Francois Caron, ed. Les grandes Compagnies de chemin de fer en France, 1823-1937. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 2005. 411 pp. ISBN 2-600-00942-6, {euro}41.61 (paper).

This is a book that is hard to describe and hard to review.It is certainly not an ordinary study of railway history buta kind of broad survey, based on a series of financial reportsconcerning the great French private railway companies, as drawnup between 1882 and 1936 by financial analysts of the CreditLyonnais Bank and preserved in the "Archives Historiques duCrédit Lyonnais." François Caron, dean of Frencheconomic and railway historians, has selected large parts ofthe original reports and has added his own comments and explanations.It     

Jari Eloranta and Jari Ojala, eds. East-West Trade and the Cold War. Jyvaskyla, Finland: Jyvaskyla University Printing House, 2005. 237 pp. ISBN 951-39-2088-7, {euro}26.00 (paper).

The fall of the Berlin Wall opened not only Eastern Europeanborders but also archives previously inaccessible to westernscholars. The result is a growing body of revisionist literatureon the origin, evolution, and end of the Cold War (e.g., JohnLewis Gaddis, We Now Know, 1997). Most literature on the ColdWar era still concerns political and military history. Broaderperspectives include social relations, and art and culture,although only touching economic relations (e.g., Toy     

Hartmut Berghoff. Moderne Unternehmensgeschichte: Eine themen- und theorieorientierte Einfuhrung. Paderborn: Verlag Ferdinand Schoningh, 2004. 380 pp. ISBN 3-8252-2483-X, {euro}17.90.

This book by the German economic historian Hartmut Berghoffintends to introduce German students, and to some degree managersand entrepreneurs, to the theory and themes of "modern businesshistory." Business history has been thriving in Germany forabout fifteen years. Given the hagiographic tradition of Germanbusiness history, there has been a marked change in that period.Commissioned studies of German business in the Third Reich,for example, proved to     

Jean-Claude Daumas. Les territoires de la laine: Histoire de l'industrie lainiere en France au XIXe siecle. Villeneuve D'Ascq: Presses Universitaires du Septentrion, 2004. 419 pp. ISBN 2-85939-812-0, {euro}26.00.

Based on his doctoral dissertation, Jean-Claude Daumas’sbook on the economics of nineteenth-century wool manufactureis a sound, workmanlike, and well-organized exposition. Withmany books already detailing various sectors of the industry,from the sheep’s back to the consumer’s closet,the question arises why another synthetic study was needed.Daumas’s rationale is that while the general contoursof the industry are well known, the variegated nature of individualwool centers has been glossed over. Like the industrial     

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