Organizations and Markets

| Peter Klein |

Not at all, says Gary Richardson, in a new NBER paper, “Brand Names Before the Industrial Revolution.” Branding has long been the target of largely uncomprehending critique from the likes of Veblen, Galbraith and sociologists such as Daniel Bell but its role in maintaining quality and reliability and securing contractual performance is now generally understood. Importantly, shows Gary (my former grad-school classmate), the use of seller-specific markers was widespread even before the Industrial Revolution and played an important role in facilitating the emergence of long-distance trade:

In medieval Europe, manufacturers sold durable goods to anonymous consumers in distant markets, this essay argues, by making products with conspicuous characteristics. Examples of these unique, observable traits included cloth of distinctive colors, fabric with unmistakable weaves, and pewter that resonated at a particular pitch. These attributes identified merchandise because consumers could observe them readily, but counterfeiters could copy them only at great cost, if at all. Conspicuous characteristics fulfilled many of the functions that patents, trademarks, and brand names do today. The words that referred to products with conspicuous characteristics served as brand names in the Middle Ages. Data drawn from an array of industries corroborates this conjecture. The abundance of evidence suggests that conspicuous characteristics played a key role in the expansion of manufacturing before the Industrial Revolution.

See also Gary’s EH.Net Encyclopedia entry on guilds.

| Peter Klein |

In assessing the role of accountants during the industrial revolution, historians generally have been guided by Sidney Pollard’s interpretation expressed in The Genesis of Modern Management (1965). Pollard contended that early industrial accounting exhibited a marked confusion between capital and revenues. This confusion suggested to him that early industrialists were more concerned with calculating and extracting interest on their investments rather than maximizing their rate of return. Thus, Pollard concluded, these early entrepreneurs apparently lacked the true profit motive possessed by modern capitalists.

David Oldroyd’s book seeks to test these contentions by subjecting the financial accounts of three northern [coal] estates to detailed analysis in four specific areas: the performance of contracts, investment planning, labor management, and managerial behavior. . . .

The result is a discussion of early industrial entrepreneurship that is both revealing and nuanced. For example, Oldroyd shows that an extensive network of contracts regulated the exploitation of the Durham and Northumberland coalfield. These contracts covered a myriad of circumstances involved in both the underground mining and aboveground transportation of minerals. A typical enterprise might need to contract the leasing or subcontracting of a mine, aboveground “wayleaves” to transport coal across neighboring properties, the shipment of coal to London or other ports, and the off-loading of coal at the point of sale. In all of these areas, accounting records carefully quantified not only total production and transport, but very often unit costs as well. Oldroyd therefore concludes that, contrary to Pollard, accounting was an essential and extremely adaptable tool promoting economic efficiency during this era.

This is from James Jaffe’s EH.Net review of David Oldroyd’s Estates, Enterprise and Investment at the Dawn of the Industrial Revolution (Ashgate, 2007). Interesting fodder for business historians and specialists in contracting and organization. And here are some previous posts on accounting (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6).

| Peter Klein |

This week’s Economist features a summary of recent economic controversies about the rule of law (thanks to Fabio Chaddad for the pointer). There is near-universal consensus among specialists in economic history and economic growth that the legal rules – and institutions more generally — “matter,” though the precise mechanisms are in dispute, and aspects of the institutional environment such as the quality of legal rules are difficult to measure consistently across societies and over time. We’ve touched on the closely related “legal origins” debate before. As with that controversy, the arguments in this one have become more subtle and complex in the last decade. As the Economist notes:

[A]s an economic concept the rule of law has had a turbulent history. It emerged almost abruptly during the 1990s from the dual collapses of Asian currencies and former Soviet economies. For a short time, it seemed to provide the answer to problems of development from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe, until some well-directed criticism dimmed its star. Since then it has re-established itself as a central concept in understanding how countries grow rich — but not as the panacea it once looked like.

The Economist piece focuses on the distinction between “thick” and “thin” understandings of the rule of law. (more…)

| Steve Phelan |

Greg Mankiw reports that Myron Scholes has a novel idea to fix the credit crisis - rather than simply guaranteeing to underwrite asset losses (as they have with the JP Morgan/Bear Stearns ) Scholes proposes that the Fed takes senior equity and debt positions in a distressed bank thereby improving the capital adequacy ratio, and thus preventing a credit freeze which would damage the real economy. I like it - what do YOU think?

| Steve Phelan |

A nice cartoon presentation of the debt crisis by the Wasington Post that you might want to use in your classes.

