Much has been done to organize the economic life of the planet, particularly during the past two centuries. Prior to the industrial revolution the economic life of the masses of the people, with the exception of a little trading and shipping, was localized and individualized in the village, the commune, the homestead and the home. The industrial revolution, with its dependence upon mechanical power, served to concentrate economic life in larger units—the factory, the plant, the industrial city. As a matter of necessity, organization followed in the wake of this concentration. The owners of industry organized on the one side: the workers organized on the other. Besides these two major forms of organization within the field of industry, there was the organization of the state, which has played a leading rôle in the life of present-day society.
The organization of the owners, which is far more complex and more highly developed than that of the workers, has followed four general lines:
1. The organization of one line of industry. Woolen mills in Massachusetts and in New York unite to form the American Woolen Company: sugar refineries are consolidated into the American Sugar Refining Company.
2. The organization of those industries which are concerned with the turning out of one product—industrial integration. The iron ore beds of Michigan, the coal and coke industries of Pennsylvania, lime-stone quarries, smelters, converters, rolling-mills, railroad connections and selling organizations all unite into the Cambria Steel Company or the Carnegie Steel Company. Timber tracts, ore properties, mills, mines and selling agencies join to form the International Harvester Company.
3. The organization of unlike and unrelated industries—manufacturing industries, public utilities, insurance companies, railroads, trust companies and banks brought under the financial control of Morgan and Company or of some other banking syndicate.
4. The banding together of these various groups in mutual welfare associations such as chambers of commerce, boards of trade, manufacturers' associations and so on.
None of these organizations has any primary interest in geographic areas or in national boundaries. Half of the business of the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey is carried on outside of the United States; the International Harvester Company puts up plants in Canada and in Russia; United States Steel buys properties in Mexico; The National City Bank opens agencies in Cuba and in Argentina. The great modern business units deal, not with political boundaries, but with economic areas. They seek out, as the field for their operations, abundant resources, cheap labor, attractive markets.
The present economic system has made great strides toward the world organization of economic life in a comparatively short time. Australia, Canada and the United States furnish excellent illustrations of the way in which continents have been surveyed, spanned with steel, populated and exploited in three or four generations. So completely has the economic system been altered that the seventeenth century world would not recognize its infant great-grandson of the twentieth century.