The Role of Pollution Regulation and Litigation in the Development of the U.S. Meatpacking Industry, 1865–1880

Abstract

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.