Two questions:

1) Is the story essentially correct or is it overly damning?

2) What are the organizational implications of this story - for institution and policy building?

We can only assume that all sorts of “corrective” measures will be planned and taken in the immediate future. I believe we should be getting involved in the debate by honing our theoretical position. We are watching economic history in the making.

| Peter Klein |

Greg Clark’s A Farewell to Alms has received a lot of attention in the econo-blogosphere. I haven’t read the book and don’t have much to say about it but you can read as much as you like from Cowen, McCloskey, DeLong, Caplan, Kling, and others. One of the most interesting reviews, to me, is this one by Robert Margo of Boston University. Margo admires the book but dislikes this genre, what he calls “Big Think.”

“Big Think” refers to the genre of economic history that asks The Big Question. Why England and not China? Do institutions “matter” or is it something else, or many things? Why is the United States rich and Bolivia poor?

Reviewers should be upfront about their ex ante biases. Here is one of mine: I do not care for Big Think. The Big Question per se is not the problem — in economics, there is nothing more important. For me, the problem with Big Think is that it is inherently Too Big. One cannot hope to answer The Big Question by tackling it head on. One must break The Big Question into a great many very tiny precisely posed questions, and get the answers to them right. In economic history we are still _very_ far from completing this task even for a country whose economic history is as well-worn as the United States. Big Think is a Big Distraction from our true purpose in life. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

That’s the title of a virtual exhibition hosted by the International Institute of Social History in the Netherlands. Jan Lucassen has collected data and images showing the connection between coin circulation and wage payments throughout history, particularly for societies about which we know little of labor patterns and wage rates. ”As far as wages are paid in currency, in particular in coin, specific patterns of denominations produced and used in space and time may provide insights into the importance of wage labour in those societies.”

Numismatists may also wish to pre-order George Selgin’s forthcoming Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821, a chapter of which you can read here. Two other Selgin papers on private coinage are here and here. As you can see, Selgin’s work has improved considerably since he quit doing stuff like this.

| Peter Klein |

Contrary to popular belief, formal education in medieval times was not restricted to the clergy and the very wealthy. Nor was theology the most popular subject. Independent schools, unaffiliated with any particular religious body or royal institution and staffed by lay people, were common, and even taught business administration (writing letters, drafting contracts, keeping the books).

So says Nicholas Orme in Medieval Schools: From Roman Britain to Renaissance England (Yale, 2006). (Thanks to Tom Woods for the pointer.) In Britain, grammar schools were often supported by wealthy patrons and were open to students of modest means. Notes Orme:

Most [English] schoolmasters were probably broad rather than specialized teachers, catering for a wide range of needs, so it is not surprising that a brand of practical teacher emerged by the fourteenth century (at latest), offering more focused instruction for careers in trade and administration. Such instruction might include “dictamen” (the art of writing letters), the methods of drafting deeds and charters, the composition of court rolls and other legal record, and the keeping of financial accounts. Since documents of these kinds were often written in French between 1200 and 1400, the practical teachers came to teach French too.

This illustration, from p. 69 of the book, depicts such a class. How did they do it without PowerPoint?

| Peter Klein |

Most historical accounts of Silicon Valley start in the 1970s or later. Christophe Lecuyer’s Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970, reminds us that the seeds of the first modern high-tech cluster were planted much earlier. Fairchild is central to the story, of course, but so is Eitel-McCullough (Eimac) in the 1930s and 1940s, Litton in the 1940s and 1950s, and Varian in the 1960s (them, not him). Lecuyer, writes reviewer Glenn Bugos,

seeks to define Silicon Valley as an industrial district, akin to the Marshallian industrial districts that economic historians have begun to explore. Also, he integrates into his story the many extant, divergent strands of Silicon Valley historiography. Into his manufacturing-driven narrative, we see the trends other historians have emphasized — military funding, the shake-out following the McNamara consolidation, the role of Stanford University in generating expertise, and the importance of workplace culture.

