Ernesto R. Gantman. Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. viii + 185 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4186-4, $99.95.

Is management a science or an ideology? Do management theoriesexplore the best way to maximize society’s welfare byefficiently coordinating inputs to produce the most output?Or are they window dressing concealing the exploitation of labor? An Argentinean professor, Ernesto Gantman surveys two centuriesof American management theory to argue that ideology trumpsscience. (Though the book purports to be a study of managementideology generally, it is almost exclusively about the UnitedStates.) Gantman quickly     

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     

Frank P. Jozsa, Jr. Sports Capitalism: The Foreign Business of American Professional Leagues. Aldershot, Hants, U.K., and Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2004. xiv + 316 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4185-6, $99.95 (cloth).

Students of international business will find this a useful andfrustrating book. It is encyclopedic in its coverage and exhaustivelyresearched. Approximately 20 percent of the book’s 316pages consists of notes, while another 10 percent is bibliography.The book is intended for nonspecialists; a glossary includesterms as diverse as economic profit, Hall of Fame, Super Bowl,and work ethic. Of these, only ‘Super Bowl’ appearsin the extremely short, five-and-a-half page index. Jozsa’srole has been to organize this material and bring     

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     

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,     

Mario Tiberi. The Accounts of the British Empire: Capital Flows from 1799 to 1914. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. ix + 183 pp. ISBN 0 7546 3916 9, $99.95 (cloth).

British economic historians teaching in traditional historyfaculties commonly experience considerable indifference, evenresistance, to statistics among many of their undergraduatestudents. One figure that always seems to impress, however,is the £4000m estimated to have been invested by Britonsabroad by 1914. According to a United Nations survey cited byTiberi, this represented more than 40 percent of all overseasassets at the time. Along with British trading and service activitiesand the global importance of its     

Anne Clendinning. Demons of Domesticity: Women and the English Gas Industry, 1889-1939. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. xvii + 352 pp. ISBN 0-7546-0692-9, $109.95 (cloth).

This book examines the role of women, both as employees andas consumers, in the English gas industry in the fifty yearsbetween the 1880s and the eve of the Second World War. By thelate nineteenth century, the gas industry was well establishedthroughout England, using coal as its main raw material andwith the provision of lighting as its main market. The historicalliterature on the     

David Mitch, John Brown, and Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, eds. Origins of the Modern Career. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. xiii + 342 pp. ISBN 0-7546-3496-5, $99.95.

Here is a sturdy volume that presents the theory, methods, andevidence involving employment patterns that constitute the moderncareer. This information is especially important to scholarsof labor studies who are interested in making historical comparisonsacross disciplinary frameworks. While the audience is likelyto be small, the book’s concerns traverse central juncturesin social history. For an edited volume the essays presented here are unusuallycogent, especially given the range of topics.     

Book Reviews: C. John Miller &; Richard S. Goldberg: Product liability, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 971 pp. ISBN 0-19-825678-7. GBP 145.00.

Book Review

Book Reviews: C. John Miller &; Richard S. Goldberg: Product liability, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 971 pp. ISBN 0-19-825678-7. GBP 145.00.     

Book Notes: John N.Adams &; Roger Brownsword: Understanding contract law, 4th edition. London: Thomson Sweet &; Maxwell. ISBN 0-421-85850-8. 273 pp., GBP 13.95.

Book Notes

Book Notes: John N.Adams &; Roger Brownsword: Understanding contract law, 4th edition. London: Thomson Sweet &; Maxwell. ISBN 0-421-85850-8. 273 pp., GBP 13.95.     

Jack Goody. Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. Cambridge, U.K.: Polity Press, 2004. vii + 200 pp. ISBN 0-7456-3190-8, $56.95 (cloth); 0-7456-3191-6, $21.95 (paper).

When and why did the West gain its current economic advantageover the rest of the world? This topic is the source of an animateddebate within the academy today. Jack Goody, a noted socialanthropologist, analyzes these questions and offers his ownviews in his new book, Capitalism and Modernity: The Great Debate. The participants in this debate often have been divided intotwo broad camps. On the one side, which I will call here theEuropeanists, are those who     

Peter Hayes. From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xx + 373 pp. ISBN 0-521-78227-9, $40.00.

Over the past few years, many histories of German companiesduring the Third Reich have been published. They are a responseto the attempts by survivors to obtain restitution from firmsinvolved in the commission of crimes against humanity duringthat period. Peter Hayes’s portrayal of one of the enterprisesthat was most deeply involved, Degussa, is among the best. Hayes begins his work with a disclaimer that "this book is designednot as an all-embracing     

Daniel Lederman. The Political Economy of Protection: Theory and the Chilean Experience. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. ix + 191 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4917-5, $55.00.

