T mHE economic and political significance of international business is currently a fashionable subject of discussion. Public interest in the characteristics and probable future evolution of international corporations stems, in the main, from the recent rapid growth of American business investment in Western Europe: investment, that is, in manufacturing plant in which the United States parent company has an active controlling interest, rather than purely financial investment in stocks and bonds. On the one hand these American companies are seen as threatening the survival of European industries, and even, in France at least, the autonomy of the nation state, while on the other it is widely recognised that investment from across the Atlantic brings with it valuable components of technological and managerial skills, both seemingly in short supply in Europe. International business operations of this kind are not, of course, a new phenomenon on the world economic scene. The first wave of foreign investment by manufacturing companies began in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, and continued, gathering strength, up to 1914. Much of it was American, not only in Canada, where the introduction in 1879 of a protective tariff expressly designed to promote the growth of Canadian manufacturing industry acted as a major stimulus to United States companies, but also in Europe. Then, as now, this American investment tended to be concentrated in the technologically-advanced growth industries, such as specialised machinery, office equipment, automobiles and carbon black. A few European companies were also beginning to expand abroad: Lever set up his first soap factory outside Britain in 1899, and Alfred Nobel was establishing armaments factories all over Europe. Foreign business investment continued to grow, unspectacularly, between 1918 and 1939. However, it is with the second great wave of international business investment, the wave that started in the 1950s and is still growing in size and power, that we are concerned. A few figures will give some idea of the speed of growth and the present importance of manufacturing investment. Between 1950 and 1967 the United States' capital stake in European manufacturing industry increased more than ten times, to a figure of $9,800m. in the latter year. About half this investment was in the EEC, and a further 40 per cent. in the United Kingdom, where by 1966, sales by U.S.-controlled companies accounted