| Peter Klein |

Check out ECHO (Exploring and Collecting History Online), a portal to several thousand websites dealing with the history of science, technology, and industry.

| Peter Klein |

Shawn Carraher and John Humphreys are editing a special issue of the Journal of Management History devoted to the life and work of the late Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. (1918-2007). Submissions are due 7 April 2008. Details below the fold. (more…)

| Steve Phelan | 

Brad De Long’s analysis of the current financial crisis published in the Taipei Times on 01/01/08 received some attention in the blogosphere yesterday. For a crisis resulting in a sustained fall in asset values, he recommends either 1) nationalizing the debt or 2) inflating the price of nominal assets. As I was reading the article (and another on the fact that an 3 million excess housing units were created in the boom above long term trends) it occurred to me that a third path might be available — increased immigration. (more…)

| Steve Phelan |

One of my pet peeves is when academics assume that people in industry are a little “dim.” For instance,

It would be churlish to point out that the fact that one should be extremely leery of arguments that diversification radically improves the safety of bond investments was well known back by Edgar L. Smith and others back in 1923.

This quote from Brad De Long here. 

I’m not picking on Brad because it happens quite a bit in my experience. The “oh my gosh, we academics have known since 1923 that diversification of bonds does not reduce systematic risk that much, you dumbasses.”

Contrast this view with the fact that the brightest minds in a generation have been taking jobs on Wall Street. So the smartest people are the biggest dumbasses???

In these matters, I prefer to assume plausible deniability. Reducing systematic risk by combining geographically diversified BBB bonds sounds just plausible enough to avoid litigation for fraud and/or negligence. Now that’s smart!

| Peter Klein |

If Nicolai’s calculator fetish isn’t nerdy enough for you, check out this videotaped lecture on the impact of the Commodore 64 computer. A panel of industry pioneers (including Steve Wozniak) explain the Commodore 64’s impact on the computer industry.

For a more scholarly treatment of this industry’s evolution see Dick Langlois’s “Cognition and Capabilities: Opportunities Seized and Missed in the History of the Computer Industry,” in Garud, Nayyar, and Shapira, eds., Technological Innovation: Oversights and Foresights (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

| Peter Klein |

We discussed earlier the increasingly quantitative nature of accounting research, what some call accountics. (When I hear that term I’m reminded of a cartoon I once saw showing a woman dressed as a dominatrix standing before a company reception desk: “Oh, you must be the new accountrix.”)

Tomo Suzuki’s paper, “Accountics: Impacts of Internationally Standardized Accounting on the Japanese Socio-economy” (Accounting, Organizations, and Society, April 2007), argues that the postwar spread of Western accounting practices “directed new courses of the Japanese economy and firms through the development of ’statistical habits of thought.’ ” A follow-up paper (same journal, August 2007 issue) traces the history of Japanese accounting practices in more detail, emphasizing the role of academic accountants in fostering the postwar accounting revolution. (See, professors can make a difference!)

| Peter Klein |

It’s hosted by Spain’s Urrutia Elejalde Foundation and takes place in San Sebastián, 14-17 July 2008. (Basque Country, not Spain, if you prefer.) The impressive speaker list includes Jon Elster, Diego Gambetta, Herb Gintis, Russell Hardin, and Edna Ullmann-Margalit, among others. Details here.

| Peter Klein |

What do bosses do? asked Stephen Marglin in his famous 1974 article. Nothing productive, he said; they create hierarchies with task specialization to extract value from laborers. Despite heroic efforts by David Landes and others to set the record straight, the myth has persisted, in some quarters, that “management” — including intermediation, market-making, the facilitation of transactions, etc. — does not create economic value, but merely redistributes it. Making widgets is OK, but merely facilitating widget transactions is wasteful or redundant.

How about transactional lawyers? Do they add value by reducing transaction costs, minimizing the chance of ex post litigation, reducing regulatory burdens, acting as reputational intermediaries, providing confidentiality, or exploiting economies of scope? Or do they simply extract value from the transacting parties?

