Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw, eds. The European Linen Industry in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxv + 334 pp. ISBN 0-19-925565-2, $95.00 (cloth).

The linen industry has not attracted nearly as much interestfrom economic and business historians as has the cotton industry.In large measure, this reflects cotton’s central rolein the industrial revolutions in Britain and elsewhere, as wellas cotton’s importance to the history of the southernUnited States. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,the linen industry struggled to compete with the cotton (andwool) industries.     

Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones, eds. Business History around the World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xv + 425 pp. ISBN 0-521-82107-X, $65.00.

This important cluster of perspectives on practice and prospectin business history derives from a fall 1998 colloquium heldat Bocconi University in Milan, sponsored jointly by the Institutefor Economic History, the Italian Association of Business Historians(ASSI), Reading University, and Johns Hopkins University. Thecollection echoes its support team’s transnational diversity,presenting an opening set of conceptualizing essays, elevenconcise national/regional overviews, and four closing chaptersthat identify themes for comparative business history. Botha snapshot of the discipline’s preoccupations in the late1990s and a handbook of historiography and work then in progress,Business History around the World is a volume every referencelibrary should own. For practicing historians and graduate students,in my view, parts one and     

Barry Shank. A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xvii + 328 pp. ISBN 0-231-11878-3, $50.00 (cloth).

Barry Shank has written a history of commercially produced greetingcards in the United States. Using vocabulary, concepts, andthe terrifically long sentences common to cultural studies,Shank argues that greeting cards reveal the emotional life ofcard-buying Americans. That inner life, he argues, was fundamentally"conditioned" and "structured" by American business culture.Many business historians will find Shank’s book challengingto read and not always convincing. If they persevere, and occasionallysuspend empirical demands, they will     

Herbert R. Lottman. The Michelin Men: Driving an Empire. London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2003. ix + 310 pp. ISBN 1-86064-896-7, $27.50.

Michelin presents a formidable opportunity for business historians.It has been a closely held, largely family-dominated Frenchfirm that developed into a leading multinational. The firm isone of the few survivors from the plethora of nineteenth-centuryrubber and tire manufacturers in Europe and North America. Itsmultinational influence extended substantially after 1970 throughthe success of its radial tires in North America. The firm reinforcedthis advantage by investing     

Richard Sennett. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. 214 pp. ISBN 0-300-10782-X, $25.00 (paper).

Richard Sennett is among the most prominent sociologists ofwork and labor in the English-speaking world, and he has writtenanother in his recent series of books on how major changes incorporate culture are effecting the personal experience andsocial outlook of workers of various kinds. Given the importanceof his focus on human impacts in a time when most economic discussionis about technology and money, it is hard to pass up this book.At the same time, it is equally hard to believe that one willlearn anything new. We     

Christopher Kobrak and Per H. Hansen, eds. European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 1920-1945. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. xiv + 261 pp. ISBN 1-57181-629-1, $60.00.

In recent years pressure from international Jewish organizationshas led many European corporations to open previously closedarchives to historians. In Germany a number of major businessesand financial institutions also have commissioned corporatehistories by leading historians, in order to throw light ontheir activities during the Nazi period. This book is a collectionof papers (in the case of Gerald D. Feldman based on one ofthese corporate histories) presented at a series of workshops     

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     

Geoffrey Jones. Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 340 pp. ISBN 0-19-927209-3, $144.50 (cloth); ISBN 0-19-927210-7, $44.50 (paper).

Geoffrey Jones introduces Multinationals and Global Capitalismin the preface as a radically revised edition of his The Evolutionof International Business: An Introduction (Routledge, 1996),which has hitherto remained the only history of the developmentand impact of multinationals worldwide. He indicates, quiterightly, that in the meantime globalization has been recognizedas a controversial and widely debated phenomenon. Indeed, itis indicative of the sweeping changes that have reshaped ourperceptions of the world economy that, at its publication lessthan a decade ago, Evolution was innocent of the very term ‘globalization’;     

Richard Coopey, Sean O'Connell, and Dilwyn Porter. Mail Order Retailing in Britain: A Business and Social History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. viii + 248 pp. ISBN 0-19-829650-9, $95.00 (cloth).

There is little doubt that there is a great need for more booksof this type. This book is a welcome addition to books in theOxford University Press collection that address issues in businesshistory. Therefore, as an addition to a collection that includesGeoffrey Jones’s British Trading Companies in the Nineteenthand Twentieth Centuries, this book provides access to a fascinatingaspect of British commercial     

Ronald Seavoy. Origins and Growth of the Global Economy: From the Fifteenth Century Onward. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. 275 pp. ISBN 0-275-97912-1, $70.95.

Few scholars are confident enough to believe that they can describethe history of the "origins and growth of the global economy"in 275 pages. But Ronald Seavoy, an emeritus professor of historyat Bowling Green State University, uses that history to illuminatetwo themes: to show that the global economy is built on thefoundation of European commercial imperialism and "to show thatthe global economy as it is currently evolving is capable ofproducing     

Jan Luiten van Zanden and Arthur van Riel. The Strictures of Inheritance: The Dutch Economy in the Nineteenth Century. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. xv + 377 pp. ISBN 0-691-11438-2, $55.00 (cloth).

