The Dynamics of Big Business

Part I

Historical Features of Italian and Spanish Capitalism

It has been written that, if a citizen of the Roman Empire could be transported some eighteen centuries forward in time, he would have found himself in a society he could have learned to comprehend without great difficulty. “Horace would have felt himself reasonably at home as a guest of Horace Walpole and Catullus would soon have learned his way among the sedan chairs, the patched-up beauties and the flaring torches of London streets at night” (Waddington 1960, 277). The First Industrial Revolution disrupted this continuity during the last decades of the eighteenth century. However, it was only from the beginning of the twentieth century, and particularly from its second half onward, ...