An interesting paper by Steven Schwarcz, “Explaining the Value of Transactional Lawyering,” uses survey data to examine this question and finds that reducing regulatory costs appears to be the main source of added value. The results “present a very different picture of how business lawyers add value than that portrayed by existing scholarship, challenging the reigning models of transactional lawyers as ‘transaction cost engineers’ and ‘reputational intermediaries,’” activities in which lawyers do not necessarily have a comparative advantage. Instead, suggests Schwarcz, it is precisely lawyers’ expertise in (business) law that gives them a role in the contracting process. (The broader question of whether legislators, most of whom are also lawyers, deliberately design rules of contract law, regulation, administrative procedure, and the like so that only other lawyers can understand them, is not addressed.) (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Former O&M guest blogger Dick Langlois reviews Thomas McCraw’s Schumpeter biography, Prophet of Innovation, for EH.Net.

McCraw is at his best in conveying Schumpeter the man, providing an engaging and beautifully written portrait of this larger-than-life and often tragic figure. McCraw also works hard at weaving Schumpeter’s economics into the life story and at making the ideas supply their share of the drama. The result deepens our understanding of a fascinating and complex man and of the difficult times in which he lived, even if it does not necessarily sharpen our understanding of his economics or add much that is new to his biography.

See also our previous comments on McCraw and Schumpeter more generally.

| Peter Klein |

Those of you in the Washington, DC area may wish to drop by “The History, Impact, and Future of Private Equity: Ownership, Governance, and Firm Performance,” November 27-28 at AEI. The lineup features heavyweights like Michael Jensen, Glenn Hubbard, Josh Lerner, Steve Kaplan, Ken Lehn, Karen Wruck, Annette Poulsen, Mike Wright, and David Ravenscraft, along with a few not-so-heavyweights like me. From the conference announcement:

From humble beginnings twenty-five years ago on Wall Street, the leveraged buyout boom has developed into a veritable industry; today, 30 percent of all corporate merger and acquisition activity in the United States is driven by buyout firms, and the sector commands over $2 trillion in leveraged assets. Along with hedge funds and real assets, private equity is now seen as an important alternative investment class, and fundamental changes in corporate control, governance, modern capital markets, institutional investing, and the funding of entrepreneurial pursuits have all been driven by the growth and evolution of the private equity sector.

My view is that the growth of the PE sector represents an increasingly important manifestation of entrepreneurship — not only because private equity helps fund new ventures, but because the creation of new financial instruments such as high-yield (”junk”) bonds, the establishment and management of diversified buyout funds, the use of private equity to restructure public enterprises, and the like are themselves entrepreneurial acts, given an appropriately broad understanding of entrepreneurship.

| Peter Klein |

It was a great pleasure watching Robert Higgs accept the 2007 Schlarbaum Award for Lifetime Defense of Liberty at the Mises Institutes’s 25th Anniversary Celebration in New York. Bob is an outstanding scholar whose 1987 book, Crisis and Leviathan, should be required reading for Naomi Klein. He is a fierce defender of political and economic freedom, private property, and the rule of law. Bob also edits the Independent Review, a terrific interdisciplinary journal that values clear exposition as well as academic rigor (a rare combination, these days).

Earlier this year a group of Bob’s friends, colleagues, and former students produced a Festschrift volume, Government and the American Economy: A New History, in his honor. Contributors include Price Fishback (the editor), Gary Libecap, Stanley Engerman, Robert McGuire, Richard Sylla, John Wallis, Jeff Hummel, Robert Margo, Mark Guglielmo, Werner Troesken, Sumner La Croix, Randal Rucker, E. C. Pasour, Jr., Lee Alston, and Joseph Ferrie. The result is “a series of stimulating cameos by a distinguished assemblage of economic historians,” writes reviewer Gavin Wright (himself a distinguished economic historian). Check it out!

| Peter Klein |

John Nye is a very interesting economic historian. I still remember his fiery (and controversial) talk at the inaugural ISNIE conference in 1997, in which he urged new institutional economists to separate themselves from their brothers and sisters in mainstream economics. (Other participants, such as Paul Joskow, thought this was a bad idea.)

John’s new book, War, Wine, and Taxes: The Political Economy of Anglo-French Trade, 1689-1900 (Princeton, 2007) argues that Britain was not, contrary to popular perception, devoted to free trade after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846. The British retained high tariffs on French wine, among other goods, leading to substantial welfare losses among Britons. (more…)

| David Hoopes |

Many people make incorrect assumptions about capitalism. Some would have us believe that capitalism is based on greed, selfishness, and promotes behavior that is completely self-centered. This is a common interpretation of Smith’s advice to allow people to make decisions based on self-interest. Examples are easy to find in the many organization theory-based papers complaining about economics and economists.

