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     

Gordon Boyce. Over Half a Million Careful Owners: A 75-year history of PSIS, 1928-2003. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2005. 326 pp. ISBN 0-476-0129-29, NZ$29.95 (paper).

Gordon Boyce traces the history of New Zealand’s PSIS,the Public Service Investment Society, in a book commissionedby the company. Boyce, now Professor of International Businessat Queensland University of Technology after thirteen yearsof teaching business and economic history at Victoria Universityof Wellington, is well qualified for the project. His recentpublications include Co-operative Structures in Global Business(2002). Boyce fulfills his commission well, narrating an engagingstory. "Vignettes" provide personal and anecdotal details thatformer staff     

Ben Ross Schneider. Business Politics and the State in Twentieth-Century Latin America. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xix + 312 pp. ISBN 0-521-83651-4, $70.00 (cloth); 0-521-54500-5, $26.99 (paper).

This volume is a valuable addition to the extensive and disparatebibliography on business associations, state-business relations,collective action, corporatism, and civil society. One of itsmajor achievements is that it will help to redirect researchon these topics. The book encompasses a wide field of scholarlywork hitherto undertaken in a variety of disciplines: politicalscience, economics, sociology of organizations, and economicand business history. In terms of business history, Schneider’sbook is an important contribution to the study of     

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     

William R. Childs. The Texas Railroad Commission: Understanding Regulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century. College Station, Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 2005. x+323 pp. ISBN 1-58544-452-9, $35.00.

In his new book, The Texas Railroad Commission: UnderstandingRegulation in America to the Mid-Twentieth Century, historianWilliam Childs explores the history of regulation in the contextof one of the most interesting state commissions in the UnitedStates. He provides a counterpoint to many economists’narrow analysis of regulation on the basis of efficiency. Regulation,he says, has to be understood as a social, cultural, and politicalphenomena operating within the federalist framework     

Michael Augspurger. An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004. viii + 292 pp. ISBN 0-8014-4204-4, $34.95 (cloth).

A curious blend of business and intellectual history, with anemphasis on the latter, Michael Augspurger’s An Economyof Abundant Beauty offers a reading of Fortune magazine fromits founding in 1930 through the election of Dwight D. Eisenhowerin 1952. Distancing himself from other observers of the publicationwho have interpreted Fortune’s heavy coverage of highculture and aesthetics during the 1930s alongside more prosaicbusiness news as the result of a distinct split between a progressivestaff of writers, including James Agee and Archibald MacLeish,and more conservative editors and publisher Henry Luce, Augspurgerclaims to discern a     

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     

Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. Shaping the Industrial Century: The Remarkable Story of the Evolution of the Modern Chemical and Pharmaceutical Industries. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. ix + 366 pp. ISBN 0-674-01720-x, $29.95 (Hardcover).

This book is a companion to Alfred Chandler’s previousbook, Inventing the Electronic Century, and provides a broadhistory of the chemical and pharmaceutical industries roughlyfrom the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentiethcentury. The history of the chemical and pharmaceutical industriesis remarkable because they are old industries, emerging after1880, and because a small number of companies quickly dominatedthem and have continued to do     

Franco Amatori and Geoffrey Jones, eds. Business History around the World. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. xv + 425 pp. ISBN 0-521-82107-X, $65.00.

This important cluster of perspectives on practice and prospectin business history derives from a fall 1998 colloquium heldat Bocconi University in Milan, sponsored jointly by the Institutefor Economic History, the Italian Association of Business Historians(ASSI), Reading University, and Johns Hopkins University. Thecollection echoes its support team’s transnational diversity,presenting an opening set of conceptualizing essays, elevenconcise national/regional overviews, and four closing chaptersthat identify themes for comparative business history. Botha snapshot of the discipline’s preoccupations in the late1990s and a handbook of historiography and work then in progress,Business History around the World is a volume every referencelibrary should own. For practicing historians and graduate students,in my view, parts one and     

Charles Loft. Government, the Railways and the Modernization of Britain: Beeching's Last Trains

"This book," writes Charles Loft, "is first and foremost aboutrailway closures ... [It] is not a business history, or an economicstudy" (p.2). What, then, does it have to offer to readers ofEnterprise & Society, who may not expect much of a bookwhich is part of a series on "British Politics and Society"?The simple answer is that it provides much more than the author'smodest opening remarks. By analyzing the political and popularopposition     

