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     

Kent H. Hughes. Building the Next American Century: The Past and Future of American Economic Competitiveness. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005. xxiii + 542 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8204-4, $55.00 (cloth); 0-8018-8203-6, $24.95 (paper).

It is paradoxical that the United States, a nation so recentlytriumphant in the Cold War, should be so gripped by anxietyabout its economic future. A burgeoning national debt and ayawning current account deficit, among other pressures, obligeAmericans to question how—and if—the next one hundredyears will bring another "American Century." Into this debatesteps longtime Washington insider Kent H. Hughes, who sets outwith the ambitious agenda of considering "America’s economicfuture and its economic past" while seeking to define a     

Paul J. Kubicek. Organized Labor in Postcommunist States: From Solidarity to Infirmity. Pittsburgh, Pa.: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004. xiv + 256 pp. ISBN 0-8229-5856-2, $29.95 (paper).

Labor unions in formerly communist societies have gone, in justfifteen years, from being large and sometimes very powerfulorganizations—think of Poland’s Solidarity—tobeing much smaller and weaker organizations. In discussing thisweakness, Paul Kubicek notes the irony that workers in communistsocieties "were able to organize to help overthrow a systemthat purportedly ruled in their name. However, they are poorlypoised to do battle against governments and policies that makelittle pretense to serve their interests"     

Elisabeth Koll. From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. xvi + 422 pp. ISBN 0-674-01394-8, $49.50 (cloth).

Elisabeth Köll has written more than a book about ZhangJian (1853–1926), a pioneer of modern business in China.This is an important study of enterprise organization, managementpractice, and the means by which Zhang’s Dasheng enterprisegroup changed the political economy of provincial Nantong, aYangzi River city near Shanghai. The author is focused firstlyon control and accountability in the management of the enterpriseand secondly on the institutional transfer—"the interpretation,adaptation and application" (p. 4)—of Western corporatestructures, such as the limited liability firm, to the Chinesebusiness     

Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia, eds. Constructing Corporate America: History, Politics, and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xii + 369 pp. ISBN 0-19-925189-4, $99.50 (cloth); 0-19-925190-8, $29.95 (paper).

Rationality, efficiency, meritocracy, productivity, innovation,professionalism: the people who have built, operated, and championedAmerican corporations have claimed these goals and means inorder to explain how and why limited liability firms evolvedin the United States. Such powerful constructions of ideas—noless than of steel—have seduced generations of analystsand citizens into accepting once contested corporate forms asthe inevitable outcomes of irresistible economic processes. The great achievements of Constructing Corporate America liein its compelling demonstrations that U.S. corporations’forms, functions, and discourses evolved—and still change—asproducts of their     

Paul Erker. Vom nationalen zum globalen Wettbewerb: Die deutsche und amerikanische Reifenindustrie im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert [From National to Global Competition: The German and American Tire Industry during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries]. 710 pp. Paderborn: Schoningh, 2005. ISBN 3-506-71788-X, X98.00.

Paul Erker begins with the question of how an uninspiring, black,nondurable commodity product such as a tire could be interesting.He emphasizes that, since its invention in 1888, the tire hasundergone several radical technical changes, and because hisstory is about competition the issue is thus thrilling and "evendramatic" (p. 9). It is for these reasons, and because the authorsystematically compares American and European firms, that thebook—written in German—should be presented to theAmerican reader.     

Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella, eds. Contract and Property in Early Modern China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. vii + 398 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4639-7, $65.00.

In 1887 the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society—ChinaBranch sponsored a symposium on "Chinese partnerships," in whicha number of eminent China hands such as E. H. Parker and ChalonerAlabaster shared their long experience with the subject. Thediscussants agreed, among other things, that liability for debtsof the firm was enforceable in Chinese courts, that this liabilitywas shared among the partners according to their contractuallydetermined shares in the business, and that a contractuallydesignated "managing partner" normally     

Jarol B. Manheim. Biz-War and the Out-of-Power Elite: The Progressive-Left Attack on the Corporation. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004. xii + 216 pp. ISBN 0-8058-5068-6, $34.50 (cloth).

Over the past ten years a large, diverse, and increasingly sophisticatedliterature has emerged to explain the decline—indeed thedeath—of liberalism and the rise of the New Right to politicaldominance. Jarol Manheim argues that the death knell for liberalismand the left has been rung too soon. While conservatism currentlyis the dominant American ideology, Biz-War contends that itfaces a real threat from a reinvigorated left now known by anew, less pejorative name, the Progressive movement. Manheim’s     

Robert H. Gudmestad. A Troublesome Commerce: The Transformation of the Interstate Slave Trade. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2003. xii + 246 pp. ISBN 0-8071-2884-8, $59.95 (cloth); 0-8071-2922-4, $21.95 (paper).

