The effect of all of this is to drive away those who actually worked the land because they loved it, replacing them with hired hands running machinery, neither of which is likely to be kind to the land.

Monopoly

Perhaps the most familiar form of business except for perfect competition, monopoly situations result when there are many potential buyers for a product or service, but only one seller.

In the Grapes of Wrath, a monopoly situation is created as the banks decide to remove tenant farmers, preferring to sell the land to a single large conglomerate of landowners or even a single corporation.

Steinbeck could hardly have painted a harsher picture of this monopoly-in-progress, with scenes of huge bulldozers razing all evidence of the tenant farmers from the land. However, he also notes that the 'monopolization' of the Great Plains was seemingly an event bigger even than those landowners who...
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