Over the past two decades, growing concentration of market power in the hands of a few large companies has reinvigorated popular critiques of “bigness.” The biggest targets for self-described “new Brandeisians” are technology companies, such as Google, Amazon, and Facebook. These papers build on this popular interest in “anti-bigness” as well as recent business history workshops (e.g. “Antimonopoly in Global Perspective,” Oxford, December 2021) to examine antimonopoly in the long twentieth century.
Tellingly, two papers focus on Big Ag rather than Big Tech. In “The Capper-Volstead Act at 100,” Victoria Woeste offers a retrospective on the Capper-Volstead Act of 1922, a landmark piece of legislation that created an antitrust exemption for American agricultural cooperatives. Ashton Merck’s paper, “Hope in Trusts: National Broiler Marketing Ass’n v. United States and the Limits of Countervailing Power,” describes how agribusiness firms unsuccessfully attempted to leverage this farmer’s exemption to fix chicken prices in the early 1970s - and in turn, helped create a global market for cheap chicken we know today.
Shaun Yajima’s paper, “Fuel, Fear, and Fault: Mass Media and the Monopoly Blaming during the German Coal Crisis in 1900” reminds us that mass media has always played an important role in constructing our understanding of “good” and “bad” forms of business cooperation, by tracking the impact of a “blame game” between the press and the German coal cartel. Richard John reconstructs the moral critique of the “liquor trust” in “Frances Willard, Anti-Monopoly, and the Liquor Machine in Victorian America.”
Taken together, these papers explore lesser-known cases in antimonopoly history, with an eye to transnational and global connections. Each of these papers also examines how competing moral visions - whether to protect the small farm, destroy immoral trusts, or promote ‘consumer welfare’ - have shaped the trajectory of antimonopoly thought in the twentieth century.