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     

Harold James. Family Capitalism: Wendels, Haniels, Falcks, and the Continental European Model. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. xii + 434 pp. ISBN 0-674-02181-9, $39.95 (paper).

In recent years, revising or amending Alfred D. Chandler’sthesis on the rise of large-scale business enterprises has becomean industry unto itself. A decade ago, the most significantchallenges to Chandler’s visible hand appeared to comefrom those who espoused both the contemporary and the historicalvirtues of flexible specialization. More recently, it appearsthat advocates of the family firm have begun to stake theirclaim to a part of Chandler’s sizable inheritance. However,just as the introduction of flexibility into the historicalliterature reflected a particular     

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.     

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     

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     

Sean Patrick Adams. Old Dominion, Industrial Commonwealth: Coal, Politics, and Economy in Antebellum America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiv + 305 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7968-X, $45.00.

In this superbly crafted study Sean Adams compares the developmentof the coal industry in Virginia and Pennsylvania before theCivil War. The comparative method allows Adams to focus hisanalysis around a seemingly simple question: Did Pennsylvania’smore open and democratic state government create a more efficientinstitutional framework than Virginia’s planter-dominatedlegislature? Posing this question allows Adams to avoid somewhatstale debates about whether large numbers of slaves could workin manufacturing, or if anticapitalist planters opposed industrialization.     

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     

Peter H. Spitz, ed. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium: Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization. Philadelphia, Pa.: Chemical Heritage Foundation, 2003. x + 387 pp. ISBN 0-941901-34-3, $45.00 (cloth).

Peter Spitz’s new book is a continuation of his earlierwork, Petrochemicals: The Rise of an Industry (1988), whichdetailed the development of the modern chemical industry beginningin the 1930s. The Chemical Industry at the Millennium picksup the story at the end of the 1970s and examines the momentouschanges that have taken place in the last twenty-five years.Subtitled Maturity, Restructuring, and Globalization, this isan excellent collection of essays by industry     

Tom Downey. Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xiii + 262 pp. ISBN 0-8071-3107-5, $49.95.

South Carolina’s Edgefield and Barnwell districts arenot new terrain for historical investigation, having alreadyconstituted the object of fine studies. Yet, Tom Downey’sbook definitely signals the achievement of the transition towardnew ways of writing southern history. The very word "transition" becomes central to Downey’sreading of the history of Edgefield and Barnwell as he distanceshimself from the interpretive framework into which the termsof the debate on the capitalist/non-capitalist nature of the     

William Faricy Condee. Coal and Culture: Opera Houses in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xii + 210 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1588-3, $34.95 (cloth).

In Coal and Culture William Condee examines Appalachian small-towntheaters built between the 1860s and 1930s that appropriatedthe high-culture term ‘opera house’ for spaces presentingdiverse activities from high school graduations to travelingtheatrical troupes. The title ‘opera house,’ ratherthan ‘theater,’ conveyed an aura of culture, refinement,and acceptability in an era when theater was sometimes regardedas having questionable morals. ‘Opera house’ soundedgrand, but many structures were modest buildings whose facadesdiffered little from     

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     

Paul Sabin. Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xx + 307 pp. ISBN 0-520-24198-3, $39.95 (cloth).

Champions of the oil industry have long claimed that oil isthe cheapest form of energy. Why is it so cheap? The conventionalanswer emphasizes oil’s natural abundance and the wondersof market supply and demand. Most historians who study the industryat least implicitly accept this explanation. But is not resourceabundance a socially constructed concept? Can we so easily isolatemarket forces from politics and government policy in explainingthe cost and price of oil? These     

Douglas Cazaux Sackman. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 401 pp. ISBN 0-520-23886-9, $45.00 (cloth).

No one familiar with California could doubt that the citrusindustry has left an indelible mark on the landscape. Streets,cities, and even an entire county are named after various citrusproducts. It is certainly no coincidence that the centerpieceof Disney’s California Adventure theme park is a rollercoaster tucked inside a giant orange peel. The last two decadeshave seen the publication of the first scholarly works thatexplore the racial, gender, and economic dimensions of the industry.     

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     

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     

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     

Michael Zakim. Ready-Made Democracy: A History of Men's Dress in the American Republic, 1760-1860. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. x + 296 pp. ISBN 0-226-97793-5, $30.00 (cloth).

Michael Zakim’s Ready-Made Democracy positions men’sclothing manufacturers at the heart of the democratic and capitalistictransformations that engulfed the United States between itsfounding and the mid-nineteenth century. He argues that thehistory of the men’s suit, embodying as it does a hostof social, economic, and political relationships, presents anunequaled opportunity to observe these changes. Zakim createsa nuanced interpretation that responds to a half century ofhistoriographical debate about the nature of the market revolutionin America.     

Carl A. Zimring. Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xi + 220 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3686-3, $39.95.

Paul Revere rode to Concord on a horse shod with shoes re-forgedfrom scrap iron. New York City’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg,misstepped when he decided that residents would sort only thoserecyclables that actually had a market, rather than the beveragecontainers that went straight to the landfill. During the intervening226 years, Americans recycled for reasons of economy, and ontothat base we recently have grafted a goal of recycling to promoteenvironmental quality. Carl Zimring’s Cash For Your Trashlinks     

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     

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