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     

Gordon Boyce. Over Half a Million Careful Owners: A 75-year history of PSIS, 1928-2003. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2005. 326 pp. ISBN 0-476-0129-29, NZ$29.95 (paper).

Gordon Boyce traces the history of New Zealand’s PSIS,the Public Service Investment Society, in a book commissionedby the company. Boyce, now Professor of International Businessat Queensland University of Technology after thirteen yearsof teaching business and economic history at Victoria Universityof Wellington, is well qualified for the project. His recentpublications include Co-operative Structures in Global Business(2002). Boyce fulfills his commission well, narrating an engagingstory. "Vignettes" provide personal and anecdotal details thatformer staff     

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     

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 C. Allen. Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. xv + 301 pp. ISBN 0-691-00696-2, $45.00 (cloth).

In this collection of concisely argued essays, Robert C. Allenreexamines several important questions familiar to anyone interestedin Soviet history: the hypothetical development of Russia inthe absence of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution; the standing ofRussia’s and the Soviet Union’s economic and demographicdevelopment in relation to other countries; the controversysurrounding the strategy for economic development after therevolution; the reasons for Stalin’s rapid industrializationand the role of the agricultural sector in it; and     

Sarah Elvins. Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. 222 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1549-2, $42.95 (cloth).

Elvins’s book is part of a growing body of historicalscholarship that interrogates the lived experience of consumersociety in the twentieth-century United States. Beginning whereWilliam Leach’s Land of Desire (1993) left off, Elvinsseeks to complicate "top-down" narratives of the homogenizationof American consumer culture into a national mass market. Takingher cue from Lizabeth Cohen’s early work on consumptionin Chicago, Elvins examines consumption on the local level in     

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     

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     

Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill. The Not So Wild, Wild West: Property Rights on the Frontier. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. xii + 263 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4854-3, $24.95 (cloth).

Adopting the approach of the "new institutional economics,"Terry L. Anderson and Peter J. Hill argue that grassroots, cooperativelydeveloped property rules in the nineteenth-century AmericanWest led to the peaceful resolution of most conflicts. To thedegree that cooperation trumped conflict and violence, the authorsinsist, "the ‘wild, wild West’ was really the ‘notso wild, wild West’" (p. 5). Institutional entrepreneurs,they contend, emerged to establish property rights governingaccess to rangeland,     

Simon Middleton. From Privileges to Rights: Work and Politics in Colonial New York City. Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. 320 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3915-6, $45.00 (paper)

The idea of a transition from small producer to capitalist productionin late eighteenth-century America, a popular topic in 1980sand 1990s, is wrong. This is the message of Simon Middleton’sFrom Privileges to Rights, a study of New York City artisansin the colonial era. Using records from the Mayor’s Court(roughly equivalent to municipal courts today), and variousother sources, Middleton finds possessive individualism to bea growing force among New York City artisans at least     

Julie Hessler. A Social History of Soviet Trade: Trade Policy, Retail Practices, and Consumption, 1917-1953. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. xvi + 366 pp. ISBN 0-691-11492-7, $39.50.

Julie Hessler’s work is the first comprehensive historyof the first thirty-five years of Soviet trade written afterthe opening of the Soviet Union’s archives following thatnation’s collapse. It will, without doubt, become a standardwork of reference. Hessler gives due credit to the Soviet historianG. A. Dikhtiar’s three-volume work on Russian and Soviettrade published in the 1960s (in Russian). Despite the book’sobvious ideological overtones, it deserves to be read alongsideHessler’s work. Hessler’s     

Timothy Cuff. The Hidden Cost of Economic Development: The Biological Standard of Living in Antebellum Pennsylvania. Aldershot, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 2005. xvii + 277 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4119-8, $99.95 (cloth).

In recent years studies of "the body" have broadened the rangeof sources employed by social and cultural historians. SimonNewman and Walter Johnson, for example, recently focused onphysical characteristics to rebuild the lived experience ofunderrepresented historical actors such as Philadelphia’spoor or the South’s enslaved African Americans. Some economichistorians have targeted "the body" as well, but with differentquestions in mind. Econometric studies of physical characteristics     

Walter A. Friedman. Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 356 pp. ISBN 0-674-01298-4, $27.95.

Given the centrality of selling to the emergence of the modernbusiness corporation, it is surprising that there has been nofull-length study of the subject before. Walter A. Friedman’spathbreaking Birth of a Salesman is a truly welcome attemptto fill this void. While he begins with earlier developmentsin selling techniques, Friedman’s real focus is on theemergence of "modern" selling, when the selling process becamesystematically organized and managed. Friedman maintains thatthis came about in the United States, not in Europe,     

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     

Amy G. Richter. Home on the Rails: Women, the Railroad, and the Rise of Public Domesticity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005. xiii + 272 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2926-9, $49.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-8078-5591-X, $19.95 (paper).

In today’s fast-paced world we sometimes forget that railroadsof the nineteenth century were the first forms of transportationto annihilate time and space. Railroads, however, played a fargreater role than transforming these physical realities. Infact, Amy G. Richter’s Home on the Rails argues that railroadsbecame the sites and symbols of a reorganized cultural spacein America. Richter, an assistant professor of history at ClarkUniversity in Worcester, Massachusetts, began her study as a     

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.     

Disembedding Socialist Firms as a Statist Project: Restructuring the Chinese Oil Industry, 1997-2002

Crucial to the success of China’s transition to the marketeconomy is the central government’s capacity for institutionalinnovation. Since 1997, Chinese politicians have sought to transformthe governance of state-owned industries from decentralizedadministrator control to centralized corporate shareholder control.This essay examines the ideological, political, and institutionalcomponents of the central state’s strategy of "disembeddedness"that aimed to disrupt preexisting social norms and exchangerelations of the planned economy. However, this authoritarianapproach to organizational change has generated sociopoliticalcontentions and unintended economic outcomes that point to alternativeconceptions of authority and exchange relations at industrialand firm levels. Focusing on the recent restructuring of theoil and petrochemical sectors into national oil corporations,I provide evidence of how certain types of informal social dynamicshave shaped and constrained the implementation of asset controlstrategies and industrial policies favored by the state, withdirect implications for the proper functioning of new marketinstitutions.     

Robert P. Bremner. Chairman of the Fed: William McChesney Martin, Jr., and the Creation of the Modern Federal Reserve System. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004. vi + 357 pp. ISBN 0-300-10508-8, $38.00.

Two men headed the Federal Reserve System for 40 percent ofits history. One was Alan Greenspan, who served from 1987 to2006. The other was William McChesney Martin, Jr., who chairedthe U.S. central bank from 1951 to 1970. Although there areother contenders, both Martin and Greenspan have their backersfor designation as America’s greatest central banker.Hence, as the Greenspan era at the Fed ends, it is more thanappropriate that Robert Bremner’s excellent biographyof Martin appears. Because it contains insights into     

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