BUSINESS HISTORY SEMINAR.

The article focuses on the business history seminar that was held on May 4, 1980 at the Polytechnic of Central London in England. Professor T.A.B. Corley read a paper entitled "Communications, Entrepreneurship and the Managing Agency System: The Burmah Oil Company 1886-1928." In this Corley explores the appropriate type of organisation in the pre-jet and telephone era for firms with extended lines of communication. In another paper on scholar Charles Morrison and the Organisation of British Investment in Argentina, professor Charles Jones described how, by the end of the nineteenth century a substantial group of Anglo-River Plate financial, land, railway and urban utility companies had been established under the effective control of London financier Charles Morrison and his associates. The structure of this coup and the manner in, which it operated support the view that a simple liberal theory based on the idea of a multitude of independent decision-makers responding to differential rates of return in such a way as to maximise short-term income is altogether inadequate as an explanation of patterns of British investment in the late nineteenth century.