Stuart B. Schwartz. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2875-0, $59.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-8078-5538-3, $22.50 (paper).

This volume examines the surprisingly complex history of thewestward shift in sugar production from the Mediterranean toAmerica in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Many factorsinfluenced this shift, including those most often studied: therise and growth of merchant capital, slavery, and technologicalchange. The local-level studies aggregated here reexamine thisdevelopment and thereby reveal the complex evolution and thegreat     

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     

Richard Dale. The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. vi + 192 pp. ISBN 0-691-11971-6, $29.95.

In The First Crash: Lessons from the South Sea Bubble RichardDale offers an easy-to-read history of the South Sea Bubbleof 1720. Though many others have written on the subject, Dalepens this contribution to argue that the South Sea Bubble wasdriven by irrational investors. Because the South Sea Bubblewas the first modern financial bubble, Dale seeks to establishthat irrational behavior began forming bubbles three     

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     

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