Currently, the terms regulation and deregulation are on everyone's lips. However, historical attempts to solve the problem of natural monopolies ranged between two extremes. On the one hand there was the government regulation of private companies in the U.S., and on the other hand there was government provision or nationalization of companies in Germany and most of continental Europe. At the interface between legal and economic history, this volume, the result of a German-American conference, focuses on the regulation of natural monopolies in network industries such as railways, energy or...