From the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe to J. T. Randolph, slavetraders stalked the pages of antebellum fiction and antislaveryliterature. Yet of the many facets of slavery that scholarshave examined in the past three decades, the one topic thathas been consistently understudied has been the internal slavetrade. Compared with other subjects deemed worthy of monographs—fromslave religiosity to rebelliousness to family structure—theinternal traffic in humans of the early to mid-nineteenth centuryhas been curiously ignored. The few exceptions include     

Clement M. Henry and Rodney Wilson, eds. The Politics of Islamic Finance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. vi + 307 pp. ISBN 0-7486-1837-6, $30.00 (paper).

Clement Henry and Rodney Wilson have assembled twelve essaysabout Islamic finance—six about thematic issues and sixabout case studies of Sudan, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia,and Egypt—plus an introduction and conclusion. Henry and Wilson’s introductory chapter is an excellentsummary of the phenomenon of Islamic banks, including theirorigins, size, and banking practices. The banks largely datefrom the mid-1970s. Purist Islamic economists thought Islamicbanking should be based on profit sharing, in which the depositor’sfunds are     

Philip Lawrence and David Thornton. Deep Stall: The Turbulent Story of Boeing Commercial Airlines. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. xii + 160 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4626-2, $79.95.

In the panoply of airframe manufacturers, the Boeing Companyholds special status. Founded in 1916, it has since the beginningof the jet age dominated the jet airliner market. In 1985 apassenger had a 75 percent chance of boarding a Boeing airlinerwhen flying virtually anywhere on the globe. Boeing attainedthat status with path-breaking jet transports—the 707,727, 737, 747, 757, and 767—as well as a host of variants.Much of this story is well known,     

Thomas C. Owen. Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism: Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. xiv + 275 pp. ISBN 0-674-01549-5, $49.95.

Fedor Chizhov (1811–1877) has long been undervalued inthe history of Imperial Russia, despite his manifest importancein journalism, Slavophile ideology, the development of industry,railroads, banking, and economic thought. The reasons for thisneglect are twofold. From a practical point of view, the sourcethat most illuminates Chizhov and his context—the candidand detailed diary he kept from the age of fourteen—hasnot been available to western researchers until recently, andSoviet (and later Russian) researchers made little use of it.The reason     

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.     

Christopher A. Reed. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. xvii + 391 pp. ISBN 0-7748-1040-8, $85.00.

In this pioneering study Christopher A. Reed addresses majorissues concerning the modernization of Chinese printing andpublishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The book’s most significant contribution is its focuson technology and business organizations. While the historyof print and publishing in China has drawn enthusiastic attentionfrom scholars over the last decade, Reed’s work breaksnew ground by studying the cultural hardware behind the writtenword—printing machines and publishing businesses. Previoushistorical and literary approaches preoccupied with     

Erik Gilbert. Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860-1970. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. xiii + 176 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1557-3, $49.95 (cloth); 0-8214-1558-1, $26.95 (paper).

It took a tsunami at the end of 2004 to alert the world to whatErik Gilbert could have told us well in advance—that theIndian Ocean’s edge and the people on it are intimatelyintertwined. Building from a rich grounding in one particularplace, Gilbert tells the story of the intersections betweenthe world of dhows and British colonial economic policies inthe Zanzibar islands. Zanzibar today is a semi-autonomous ifcantankerous partner with the former Tanganyika     

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     

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     

Multilateral Contracting in Australian Mining: The Development of Hamersley Iron, 1961-1966

Management theory and transaction cost economics provide fewinsights into the dynamics of multilateral negotiations. A hostof factors suggest that complex transactions—especiallythose that involve government agencies—face a high probabilityof failure. Yet history records many examples of successfulmultiple-party transactions. Using the records of a major Australianiron ore mining venture, Hamersley Iron, this article revealsa number of the tactics that are used to engineer an agreementwhen the parties concerned have conflicting objectives, differentcultural affiliations, and distinctive institutional ties. Theessay also exposes some of the devices that the Japanese steelindustry—Hamersley's main customer—used to securecompetitive advantages in raw material procurement during theindustry's rise to international prominence.     

Laura Hein. Reasonable Men, Powerful Words: Political Culture and Expertise in Twentieth-Century Japan. Washington, D.C., and Berkeley, Calif.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and University of California Press, 2004. xvii + 328 pp. ISBN 0-520-24347-1, $45.00.

Laura Hein begins this engaged and original study by notingthe greater economic sophistication of Japanese than of Americanstoday—and one need only browse the extensive popular economicssection of any Japanese bookstore or look at the use of economiccharts and statistics in Japanese print and television newsto see that this is so. To achieve national economic literacywas a major goal of the tight-knit cohort of progressive economistswho are the subject of Hein’s book. Why then,     

Todd A. Diacon. Stringing Together a Nation: Candido Mariano da Silva Rondon and the Construction of a Modern Brazil, 1906-1930. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. xi + 228 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3210-8, $74.95 (cloth); 0-8223-3249-3, $21.95 (paper).

Biographical studies of military men seldom have much in commonwith analyses of either economic enterprise or society at large.But the present work by historian Todd A. Diacon clearly deservesa review in this journal under both these headings—onthe one hand, because it deals with two long-lasting nationalinitiatives related to the beginnings