Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak, eds. Consuming Motherhood. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. ix + 323 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3429-1, $62.00 (cloth); 0-8135-3430-5, $22.95 (paper).

Motherhood imposes a birth of sorts for the women involved,according to the various authors in this exceptionally wellintegrated and provocative volume of essays. Women are rebornto a new status of ‘mother’ and simultaneously asa new kind of consumer of goods—goods in the form of services,consumer products, and even of babies. This volume weds thestudy of consumerism to the anthropological study of motherhoodand represents a genuine contribution to an array of fields,including     

Frank Dobbin, ed. The New Economic Sociology: A Reader. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. vii + 565 pp. ISBN 0-691-04905-X, $65.00 (cloth); 0-691-04906-8, $27.95 (paper).

This volume is designed to ease the entry of advanced sociologystudents into the growing literature in their discipline aboutmarkets and the organizations and individuals who operate withinthem. It can serve this useful function for business historiansas well, although it will take some tenacity on the part of"splitters" to make sense of what the "lumpers" are gettingat. The collection’s twenty chapters include articles fromleading journals and book excerpts and are organized around     

Harm G. Schroter. Americanization of the European Economy: A Compact Survey of American Economic Influence in Europe since the 1880s. Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2005. xii + 268 pp. ISBN 1-4020-2884-9, {euro}.84.53.

This volume is a rather ambitious and, in my opinion, successfulattempt to synthesize a topic of great debate in recent years.Schröter differentiates his work from the earlier literaturein two aspects. While earlier works have tended to examine primarilythe postwar years, Schröter chooses to deal with a muchlonger period (that is, from the final decades of the nineteenthcentury up to present day). Second, Schröter chooses notto limit his examination only to business or economic issuesbut also—and especially—to further extend his analysisand deal with how they are interwoven with cultural and socialaspects.     

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     

Kaoru Sugihara, ed. Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850-1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xv + 295 pp. ISBN 0-19-829271-6, $140.00.

This important cluster of perspectives on the growth of theAsian international economy originates from a 1993 workshopheld in Osaka on the role of China and overseas Chinese networksin the Asian international economy. It is the first volume inthe series of "Japanese Studies in Economic and Social History"edited by Osamu Saito and Kaoru Sugihara. As the title suggests,this book does not deal with issues concerning commodity productionand consumption; it focuses instead on matters     

David Reisman. Schumpeter's Market: Enterprise and Evolution. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2004. vii + 294 pp. ISBN 1-84376-164-5, $120.00.

The life and works of Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) continueto fascinate social scientists of diverse disciplines and schools.For some economists Schumpeter’s institutional and evolutionaryapproach is the only way to practice economics; but even forthe mainstream the current buzz about endogenous growth andthe knowledge economy has renewed interest in his writings,especially those on technology and entrepreneurship. Businesshistorians always have been attentive to Schumpeter’sentrepreneurs and the dynamic of creative destruction, and globalizationnow provides a     

Douglas A. Farnie and David J. Jeremy, eds. The Fibre That Changed the World: The Cotton Industry in International Perspective, 1600-1990s. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2004. xxxiv + 614 pp. ISBN 0-19-925566-0, $185.00 (cloth).

This volume sets a new yardstick for future research on thecotton industry, from early modern times to the present. Theeditors have brought an international perspective to a researcharea too long dominated by national or regional studies. Therehave been excellent comparative studies in the past, but thisvolume is distinguished by its unwavering commitment to studythe volume and means of exchanges and technology transfer acrossborders and oceans. With the exception of     

James W. Cortada. The Digital Hand, Volume 2: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xv + 629 pp. ISBN 0-19-516587-X, $59.50.

This large and extensive volume is the second in an ambitiousprojected three-volume series that examines nothing less thanhow the information revolution of the second half of the twentiethcentury impacted every aspect of the U.S. economy. The firstvolume, weighing in at a mere 500 pages or so, was The DigitalHand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing,Transportation, and Retail Industries (Oxford University     

Richard Coopey, ed. Information and Technology Policy: An International History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xvi + 346 pp. ISBN 0-19-924105-8, $99.50 (cloth).

