ABSTRACT
THE movement towards concentration of units has, in our opinion, wherever it is found, its fundamental and exclusive explanation in certain forces of modern capitalism which relate to the structure of production and distribution. The development of transport, of the technique of conservation of goods, and of improved communication systems necessarily led to bigger units in industry and in trade.! Centralisation of distribution meant centralisation of production wherever it became possible. But centralisation of distribution at first did not mean concentration of retail business; it merely meant producing for consuming centres, far away from the producing centres, producing for whole well-defined regions, national or even international, but certainly not local. This centralisation seemed for a long time to be an isolated development, as Macrosty's remark, quoted at the head of this chapter, shows. But at last the movement of concentration set in here as well. There were a great many different reasons for this, but all of them were derived from the same basic cause. At bottom, the capitalist development of distribution, being a movement towards the sale of mass-produced goods to uniform customers in centralised markets necessarily and inevitably led to an enlargement of the units of distribution. But although the fundamental driving force was the same, it operated in very diverse ways.
