Richard Perren. Taste, Trade and Technology: The Development of the International Meat Industry since 1840

This is a very British book about the international meat industry.A volume in Ashgate's Modern Economic and Social History series,its principal contribution is charting the relationships betweencountries engaged in the meat business, especially the nationsin Latin America, plus Australia and New Zealand that exportedmost of their production to the United Kingdom. The author notes several times that Britain was "the largestmarket for internationally traded meat." His analysis throughmuch of the volume is     

Richard Coopey, ed. Information and Technology Policy: An International History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. xvi + 346 pp. ISBN 0-19-924105-8, $99.50 (cloth).

Richard Coopey’s Information and Technology Policy isan edited volume featuring an impressive array of scholars whoprovide nuanced accounts of national governmental policies relatedto the computer and (to a lesser extent) software industries.As Coopey writes in his introduction, the post–World WarII period is remembered as a time of American political, economic,and technological ascendancy. In the design, manufacture, anddistribution of computers, the United     

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     

John Franch. Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006. vii + 374 pp. ISBN 0-252-03099-0, $45.00 (paper).

Robber Baron, John Franch’s biography of Charles TysonYerkes, provides a fascinating window into the workings of laissez-fairecapitalism. Yerkes, one of the most notorious self-made menof nineteenth-century America, embodied the drive, avarice,and unscrupulousness of his age—taking each to its limits.Robber Baron is an academic work that should appeal to a wideraudience. Yerkes’s dealings are fascinating: the samemen did business with him time after time as they tried to getthe     

Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella, eds. Contract and Property in Early Modern China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. vii + 398 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4639-7, $65.00.

In 1887 the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society—ChinaBranch sponsored a symposium on "Chinese partnerships," in whicha number of eminent China hands such as E. H. Parker and ChalonerAlabaster shared their long experience with the subject. Thediscussants agreed, among other things, that liability for debtsof the firm was enforceable in Chinese courts, that this liabilitywas shared among the partners according to their contractuallydetermined shares in the business, and that a contractuallydesignated "managing partner" normally     

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     

Frank Dobbin, ed. The New Economic Sociology: A Reader. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. vii + 565 pp. ISBN 0-691-04905-X, $65.00 (cloth); 0-691-04906-8, $27.95 (paper).

This volume is designed to ease the entry of advanced sociologystudents into the growing literature in their discipline aboutmarkets and the organizations and individuals who operate withinthem. It can serve this useful function for business historiansas well, although it will take some tenacity on the part of"splitters" to make sense of what the "lumpers" are gettingat. The collection’s twenty chapters include articles fromleading journals and book excerpts and are organized around     

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     

Werner Abelshauser. The Dynamics of German Industry: Germany's Path toward the New Economy and the American Challenge. New York: Berghahn Books, 2005. vii + 168 pp. ISBN 1-84545-072-8, $45.00.

Werner Abelshauser is a professor of economic history at theUniversity of Bielefeld. He has written about Germany’seconomic history since 1870, with specific studies concerningKrupp between 1933 and 1951, BASF since 1952, and Germany’seconomic history since World War II. Part of a series devotedto historiography, this volume grew out of     

Richard E. Caves. Switching Channels: Organization and Change in TV Broadcasting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. ix + 360 pp. ISBN: 0-674-01878-8, $39.95 (paper).

Economist Richard Caves has taken on the daunting task of explaininghow and why the U.S. television "industry" produces what itdoes. He does this, notably, by treating public policy and contentcriticism—the themes prevalent in most scholarship ontelevision issues—as two among numerous other explanatoryfactors. His approach is decidedly that of an economist, nota historian, so his aim is to produce a well-supported, cohesiveeconomic model—which he does. Caves argues that one should consider