Edith Sparks. Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in San Francisco, 1850-1920

The history of business is an ever expanding topic. Numerousbooks on the role of women in modern American business and onwhy women continue to lag behind men in both earning power andbusiness leadership are available. But, few such studies haveplaced the issue of women in business in a historical context.Edith Spark's Capital Intentions: Female Proprietors in SanFrancisco, 1850–1920 is thus both welcome and overdue.Sparks, an assistant professor of history at the University     

Dwijendra Tripathi. The Oxford History of Indian Business

Dwijendra Tripathi has provided an invaluable service to scholarsand practitioners in business management, history, and socialsciences with his book, The Oxford History of Indian Business.Tripathi is considered to be the founder of the field of businesshistory (with an emphasis on all facets of this history includingpolitics, economics, and society) in India. His tenureship atthe Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad led to the adoptionof an academic and research program in business     

Renato Giannetti and Michelangelo Vasta. L'impresa italiana nel Novecento. Bologna, Italy: Societa Editrice il Mulino, 2003. 486 pp. ISBN 88-15-09496-2, {euro}30.00.

Italian business history is not well known abroad. This is quiteobvious. Even though Italy has been industrialized since the1920s, it is a small country, with little international influence.Its historical patterns of evolution privileged the internalmarket, and although its domestic corporations have traditionallynot been very active abroad, foreign firms have also manifestedopenly their reluctance to invest in a promising but too turbulentenvironment. As a result, Italian business history has fromthe beginning been a domestic story, scarcely appealing forforeign scholars. The Italian historiographic climate was partiallyresponsible for this situation. Business history as a disciplinehas only recently been "legitimized" in Italy (still there areno chairs in the field). For a long time, the     

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     

Warren Belasco. Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food

Warren Belasco does not know what the future of food is goingto be, but he does know a great deal about the history of thefuture of food. In his book, Meals to Come: A History of theFuture of Food, Belasco examines predictions, discussions, fears,and controversies that have surrounded our food supply overthe previous two centuries. As he notes in his introduction,making predictions is a risky business, but, risk aside, therehave been no shortage     

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 Coopey, Sean O'Connell, and Dilwyn Porter. Mail Order Retailing in Britain: A Business and Social History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. viii + 248 pp. ISBN 0-19-829650-9, $95.00 (cloth).

There is little doubt that there is a great need for more booksof this type. This book is a welcome addition to books in theOxford University Press collection that address issues in businesshistory. Therefore, as an addition to a collection that includesGeoffrey Jones’s British Trading Companies in the Nineteenthand Twentieth Centuries, this book provides access to a fascinatingaspect of British commercial     

Barry Shank. A Token of My Affection: Greeting Cards and American Business Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xvii + 328 pp. ISBN 0-231-11878-3, $50.00 (cloth).

Barry Shank has written a history of commercially produced greetingcards in the United States. Using vocabulary, concepts, andthe terrifically long sentences common to cultural studies,Shank argues that greeting cards reveal the emotional life ofcard-buying Americans. That inner life, he argues, was fundamentally"conditioned" and "structured" by American business culture.Many business historians will find Shank’s book challengingto read and not always convincing. If they persevere, and occasionallysuspend empirical demands, they will     

Arthur L. Norberg. Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2005. x + 347 pp. ISBN 0-262-14090-X, $40.00 (cloth).

Arthur Norberg’s Computers and Commerce is a much-neededstudy of the technical and business history of the Eckert-MauchlyComputer Corporation (EMCC) and Engineering Research Associates(ERA). Although there have been many historical studies aboutIBM, there have been relatively few accounts describing thefirm’s primary competitors or of the early formation ofthe industry. Norberg’s study offers valuable insightsinto the latter by providing a detailed history of the technicaldecisions and financial strategies of the two entrepreneurialfirms that     

Leslie Berlin. The Man behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xi + 402 pp. ISBN 0-19-516343-5, $30.00.

The last few years have seen a number of books on the rise ofSilicon Valley. Martin Kenney’s Understanding SiliconValley (2000), Ross Bassett’s To the Digital Age (2002),Frederick Terman at Stanford by C. Stewart Gillmor (2004), andmy own book on Making Silicon Valley (2006) are notable examples.Another addition to this literature is The Man behind the Microchip:Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley by