The history of commerce is
a long way from being written. Even an outline hardly exists. We have
no way to identify the first elements of Industrial Commerce.
If you focus on labor you will get some cane sugar producers in the Carribean as the forerunners of Industrial commerce because labor was treated as low cost and replaceable. If you focus on machine power you will get the production of fabrics and grains from windmills among the first. If you focus on marketing you will choose chinaware from England. There are historians who argue for the clock and for watch technology as the key elements in the introduction of Industrial Commerce.
It is also possible to focus on the legal environment
and you will have to skip from the East India Company to the state
chartered corporations in the mid 1800s in the U.S.
The nineteenth Century saw many critical industrial innovations from the management structure that used engineers in railroads, to large scale bond financing, to the retail introduction of fixed price and sales registers to replace bargaining with a sole proprietor.
Late in the nineteenth Century we get the first
glimpses of management and orders of magnitude reductions in cost with
Rockefellar's oil company and Carnegie's steel. Both of these
achievements were important because they established professional
management and meritocratic promotion. We also have to give credit to
quality control and its influence on management at Dupont and later at
General Motors.
I find one of the most interesting changes occured when the U.S. government dropped laws letting wholesalers set retail prices in 1959 and a tidal wave of imports that subsequently arrived in the early 1960s.
Ultimately I am most impressed with the recent creation
of a market for buying and selling corporations that came with the
first genuine conglomerate's. This recent innovation seems to be one
of the most significant developments in the past 50 years. I identify
IT&T as the first real conglomerate, run entirely by numbers at
headquarters. The open market for buying and selling corporations has
had a great impact on productivity.
The details of each of these innovations are fascinating and important.
Have I left out some obvious major element in the development of industrial commerce?