Business History Review

In the late eighteenth century, northern Virginia's grain-based slave economy prompted a thriving but risky overseas trade. The merchants who conducted this trade sought to manage their risks by purchasing marine insurance, initially from British and northern U.S. sources. After the American Revolution, however, the expense and inconvenience of obtaining insurance abroad prompted merchants to create local institutions modeled on northern practices. Most notably, in 1797 Alexandria merchants established the Alexandria Marine Insurance Company, an incorporated entity that helped manage the risks of overseas trade during the dangerous Napoleonic Wars, enlarged local sources of capital, and, in turn, played a significant role in stimulating regional economic development. The appearance of this marine insurance company (and others like it) reveals the significant role that financial intermediaries played in the development of the southern slave economies in the early republic.

The risk of hurricanes made planting in the British Greater Caribbean, a region stretching from Barbados through South Carolina, an especially volatile and uncertain business during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The storms were a new experience for European colonists, and they quickly became the most feared element of the region's environment. Hurricanes routinely leveled plantations and towns, destroyed crops and infrastructure, and claimed hundreds of lives. The widespread destruction resulted in significant losses for planters and necessitated major reconstruction efforts. Most planters survived these economic shocks, often with the help of outside credit, but at times hurricanes were the breaking point for smaller or heavily indebted planters. The profits that came from sugar and rice kept planters rebuilding, but the threat posed by the storms shaped the experience of plantership in the region throughout the period.

This essay examines the origins of a managerial class in American business by exploring the dynamic economic and cultural milieu in which merchants and clerks forged apprenticeship and employment relations in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century northeastern cities. Apprenticeship unraveled as an institution in countinghouses and stores throughout this period, a casualty of the Revolutionary-era narrative touting economic opportunity and independence through the cultivation of character. Increased competition for clerkships in the early republic led to the establishment of waged relationships shorn of traditional obligations. Yet in an uncertain economic climate, apprenticeship endured in idealized form within an antebellum cultural debate about the meanings of success and the ways to achieve it. As clerks' work tasks, social status, and economic prospects changed, many attempted to hitch their hopes for advancement to the coattails of merchants with capital instead of starting their own businesses, decisions that foreshadowed the formation of corporate hierarchies in the late nineteenth century.

Unlike U.S. and British steel firms, Spanish steel manufacturers did not integrate their operations with wholesalers and retailers or distribute their output through the market. Instead, from 1928 onward, Spanish steel firms imposed various forms of vertical restraints on wholesalers, including exclusive dealing, stock quotas, and resale price maintenance. These restrictions prevented the iron-and-steel wholesalers, who banded together to form a cartel in 1910, from establishing their own pricing policies. In addition, the restrictions limited competition in the industry. After 1928, when the independent steel firms found it impossible to distribute their products through the main iron wholesalers, they had no choice but to join the Spanish steel cartel.