On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 21:04:13 -0700, Michael Snow <wikipedia(a)earthlink.net> wrote:
Stan Shebs wrote:
Another interesting exercise is to look at the
1911 encyclopedia
articles. Hundreds of obscure personages of ancient Rome each
have their own article, carefully documented and cited, but there
is no article for Standard Oil; it is briefly described in
Rockefeller's bio, and under Trusts, but there is no encyclopedic
description of the company itself, and ditto for the many other
companies of the time. Despite the evidence all around them that
corporations had come to be a significant part of their world,
it seems that the 1911EBers had the idea that corporations were
somehow "unencyclopedic", and to us today it looks like an odd
oversight in Britannica's coverage.
In their British Empire-centric view, the EB editors of 1911 looked
backward to empires of the past (especially Rome), and it's not
surprising that they didn't recognize the empires of the future that
would displace them. At the time, the concept of a commercial
corporation in most cases was still strongly tied to the individuals who
organized them, often as family firms, so it probably didn't seem
worthwhile to create another article that would simply duplicate
information already covered. Had they been using a wiki, they probably
would have created [[Standard Oil]] as a redirect to [[John D.
Rockefeller]].
They also probably thought commerce was below them.
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