The Birth of Big Business in the US

3 July 2006 at 11:01 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

David L. Mason reviews David O. Whitten and Bessie E. Whitten’s The Birth of Big Business in the United States, 1860-1914: Commercial, Extractive and Industrial Enterprise (Praeger, 2005), in the latest EH.Net book review. It sounds like a valuable overview of an extremely important period:

The roughly fifty-year period between the end of the Civil War and the start of World War I was one of the most dynamic periods in American economic history, in no small part because of the rise of big business. _The Birth of Big Business in the United States_, an introductory work intended for students and the general reader, chronicles the developments and processes that led to the rise of large-scale firms in both well-known industries like oil and steel, as well as in the extractive industries like mining and forestry. Throughout the concisely written narrative, the authors highlight the role of government in both encouraging and restraining the expansion of big business. This work succeeds in placing industrialization in the broader context of American history, an important consideration for first-time students of business history.

Good to see the role of government highlighted. As an aside, many economists and management scholars seem surprisingly uninformed about the role of the state in the emergence of modern business enterprise. As a young lad I was strongly influenced by the Kolko thesis, at least as interpreted by Murray Rothbard and his students (1, 2). Today, while the better strategy and managerial economics texts include some modern political economy, fields like organizational behavior, labor economics, industrial organization, and some others appear stuck with the naive, high-school-civics-class view of government as benevolent and efficient protector of the common man against the rapacious capitalist.

Incidentally, let me take this opportunity to plug one of the best, and underappreciated, recent books in this area: Butler Shaffer’s In Restraint of Trade: The Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918-1938 (Bucknell University Press, 1997).