A survey of insurance records covering eighteenth-century manufactories in three branches of the British textile industry reveals much about the gradual evolution of factory production in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution. Professor Chapman suggests that neither size, power source, nor the supervision of work constitutes a useful criterion by which to identify the modern, Arkwright-type factory. The essential characteristic of that institution was that it was specifically designed for flow production, rather than the batch production methods of earlier modes of manufacturing.

Offering a significant revision of prevailing views, Professor Nelson examines the actual implementation of scientific management in industry and finds that it bore only a superficial resemblance to the system described by Taylor and his disciples. Rather than a “partial solution of the labor problem,” the Taylor system was a comprehensive answer to the problems of factory coordination, a refinement and extension of the earlier ideas known as systematic management.

This study of the history of a large group of merchants directing Anglo-American commerce from the end of the eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century analyzes major long-run changes in the organization and functions of mercantile institutions in that important period.

Professor Gilbert examines the impact of the corporate form of organization upon the utopian thinking of American intellectuals of the progressive era, using the ideas of Charles Steinmetz as an example of the way in which collectivist assumptions were brought to bear on descriptions of society.