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     

Steve J. Wurtzler. Electric Sounds: Technological Change and the Rise of Corporate Mass Media

In the 1920s, a series of striking innovations in sound reproductionmade the American parlor—and movie house—noisierplaces. Improvements in audio recording fostered a new demandfor the phonograph. Millions of Americans began buying theirfirst radios, even as the infant industry struggled to establishits economic base and define its cultural mission. By the late1920s, the motion picture industry was producing talking features. In Electric Sounds, Steve J. Wurtzler     

S. Max Edelson. Plantation Enterprise in Colonial South Carolina

One of the latest books to reappraise the economy of the AmericanSouth is also one of the best. In Plantation Enterprise in ColonialSouth Carolina, S. Max Edelson presents an examination of thecolonial plantation society that is remarkable both for thedepth of its research and the nuance of its arguments. Takingaim at the stubbornly persistent image of stagnant plantationsand planters more interested in being patriarchs than entrepreneurs,Edelson details the rise and maturation of a society that     

Editor's Introduction

With this issue, Enterprise & Society embarks on its tenthyear of publication. It seems (to me, at least) a very longtime ago when, a bit before the turn of the century, Will Hausman(William and Mary) and Pat Denault (Harvard) commenced the processof designing a fully refereed quarterly journal to build onthe foundations Business and Economic History had developed.BEH was for decades the Business     

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’;     

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     

From Artisans to "Factories": The Interpenetration of Craft and Industry in English Cheese-Making, 1650-1950

This article traces the uneven development of English cheese-makingfrom its early commercialization to the eventual triumph ofthe "cheese factory." The narrative shows how contemporary actorsinitiated and adapted to changes in technology, distribution,consumption, and regulation. It indicates that artisanal practiceshave both borrowed from and become integrated with industriallogics and strategies, exemplifying a process that Charles F.Sabel and Jonathan Zeitlin termed the "recombinablility andinterpenetration" of different forms of economic organization[World of Possibilities: Flexibility and Mass Production inWestern Industrialization (Cambridge, U.K., 1997), 2–3].International comparisons are introduced to clarify the reasonsfor England’s halting and idiosyncratic transition toindustrial-scale cheese-making.     

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     

John Franch. Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006. vii + 374 pp. ISBN 0-252-03099-0, $45.00 (paper).

Robber Baron, John Franch’s biography of Charles TysonYerkes, provides a fascinating window into the workings of laissez-fairecapitalism. Yerkes, one of the most notorious self-made menof nineteenth-century America, embodied the drive, avarice,and unscrupulousness of his age—taking each to its limits.Robber Baron is an academic work that should appeal to a wideraudience. Yerkes’s dealings are fascinating: the samemen did business with him time after time as they tried to getthe     

Shop Talk: Liberalism, Consumerism, and the American Revolution

T. H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer PoliticsShaped American Independence. Oxford: Oxford University Press,2004. xviii + 380 pp. ISBN 0-19-506395-3, $30.00. The Marketplace of Revolution is the culmination of more thantwenty years of sustained inquiry by the distinguished earlyAmerican historian T. H. Breen into the economic culture ofcolonial America. Sweeping in scope and magisterial in conception,it sets forth a novel interpretation of the American Revolutionthat is predicated on the assumption that the pursuit of happinessin the eighteenth-century America referred more to the promiseof personal fulfillment than to the promotion of the commongood. In the language of colonial historians, Breen’sAmerican revolutionaries were paragons of ‘bourgeois virtue’rather than ‘civic humanism.’ Breen’s principalhistoriographical foil is Bernard Bailyn and the so-called republicaninterpretation of the American Revolution with which Bailyn     

John Storey, ed. The Management of Innovation. 2 vols. Cheltenham, U.K.: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2004. xxxi + 734 pp. (vol. 1); ix + 570 pp. (vol. 2). ISBN 1-84376-429-6, $495.00 (cloth).

Edited by John Storey of Open University Business School inthe United Kingdom, The Management of Innovation (MoI) consistsof fifty-three of the most important social science works onorganizational and technological innovation. Predominantly journalarticles with some book chapters, the contents of the twin volumesare organized into nine sections that, as Storey says in hisintroduction, shift from overviews and general issues to morenarrowly focused topics. In the former category are three sections:Theoretical Perspectives and Overviews; National Systems, Diffusionand Historic Trajectories; and Business Strategy, Entrepreneurshipand Innovation. In the latter category are the remaining sixsections: Technology Strategy and New Product Development; Barriersand Enablers; Managing Innovation through     

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     

Chandler in a Larger Frame: Markets, Transaction Costs, and Organizational Form in History

