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     

Victoria de Grazia. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 586 pp. ISBN 0-674-01672-6, $29.95 (cloth).

There is no doubt that the twentieth century is America’scentury, but the terms of that conquest and dominance are lesscertain and apparent. Of course, military force has much todo with the creation of this hegemony, despite periodic boutsof isolationism. But even in these moments of vaunted withdrawalfrom the political and military systems of the world, thereis nothing to suggest a withdrawal in an economic sense. Indeed,during the isolationist 1920s, as de Grazia describes it, theUnited States was having     

Brett Williams. Debt for Sale: A Social History of the Credit Trap. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 154 pp. ISBN 0-8122-3817-6, $24.95 (cloth).

This volume covers a social history of modern consumer credit,specifically, credit card debt, pawnshops, and storefronts thatoffer check-cashing services and paycheck loans. Consumer creditis largely a product of the past half century. Diners Club issuedits first credit cards in 1951, and Carte Blanche, AmericanExpress, and other entities soon followed suit. In the 1970sthe advent of computers and the deregulation of banking resultedin an explosion in the use of credit cards. Initially, credit     

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     

Geoffrey Jones. Multinationals and Global Capitalism: From the Nineteenth Century to the Twenty-First Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 340 pp. ISBN 0-19-927209-3, $144.50 (cloth); ISBN 0-19-927210-7, $44.50 (paper).

Geoffrey Jones introduces Multinationals and Global Capitalismin the preface as a radically revised edition of his The Evolutionof International Business: An Introduction (Routledge, 1996),which has hitherto remained the only history of the developmentand impact of multinationals worldwide. He indicates, quiterightly, that in the meantime globalization has been recognizedas a controversial and widely debated phenomenon. Indeed, itis indicative of the sweeping changes that have reshaped ourperceptions of the world economy that, at its publication lessthan a decade ago, Evolution was innocent of the very term ‘globalization’;     

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     

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     

Glenn Adamson. Industrial Strength Design: How Brooks Stevens Shaped Your World. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. xi + 219 pp. ISBN 0-262-01207-3, $45.00 (cloth); 0-944110-81, $25.00 (paper).

Brooks Stevens participated in the transformation of the modernsetting of everyday life into a designed environment. Althoughhardly a household name, he influenced the conceptual infrastructureof mid-twentieth-century consumer culture as he worked withproduct manufacturers and communicated his understanding ofAmerican business and consumer product design. In this way,as well as in his design of many consumer products and vehicles,Stevens shaped our world and the way we have moved through it. Industrial     

David M. Young. The Iron Horse and the Windy City: How Railroads Shaped Chicago. DeKalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005. ix + 270 pp. ISBN 0-87580-334-2, $39.95 (cloth).

Since their initial development, railroads have always beencentral to the development of Chicago as the transportationhub of the Midwest and the nation. Indeed, they remain centralin the twenty-first century. Although the number of trains andtrackage declined precipitously as consolidations and deregulationtook hold in the twentieth century, the actual tonnage hauledand the number of trains have grown. Consequently, Chicago founditself "as inundated with railroad trains in 2001 as it hadbeen a century earlier" (p. 220). Young     

Morris L. Bian. The Making of the State Enterprise System in Modern China: The Dynamics of Institutional Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. xi + 331 pp. ISBN 0-674-01717-X, $45.00 (cloth).

Although it has been generally recognized that industrial andeconomic expansion in China can be traced from the early yearsof the nineteenth century, the conventional view is that thedevelopment of the modern state enterprise system dates fromthe setting up of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.According to most commentators, the Chinese almost universallyadopted Stalinist industrial and economic systems in the earlyyears of the postrevolutionary period without much by way of     

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     

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     

Jeffrey M. Hornstein. A Nation of Realtors(R): A Cultural History of the Twentieth-Century American Middle Class. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005. xi + 252 pp. ISBN 0-8223-3528-X, $79.95 (cloth); 0-8223-3540-9, $22.95 (paper).

For many people who study the culture of American business,a mention of real estate will conjure up Sinclair Lewis’sfictional creation George F. Babbitt, the title character ofthe 1922 novel Babbitt. I was reminded, when reading JeffreyHornstein’s A Nation of Realtors^®, that Lewis at onepoint used a different working title: "Population 300,000."Between these two titles lay the relationship between the characterof the Realtor and the community that the Realtor, and his peers,