The rise of big business

From the Industrial Revolution onwards, big business has been an integral part of the economic landscape.

Yet the response by economists to big business has ranged from an enthusiastic endorsement of mass production to an immense concern about trusts and monopolies.

This set collects some of the most important early responses to the big business phenomenon.

It addresses issues such as cartels, trusts, mergers, acquisitions and rationalizations, and charts the development of the theory of the firm from Marshall to Coase.

This invaluable set examines the origins of today's transnational corporations shows that many British big businesses were as well run and efficient as their US counterparts analyses how receptive big businesses were to new technology assesses attitudes to domestic and international cartels These books show that productivity differences in mass production industries were large, and methods of corporate organization were leaner and more efficient than is commonly believed.

The major entrepreneurial weakness was a failure to appreciate the full commercial significance of new technologies.