That human needs and social realities are the roots of all systems of jurisprudence is nowhere more demonstrable than in the evolution of the law of business. Professor Freyer shows that neither the English common law of negotiable instruments nor the modifications made in it in the colonial era were adequate in the lusty, far-flung, and rapidly growing young nation that the Constitution of the United States created. Innovation, he reveals, promptly followed.

This study analyzes the differing managerial behavior of the three dominant firms in the steam locomotive oligopoly as diesel locomotives replaced steam.

Professor Gersuny examines discipline and punishment of the workforce in two New England textile mills separated in time by almost a century and a half. He finds that, despite dramatic changes in the technological, social, and cultural context, the constraints governing factory discipline have shown remarkable continuity.

The long, slow decline of the handicraft industries in Western Europe was attended by protracted hardship and misery for the artisan classes, short-term exploitative opportunities for crass merchants to whom the old medieval communal values were outdated cant, and confusion and eventual rout for the town fathers who attempted to maintain such values in the face of ineluctable economic change. Professor Friedrichs draws these conclusions from his research on woolen cloth weavers in the German town of Nördlingen in the seventeenth century and shows how, once the old values were no longer useful, the state itself took the initiative in the eighteenth century in facilitating the conversion of handicraft industry to the modern wage-labor system.

Medieval strictures against usury were a long time dying, and the dynamic society of the English Renaissance could not afford to wait. Inflation, the growth of commerce, and the increasing splendor of the royal court created a strong demand for cash, especially among the landed gentry. Professor Shipley describes how one of the greatest of the moneylenders legalized the interest rates he charged, secured his loans against default, and (with limited success) maintained his reputation for respectability while engaged in a dubious occupation. Thomas Sutton and his like filled the gap that old church doctrine made in the social fabric of sixteenth-century England and smoothed the way for their successors who, after the ethical revolution of the seventeenth century, would he legitimized as private bankers.

The National Association of Manufacturers was influential in establishing public relations as a permanent fixture in American corporate life. The Association took up the use of public relations in the depths of the depression, promoted its use strongly, and increased its stature.

A content analysis of two major rail journal leads the author to conclude that too many historians have overestimated the radicalism of state regulation and have also operated on the questionable assumption that rail managers wanted the elimination of patchwork state controls in favor of uniform national regulation. Further, he maintains that the Transportation Act of 1920 was more a reversal than a continuation or logical culmination of Progressive regulation.

To the literature on social mobility and the question of earned versus inherited fortunes, Professor Jaher and Dr. Ghent add findings for the city of Chicago in the late nineteenth century that are in strong contrast to simuar studies for other cities. From the Civil War to the turn of the century, Chicago's rate of economic growth far exceeded the national average, and out of 1186 members of the Chicago business elite whose careers were embraced by the years 1830 to 1930, fully two-thirds made their own fortunes. This phenomenon was especially strong in manufacturing and the aggressive young industries of meatpacking and railroading.

Led by James J. Hill, a group of businessmen expanded the use of coal as a fuel in the Northwest by monopolizing the market, apportioning the business among a limited number of people, maintaining prices, profit margins, and profit flow, thereby establishing a reputation of dependability for the fuel and a source of risk capital for further investment in the industry. This, Professor Martin argues, was a clear case of “constructive monopoly.”

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 foreign economic policy of the United States in the aftermath of World War I was not isolationist, but selectively interventionist. With a group of very able American businessmen-diplomats in the lead, the nation pressured the French to accept the Dawes Plan, which, it was hoped, would solve the reparations problem, encourage healthy economic recovery and growth (which would embrace large sales of American capital goods to Germany), and ensure peaceful contentment in two nations that were more bitter enemies than ever. But, Professor Costigliola shows, a plan to rebuild Germany that was half private business and half foreign policy, and that was manipulated to both ends, could not succeed in the marketplace, where it had to live or die.

Dramatic evidence of the vital role played by the British East India Company in Britain's rise to preeminence in world trade is revealed in the intimate relations between the Company, Parliament, and Charles II. Britain needed an agency for pressing the struggle against the resourceful Dutch, and the King needed revenue. The Company needed assurance in the form of a charter that its existence would be continuous; Navigation Acts to give meaning to its trading monopoly; laws against “interlopers” in its trading areas; and relief from mercantilist prejudices so that it could buy for cash where British goods were not in demand. Government and Company provided each other with all these, in a pragmatic arrangement that overrode prejudices and political sensitivities.

This study reports interest rates on New York Bankers' balances and argues that their stability in periods of generally falling interest rates was a sign of a highly competitive financial system.

Professor Wheeler describes and analyzes the extreme violence that marked labor-management relations in the West Virginia coal fields.

As the westward movement gained momentum after the Civil War, the demand for farm mortgage credit grew rapidly. At the same time, the supply of lendable funds in the East and especially in Europe, although continuing to grow, turned away from U.S. government securities and American railroad bonds. The time seemed ripe for Eastern capitalists to expand their non-bank financial services to include intermediation between lenders and borrowers. Using the United States Mortgage Company and the Mercantile Trust Company as examples, Mr. Brewer shows that the opportunity was lost due to poor organization and management, faulty communication, and most of all to an innate conservatism and mistrust of the unfamiliar that caused the companies to disapprove the bulk of the mortgage loan applications that energetic field agents brought in.

Students of the origins and accomplishments of government regulation of economic activity have open suspected that the laws on which regulation is based were addressed to problems and conditions of the past that no longer prevailed, or — what is worse — assumptions about the “real world” that are highly unrealistic. This is Professor West's main conclusion about the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, especially as regards its discount rate and international exchange policies.

In 1930 Jacob Reimer, along with sixteen other employees of International Harvester, went to the Soviet Union for one year to service agricultural implements and to train Soviet workers in their use. This document describes his experiences.