Abstract
Regulation of the business and economic life of the people was recorded in legal codes dating before 2000 B.C. Until the middle of the eighteenth century, regulation was accomplished by the church guilds, customs and legislation. Old statutes regulated all aspects of marketing and covered a wide variety of markets. The American colonies followed, the English idea of governmental control. Early Massachusetts and New York statutes fixed prices, wages, hours worked, and set limits on profit percentages. Large scale industry in the United States developed after the Civil War. Competition became bitter in the ensuing decades. In order to ameliorate the rivalry, competing sellers, upon occasion,banded together to fix prices and to allocate-production among themselves by uses of pools. Operating difficulties led to the use of "trusts" in which one company owned stock in other companies and attempted to fix prices by monopolization.