The economic history of the Netherlands during the nineteenthcentury demonstrates some remarkable features when comparedwith other countries such as the United Kingdom or Belgium.Dutch industrialization is "slow," "late," and even "different,"often attributed to a lack of natural resources (like coal andore) and/or entrepreneurial spirit. This protracted developmentgenerated some debate between Dutch historians, but no consensuswas reached until the publication in 1968 of J. A. de Jonge’sbook on Dutch industrialization between 1850 and     

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., and Bruce Mazlish, eds. Leviathans: Multinational Corporations and the New Global History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xiii + 249 pp. ISBN 0-521-84061-9, $65.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54993-0, $22.99 (paper).

The advertising extract, which is this book’s first sentence,reads "Leviathans represents a path-breaking effort to lookat multinational corporations in the round, emphasizing especiallytheir scope, history, development, culture and social implication,and governance problems" (p. i). Given the appropriately globalprestige of the editors and of several of the chapters’authors, one’s curiosity is unavoidably piqued. Whilefew readers will ultimately judge the book to be path-breaking,many will welcome its contribution to     

Ben Ross Schneider. Business Politics and the State in Twentieth-Century Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xix + 312 pp. ISBN 0-521-83651-4, $70.00 (cloth); 0-521-54500-5, $26.99 (paper).

This volume is a valuable addition to the extensive and disparatebibliography on business associations, state-business relations,collective action, corporatism, and civil society. One of itsmajor achievements is that it will help to redirect researchon these topics. The book encompasses a wide field of scholarlywork hitherto undertaken in a variety of disciplines: politicalscience, economics, sociology of organizations, and economicand business history. In terms of business history, Schneider’sbook is an important contribution to the study of     

Marcelo Bucheli. Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000. New York: New York University Press, 2005. xi + 241 pp. ISBN 0-8147-9934-5, $45.00 (cloth).

The United Fruit Company (UFC) long has been maligned as animperial bastion of American business interests, quick to exploitits workers for a buck and slow to return profits to where itscommodity is extracted. This interpretation came early to Colombiancritics after a 1928 massacre of striking workers left hundreds,maybe thousands, dead. Gabriel Garcia Marquez exaggerated thedetails of this violence for One Hundred Years of Solitude,and few others have believed the company did more     

John Landers. The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-industrial West. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiii + 440 pp. ISBN 0-19-924916-4, {pound}60.00 (cloth); 0-19-927957-8, {pound}22.50 (paper).

This book recalls literature that emanated from the Annalesschool of historians, for, like the annalistes, Landers is fascinatedby the longues durées of history. His subject is preindustrialEurope from roughly the second century (with occasional forays back to the Iron and Bronze Ages) to the nineteenthcentury . He takes his thesis from E. A. Wrigley: preindustrial Europe relied overwhelmingly on organicsources for food, heat, energy, crafts, manufactures, commerce,and the means     

Werner Abelshauser. The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany's Path toward the New Economy and the American Challenge. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. vii + 168 pp. ISBN 1-84545-072-8, $45.00.

Werner Abelshauser is a professor of economic history at theUniversity of Bielefeld. He has written about Germany’seconomic history since 1870, with specific studies concerningKrupp between 1933 and 1951, BASF since 1952, and Germany’seconomic history since World War II. Part of a series devotedto historiography, this volume grew out of     

Victor J. Tremblay and Carol Horton Tremblay. The U.S. Brewing Industry: Data and Economic Analysis. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. xiv + 379 pp. ISBN 0-262-20151-8, $40.00 (cloth).

The brewing industry does not appear to have attracted the sameresponse from business historians in the United States thatit has in countries such as Britain, where there have been severalauthoritative monographs. This book is therefore welcome. Writtenby the leading economists of American brewing, Victor J. Tremblayand Carol Horton Tremblay, it provides a comprehensive and analyticaloverview of the industry in the modern period. After setting out the general demand and cost     

H. Roger Grant. "Follow the Flag": A History of the Wabash Railroad Company. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004. xii + 291 pp. ISBN 0-87580-328-8, $49.95 (cloth).

"Follow the Flag" reaffirms Roger Grant’s status as oneof the preeminent historians of transportation in the UnitedStates. The book reflects the predilection of many railroadhistorians to focus on a specific firm, rather than addresslarger thematic issues. Far more than being "just another railroad,"however, the Wabash reflected changes in its political, economic,and social milieu, while also playing a leading role in shapingthe very environment that surrounded it. The Wabash rose from the ashes of an 1830s Illinois internal     

Gijs Mom. The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiii + 423 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7138-7, $54.95.

Automotive historians have long dismissed the electric vehicle;who would want a car with limited speed that had to be rechargedevery hundred miles? But in 1905, Gijs Mom reminds us, "morethan half of all commercial vehicles in the United States wereelectric powered," and by 1940 tens of thousands of electriccars and trucks had been produced (pp. 206, 265). In the UnitedStates and Europe, electric vehicles appeared as taxicabs, deliveryvans, and even fire engines, as     

Francois Caron, ed. Les grandes Compagnies de chemin de fer en France, 1823-1937. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 2005. 411 pp. ISBN 2-600-00942-6, {euro}41.61 (paper).

This is a book that is hard to describe and hard to review.It is certainly not an ordinary study of railway history buta kind of broad survey, based on a series of financial reportsconcerning the great French private railway companies, as drawnup between 1882 and 1936 by financial analysts of the CreditLyonnais Bank and preserved in the "Archives Historiques duCrédit Lyonnais." François Caron, dean of Frencheconomic and railway historians, has selected large parts ofthe original reports and has added his own comments and explanations.It