Berger, Dina. The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry: Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night

Dina Berger's The Development of Mexico's Tourism Industry:Pyramids by Day, Martinis by Night traces the historical foundationsof the tourism industry in México from 1928 to the earlypost–WW II period. The author argues that during thisperiod tourism became a medium for the modernization and economicdevelopment of México. According to Berger, the "creationof a tourist industry emerged as the cornerstone to state-ledmodernization programs in the late 1920s at the height of revolutionary     

Price V. Fishback et al. Government and the American Economy: A New History

In Government and the American Economy: A New History, a distinguishedpanel of economic historians chronicles and evaluates how governmenthas shaped U.S. economic development and growth from the colonialperiod to the present. The volume is dedicated to Robert Higgs,whose seminal thesis on the growth of government—thatit is a crisis-induced and persistent process—is one ofthe volume's underlying themes (and the subject of Higgs’chapter titled, "The World Wars"). The other is that government     

Susannah Walker. Style and Status: Selling Beauty to African American Women, 1920-1975

Susannah Walker's well-researched and well-written examinationof the African American beauty industry, from approximately1920–1975, makes an important contribution to the growingfield of African American business history. Style and Statusprovides a detailed account of the triumphs and travails ofAfrican American entrepreneurs who satisfied the hair care needsof black women. One of the major issues faced by historic and contemporary AfricanAmerican purveyors of "beauty" to black women is the questionof what (or whose) "standard"     

Peter H. Spitz, ed. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium: Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2003. x + 387 pp. ISBN 0-941901-34-3, $45.00 (cloth).

Peter Spitz’s new book is a continuation of his earlierwork, Petrochemicals: The Rise of an Industry (1988), whichdetailed the development of the modern chemical industry beginningin the 1930s. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium picksup the story at the end of the 1970s and examines the momentouschanges that have taken place in the last twenty-five years.Subtitled Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization, this isan excellent collection of essays by industry     

Bringing Political Economy Back in

Like so many of the fields that have flourished in history departmentsin recent years, business history has an uneasy relationshipwith political history. When business history first emergedin the United States as a separate field in the 1920s, its foundersstressed the importance of lavishing on business records thesame reverence that political historians accorded the personalpapers of lawmakers. Only in this way, business historians assumed,would it be possible to convince other historians of the centralityof business leaders—and, more broadly, of economic institutions—tothe making of the nation. Much has changed since the 1920s. Yet the adversarial relationshipof business historians toward political history persists. Thismindset is evident     

Robin Pearson. Insuring the Industrial Revolution: Fire Insurance in Great Britain, 1700-1850. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2004. xiii + 434 pp. ISBN 0-7546-336302, $99.95 (cloth).

Robin Pearson’s Insuring the Industrial Revolution providesa richly detailed account of the British fire insurance industrythrough the mid-nineteenth century. Whereas most previous accountshave focused on single companies, Pearson’s study encompassesthe entire industry of London and provincial firms and seeksto place the industry within the larger context of British economichistory. British economic historians have long overlooked the contributionof insurance, and service industries in general, to the nation’seconomic     

Paul Jobling. Man Appeal: Advertising, Modernism, and Menswear * Linda Welters and Patricia Cunningham, eds. Twentieth-Century American Fashion

Since the New Millennium, the study of fashion and apparel hasblossomed as an academic subdiscipline, riding on the achievementsof curatorial pioneers like Claudia Kidwell and the next generationof historians, Valerie Steele and Christopher Breward. In thepublishing world, Berg Press has capitalized on the fervor withthe journal Fashion Theory and the dress, body, and culturebook series. Over the past decade, more than three dozen books—monographsand edited volumes—have come out of the dress, body, andculture series. Many of     

Charles F. McGovern. Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship, 1890 1945

Charles McGovern's Sold American: Consumption and Citizenship,1890–1945, explains how Americans came to see consumerismas central to their national identity. More specifically, itexamines how two key interest groups—advertisers and consumeractivists—battled over and ultimately helped define thepolitical meaning of consumerism. According to McGovern, in the early twentieth-century, advertisersassumed consumers were "childlike, irrational, ungovernable,and unpredictable" (p.60), and hoped to sway this malleablemass by convincing them of the deeper value of consumerism.To     

Frederick H. Smith. Caribbean Rum: A Social and Economic History

Frederick Smith's early evocation (p. 2) of Sidney Mintz's 1985master-work Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in ModernHistory is most unfortunate because Smith is no Mintz—exceptthat they are both anthropologists. This sad little book suffersby comparison on most every page. In contrast to Mintz, it isnot good social history, it is not good economic history, andit is not good anthropology. More particularly for readers ofEnterprise Society, Caribbean Rum is not good     

Arthur L. Norberg. Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. x + 347 pp. ISBN 0-262-14090-X, $40.00 (cloth).

