Richard (Wesleyan University, USA) Adelstein 
The Rise of Planning in Industrial America, 1865-1914 [PDF ebook] 

Central economic planning is often associated with failed state socialism, and modern capitalism celebrated as its antithesis. This book shows that central planning is not always, or even primarily, a state enterprise, and that the giant industrial corporations that dominated the American economy through the twentieth century were, first and foremost, unprecedented examples of successful, consensual central planning at a very large scale.