I met Al Chandler in late 1962 (or early 1963), when he visited the Graduate School of Business, Columbia University, as a guest of Associate Dean Clarence Walton. Chandler gave a seminar, based on his new book Strategy and Structure. I was then at Columbia Business School, completing my (and Frank Ernest Hill's) archive-based history of Ford Motor Company's international operations, which was my first book. As my next project, I was seeking to write an overall history of US business abroad. I wanted to figure out whether patterns I had found in my research on Ford abroad were typical (or atypical) of US corporations, in general, as the latter expanded worldwide.

Once, long ago, I was teaching business and economic history at Rice University in Houston, Texas. Alas,my academic career was stalled in the early 1960s. A distinguished Yale professor had kept the revised manuscript of my dissertation sitting on his desk for a year without reading it or submitting a report to the press. Meanwhile, I had just learned that editors do not want to publish fifty-page academic articles. I was having a wonderful time teaching the talented students at Rice, but it was not at all clear that I was not soon going to be looking for a different job and maybe a different profession.

Alfred D. Chandler entered my professional life incrementally rather than dramatically.As a student of economic history at CambridgeUniversity in Britain in the early 1970s, I barely encountered his name. British universities had their own long traditions in business and economic history, including a strong interest in entrepreneurship and in government policies toward industry. Most British scholars were not especially enthusiastic about ideas from across the Atlantic, whether the methodological approach of the new economic history of Robert Fogel, or Chandler's organizational synthesis. Cambridge was an especially closed academic world, with a strong assumption that little that happened outside its delightful campus could be really important. It was not until 1979, when I was recruited by the Business History Unit at the London School of Economics (LSE), headed by Chandler's (then) acolyte Leslie Hannah, that I read Strategy and Structure, nearly two decades after it was published.

Unlike several of my colleagues whose retrospective essays are included in this special section, I did not have a personal relationship with Alfred DuPont Chandler, though during the 1980s he did invite me to present a discussion of my first book Proprietary Capitalism at his Harvard business history seminar. I also met Dr. Chandler frequently at Business History Conference meetings, where I found him ever-gracious, indifferent to criticism, and supportive of diverse projects whether allied with or tangential to his own. Thus here I offer some reflections on our discipline and its current situation, taking Chandler's publications as a point of departure.

One could make a career of throwing darts at the work of Alfred Chandler. I don't mean just criticizing him. You could take the pages of Chandler's books, paste them up on a wall, and start throwing. Almost everywhere a point struck would be a little gem of business history to draw your interest.

Historians have often looked to industrial capitalism to further our understanding of “time consciousness.” This article explores time consciousness through the experience of a railroad in pre-Civil War South Carolina. Examining the South Carolina Railroad allows us to examine how time consciousness operated in a region not associated with industrial capitalism, and also see how multiple times could function simultaneously. While clocks were important to railroad operations, companies also had to address an array of non-clock times. Moreover, companies were never fully in control of their own time, but were in constant conflict and negotiation with various groups in the community. While industrialization and factory labor remain important ways to understand time consciousness, looking beyond the factory walls can help historians make better use of the analytical power of time.

The case study of Bresee's Department Store in Oneonta, New York, suggests that small-town department stores were not necessarily fully “modern” by the early twentieth century. This article demonstrates how modern, big-store, business methods came later and documents how earlier modes of trade, such as credit and bartering, persisted into the early twentieth century, even in non-rural, northern contexts. Preliminary findings suggest that eliminating the urban bias in much historiography by including small-town retailing practices may lead to a later periodization of American consumer society.

Like so many of the fields that have flourished in history departments in recent years, business history has an uneasy relationship with political history. When business history first emerged in the United States as a separate field in the 1920s, its founders stressed the importance of lavishing on business records the same reverence that political historians accorded the personal papers of lawmakers. Only in this way, business historians assumed, would it be possible to convince other historians of the centrality of business leaders—and, more broadly, of economic institutions—to the making of the nation.

The history of slavery cannot be separated from the history of business in the United States, especially in the context of the relationship between public power and individual property rights. This essay suggests that the American devotion to “sacred” property rights stemsmore from the vulnerability of slaveholding elites than to a political heritage of protection for the “common man.”

The half-century following the Civil War witnessed an epochal transformation in American telecommunications. In the 1870s, the telegraph network became a spawning ground for a remarkable spate of inventions that included the phonograph and the telephone, and around 1900 the telephone network became the first electrical communications medium that network providers intended to be accessible to the entire population. This transformation was a centerpiece of the still unprecedented burst of inventive activity that economic historians call the Second Industrial Revolution.

This essay explores how historians and others have used the concept of political economy, arguing that its application to United States history between the 1920s and 1940s helps to clarify the relationships between politics, the economy, and liberalism.