In 1966 the Supreme Court expressed a desire to arrest consolidation of the brewing industry “in its incipiency.” This article argues that a national brewing oligopoly had already emerged by that date. In the 1930s and 1940s, restrained demand and regulatory pressure discouraged price and advertising competition and forced brewers to adopt cost-saving technologies. By the end of the Second World War, the largest brewers harbored unexploited economies of scale in processing. With relief from war shortages in the 1950s, large regional brewers expanded to pursue processing economies and secured their advantages with scale in distribution and advertising.

This intensive analysis of the Railroad Commission of Texas during the first half of the twentieth century focuses on the impact of personality and of regional and cultural characteristics on regulatory policy and outcomes. The article suggests that a “myth of power” and a “civil religion” of Texas oil, galvanized by a popular commissioner, both allowed cooperative control of oil production and obscured the real sources of power in the world oil industry.

Using the record books of M'Connel and Kennedy, a leading cotton-spinning firm in Manchester, this article traces the development of managerial strategies to elicit effort from workers during the Industrial Revolution. Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the firm had difficulty in extracting effort from its workers, who were unwilling to increase output without capturing some of the gains through wage adjustments. Since spinners controlled the work organization, M'Connel and Kennedy had to accommodate workers' demands for stable piece rates, which were codified in the Manchester list of prices of 1829.

It has been claimed that the diversified mercantile capitalist of eighteenth-century Britain was replaced by the specialist industrialist of the nineteenth. This study of Manchester cotton merchants who moved into fire insurance in the 1820s examines the neglected strategy of collective diversification. It argues that the merchants' decision to diversify cannot be explained by short-term financial or economic considerations arising out of the insurance or cotton markets and only partly by long-run issues such as profit maximization and constraints on growth. Collective diversification is best understood as part of a broader attempt to create a system of interlocking services by an urban oligarchy seeking both to improve the economic infrastructure of their region and to consolidate the economic and political power of their group.