I thought about the theme of this book long before I considered writing about it. Alfred D. Chandler noted during a seminar I attended in 1975–1976 that the complexities of antitrust might be better understood if studied in a comparative international context. Divergent rules governing mergers and cartels, he said, influenced the point at which big business emerged in the world's leading industrial nations. The idea intrigued me because I had always thought of antitrust as a distinctive element of American law, economics, and culture. Generally, I understood, other industrial nations had no antitrust policies until the middle of the twentieth century. Yet in some form big business appeared in all those nations around the turn of the century. Thus Chandler's comment raised an interesting question: how to compare American antitrust to something which initially did not exist in other nations?

Other projects absorbed my attention for nearly a decade, but I did not forget the question. By the mid-1980s business historians, economists, and other scholars increasingly were exploring the international implications of antitrust. Some of this work examined the relation between cartels and mergers in a comparative context. Especially important were studies written by the British business historian Leslie Hannah and, of course, by Chandler himself. Central to the study of the wider issues was the particular experience of Great Britain. Britain was the first industrial nation, while the United States was the first nation in which managerial capitalism triumphed. The early forms of large-scale corporate enterprise appeared in both nations during the turn of the century. Britain, however, lagged behind in the development of managerially centralized corporate structures.