To anyone teaching the political economy of protection, Chilemust be among the closest "natural" experiments around. Thisbook provides a rich and very informative interpretation ofChilean trade policies that covers the period 1810–2000. Chapter 1 reviews the contributions by economists and politicalscientists to the public choice approach to the determinantsof protection. Contributions by the economics and politicalscience literature are grafted to a supply-demand frameworkof protection, with much of the discussion focusing on     

John Landers. The Field and the Forge: Population, Production, and Power in the Pre-industrial West. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2003. xiii + 440 pp. ISBN 0-19-924916-4, {pound}60.00 (cloth); 0-19-927957-8, {pound}22.50 (paper).

This book recalls literature that emanated from the Annalesschool of historians, for, like the annalistes, Landers is fascinatedby the longues durées of history. His subject is preindustrialEurope from roughly the second century (with occasional forays back to the Iron and Bronze Ages) to the nineteenthcentury . He takes his thesis from E. A. Wrigley: preindustrial Europe relied overwhelmingly on organicsources for food, heat, energy, crafts, manufactures, commerce,and the means     

Douglas Brinkley. Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003. New York: Viking, 2003. xxii + 858 pp. ISBN 0-670-03181-X, $34.95. * Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. 465 pp. ISBN 0-312-29022-5, $27.95

In recent years the line dividing scholarly histories from popularones has grown blurry. Changes in how books are marketed andretailed over the past two decades have whetted the appetiteof general readers for history, and many academic historians,though trained to write for specialists, now seek to tap into this audience more broadly. The commercial success of suchscholars as Joseph Ellis and James M. McPherson has inspiredacademic historians to try to write more readable books. Atthe same time, journalists and other writers are producing ambitiousnarratives based on primary sources. Still, important differencesremain between the kinds of history that academic and popularwriters produce. These differences surface in interesting waysin two new books on Henry Ford. The author of the first, Douglas Brinkley, is a professor anddirector of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilizationat     

Kathleen Thelen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv + 333 pp. ISBN 0-521-83768-5, $75.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54674-5, $29.99 (paper).

Kathleen Thelen has written an incredibly fascinating book thatshould be obligatory reading for anyone interested in the historyof skill formation or the evolution of institutions in general.For those working on the "varieties of capitalism," path-dependency,punctured equilibrium, or historical institutionalism, thistext should feature prominently in their work. Thelen’sgoal in this book is to discover why Germany, Britain, the UnitedStates, and Japan pursued different "paths" of skill formation.She traces the origin of each path     

Ronald Seavoy. Origins and Growth of the Global Economy: From the Fifteenth Century Onward. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. 275 pp. ISBN 0-275-97912-1, $70.95.

Few scholars are confident enough to believe that they can describethe history of the "origins and growth of the global economy"in 275 pages. But Ronald Seavoy, an emeritus professor of historyat Bowling Green State University, uses that history to illuminatetwo themes: to show that the global economy is built on thefoundation of European commercial imperialism and "to show thatthe global economy as it is currently evolving is capable ofproducing     

Lowell J. Satre. Chocolate on Trial: Slavery, Politics, and the Ethics of Business. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xi + 308 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1625-1, $55.00 (cloth); 0-8214-1626-X, $24.95 (paper).

Solid scholarly historical studies of overseas businesses inAfrica are rare. Rarer still are studies of this area that dealwith ethics and corporate responsibility without cant or overheatedrhetoric. Lowell J. Satre’s Chocolate on Trial standsout as a nuanced history of the dilemmas of doing business responsiblyin a colonial setting. The paradoxes it describes are similarto what many corporations face today. The book demonstratesthat the     

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     

Anne G. Hanley. Native Capital: Financial Institutions and Economic Development in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1920. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. xviii + 286 pp. ISBN 0-8047-5072-6, $55.00 (paper).

Anne Hanley presents a lucid and impressive narrative of theevolution of financial markets in São Paulo, Brazil.She traces the evolution of the banking sector and SãoPaulo stock exchange from the end of the Empire (Brazil wasan empire with a constitutional monarchy between 1822 and 1889)through the first three decades of the Republic (1889–1920)and the contemporaneous evolution of capital markets from theirearly "personalistic" stage to "maturity" in the early twentieth