American Fair Trade
Proprietary Capitalism, Corporatism, and the 'New Competition,' 1890–1940

Shows how, in the decades prior to the Great Depression, associations of independent proprietors partnered with federal regulators to create codes of fair competition.

Laura Phillips Sawyer (Author)

9781107434073, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 26 September 2019

392 pages
29 x 15.1 x 2.3 cm, 0.6 kg

'This is a fine work of legal history and business history, and it makes an important contribution to the literature on this formative period in the development of the American regulatory state.' Eric Hilt, Business History Review

Rather than viewing the history of American capitalism as the unassailable ascent of large-scale corporations and free competition, American Fair Trade argues that trade associations of independent proprietors lobbied and litigated to reshape competition policy to their benefit. At the turn of the twentieth century, this widespread fair trade movement borrowed from progressive law and economics, demonstrating a persistent concern with market fairness - not only fair prices for consumers but also fair competition among businesses. Proponents of fair trade collaborated with regulators to create codes of fair competition and influenced the administrative state's public-private approach to market regulation. New Deal partnerships in planning borrowed from those efforts to manage competitive markets, yet ultimately discredited the fair trade model by mandating economy-wide trade rules that sharply reduced competition. Laura Phillips Sawyer analyzes how these efforts to reconcile the American tradition of a well-regulated society with the legacy of Gilded Age of laissez-faire capitalism produced the modern American regulatory state.

Preface
Acknowledgments
Introduction: American competition: trade associations, codes of fair competition, and state building
1. Contracts and competition in an era of economic uncertainty, 1880–1890
2. The origins of American fair trade: the Sherman Antitrust Act and conflicting interpretations of law, 1890–1911
3. The economics and ideology of American fair trade: Louis Brandeis, resale price maintenance, and open price associations, 1911–1919
4. Institutionalizing the 'new competition', 1920–1928: Herbert Hoover and the adaptation of regulated competition
5. California fair trade: constitutional federalism and competing visions of fairness in antitrust law, 1929–1933
6. Managing competition in the Great Depression: between associational and state corporatism, 1929–1938
Conclusion: varieties of competition and corporatism in American governance
Bibliography
Case index
Subject index.

Subject Areas: Competition law / Antitrust law [LNCH], Company, commercial & competition law [LNC], 20th century history: c 1900 to c 2000 [HBLW], History [HB]