The road to merger is strewn with fortuitous events, surprises, and disappointments for most firms even under ordinary circumstances, but the airline industry following World War II faced special problems of postwar readjustment, rapid technological change, and government intervention by a Civil Aeronautics Board that was determined to shape the future of American commercial aviation. Congruence with federal regulatory policy was a key element in the success of the merger with which this essay deals.

Only a few years before Juan Trippe of Pan American Airways successfully established an international commercial air carrier based upon the flying boat, Inglis M. Uppercu, with apparently ample financial and managerial resources, failed to do so. In telling why, Professor Leary demonstrates the overwhelming importance of timing and a knowledge of the exact nature of market opportunities in the entrepreneurial process.

Prompted by a 1974 article by Professor Klaus H. Wolff in the Business History Review, Dr. Gittins considers the economic factors that influenced the introduction of technical changes in textile bleaching.

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.