, reciprocal relationships with the executive branch. The Council enthusiastically supported the new foreign and national security policies of the Truman Administration, but strongly opposed its domestic programs. By contrast, the Council supported both the foreign and domestic policies of the Eisenhower Administration, and helped promote the administration's economic programs in a series of major advertising campaigns. Through its millions of “public service” advertisements, the Council sought to promote an image of advertising as a responsible and civic-spirited industry, of the U.S. economy as a uniquely productive system of free enterprise, and of America as a dynamic, classless, and benignly consensual society.

No conviction has been more a part of the standard interpretation of American history in the twentieth century than the belief that the U.S. Supreme Court, in a series of late-nineteenth-century decisions bearing on government-business relations, reflected the conservative reaction that seemed to mark the depression of the 1890s. But Professor McCurdy demonstrates that in its 1895 decision in the case of United States v. E. C. Knight Company, which drew a distinction between manufacturing and trade in defining interstate commerce, the Court was not trying to shield a vast, monopolistic aggregation of wealth (Henry O. Havemeyer's “Sugar Trust”) from the will of the people that it be broken up under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890. The decision, in fact, was not the beginning of a conservative reaction, but the last effort in a thirty-year attempt to maintain a role for state jurisdiction over the behavior of chartered enterprises.

“The telegraph system in America is eminently characteristic of the national mind. At its very birth, it became the handmaiden of commerce.” So wrote the editor of a telegraph trade journal in 1853. Professor Du Boff describes an antebellum American business community that was as ready for a “revolution” in its size and structure as the dawning science of electricity was ready to make it happen. The result was the telegraph and its enthusiastic adoption in a few short years by a business system that quickly became national in scope and outlook. The railroad may ultimately have changed America even more than the telegraph but, as Du Boff shows, the railroad was originally conceived as a local and regional facility whereas the telegraph was interregional in its impact from its very beginnings.

This article examines the collusion between the only two major banks to operate in British West Africa for most of the colonial period after 1916, Barclays and the Bank of British West Africa. The companies' records reveal that the alliance was more far-reaching than has previously been shown, escalating to include not only comprehensive price-fixing but also restrictions on the products offered. The article considers the reactions of African and European customers and the colonial governments, and analyzes the motives that sustained the collusion for so long and the political circumstances that permitted it. The arrangement was partly a defensive response to a perception that the market was too small for full rivalry, but there was a rent-seeking element too. Finally, the article explores the implications of the bank alliance for the broader economies, reflecting on the relation between the security that the banks achieved through their agreements and their very cautious lending policies.

Histories of the rising popularity of Danish modern furniture in both Denmark and the United States have traditionally ascribed its success to the inherent beauty of Danish design. This article argues that Danish modern furniture succeeded for two other reasons. First, through the creation of powerful narratives, or stories, that framed the way consumers made sense of this furniture; and, second, through the calculated development of a network of individuals and organizations whose goal was to promote and legitimize these narratives.

Professor Engerman constructs estimates of relevant data in order to test the assertion that profits from the slave trade provided the capital which financed the Industrial Revolution in England.

Many observers of the American automobile industry have focused on Ford's development of mass production shortly before the First World War; they have then moved to General Motors's success in the 1920s, usually attributing it to a marketing innovation, the introduction of the annual model change. This article argues that the emphasis on GM's marketing strategy is misplaced and that profound changes in the organization of production, exploiting the economies of common parts, were far more fundamental. Rough calculations of the cost structure involved in the rise of the Chevrolet to mass market domination are presented to support this interpretation.

The Industrial Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, the American Revolution, and our emergence as an independent trading nation all worked profound changes upon the British marketing enterprise, but it is an oversimplification, according to Dr. Chapman, to conclude that manufacturers quickly or entirely replaced traditional British merchant banking houses even down to World War I. He develops three phases of a long-drawn-out process of change that served Britain's needs poorly throughout the nineteenth century.

Professor Neal assesses the innovative role of a key financial institution — the trust company — during the period of American economic growth after the depression of the 1890's and prior to World War I.

An extensive global market in patents and innovations developed after the middle of the nineteenth century. I employ data from the United States, Britain, Germany, Canada, New South Wales, Spain, and Japan during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to assess the evolution of transfers in patent-property rights across these countries. The empirical analysis examines the factors that affected patterns in patent assignments and foreign patenting for these countries. It sheds further light on cross-sectional variation in foreign patenting and transfers to corporations, based on a panel data set of patent grants and assignments at issue in the United States during the Second Industrial Revolution. The results indicate that, just as inventive activity responded to incentives, the patterns of market exchange in patent rights varied in accordance with legal, economic, and institutional parameters. The analysis is consistent with the position that developing countries today might benefit from tailoring their patent institutions to individual circumstances rather than adhering to harmonized standards.

Once the story of modern America seemed relatively simple. On one side stood a business elite defending a market system to which it owed its power and position. On the other stood the “common man,” economically weak but politically capable of forging tools that could alter the workings of market discipline. And between them, waxing and waning in response to “reform” and “counter-reform,” stood the aggregation of political tools that the “common man” had been able to forge. Such was the story told in “liberal” history; and with reversed heroes and villains, the same story was told in “conservative” history. Both assumed a business-government dichotomy, and both ignored or slighted those aspects of modern America that could not be fitted into it.

Many observers of the corporate restructurings that reached major proportions in the United States in the 1980s have believed that the market for corporate control had a serious negative impact on companies' long-term investment, which in turn contributed to the United States's decline in global competitiveness. In the following study, the author looks carefully at the effects of financial restructurings on investment, especially at expenditures on R&D, in a large set of companies categorized according to their level of technology and the length of their investment horizon. She then compares the U.S. situation with that in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. She concludes that, though many such events occasioned no change at all in investment strategies, restructuring pressures and declines in investment tended to concentrate in certain industries. She also finds that investment decisions were usually rational, given high interest rates and a tax environment that favored debt over equity.

Professor Madison examines the formative decades of an important new industry in the nineteenth-century American economy. Overcoming a wide range of problems and challenges, firms such as the Bradstreet and the Dun agencies became established enterprises by the end of the century primarily because they effectively met new needs in a changing business environment.

The following case studies and analysis of the machine tool and jewelry manufacturing industries attempt to set the stage for a reconsideration of “the other side of industrialization” in the United States during the Second Industrial Revolution—the custom and batch production sectors. Recognizing that much work remains to be done in this area, the author nevertheless concludes that the diversity of circumstances and responses characterizing these industries makes it unlikely that one theory can be adduced to explain their highly contingent world.

The following article appeared in the March, 1961, issue of the Weltwirt-Schaftliche Archiv, published since 1913 by the Institut für Weltwirt-Schaft an der Universität Kiel. Because of the pertinence and broad interest of the study, publication in America seemed highly desirable. Reproduction rights were graciously extended by Dr. Anton Zottmann, editor of the Archiv, and by the authors. The article is printed here directly from galley proof supplied by the Archiv. Commentaries by American scholars will be published in a subsequent issue of the Business History Review.