Practical demonstrations in Great Britain led some observers to conclude that the railroad would soon introduce “a new era in the business and arrangements of Society.” Thus inspired, promoters of the first American rail ventures began to draw heavily, both for practical information and equipment, upon the resources of the British pioneers, whose response was magnificently cooperative.

Growth is governed by a creative and dynamic interaction between a firm's productive resources and its market opportunities. Available resources limit expansion; unused resources (including technological and entrepreneurial) stimulate and largely determine the direction of expansion. While product demand may exert a predominant short-term influence, over the long term any distinction between “supply” and “demand” determinants of growth becomes arbitrary.

The President's determined foreign policy pronouncement focused attention upon both the lack of unanimity in business circles and a surprising capacity for independent American action in international finance. For historians, the Venezuelan Message is a challenge inviting efforts to probe the depth and longevity of cleavage between public policy sentiment in the financial and industrial-mercantile sectors of the economy.

“Second generation” historical efforts are shedding new light on the beginnings of the textile industry. Even fragmentary records, minutely examined, yield vignettes that may one day be merged to form important new chapters of industry history. The Darley Abbey story reveals rare operational detail and an interesting variant in the British pattern of development.

As distrust of American investments lessened, conservative international brokers allowed themselves to be drawn into an economic orbit with ever-widening western limits. Short-term credits to support an active agency business in railroad construction materials led inevitably to longer term commitments. The merchant bankers supplied the facilities for transatlantic capital exchange and by absorbing the best rail and government issues helped create an American market for all grades of railroad securities.

In the energetic attempt to control destructive competition through pooling, Albert Fink occupied a position of prominence analogous to that enjoyed by Morgan in the consolidation movement that was to follow. Fink's rational advocacy did much to dispel the notion that the railroads were exercising irresponsible censorship over the affairs of the business community. His rate-making ideas and techniques were a lasting contribution to scientific railroad management.

The first third of the twentieth century completely transformed the practice of industrial relations in American business. Three principal motivating forces may be identified. These not only fluctuated in time, place, and influence, but have received unequal and less than impartial historical attention.

The advertising industry generated remarkably prompt responses, at both the institutional and individual level, to the opportunities and problems of growth. Once associationist activities had achieved a measure of industry self-regulation and self-analysis, individual entrepreneurs stepped in to offer specialized services that grew in value as the professional status of the parties concerned became established and differentiated.

Like most speculative extravaganzas, the Western cattle boom was compounded out of a bona fide opportunity, exaggeration, gullibility, inadequate communications, dishonesty, and incompetence. There were some solid residual benefits, representing, in effect, an involuntary gift by British investors to their American cousins.

River transport was for a time a critical link in the upper Mississippi Valley transportation system, bridging diminishing gaps in the railroad network and linking those river-axis trade centers through which were pouring the human and commodity tides of war and frontier development. Riverboat operations in such an environment offered limitless challenges to management and provided opportunities for both disaster and great profit.

Two recent acquisitions of the Kress Library, a part of Baker Library of the Harvard Business School, will be of particular interest to business historians. The Kress Library, rich in the history of economic institutions and business life, as well as in material on the progress of economic thought, has a strong and varied collection on bookkeeping, to which it has recently added two rare volumes.

Many Hawaiians viewed the great irrigation project and its vigorous promoter with enthusiasm and awe. Unfortunately, not all aspects of American entrepreneurship were palatable to the Islanders.

Over a famous Congressional investigation lies the shadow of evidence suppressed for political reasons and long ignored by scholars, who by too glib acceptance of the printed testimony have perpetuated bias as historical fact.

The transition from simple record keeping to accounting more or less in the form we know it today took many hundreds of years, though most of the basic developments had occurred by early Renaissance times. The advance of the art was intimately linked with a growing literature, the advancement of status, and other recognizable signs of maturing professionalism.

British investors, whose support was of importance to American railroad development, fluctuated between enthusiasm and dismay. Low investment per mile, the performance of certain blue chip carriers, and the native growth potential all stimulated the vital flow of foreign capital. Rate wars, overcapitalization, stock price fluctuations, imprudent reorganizations, and low business morality had an inhibiting effect. In most cases American investments offered little opportunity to exert control. By the late 1890's, British investors had largely outgrown their enchantment with the American railroad bonanza.

The bonanza lure of lumbering proved irresistible to many established small businessmen, who were dazzled by the prospects of cheap raw materials and simple processing, on the one hand, and by growing markets on the other. Disillusionment was frequent, but amidst crushing difficulties created by inexperience and inadequate capital the small operator proved remarkably ingenious and persistent. His often ill-rewarded and seemingly unjustified ventures contributed much to the economic growth of the nation.

Many manuscript collections contain business materials of one sort or another, but Baker Library, of the Harvard Business School, has the largest single accumulation of such records, acquired by a private institution for purposes of research. These qualifications are necessary, since the records of many large companies, such as U. S. Steel, would greatly outnumber our holdings; and such a public institution as the National Archives contains extensive business materials.

A major accomplishment sometimes overshadows the background that made accomplishment possible. The creator of Wall Street's most famous investment formula was, in fact, a journalist and entrepreneur of note. His total contribution to the financial community was far larger than the theory for which he is remembered today.

The scope of our annual bibliography has been enlarged this year to provide more comprehensive coverage than was attempted in the original “Studies in Enterprise” and its 1958 Supplement. Although still limited geographically to America and Canada, this list now covers histories of industries, histories of specific corporate functions, episodes in the history of companies, and histories of trade associations and trade unions, as well as over-all histories of companies and biographies of businessmen.

Some later observers, impressed perhaps by rapid progress of the art after 1900, showed disdain for nineteenth-century methods. Five principal factors, however, produced a steady evolution and made accounting an element of importance in the nineteenth-century American business world.