The invention of the airplane by Wilbur and Orville Wright in 1903 marked the beginning of an industry which has grown to be the largest single manufacturing employer in the United States. Once the airplane was invented, there was wide-spread expectation that producing aircraft would be a very profitable business.

In the eighteenth century, industry, though still a minor factor in the total economy of the Habsburg monarchy—over 80 per cent of the people lived on the land—was the object of special attention from statesmen and theorists. To them industry connoted progress and showed great promise of being the handmaiden to the evolving power of the modern state. The great teacher in this respect was Colbert, and since the late seventeenth century the rulers of the Habsburg monarchy, as those of other states, had at least paid lip service to his ideas. The static nature of society, however, all too often prevented them from putting Colbert's mercantilist principles into practice.

Monetary and economic difficulties in the United States in the 1830's and early 1840's have been attributed by some writers to the struggle between the supporters of Andrew Jackson's “hard currency” and Nicholas Biddle's “Second Bank.”

A meeting of scholars to consider problems of teaching and research in Asian economic history was held in Highland Park, Illinois, October 30–31, 1959. It was organized under the auspices of The Research Center in Economic Development and Cultural Change of the University of Chicago, and funds were provided by the Division of Social Sciences of The Rockefeller Foundation. Professor Bert F. Hoselitz chaired the sessions.

The successful establishment of the European Common Market on January 1, 1959, has renewed interest in the tool by which this most ambitious of all economic integration projects has been accomplished. The interest is the greater as this is only the first of three attempts to integrate economic development on a continental scale. The others are the common markets envisioned for Africa and Latin America. This article is an attempt to convey in the briefest possible space the history of economic integration that preceded the current drive toward common markets.