Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on May 29, 2007
Enterprise and Society 2007 8(2):297-347; doi:10.1093/es/khm026
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The Role of Pollution Regulation and Litigation in the Development of the U.S. Meatpacking Industry, 1865–1880
Associate Professor, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley. Contact information: Haas School of Business, #1900, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720 - 1900.
crosen{at}haas.berkeley.edu
Business historians have treated the emergence of large, modern, vertically integrated meatpacking firms in the second half of the nineteenth century as the economically rational and inevitable product of the industry's search for ways to maximize profits through technological innovation, vertical integration, and the achievement of economies of scale and scope. This is only part of the story, however. Society's efforts to force the industry to abate its environmental pollution through government regulation and private lawsuits also stimulated and shaped these processes of modernization.
I would like to thank Ken Lipartito and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions on how to improve this article. I would also like to thank Roger Horowitz for helping me get access to materials relating to the Sellers litigation. Many thanks also to the friends who gave me feedback on the paper that became the basis for this article and the people who commented on it when I presented it at the annual meetings of the Business History Conference and the American Society for Environmental History.