ABSTRACT

Technology played an important role in the increase in size of American business enterprises over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The railroads, with their large capital requirements and necessarily far-flung administrative structure, were by far the largest American corporations in the nineteenth century. Later corporations borrowed the mechanisms that they developed for supervising geographically separate middle managers. The railroads also encouraged the growth of other businesses by increasing the access of many firms to much more extensive markets. Large national retailing companies were the first to appear. Sears and Montgomery Ward were established as mail order distributors through railroad delivery.