Erik Gilbert. Dhows and the Colonial Economy of Zanzibar, 1860-1970. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. xiii + 176 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1557-3, $49.95 (cloth); 0-8214-1558-1, $26.95 (paper).

It took a tsunami at the end of 2004 to alert the world to whatErik Gilbert could have told us well in advance—that theIndian Ocean’s edge and the people on it are intimatelyintertwined. Building from a rich grounding in one particularplace, Gilbert tells the story of the intersections betweenthe world of dhows and British colonial economic policies inthe Zanzibar islands. Zanzibar today is a semi-autonomous ifcantankerous partner with the former Tanganyika     

William Faricy Condee. Coal and Culture: Opera Houses in Appalachia. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2005. xii + 210 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1588-3, $34.95 (cloth).

In Coal and Culture William Condee examines Appalachian small-towntheaters built between the 1860s and 1930s that appropriatedthe high-culture term ‘opera house’ for spaces presentingdiverse activities from high school graduations to travelingtheatrical troupes. The title ‘opera house,’ ratherthan ‘theater,’ conveyed an aura of culture, refinement,and acceptability in an era when theater was sometimes regardedas having questionable morals. ‘Opera house’ soundedgrand, but many structures were modest buildings whose facadesdiffered little from     

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     

Paul Sabin. Crude Politics: The California Oil Market, 1900-1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. xx + 307 pp. ISBN 0-520-24198-3, $39.95 (cloth).

Champions of the oil industry have long claimed that oil isthe cheapest form of energy. Why is it so cheap? The conventionalanswer emphasizes oil’s natural abundance and the wondersof market supply and demand. Most historians who study the industryat least implicitly accept this explanation. But is not resourceabundance a socially constructed concept? Can we so easily isolatemarket forces from politics and government policy in explainingthe cost and price of oil? These     

Andrew Wender Cohen. The Racketeer's Progress: Chicago and the Struggle for the Modern American Economy, 1900-1940. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xviii + 333 pp. ISBN 0-521-83466-X, $60.00 (cloth).

The Racketeer’s Progress is an important contributionto the growing literature on the role of law in the relationshipbetween labor and capital. It focuses not on legislation orgovernment officials but on local and state courts, where, authorAndrew Wender Cohen argues, a legal revolution was underwayin the early decades of the twentieth century. Legal actionshifted from the defense of property through the convictionof union leaders for conspiracy to the prosecution of corruptunion leaders     

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     

Kevin Binfield. Writings of the Luddites. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xxviii + 279 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7612-5, $49.95 (cloth).

On the whole this volume offers more than its title suggests.Kevin Binfield has collected and annotated a wide array of textsconcerning not only the specific activities of the Ludditesbut also the wider economic and political contention of the1810s. He takes as his purpose the "textual recovery" of workingpeoples’ rhetorical strategies from the Luddite era. Todo this, he has thoroughly scoured national, county, and cityarchives, local newspapers, collections of several major businesses     

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     

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     

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     

Lisa Jacobson. Raising Consumers: Children and the American Mass Market in the Early Twentieth Century. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. xvi + 299 pp. ISBN 0-231-11388-9, $35.00 (cloth).

Ever since the publication of Thorstein Veblen’s Theoryof the Leisure Class (1899), economists and other social scientistshave studied the importance of consumption to the economy ofthe United States. There are numerous studies of patterns ofconsumption, but, Jacobson argues, the role of children hasbeen seriously neglected. The children Jacobson studies werenot just miniature shoppers; they were "cultural icons" whohelped to establish the legitimacy of consumption in Americansociety (p. 2). Early in the twentieth century     

Marcelo Bucheli. Bananas and Business: The United Fruit Company in Colombia, 1899-2000. New York: New York University Press, 2005. xi + 241 pp. ISBN 0-8147-9934-5, $45.00 (cloth).

The United Fruit Company (UFC) long has been maligned as animperial bastion of American business interests, quick to exploitits workers for a buck and slow to return profits to where itscommodity is extracted. This interpretation came early to Colombiancritics after a 1928 massacre of striking workers left hundreds,maybe thousands, dead. Gabriel Garcia Marquez exaggerated thedetails of this violence for One Hundred Years of Solitude,and few others have believed the company did more     

Douglas Cazaux Sackman. Orange Empire: California and the Fruits of Eden. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. 401 pp. ISBN 0-520-23886-9, $45.00 (cloth).

No one familiar with California could doubt that the citrusindustry has left an indelible mark on the landscape. Streets,cities, and even an entire county are named after various citrusproducts. It is certainly no coincidence that the centerpieceof Disney’s California Adventure theme park is a rollercoaster tucked inside a giant orange peel. The last two decadeshave seen the publication of the first scholarly works thatexplore the racial, gender, and economic dimensions of the industry.     

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     

Elisabeth Koll. From Cotton Mill to Business Empire: The Emergence of Regional Enterprises in Modern China. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. xvi + 422 pp. ISBN 0-674-01394-8, $49.50 (cloth).

Elisabeth Köll has written more than a book about ZhangJian (1853–1926), a pioneer of modern business in China.This is an important study of enterprise organization, managementpractice, and the means by which Zhang’s Dasheng enterprisegroup changed the political economy of provincial Nantong, aYangzi River city near Shanghai. The author is focused firstlyon control and accountability in the management of the enterpriseand secondly on the institutional transfer—"the interpretation,adaptation and application" (p. 4)—of Western corporatestructures, such as the limited liability firm, to the Chinesebusiness     

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     

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’;     

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     

Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw, eds. The European Linen Industry in Historical Perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. xxv + 334 pp. ISBN 0-19-925565-2, $95.00 (cloth).

The linen industry has not attracted nearly as much interestfrom economic and business historians as has the cotton industry.In large measure, this reflects cotton’s central rolein the industrial revolutions in Britain and elsewhere, as wellas cotton’s importance to the history of the southernUnited States. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,the linen industry struggled to compete with the cotton (andwool) industries.