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’;     

Geoffrey Jones. Renewing Unilever: Transformation and Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 0-19-926943-2, $64.50.

A commissioned study, Renewing Unilever analyzes the historyof one of the world’s largest and, arguably, most importantmultinational enterprises in the years after 1965. Primarilya manufacturer and seller of branded, non-durable, consumergoods, Unilever produced items that could be found in aboutone-half of households globally by the early twenty-first century.Picking up where earlier histories of Unilever by Charles Wilsonended, Geoffrey Jones very ably tells the story of Unilever’srecent activities.     

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     

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     

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     

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.     

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     

Kaoru Sugihara, ed. Japan, China, and the Growth of the Asian International Economy, 1850-1949. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. xv + 295 pp. ISBN 0-19-829271-6, $140.00.

This important cluster of perspectives on the growth of theAsian international economy originates from a 1993 workshopheld in Osaka on the role of China and overseas Chinese networksin the Asian international economy. It is the first volume inthe series of "Japanese Studies in Economic and Social History"edited by Osamu Saito and Kaoru Sugihara. As the title suggests,this book does not deal with issues concerning commodity productionand consumption; it focuses instead on matters     

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     

Steve Fraser. Every Man a Speculator: A History of Wall Street in American Life. New York: HarperCollins, 2005. xxiii + 721 pp. ISBN 0-06-662048-1, $29.95 (cloth).

Steve Fraser has undertaken the daunting task of a culturalhistory of Wall Street. The result is a book that is at onceintriguing and exasperating, insightful and overstated, comprehensiveand flawed. The research is broad and imaginative but not deepin key areas and marred by small but silly errors. The writingis often lucid and sprightly but also strains too hard to beclever. Fraser organizes his narrative around four broad eras. Duringthe first one, the "Financial Frontier,"     

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     

James Aho. Confession and Bookkeeping: The Religious, Moral and Rhetorical Roots of Accounting. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005. xx + 131 pp. ISBN 0-7914-6545-4, $40.00.

Confession and bookkeeping, at first sight, have an unlikelybut important link with the origins and development of capitalism,as a set of business practices and as the conceptualizationof such practices. Werner Sombart originally contended thatcapitalism and double entry bookkeeping (DEB) were inextricablylinked as form and content, a theme also developed by Max Weberas part of his analysis of Protestantism and the rise of capitalism. James Aho’s book addresses this important theme and makesa     

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     

Book Reviews: C. John Miller &; Richard S. Goldberg: Product liability, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 971 pp. ISBN 0-19-825678-7. GBP 145.00.

Book Review

Book Reviews: C. John Miller &; Richard S. Goldberg: Product liability, 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 971 pp. ISBN 0-19-825678-7. GBP 145.00.     

Carl A. Zimring. Cash for Your Trash: Scrap Recycling in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. xi + 220 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3686-3, $39.95.

Paul Revere rode to Concord on a horse shod with shoes re-forgedfrom scrap iron. New York City’s Mayor, Michael Bloomberg,misstepped when he decided that residents would sort only thoserecyclables that actually had a market, rather than the beveragecontainers that went straight to the landfill. During the intervening226 years, Americans recycled for reasons of economy, and ontothat base we recently have grafted a goal of recycling to promoteenvironmental quality. Carl Zimring’s Cash For Your Trashlinks     

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     

James W. Cortada. The Digital Hand, Volume 2: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xv + 629 pp. ISBN 0-19-516587-X, $59.50.

This large and extensive volume is the second in an ambitiousprojected three-volume series that examines nothing less thanhow the information revolution of the second half of the twentiethcentury impacted every aspect of the U.S. economy. The firstvolume, weighing in at a mere 500 pages or so, was The DigitalHand: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing,Transportation, and Retail Industries (Oxford University     

Clement M. Henry and Rodney Wilson, eds. The Politics of Islamic Finance. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. vi + 307 pp. ISBN 0-7486-1837-6, $30.00 (paper).

Clement Henry and Rodney Wilson have assembled twelve essaysabout Islamic finance—six about thematic issues and sixabout case studies of Sudan, Kuwait, Jordan, Turkey, Tunisia,and Egypt—plus an introduction and conclusion. Henry and Wilson’s introductory chapter is an excellentsummary of the phenomenon of Islamic banks, including theirorigins, size, and banking practices. The banks largely datefrom the mid-1970s. Purist Islamic economists thought Islamicbanking should be based on profit sharing, in which the depositor’sfunds are     

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,     

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