In 1977, when Alfred D. Chandler's pathbreaking book The VisibleHand appeared, the large, vertically integrated, "Chandlerian"corporation had dominated the organizational landscape for nearlya century. In some interpretations, possibly including Chandler'sown, The Visible Hand and subsequent works constitute a triumphalistaccount of the rise of that organizational form: the large,vertically integrated firm arose and prospered because of itsinherent superiority, in all times and places, to more decentralized,market-oriented production arrangements. A quarter century later,however, the Chandlerian firm no longer dominates the landscape.It is under siege from a panoply of decentralized and market-likeforms that often resemble some of the "inferior" nineteenth-centurystructures that the managerial enterprise had replaced.     

Daniel W. Hamilton. The Limits of Sovereignty: Property Confiscation in the Union and the Confederacy during the Civil War

The Limits of Sovereignty is a concise, well written, and wellargued account of the shifting relationship between state powerand individual property rights during a defining moment in UShistory. Through its examination of government confiscationin the north and south, the book provides historians with insightinto the legal factors contributing to economic and businessdevelopments during the Civil War and Reconstruction. DanielHamilton argues that the various confiscation acts of the CivilWar,     

Alison Isenberg. Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It

Although academic and popular observers have mourned the deathof Main Street and blamed its decline on objective economicforces, Alison Isenberg challenges these assumptions in hermonograph Downtown America. Currently an associate professorof history at Rutgers University, she began her study as a doctoraldissertation at the University of Pennsylvania. Isenberg focuseson the changing nature of commercial districts from the latenineteenth century to the present day. She argues that businesspeople, municipal officials, city planners, real estate professionals,downtown residents,     

Fred Turner. From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism

The Whole Earth Catalog provided the commune-dwellers of the1960s with a forum in which to discuss tools and systems forbuilding alternative life styles. From Counterculture to Cybercultureexplains why and how the Catalog's perspective on tools andsystems became a dominant paradigm for information networksand the technology industry. Using archival material and hisown interviews with many key figures, Fred Turner has writtenan engrossing and in-depth account of the role the Catalog andits founder, Stewart Brand, played     

Robert E. Wright. The First Wall Street: Chestnut Street, Philadelphia, & The Birth of American Finance

The First Wall Street is Robert Wright's latest installmentin his campaign to highlight financial institutions as the drivingforce in the economic and political history of the Early Republic.Wright reminds us that prior to Wall Street's ascendance inthe 1830s, Chestnut Street in Philadelphia was the nation'sfinancial center and the birthplace of some of America's mostimportant financial innovations. Wright argues that despite its physical disadvantages as a port,Philadelphia thrived because its climate of     

The genesis of macroeconomics: new ideas from Sir William Petty to Henry Thornton

Annual reports are situated artefacts which relate a longitudinal grand narrative or corporate (auto)biography. This paper explores the narrative reporting of two former asbestos manufacturers, Turner &; Newall in the UK and James Hardie in Australia. Asbestos features prominently in the industrial expansion and decline of both companies as the toxic health effects of this ‘magic mineral’ became evident over time. This paper finds evidence of several distinct phases of reporting of asbestos, from reporting it as a source of unmitigated value, to a source of risk and finally as a threat to corporate viability. Each stage erased or re-situated the prior story of asbestos so that users of individual annual reports may be unaware of the grand narrative of asbestos in its transformation from ‘magic mineral to killer dust’.     

Dimitry Anastakis. Auto Pact: Creating a Borderless North American Auto Industry, 1960-1971

For Canadians, the Canada-US Automotive Products Trade Agreement,or Auto Pact, is considered an icon of successful industrialpolicy. How did it evolve? Who were the players? What were theirmotivations? What was its impact? These are the central questionsfor which Dimitry Anastakis seeks answers in Auto Pact: Creatinga Borderless North American Automotive Industry. This book stems from Anastakis's 2001 PhD thesis, Auto Pact:Business and Diplomacy in the Creation of a Borderless NorthAmerican     

Dwayne R. Winseck and Robert M. Pike. Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization, 1860-1930

Dwayne Winseck and Robert Pike present a wide-ranging studyof communications technologies, global media, and the growthof international cable and wireless telecommunications providersin Communication and Empire: Media, Markets, and Globalization,1860–1930. Over the course of ten chapters, Winseck, aprofessor of media studies at Carleton College, and Pike, ProfessorEmeritus of Sociology at Queen's University, uncover the complexorigins of the international telecommunications industry inthe mid-nineteenth century, and explore its growing influenceover commerce, information