Research about the rise of large-scale enterprise has concentrated on the world's leading industrial economies, particularly the United States, Britain, Germany, France and Japan. By way of contrast, this study discusses the evolution of large business enterprises in an economy at the ‘periphery’ of the world's economic system rather than at the ‘centre’. The drivers of the emergence of big business in Australia were fundamentally the same as those operating in many other mature and later starting industrial economies. However, it will be argued that the nature of the Australian economy, and particularly its economic relationship with the rest of the world, had a powerful impact on the timing of the emergence of big business and its subsequent character. These local issues will be explored before turning to an examination of the characteristics of top 100 non-financial and 25 financial firms operating in Australia at various dates from 1910 up to 1997. This chapter deals with aggregate data and trend movements rather than the identification and histories of individual firms. The rise of firms within industries is considered in Chapter 3.

Drivers of big business in Australia

The large-scale industrial firms that emerged in the United States and Europe in the later part of the nineteenth century were powerful agents of economic change. Utilising new technologies in communication and production, they transformed existing industries and created new ones through research and development-related diversification, and widened markets from local to regional to national and, in many cases, international.