Two very good papers can aid in a deeper understanding of the invisible hand. First is James Q. Wilson’s “Adam Smith on Business Ethics.” A central point Wilson makes is that Adam Smith assumed people will behave with a moral sense. Wilson, “A moral man is one whose sense of duty is shaped by conscience; that is, by that impartial spectator within our breast who evaluates our own actions as others would evaluate it.” By suggesting people be allowed to make decisions based on their own self interest Smith was not advocating selfishness and greed. What then was he advocating?

This leads to the second paper, Harold Demstez’s “The Theory of the Firm Revisited.” In the third paragraph Demsetz notes that the debate between mercantilists and free traders was over the role of the government in the economic affairs of the state. “Is central economic planning necessary to avoid chaotic economic conditions?” The great achievement of the perfect competition model, what Demsetz argues should be called perfect decentralization, is its abstraction from centralized control of the economy.

Thus, the central element to capitalism is that decision making is pushed down as far as possible. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

Cousin Naomi is in the news again. Her new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, is attracting a lot of attention in the econo-blogosphere, virtually all negative. The Economist offers this guide to the commentary. The only sensible person who likes the book appears to be Joe Stiglitz, taken to task here by Pete Boettke. Klein’s shocking treatment of Milton Friedman has raised hackles everywhere (see this and this). Ultimately, her thesis is unsupported by any historical evidence. When one is a “cultural critic,” however, facts and reason are not too important.

| Peter Klein |

Here is a terrific resource: the World Freedom Atlas, a “geovisualization tool” — i.e., cool interactive map — for world statistics. It includes the most important variables used by economists including income and purchasing power from the Penn World Table, legal origin from LLSV, economic freedom from the Fraser Institute and the Heritage Foundation, policy constraints from Witold Henisz, the World Bank’s governance indicators, and a host of other variables from Acemoglu, Johnson and Robinson; Barro and Lee; Easterly and Levine; Persson and Tabellini; and several others. All that’s missing is links to the original datasets. Still, an impressive tool. (HT: Mike Kellermann)

| Peter Klein |

We’ve written before about the history of industrial recycling, how waste products, both natural (manure, animal parts) and man-made (scrap metal, old rags), were frequently collected and re-used, for profit, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

Now comes another paper on the market for manure: Liam Brunt’s “Where There’s Muck, There’s Brass: The Market for Manure in the Industrial Revolution” (Economic History Review 60, no. 2, May 2007, 333-72). (Non-gated version here.) Writes Brunt:

In this paper we present the first detailed assessment of off-farm manure in English agriculture, by quantifying the use of 21 varieties. We consider how many people were using each type of manure; how much they were using; and the total effect on wheat yields. . . . We show that by 1770 there were local, regional and even international markets for manure; and we can explain the pattern of manure use by supply and demand. We estimate that off-farm manure raised yields by a steady 20 per cent throughout the period 1700 to 1840.

I suppose I could have titled this post (channelling Tyler Cowen) “Markets in Everything: ________ Edition” (fill in the blank yourself).

| Peter Klein |

Brian Caplan and Edward Stringham explore the private provision of dispute-resolution services:

Must the state handle the adjudication of disputes? Researchers of different perspectives, from heterodox scholars of law who advocate legal pluralism to libertarian economists who advocate privatizing law, have increasingly questioned the idea that the state is, or should be, the only source of law. Both groups point out that government law has problems and that non-state alternatives exist. This article discusses some problems with the public judicial system and several for-profit alternatives. Public courts lack both incentives to be customer oriented and pricing mechanisms, plus they face problems associated with the bureaucratic provision of services. When parties can choose their tribunals, in contrast, those tribunals must serve customers and be mindful about conserving resources. Competition between arbitrators also can allow for experimentation and the provision of customized services rather than a centrally planned, one size fits all system. Contracts with an arbitration clause can easily stipulate the choice of tribunal, and we argue that if government courts simply refused to overrule binding arbitration agreements, de facto privatization could easily take place. This article discusses how private adjudication of disputes could enable the market to internalize externalities and provide services that customers desire.

