Does your city have a Carnegie Library? If so, it is probably a wellbuilt
brick building containing the original mission-style furniture of
the late 1800s, the time at which Carnegie constructed his libraries. Almost every
small town in Texas has one. Carnegie created these libraries because in his youth, a
rich Pittsburgh merchant decided to open his personal 400-volume library to the public,
allowing anyone to take out one volume a week to read. Carnegie read most of
them, and all his life attributed his business success to the knowledge he had gained
from books. Carnegie decided that an important way he could help other people succeed
in business was to provide them with access to valuable knowledge. So he built
his new libraries in places such as small Texas towns where books were a rare sight.
However, as one of Carnegie's workers commented: "A library is small use for a
man who works hard twelve hours a day."
Biographers claim it was the guilt Carnegie felt later in life that led to his great
philanthropy - guilt because of the way he had treated his workers and the fact that
his former company monopolized the steel industry for decades. He ended up giving
away most of his huge fortune, establishing the Carnegie Foundation, which
remains today one of the richest nonprofit organizations in the United States.
We can tell a lot about why business is the way it is today by looking at how it has
evolved over time. The history of business is the story of people’s constant struggle to
obtain scarce resources to increase their well-being - resources such as the food, shelter,
land, money, and savings people need to survive, protect their futures, and
improve the future prospects of those they care about. The story of Carnegie's rise
from poverty to wealth and power illustrates just this struggle.
In this chapter, we look at the evolution of business and how and why the nature of
business has changed over time. We go back in history and trace the way the control
of land and labor have been used to build capital and wealth. First, we chart the
development of Feudalism, a business system based on the control of property rights
to land and labor. Second, we look at the operation of money in a business system,
the way it facilitates trade, and promotes the accumulation of capital. Third, we
examine mercantilism, the business system in which products are traded across markets
and countries until they are put to their most highly valued use.
We then describe the Industrial Revolution and the emergence of capitalism. Capitalism
is the economic or business system in which private property rights become
the basis for the production, trade, and distribution of goods and services. Finally, we
take a look at the different forms of business organizations that have emerged over
time to make more productive use of resources, enabling people to build capital and
wealth. By the end of this chapter you will appreciate how business has always centered
on the quest to obtain capital, wealth, and the power and influence that goes
with them.
