The Growth of Big Business in the United States and Western Europe, 1850-1939

Few developments in the world economy over the past century have been more controversial than the rise of big business and multinational enterprise. The activities of giant firms like general motors, Royal Dutch-Shell and Siemens seem to have increasingly dominated international economic relations and the individual economies in which they operate. Under attack from liberals as a threat to the competitive market and from Marxists as a devious regeneration of capitalism, a more balanced understanding of giant corporations has slowly emerged from the work of economists and business historians. Christopher J. Schmitz provides a brief survey of the nature and spread of big business in the United States and western Europe between the 1850s and World War II. He offers the non-specialist reader a critical guide to the massive outpouring of literature generated in this field. This study also assesses key theoretical approaches to the development of big business and managerial capitalism during their formative years. It concludes that desire to gain monopoly profit from controlled markets is an insufficient explanation of the larger part of past business concentration.