ABSTRACT
Modern Commercial Tendencies.—The commercial evolution of the last hundred and fifty years shows three main tendencies at work, similar to those we have already observed operating in industry, namely, expansion, specialization, and reintegration. The expansion of commerce can be illustrated in many ways: by the increasing volume of commercial transactions, by the growing proportion (now nearly a fifth) of the active population engaged in the exchange and transport of goods, 1 by the widening of the market for articles of common consumption, by the extension of foreign trade and the increasing range and variety of the commodities that enter into it. Commercial specialization is illustrated by the clear-cut distinction which has arisen between wholesale and retail trading, a distinction which in earlier days was somewhat blurred, where it existed at all, by the tendency of the general merchant to give place to the specialist in particular lines, and by the appearance of a great army of commercial functionaries, brokers, commission agents and commercial travellers, each of whom devotes himself exclusively to some single branch of the great business of buying and selling goods. Finally, reintegration shows itself in the growing tendency of commerce and industry to draw together again, the manufacturer taking over the work of wholesaling and retailing, or the merchant reaching back to control the earlier processes of manufacture.
