This article investigates the role of the private banking house of Thomas Branch & Sons of Petersburg, Virginia, in promoting entrepreneurship and economic development in the early United States. It argues that while Branch adopted many of the methods and practices of antebellum commercial banks in that he accepted and created deposits and followed a real-bills philosophy in his lending, he also differed from them by extending his services to a particular market niche. Many of his borrowers were young entrepreneurs who were just embarking upon their own commercial ventures. In addition, many of his customers had accumulated only limited wealth. If Branch's actions, then, can be considered indicative of those of private bankers more generally, this article reveals the importance of small town private bankers in supplying monetary and intermediary services to local communities, and moreover, helps clarify their place in the history of antebellum banking.

In the 1920s and 1930s, the rubber tire industry faced debilitating challenges, mostly brought about by changes in the industry's retail structure and exacerbated by the Great Depression. Segments of the industry attempted to use the New Deal's NRA codes to solve these new problems and stabilize the tire market, but the tire manufacturing and tire retailing codes were patent failures. Instead of leading to cartelization and higher prices, which is what most scholars assume the NRA codes did, the tire industry codes actually led to even more fragmentation and price-cutting.

The Reichskuratorium (RKW) was founded in 1921 by Carl Friedrich von Siemens and his subalternate, Carl Köttgen. The organization strove to implement measures of industrial and organizational efficiency in Germany in the interwar era following the American models of Frederick W. Taylor and Henry Ford. This study uses the organization as a vehicle to evaluate varieties of organized capitalism in German business and industrial history since the late nineteenth century. Most recent research has identified forms of organized capitalism that include significant input from organized labor along with state and industry as the most “modern” forms. While these efforts stagnated and eventually failed in Germany's interwar Weimar Republic, they are still seen as the origin of a characteristic and successful postwar model of organized capitalism. Acknowledging that this view is accurate, this study draws attention to the alternate model of the RKW which strove to implement technical and organizational measures of industrial and economic efficiency using state funding but avoiding significant input from organized labor. This variation of German organized capitalism emerged from the more traditional, self-regulating patterns of the late nineteenth century. It persisted through the Weimar Republic, through World War II, and into the postwar era. Less fruitful for understanding the character of the RKW are models from the 1970s Cold War era which elaborated a strongly symbiotic version of organized capitalism between state and big business, which allegedly subordinated efforts of big business to state interests.