Richard Coopey’s Information and Technology Policy isan edited volume featuring an impressive array of scholars whoprovide nuanced accounts of national governmental policies relatedto the computer and (to a lesser extent) software industries.As Coopey writes in his introduction, the post–World WarII period is remembered as a time of American political, economic,and technological ascendancy. In the design, manufacture, anddistribution of computers, the United     

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     

Kevin Binfield. Writings of the Luddites. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xxviii + 279 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7612-5, $49.95 (cloth).

On the whole this volume offers more than its title suggests.Kevin Binfield has collected and annotated a wide array of textsconcerning not only the specific activities of the Ludditesbut also the wider economic and political contention of the1810s. He takes as his purpose the "textual recovery" of workingpeoples’ rhetorical strategies from the Luddite era. Todo this, he has thoroughly scoured national, county, and cityarchives, local newspapers, collections of several major businesses     

Richard Perren. Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840

This is a very British book about the international meat industry.A volume in Ashgate's Modern Economic and Social History series,its principal contribution is charting the relationships betweencountries engaged in the meat business, especially the nationsin Latin America, plus Australia and New Zealand that exportedmost of their production to the United Kingdom. The author notes several times that Britain was "the largestmarket for internationally traded meat." His analysis throughmuch of the volume is     

Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, Gelina Harlaftis and Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou, eds. Diaspora Entrepreneurial Networks: Four Centuries of History. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 2005. 411 pp. ISBN 2-600-00942-6, {euro}41.61 (paper).

This book is the product of two conference meetings, the firstheld in Corfu, Greece, in 2001 and the second in the BuenosAires International Congress in 2002. In addition to an introductionand other brief preliminary pieces, the volume contains nineteenpapers under four different headings. The first and the seconddeal with the early modern and modern periods and are a seriesof case stories. The third part contains four papers of moregeneral import, and the fourth consists of a single     

Mark Duckenfield, Stefan Altorfer, and Benedikt Koehler, eds. History of Financial Disasters, 1763-1995

In a History of Financial Disasters, Stefan Altorfer has assembleda collection of contemporary accounts and journal articles toexamine the history of financial crises since the eighteenthcentury. The collection is divided into three volumes with eachchapter devoted to one financial crisis. The first volume examinesimportant financial disasters prior to 1850, including earlyEuropean financial crises in 1763 and 1772–73, and theAssignat Inflation during the French Revolution. This is followedby a discussion of the 1918–1919 crisis of the SecondBank of the United States, the London Crisis of 1825, the Panic     

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     

Sheldon Garon and Patricia L. Maclachlan, eds. The Ambivalent Consumer: Questioning Consumption in East Asia and the West

This book, edited and introduced by Sheldon Garon and PatriciaMaclachan, represents the first comparative volume on globalizationof consumer culture especially from the perspective of EastAsia. This volume is the end result of a seminar series organizedby Abe Fellowship Program and funded by the Japan FoundationCenter for Global Partnership. The title of this book indicates the challenge facing the editorsapproaching consumerism in such a comprehensive and ambitiousway. Understanding consumerism has always been an appealing     

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     

Stuart B. Schwartz. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2875-0, $59.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-8078-5538-3, $22.50 (paper).

This volume examines the surprisingly complex history of thewestward shift in sugar production from the Mediterranean toAmerica in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Many factorsinfluenced this shift, including those most often studied: therise and growth of merchant capital, slavery, and technologicalchange. The local-level studies aggregated here reexamine thisdevelopment and thereby reveal the complex evolution and thegreat     

Liquidity,exchange listing,and common stock performance

The liquidity of securities—the relationship between volume of trading and changes in market price—has won increasing recognition as an element of investment strategy in recent years. Relatively high liquidity is deemed to be a desirable characteristic of a stock, especially for the institutional investor, who typically trades in large volume. Thus, firms can generally be expected to seek means of enhancing the liquidity of their shares. One of the supposed means of accomplishing this is by listing one's stock on a national securities exchange. This paper examines the relationship of common stock liquidity to both exchange listing and price behavior during major up and down movements in the market. Our conceptual and empirical analyses indicate that liquidity is linked to price behavior; and we suggest that the view held by at least some corporate officers—that exchange listing increases liquidity—may be erroneous. More specifically, it appears that when the amount of firm capitalization is taken into account, exchange listing does not result in greater stock liquidity.     

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