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. 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.     

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, 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     

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’;     

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.     

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     

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     

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.     

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     

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     

Kathleen Thelen. How Institutions Evolve: The Political Economy of Skills in Germany, Britain, the United States, and Japan. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xv + 333 pp. ISBN 0-521-83768-5, $75.00 (cloth); ISBN 0-521-54674-5, $29.99 (paper).

Kathleen Thelen has written an incredibly fascinating book thatshould be obligatory reading for anyone interested in the historyof skill formation or the evolution of institutions in general.For those working on the "varieties of capitalism," path-dependency,punctured equilibrium, or historical institutionalism, thistext should feature prominently in their work. Thelen’sgoal in this book is to discover why Germany, Britain, the UnitedStates, and Japan pursued different "paths" of skill formation.She traces the origin of each path     

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     

Andre Millard, ed. The Electric Guitar: A History of an American Icon. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. x + 215 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7862-4, $45.00 (cloth).

In 1996 the Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Studyof Invention and Innovation sponsored a symposium, "Electrified,Amplified, and Deified: The Electric Guitar, Its Makers, andIts Players." This book distills and amplifies the scholarshipin that encounter between researchers, innovators, and practitioners.The editor takes up where speakers left off and contributesthe introduction, conclusion, and five of nine chapters. Millardmakes a case for the electric guitar as a totem of modern Americanculture. Intended for the general     

David Mitch, John Brown, and Marco H. D. van Leeuwen, eds. Origins of the Modern Career. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. xiii + 342 pp. ISBN 0-7546-3496-5, $99.95.

Here is a sturdy volume that presents the theory, methods, andevidence involving employment patterns that constitute the moderncareer. This information is especially important to scholarsof labor studies who are interested in making historical comparisonsacross disciplinary frameworks. While the audience is likelyto be small, the book’s concerns traverse central juncturesin social history. For an edited volume the essays presented here are unusuallycogent, especially given the range of topics.     

Thomas A. Kinney. The Carriage Trade: Making Horse-Drawn Vehicles in America. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xi + 381 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7946-9, $49.95 (cloth).

Although ‘horse and buggy’ usually connotes a quainticon of the preindustrial world, The Carriage Trade by ThomasA. Kinney shows that horse-drawn vehicles were anything butquaint. Carriage and wagon making was a major nineteenth-centuryindustry, employing by 1890 130,000 employees in 13,000 firmsproducing $200 million in value (p. 262). These firms were leadersin production, management, and marketing innovations. Kinney’sstraightforward account shows how mechanization, interchangeability,and rationalization changed the nature of     

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     

Robert G. Angevine. The Railroad and the State: War, Politics, and Technology in Nineteenth-Century America. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. xvii + 351 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4239-1, $65.00 (cloth).

Robert Angevine’s excellent monograph offers valuableinsights for historians of technology, business, and the military.This book details the "symbiotic" relationship of railroadsand the military, showing how the relationship evolved duringthe nineteenth century. Angevine lays out his story chronologically. The fact that theUnited States was going to need some sort of transportationinfrastructure in order to move troops in a timely manner wasfirst realized after the War of 1812. As a result,     

Janelle S. Taylor, Linda L. Layne, and Danielle F. Wozniak, eds. Consuming Motherhood. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2004. ix + 323 pp. ISBN 0-8135-3429-1, $62.00 (cloth); 0-8135-3430-5, $22.95 (paper).

Motherhood imposes a birth of sorts for the women involved,according to the various authors in this exceptionally wellintegrated and provocative volume of essays. Women are rebornto a new status of ‘mother’ and simultaneously asa new kind of consumer of goods—goods in the form of services,consumer products, and even of babies. This volume weds thestudy of consumerism to the anthropological study of motherhoodand represents a genuine contribution to an array of fields,including     

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