Looking back on the 1920's, it has become fashionable to accuse black businessmen of betraying and exploiting the Negro masses for their own gain. The career of George W. Lee, however, suggests that some black capitalists did much more than use racial pride for economic profit. They could be the real cutting edge of Negro protest, providing local leadership and a militant philosophy in a period characterized by capitulation to the white majority.

Professor Chandler uses data compiled by two of his students, Harold C. Livesay and P. Glenn Porter, whose work is condensed in the charts and tables which accompany this article, to propose a historical explanation for the changing industrial structure of the modem American economy.

The history of Supreme Life Insurance Company, now the third largest black insurance firm in the United States, is representative of its industry as a whole. In this first study of an individual Negro life insurance firm, Professor Puth suggests that Supreme Life may also serve as a barometer of future trends as black firms compete with larger white companies now being drawn into the formerly segregated market by falling mortality rates and rising incomes among Negroes.

Professor Cuff casts a critically dissenting eye at one of American history's most cherished myths: Bernard Baruch's role in United States' mobilization during World War I.

Of all business-supported reform in the early twentieth century, none was more significant or widely accepted than workmen's compensation for industrial accidents. Using the experience of Massachusetts as a case study, Mr. Asher reveals the unique consensus of management and labor which produced “the first victory for the idea of the modern welfare state in the United States.”

In the mid-1860's, Singer became the first American firm to produce and market extensively in Europe. Without using government aid, the company built an aggressive and effective organization which became a model for other overseas operations. Professor Davies traces Singer's foreign undertakings from their modest beginnings in 1854 to acknowledged dominance of the industry in 1889.

Every schoolboy knows that a large fraction of the American public domain was granted to pioneer railroads in the nineteenth century. But was the federal land-grant policy socially beneficial? Professor Mercer provides one imaginative answer based upon an analysis of the economic issues involved and estimates of the private and social rates of return on the investment in the subsidized railroads.

In the mid-eighteenth century, the Scottish coal industry was characterized by small pits, lagging technology, serf labor, and owner management. Thus, severe bottlenecks in the supply of responsible managerial personnel occurred when the market expanded as the result of the establishment of coke-using iron works and the growth of urban centers in the last four decades of the century. By 1815, however, the Scottish industry had seen the rise of large firms, an advance in technology, the abolition of serf labor, and the attainment of near self-sufficiency in the supply of essential professional managers.

Although Singer was the first American manufacturing firm to produce and market extensively in Europe, the American Radiator Company is perhaps more typical of the United States firms that expanded abroad in the nineteenth century. Professor Wilkins documents the evolution of this multinational enterprise and offers her study as a test of recent theories on direct investment abroad.

As Great Britain expanded its economic sphere at the turn of the century, what was the nature of the relationship between the imperial government and private firms seeking profits within the free trade empire? Was there a “well-planned and consistent program directed from the top,” or was the government's so-called “high policy” toward business actually the result “of ad hoc compromises among various departmental heads” buried three and four levels deep in the Colonial Office? The experience of the Tanjong Pagar Dock Co. of Singapore suggests that the opportunities for British firms to exploit the resources of British controlled territories could be seriously circumscribed by the “arbitrary paternalism” of “crusading bureaucrats.”

Part of the eighteenth-century Spanish crown's attempt to restore national power through the promotion of trade and manufacturing was a campaign to eradicate the aversions of the nobility toward commerce and industry. Don Juan de Goyeneche was most often held up as the model of what the state expected of its noblemen. But Professor Callahan concludes that Goyeneche's significance lies more in symbol that in accomplishment.

Although early British aircraft manufacturers attempted to exploit the private, civil aviation, and export markets for their products, the military market became the most important one by World War I. Mr. Fearon shows that the aircraft industry was largely dependent on military orders, but that government policy in this area tended to retard rather than promote progress and growth. It was only the optimism of the pioneer firms about the future which made the expansion of the industry possible.

During the first half of the nineteenth century, a number of American states prohibited the establishment of banks of issue within their borders. In theory, these states seemingly opted for the slow economic development associated with an inelastic currency supply. In the case of Iowa, however, the people's demand for an elastic currency was met by the creation of substitute financial institutions — land agency-banks — that functioned as de facto banks of issue.

This paper sketches the formation and expansion of a Scottish company engaged in the Indian trade, and follows its attempts to formulate policies to meet the changing demands of an overseas market known only through long delayed and often conflicting reports from abroad.

According to a key participant, members of both the outgoing and incoming administrations worked side-by-side during the banking crisis of 1933. Their concern was not politics, but rather the search for a solution to the nation's financial problems — even though relations between President Herbert Hoover and President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt were not so amicable. Thus, the resultant banking holiday and Emergency Banking Act were not sole products of either the Republican or the Democratic administrations but the results of pragmatic, cooperative attempts to meet and solve the crisis.

During the 188's and 1890's, the innovations of James Buchanan Duke first disrupted and then rationalized the American tobacco industry. Duke's career and the early history of his American Tobacco Co. serve as case studies in both the history of business administration and in the coming of “big business” to the United States.

Prepared for the Brazilian Ambassador to the United States, this document is a review of all foreign investment in that South American nation in 1935. However, as Mr. Berson points out in his introduction, omissions are just as important as inclusions, especially in light of the trade and commerce treaty then being negotiated between the two countries.

Professor McClelland reviews two book on land speculation, a traditional historical study by Malcom J. Rohrbough and another which falls in the category of “new economic history” by Robert Swierenga.

Professor van der Wee reviews Raymond de Roover's important new study of medieval business history, The Bruges Money Market around 1400.

Professor La Force traces the frustrated efforts of the Spanish revolutionary government to arm its forces against the invading army of Napoleon.