Skip to Main Content
HBS Home
  • About
  • Academic Programs
  • Alumni
  • Faculty & Research
  • Baker Library
  • Giving
  • Harvard Business Review
  • Initiatives
  • News
  • Recruit
  • Map / Directions
Faculty & Research
  • Faculty
  • Research
  • Featured Topics
  • Academic Units
  • …→
  • Harvard Business School→
  • Faculty & Research→
Publications
Publications
  • 2018
  • Book

American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940

By: Laura Phillips Sawyer
  • Format:Print
ShareBar

Abstract

American Fair Trade explores the contested political and legal meanings of the term fair trade from the late nineteenth century through the New Deal era. This history of American capitalism argues that business associations partnered with regulators to create codes of fair competition that reshaped both public and private regulatory power.

Rather than viewing the history of American capitalism as the unassailable ascent of large-scale corporations and free competition, American Fair Trade argues that trade associations of independent proprietors lobbied and litigated to reshape competition policy to their benefit. At the turn of the twentieth century, this widespread fair trade movement borrowed from progressive law and economics, demonstrating a persistent concern with market fairness—not only fair prices for consumers but also fair competition among businesses. Proponents of fair trade collaborated with regulators to create codes of fair competition and influenced the administrative state’s public-private approach to market regulation. New Deal partnerships in planning borrowed from those efforts to manage competitive markets, yet ultimately discredited the fair trade model by mandating economy-wide trade rules that sharply reduced competition. Laura Phillips Sawyer analyses how these efforts to reconcile the American tradition of a well-regulated society with the legacy of Gilded Age laissez-faire capitalism produced the modern American regulatory state.

Keywords

Economic Systems; Competition; Policy; Fairness; History; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; United States

Citation

Phillips Sawyer, Laura. American Fair Trade: Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018.
  • SSRN
  • Find it at Harvard
  • Purchase

More from the Author

    • Business History Review

    Introduction

    By: Laura Phillips Sawyer and Herbert Hovenkamp
    • 2019
    • Faculty Research

    U.S. Antitrust Law and Policy in Historical Perspective

    By: Laura Phillips Sawyer
    • 2019
    • Faculty Research

    Voting Trusts and Antitrust: Rethinking the Role of Shareholder Rights and Private Litigation in Public Regulation, 1880s to 1930s

    By: Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Laura Phillips Sawyer
More from the Author
  • Introduction By: Laura Phillips Sawyer and Herbert Hovenkamp
  • U.S. Antitrust Law and Policy in Historical Perspective By: Laura Phillips Sawyer
  • Voting Trusts and Antitrust: Rethinking the Role of Shareholder Rights and Private Litigation in Public Regulation, 1880s to 1930s By: Naomi R. Lamoreaux and Laura Phillips Sawyer
ǁ
Campus Map
Harvard Business School
Soldiers Field
Boston, MA 02163
→Map & Directions
→More Contact Information
  • Make a Gift
  • Site Map
  • Jobs
  • Harvard University
  • Trademarks
  • Policies
  • Accessibility
  • Digital Accessibility
Copyright © President & Fellows of Harvard College