Financial Management, 1880-1934 (Foundations of Modern Management S.) - Tapa dura

The growth in the scale and scope of business enterprises during the late 19th century and early 20th century, especially in the USA, brought with it an increasing complexity in financial management. As corporations and trusts replaced partnerships, financial management took offered on new importance. The parallel growth in capital markets and the development of new ranges of financial instruments offered companies more and better options for raising capital. Indeed, it could be argued that the rise of large national and international corporations during this time was at least as much the consequence of changes in financial structures and markets as it was of new technology and new methods of organization. Just as in the 18th century the easy availability of capital drove the Industrial Revolution in Britain, so a century later it helped push the USA and its large corporations into the position of leaders of the world economy, and turned Wall Street into the world's largest financial centre. This set looks at some of the developments during the period 1880-1934. It includes works on the newly-recognized discipline of "corporation finance" by pioneers in the field such as William Lough, Edward Meade and Charles Gertenberg. It also includes observations and comments on these changes by writers such as W.W. Fowler, E.L.S. Patterson and William Ripley. As with earlier collections in the series, the works reproduced here show how a new and more systematic approach to the problems of finance changed the nature of financial management and led to the growth of corporate finance as it is now known.

Morgen Witzel is Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. He is editor-in-chief of Corporate Finance Review. He is the author of ten books and more than 500 articles, essays and reviews.