In the following article, Professor Baskin traces the evolution of corporate finance from its beginnings among the British trading companies to its modern transformation in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. He argues that deductive theoretical analyses based on perfect capital markets cannot always explain actual historical developments, and that financial history generally has not received sufficient attention from either economic theorists or historians. Professor Baskin suggests that financial markets developed as they did largely as a result of efforts to minimize the problems created by the asymmetry of information between company insiders and potential investors.

In this article, Professor Dintenfass reexamines entrepreneurial efficiency in the interwar British coal industry. Using previously neglected company documents, he shows that cost-reducing and price-enhancing innovations in coal extraction, organizational practice, and marketing were not widely diffused, though neither geology, finance, nor industrial relations inhibited their adoption. He concludes that mismanagement was an important cause of the British coal industry's misfortunes in the 1920s and 1930s, but that the coalowners' failure to employ the new techniques cannot be attributed to the structure of the industry or to the survival of outmoded forms of business organization.

Re-emerging from the disruption caused by the Revolution and the War of 1812, the American whaling industry grew to dominate the seas between 1820 and 1860, only to suffer a severe decline during and after the Civil War. In the following article, Professors Davis, Gallman, and Hutchins examine the hypothesis that the U.S. whaling industry collapsed because the stock of whales was being depleted. After investigating the size of the original whale populations, their breeding habits, and the estimates of whales taken during the nineteenth century, the authors conclude that the overfishing of whales of various species occurred either not at all or too late to have been a contributing factor in America's whaling decline.

A great deal has been written about the perception of time before the invention of mechanical timepieces, but the nature of the evidence has led much of this literature to take on an impressionistic, even metaphysical, cast. In the following article, Professor Epstein uses specific data gleaned from the cartularies of thirteenth–century Genoese notaries to investigate more concretely the uses of time and the structure of the business day in Genoa. He concludes that, in this early center of Western commercial activity at least, an impulse toward greater precision in marking the time of day preceded the arrival of the clock.

In this article Dr. Michie examines the origins and development of the Canadian securities market from its appearance in the mid-nineteenth century until the First World War. He traces the growth of Canadian-based and Canadian-owned joint-stock enterprise and the rise of a distinct Canadian investing public, which led to the establishment of a Canadian securities market, and he explains why so much Canadian business continued to be transacted on both the London and New York stock exchanges. Dr. Michie also discusses the rivalry between the Montreal and Toronto stock exchanges and its detrimental consequences for the creation of a strong and unified Canadian market. Finally, he argues that, despite Toronto's rapid growth, Montreal remained the financial center of Canada throughout this period.

This historical comparison of the Vickers and Alcoa experiences with “borrowed” German airship technology highlights the importance of studying the way industrial R&D has been organized, both within industries and inside individual companies. Professor Graham shows that Alcoa's move in 1919 to organize its corporate Technical Department to include balanced research and development capabilities allowed it not only to appropriate Duralumin technology, but also to build on that technology so that it could be used to supply the infant U.S. airframe industry. Lacking such integrated R&D at the corporate level, Vickers obtained only short–term financial returns on its investment in Duralumin expertise. This article suggests that the differences in exploitation of high–strength aluminum derived partly from different national climates for R&D in the United States and England after the First World War.

In this study of a neglected topic, Dr. Channon examines the attempts of British railway leaders to regulate competition among routes. Drawing illustrative material from the management of Anglo-Scottish traffic and making comparisons with the American railroad industry, Dr. Channon concludes that pooling agreements did not provide the long-term stability and savings that railway managers sought. Changes in traffic patterns led to dissatisfaction with pool allocations, and competitive pressures from outside, as well as legal and political uncertainties, undermined cconfidence in the pools. In contrast to the United States, where railroads were able to turn to consolidation after pooling had failed, in Britain this strategy was not a politically viable option.

In fifteenth– and sixteenth–century Europe, international trade was often conducted by family partnerships. Commonly, one partner remained in the family's native land, while one or more family members established themselves temporarily or permanently abroad. In this article, Professor Mathers describes the mercantile activity of three families from the Spanish city of Burgos who profited from family partnerships that linked trade from northern Spain to England and France. She also examines the ways in which family inheritance practices and alternative family investments and expenditures affected the capital and continuity of the partnerships.

Historians of Progressive Era conservation measures have focused on the efforts of government resource experts to free environmental management decisions from special-interest groups. Professor Judd argues that this emphasis has obscured the importance of economic factions in securing conservation legislation reflecting their various interests. His examination of Maine's ongoing efforts to manage its lobster industry demonstrates that scientific conservation codes received legislative sanction only when they could be made to conform to the commercial needs of the industry's competing groups.

Historians and social scientists have often described modern America as a uniquely pluralist society in which a collective bargaining model of industrial relations won an early triumph over other conceptions of labor relations. Professor Gerber challenges this traditional view. Comparing American and British thinking and policies relating to labor relations during and just after the First World War, Professor Gerber concludes that, in large part because of the war's impact, corporatist conceptions of political economy had by 1920 achieved a wide appeal in both Britain and America. Though a pluralist conception of collective bargaining may later have become dominant in the United States, at least as of 1920 many parallels existed between the emerging “corporatist bias” of British thinking about labor relations and American thinking about this issue.

An industry may fail to adopt or to extend new technology for many reasons other than lack of entrepreneurial vision. In the following article, Professor Newell considers the halting and incomplete diffusion of mechanization and continuous-process technology in the salmon-canning industry of the Pacific Northwest. She shows that the fragile and cyclical character of the natural resource, the labor system employed, and the remote and isolated locations of individual production units all affected cannery operators' decisions about technology adoption, and that the persistence of manual labor reflected rational, not reactionary, business choices.

In discussions of the fight for the Pure Food and Drugs Act of 1906, Harvey Washington Wiley is usually portrayed as the consumers' champion, the Whiskey Trust as their adversary. Messrs. High and Coppin argue otherwise. Wiley's correspondence from 1904 to 1906 reveals a deep split between whiskey producers, with the makers of straight whiskey lining up behind Wiley's pure food bill and the rectified whiskey producers fighting against it. The authors argue that both sides used the consumer only as a convenient focus for their rhetoric; their activities thus provide another example of regulatory legislation passed to further the goals of private interests rather than to protect the public interest.

Much has been written about late-nineteenth-century multinationals and their relationship to the transnational firms of the present, but both historians and economists have largely discounted the relevance of the earlier chartered trading companies to this discussion. In an article emphasizing transaction cost analysis and the theory of the firm, Professors Carlos and Nicholas argue that the trading companies did meet the criteria of the modern MNE—the growth of a managerial hierarchy necessitated by a large volume of transactions and of systems to control those managers over space and time.

In the following essay, Dr. Schröter examines a specific case, German multinational activity in Scandinavia between the wars, and uses that information to raise more general questions about the nature of multinational enterprise. Before 1914, patterns of German foreign direct investment resembled those of the nation's competitors. After the First World War, however, having lost almost all their overseas holdings and suffering from a severe shortage of capital, German industries tried to replace foreign direct investment with other financial tools, principally cartels and long–term contracts. Using extensive German archival materials, Dr. Schröter describes the forces motivating these businesses.

In the following article, Professor Derickson examines the motivation for and the results of employee medical screening of workers in a midwestern mining community. He argues that, contrary to the goals of the associative state as envisioned by Herbert Hoover and others, government and mine operator efforts to determine the extent of respiratory disease among mine workers in the Tri-State were neither impelled by a concern for workers' welfare nor conducive to the amelioration of their problems.