What goes around

ALFRED CHANDLER, AMERICA’S leading business historian, once summed up the history of American business after the civil war as “ten years of competition and 90 years of oligopoly”. American business history has been defined by periods of intense competition followed by long periods of consolidation. The digital revolution is likely to repeat that pattern, but on a global scale.

The decades after the civil war saw bursts of intense competition in America’s two leading industries, oil refining and steelmaking, in which the robber barons quickly built up giant companies. Economies of scale and technological innovation caused productivity to rise and prices to fall, allowing the robber barons to present consolidation as the friend of the common man.