See also these comments about Bruce Benson’s Enterprise of Law.

| Peter Klein |

Video and audio files that may intrest our readers:

• The 2006 and 2007 Allen Hamilton Eminent Scholar in International Management awards presentations. See lectures by C. K. Prahalad (with commentary by Yves Doz) and Ikujiro Nonaka (with commentary by David Teece).
• Economic history lectures from Brad LeLong: Marx, Rostow, Kuznets, Gerschenkron; The Slow Spread of Industrialization; Political Economy 101 .
• Original video from the 1962 Milgram experiment (via Max Raskin). As chilling today as 45 years ago. (See also the wiki.)

| Peter Klein |

Information technology (IT) intensity is correlated with firm-specific performance heterogeneity, controlling for industry- and time-fixed effects and a host of strategic and financial control variables. Moreover, high rates of firm-specific performance heterogeneity are associated with subsequent increases in industry total factor productivity (TFP). In other words, IT can be interpreted as a general-purpose technology that unleashes a wave of innovation, leading to a shakeout followed by performance improvements — Shumpeter’s ”gale of creative destruction.”

So say Hyunbae Chun, Jung-Wook Kim, Randall Morck, and Bernard Yeung in “Creative Destruction and Firm-Specific Performance Heterogeneity” (NBER Working Paper No. 13011, April 2007). (Non-gated version here.) There’s not much theory but the empirical exercise is interesting and worth a look.

| Peter Klein |

Several papers in economic history, law, and political economy argue that the corporate form owes its emergence and persistence not to superior performance, but to legal privilege. This two-part series by Piet-Hein van Eeghen in the Journal of Libertarian Studies (1, 2) makes such a case, as do many essays by regular O&M commentator Kevin Carson. I tend to be somewhat skeptical of this literature, finding it insufficiently comparative institutional and not always consistent with the historical record as I understand it.

A new paper by Naomi Lamoreaux, whose work I very much admire, may force me to rethink my views, however. In “Putting the Corporation in its Place” (NBER Working Paper No. 13109) Lamoreaux and her coauthors Timothy Guinnane, Ron Harris, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal argue that entrepreneurs in common-law countries tended to choose the corporate form over the next-best alternative, the partnership, only because a still more desirable alternative, the private limited liability company, was not available. (more…)

| Peter Klein |

John T. Flynn’s 1941 classic Men of Wealth is back in print, courtesy of the Mises Institute. I’ve had an old copy on my shelf for years, having once stumbled across a rare first edition at Bell’s Books in Palo Alto. The book profiles Jacob Fugger, John Law, the Rothschilds, Robert Owen, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Henry Green, Hachirobei Mitsui, Cecil Rhodes, Basil Zaharoff, Mark Hanna, John D. Rockefeller, and J. Pierpont Morgan. Unlike the typical business history text (ahem), it is written in a lively and engaging style. To get the flavor, consider this excerpt from chapter 9 on the little-known but highly influential arms dealer Basil Zaharoff:

Zaharoff played a leading, if not the leading, role in that strange world comedy of the arms makers leading the double life of chauvinists and internationalists. They gave us the spectacle of Boers mowing down English regiments with Vickers’ pom-poms, Prussian surgeons picking out of Prussian wounded Austrian shrapnel fired by Krupp’s cannon, French poilus massacred by shot poured out of guns made in Le Creusot, English Tommies killed by weapons produced by Armstrong and Vickers, and American ships sent to the bottom by U-boats built on models supplied by American submarine builders. Zaharoff was the master of what one biographer has called the “principle of incitement,”under which war scares were managed, enemies created for nations, airplanes sold to one nation and antiaircraft guns to her neighbors, submarines to one and destroyers to another. He did what the cigarette people did, what the liquor industry, the beauty industry did — created a demand for his merchandise. The armament industry became a game of international politics, the arms salesman a diplomatic provocateur, the munitions magnates of all nations partners in cartels, combines, consolidations; exchanging plans, secrets, patents. He was the greatest of all the salesmen of death, and, as one commentator has observed, if you would see his monument, look about you at the military graveyards of Europe.

You can read the rest of the chapter here.