The concentration of business enterprise in corporate structures at the end of the last century called the attention of scholars to the history of the business corporation, the chartered joint-stock company. Even those who agreed that “the honour of originally inventing these political constitutions entirely belongs to the Romans” realized that their modern economic functions were relatively recent and demanded explanation. In this country, Williston's brilliant essay, the studies of Simeon Baldwin, and a number of other investigations probed into the origin and nature of the institution at about the period when it became a pressing social issue.

By the 1820's, New England was in ferment. Unitarianism had shattered the old religious orthodoxy and, while the Dedham case provided a material dowry for the new religion, the sermons of William Ellery Channing furnished a theology and creed. In politics the dogmas of regional Federalism were weakened and soon Daniel Webster was to celebrate the virtues of an embracing nationalism which Pickering and his fellow conspirators of an earlier period would have found incomprehensible. Along the Merrimack were arising the cotton-mill towns, symbols of a new industrialism. An old order was giving way to a new. Once begun, change accelerated and touched one by one the institutions and ideas of the region. Of the economic factors that gave momentum to this transformation, the railroad was the most important. For it was the railroad that after 1830 tied New England into the nation. No longer was it to be a fringe of Hanseatic ports communicating with the rest of the world and with America by sea; it was to become a section in a developing nation. When Emerson wrote of Massachusetts, “From 1790 to 1820, there was not a book, a speech, a conversation, or a thought in the State,” he should have added that there was not a railroad. For the railroad, even though it may not have opened wider prospects, at least revealed different ones.

This paper is in no way a definitive study of classes, especially of the business classes, in the city of Genoa in the thirteenth century. The materials for such a study do exist in the notarial archives and in earlier publications on this and related subjects. Rather, this is a report drawn from “work resumed” and work in its early stages at that.

The problem of the origins of marine insurance is one of the most complicated and controversial questions in the history of business institutions. One cause of this confusion is the fact that the earliest documentary sources are often ambiguous and lend themselves to widely varying interpretations. The legal writers, who have done most of the research on the early history of insurance, have focused their attention upon certain documents of the late thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries. As these sources unfortunately give incomplete information, the results of all this research have been rather disappointing. The minute scrutiny with which the legal writers have examined the early documents has produced subtle and brilliant examples of textual criticism but has also given rise to conflicting theories which have confused the issues instead of clarifying them.

The Dictionary of American Biography contains 1,464 biographies of eminent American businessmen. Among them are most of the wellknown financial and business figures, as well as many others never widely known or else long forgotten. The announced criterion for inclusion in the D.A.B. is that the person “did something notable in some field of American life.” Over 100 “consulting specialists” handled the various lists of candidates for inclusion; these specialists included economic and business historians.

In constructing his social theory Saint-Simon made use of the inductive method: by the study of historical facts he endeavored to win knowledge of the laws of the character and movements of society. In shaping his spiritual program he followed a different path, the path of deduction: his goal was to find a great principle in accordance with which the institutions of the future social order could be consciously molded. “Socrates,” he said, putting his ideas into the mouth of the great Greek, “clearly understood that we must criticize a posteriori and organize a priori.” For “any social regime is an application of a philosophical system, and, consequently, it is impossible to institute a new regime without having before established the new philosophical system to which it should correspond.”

Perhaps there exists no better index of the increased sophistication of research in American economic and business history than the enhanced, still expanding utilization of manuscript materials, especially the records of individual businessmen and corporations. One has only to compare the scholarly productions of a generation ago—Copeland's Cotton Manufacturing Industry, Eliot Jones's Anthracite Coal Combinations, or Lippincott's Manufactures in the Ohio Valley—with nearly any first-class corresponding volume of recent years—for example, in the series edited by N. S. B. Gras—to be struck with the greatly increased reliance of recent and contemporary authors upon unpublished materials.

Isaac bronson was a highly successful financier of the Jacksonian era who was also one of the period's most original and influential banking theorists. Bronson accumulated his very considerable fortune in New York primarily by judicious personal money-lending operations on long-term bonds and mortgages at a cautious 7 per cent annual return, supplemented by successful ventures in land speculation. In addition to wealth, he had by the 1830's acquired a weighty reputation for sober financial conservatism and was regarded as an authoritative exponent of sound banking principles. Prominent in the financial community, he had long thrown his weight as a sound banking theorist against the “wild-cat” practices of the then rampant state banks. As controlling stockholder of the Bridgeport Bank for almost thirty years, and as president for much of that time, he prided himself on its successful weathering of the financial storms of the period.”

The ensuing remarks are addressed to two topics which seem to me important: (a) what conflicts, if any, are there between business history and economic history; and (b) how can research in the two areas be mutually helpful.

A Weakness often apparent in interpretations of economic history lies in failure to evaluate properly the factor of relative location and the mechanism of cultural diffusion through which it operates to affect the changing character of regions. In studies of the historical geography of New Zealand, for example, extant interpretations have both emphasized an almost teleological view of unilinear cultural descent and shown a strong tendency toward environmental determinism. Neither of these philosophies or approaches in the writing of history has proved satisfactory in itself, but, taken together (antithetical though they may seem), they have provided a deceptively simple interpretive base upon which there has been almost universal reliance.

During the past winter the New York Committee on Business Records has dealt in a practical way with one group of the difficulties discussed by Arthur Cole in his article, “Business Manuscripts: A Pressing Problem.” This committee has sought to solve the problem by convincing executives that business records are of value not only to themselves but also to scholars, by advising businessmen how they may best arrange their records, and by learning under what conditions scholars may have access to business archives.

The initial problems in writing the history of a business are similar to those encountered in writing the history of anything else: obtaining free access to all the existing records; determining whether these records are adequate to warrant the writing of a history; and then deciding what one wants to know from the records.

The great inventions of the past and their effect on history form a subject that everyone talks about, and no one thinks about, or precious few ever think hard about. So I consider this a good subject for economic historians to do some hard thinking about now. It is not enough just to schematize the subject philosophically; we should replace and improve some ideas of history that are very popular. Particularly in need of examination is the idea of materialistic Karl Marx, which has spread to such respectable professors and other well-heeled gentlemen that Marx would shudder at his associates—the idea that invention, technologic change, determines economic life and hence all history.

This paper is a tentative effort to suggest how some of the problems of economic history look to a student of the history of labor policy. In this, as in other areas of economic history, the investigator wants to know what the policies are and how they have worked. To help him answer these questions he has at his disposal familiar tools of inquiry—economic theory or analysis, the evidence of history, and comparative economic experience.