The history of the part played by the sedentary merchant in financing the business of his time is a long and important story. We know that merchants served as suppliers of capital to others as far back as in twelfth-century Genoa. Through the centuries mercantile families and sedentary merchants, as they grew old and rich, tended to specialize in lending money for business purposes. This contribution of the sedentary merchant was important in the economic life of many countries over centuries of time.

Man has developed three types of explanation of phenomena. The oldest is deistic or theological. From earliest times man has explained happenings and situations by looking to outside powers, at first to many gods and later to one all-powerful deity. We still say, “God wills it,” “Thy will be done,” and “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” But, not later than the flowering of the Greek mind, a second type arose, namely, the metaphysical or philosophical. According to this type of explanation, there are great forces at work, such as the pursuit of liberty, economic determinism, and the unconscious urge of the reproduction of our kind. Such explanations or solutions are easy, economical, and satisfying to their devotees. They tend to reflect the working of the mind, however, rather than mirror the world that is. Reacting from the subjective, modern scholars have insisted upon a more objective approach. Impatient with deduction, they have proclaimed induction as the more fruitful method of discovering and dealing with phenomena, The result is positivism or science. For over a hundred years, workers have been allured by the new prospects, and in the group have been both Comte and Pareto: let us discover facts and classify them and avoid all metaphysical dogma.

The development in the nineteenth century of new manufactured products which were made in large quantities and under increasing competition as the decades passed brought great changes in marketing organization, in the financing of marketing, and in selling methods. Since there was no adequate experience, no precedent, to go by, the changes that came were largely improvised and experimental. Some of the problems that arose and attempts at solving them are well illustrated by what happened in the marketing of sewing machines.

Observation of the operation of a number of large companies has convinced Professors Clough and Cochran, the two most active members of the New York Committee on Business Records, that in most companies no official is satisfactorily taking care of the problems of record management.