Arthur Norberg’s Computers and Commerce is a much-neededstudy of the technical and business history of the Eckert-MauchlyComputer Corporation (EMCC) and Engineering Research Associates(ERA). Although there have been many historical studies aboutIBM, there have been relatively few accounts describing thefirm’s primary competitors or of the early formation ofthe industry. Norberg’s study offers valuable insightsinto the latter by providing a detailed history of the technicaldecisions and financial strategies of the two entrepreneurialfirms that     

Robert M. Collins. Transforming America: Politics and Culture during the Reagan Years

Robert Collins has written two superb books treating modernAmerican business history—The Business Response to Keynes(1981), and More: The Politics of Growth in Postwar America(2000). In this, his most recent and elegantly written book,he takes on the rather more slippery, amorphous cultural historyof the period. He even dives undaunted into that most murkyphenomenon, "postmodernism." There, he has some delightful thingsto say about "the therapeutic culture" and the "self-esteem"fad that it produced. In his treatment     

Peter von Staden. Business-Government Relations in Prewar Japan

Business–Government Relations in Prewar Japan by Petervon Staden deals with the Japanese iron and steel industry fromthe late 1910s through the early 1930s. The period was the turbulentyears for the industry, finally leading to the formation ofJapan Steel Corporation in 1934. Japan Steel Corporation wasa huge production firm, by Japanese standard, whose market sharewas over 90 percent in pig iron and over 50 percent in finishedsteel of the Japanese market, so that it became virtually amonopoly firm. How and why was such a semimonopoly iron     

Old structures versus new logic in the electronics industry

Electronics is a branch of industry in which the competitive position of European firms is relatively weak, compared to the chemical, motor vehicle and mechanical engineering industries. This fact appears to some observers—in view of the electronic industry’s high rates of growth and its technologically “strategic” importance—to represent a threat to Europe’s future industrial development. This has led to intensive political discussions in recent years and to a multitude of initiatives for the revitalisation of the European electronics industry. This paper analyses the extent to which the discussions and initiatives have in fact dealt with the problems in hand.     

Edith Sparks. Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920

The history of business is an ever expanding topic. Numerousbooks on the role of women in modern American business and onwhy women continue to lag behind men in both earning power andbusiness leadership are available. But, few such studies haveplaced the issue of women in business in a historical context.Edith Spark's Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in SanFrancisco, 1850–1920 is thus both welcome and overdue.Sparks, an assistant professor of history at the University     

John Patrick Diggins. Ronald Reagan: Fate, Freedom, and Making of History

More words have been written about Ronald Reagan than most otherpresidents combined, but few of these volumes are serious historicaltreatments—the history has been too fresh and the archivalmaterial too difficult to access. As a result, while the literatureon Reagan is vast, the scholarship has been scanty. But, overthe past few years several books on Reagan have appeared (includingRichard Reeves' President Reagan and Gil Troy's Morning     

Roger Horowitz. Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation. Baltimore, Md.: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xiii + 170 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8240-0, $35.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-8018-8241-9, $19.00 (paper).

Roger Horowitz opens Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste,Technology, Transformation with the observation that Americais a meat-eating nation. Throughout his narrative, he examinesthe forces that allow so much meat—six to eight ouncesper person per day—to satiate Americans’ appetite.The central questions driving Horowitz’s analysis are(a) what is the relationship between producing and consuminga product and (b) how does the nature of the good affect thisrelationship? In     

Pioneering Modern Corporate Governance: A View from London in 1900

Around 1900 Britain was exceptionally suited to pioneering largescale enterprises because of the precocious development of itsequity markets and London's experimentation with a more eclecticrange of corporate governance techniques than the world's smallerand less cosmopolitan financial centers. Information dissemination,incentives, and reputation—developed by a serendipitousmix of legal compulsions and flexible voluntarism—setthe scene for the growth of large, UK-based, national and internationalcorporations in the twentieth century. "The investment business is not with us as well developed oras well understood as it is in England." W. H. Lyon, Capitalization (Boston, 1913), 207.     

Michael Augspurger. An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. viii + 292 pp. ISBN 0-8014-4204-4, $34.95 (cloth).

A curious blend of business and intellectual history, with anemphasis on the latter, Michael Augspurger’s An Economyof Abundant Beauty offers a reading of Fortune magazine fromits founding in 1930 through the election of Dwight D. Eisenhowerin 1952. Distancing himself from other observers of the publicationwho have interpreted Fortune’s heavy coverage of highculture and aesthetics during the 1930s alongside more prosaicbusiness news as the result of a distinct split between a progressivestaff of writers, including James Agee and Archibald MacLeish,and more conservative editors and publisher Henry Luce, Augspurgerclaims to discern a     

Clifford J. Doerksen. American Babel: Rogue Radio Broadcasters of the Jazz Age. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. xi + 157 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3871-0, $34.95 (cloth).

In American Babel: Rogue Broadcasters of the Jazz Age, CliffordDoerksen presents a lively discussion of the economic implicationsof cultural hierarchy on radio broadcasting. In this slim volume,only 176 pages (including footnotes), he tells the stories ofseveral radio pioneers who have been largely ignored in theretellings of the medium’s history. The difficulties inexploring the world of independent broadcasters long has beena lament of radio scholars, and Doerksen’s book represents     

Leslie Berlin. The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 402 pp. ISBN 0-19-516343-5, $30.00.

The last few years have seen a number of books on the rise ofSilicon Valley. Martin Kenney’s Understanding SiliconValley (2000), Ross Bassett’s To the Digital Age (2002),Frederick Terman at Stanford by C. Stewart Gillmor (2004), andmy own book on Making Silicon Valley (2006) are notable examples.Another addition to this literature is The Man behind the Microchip:Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by