Journal of Economic History

Table of Contents - March 2008 - Volume 68, Issue 01  

ARTICLES

Logistics, Market Size, and Giant Plants in the Early Twentieth Century: A Global View

LESLIE HANNAHa1

a1 Visiting Professor, Department of Economic History, London School of Economics, Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom. E-mail: lesliehannah@hotmail.com.

Abstract

The businesses of developed Europe—transporting freight by a more advantageous mix of ships, trains, and horses—encountered logistic barriers to trade lower than those in the sparsely populated United States. Economically integrated, compact northwest Europe was a multinational market space larger than the United States, and, arguably, as open to interstate commerce as the contemporary American domestic market. By the early twentieth century, the First European Integration had enabled its manufacturers to build more than half the world's giant plants—many more than in the United States—as variously required by factor endowments, consumer demand, and scale economies.

Footnotes

Thanks, for assistance with census materials, to Yoko Yonekawa and the staff of the Economics Library of Tokyo University and, for advice, to Jeremy Atack, Lou Cain, Andrew Godley, Howard Gospel, William Lazonick, David Merrett, Gijs Mom, Philip Scranton, Raymond Stokes, Kazuo Wada, Peter Wardley, Takeshi Yuzawa, participants in seminars at Göttingen, LSE, Paris, Rotterdam, and UCLA, and two anonymous referees.