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.     

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     

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     

David Reisman. Schumpeter's Market: Enterprise and Evolution. Northampton, Mass.: Edward Elgar, 2004. vii + 294 pp. ISBN 1-84376-164-5, $120.00.

The life and works of Joseph Schumpeter (1883–1950) continueto fascinate social scientists of diverse disciplines and schools.For some economists Schumpeter’s institutional and evolutionaryapproach is the only way to practice economics; but even forthe mainstream the current buzz about endogenous growth andthe knowledge economy has renewed interest in his writings,especially those on technology and entrepreneurship. Businesshistorians always have been attentive to Schumpeter’sentrepreneurs and the dynamic of creative destruction, and globalizationnow provides a     

Todd A. Knoop. Recessions and Depressions: Understanding Business Cycles. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. xv + 289 pp. ISBN 0-275-98162-2, $49.95.

This book covers "the empirics, the theory, and internationalcase studies of recessions and depressions" as a "contributionto the ongoing debate over the nature and causes of recessionsand depressions" (p. xiv). It does this with non-technical narrativesthat can be understood by upper-level undergraduates and thegeneral reader with some economics background: a welcome goalthat the author achieves. Chapters include useful data tablesand charts without being overwhelming and conclude with furtherreading suggestions.     

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     

Christopher A. Reed. Gutenberg in Shanghai: Chinese Print Capitalism, 1876-1937. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2004. xvii + 391 pp. ISBN 0-7748-1040-8, $85.00.

In this pioneering study Christopher A. Reed addresses majorissues concerning the modernization of Chinese printing andpublishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.The book’s most significant contribution is its focuson technology and business organizations. While the historyof print and publishing in China has drawn enthusiastic attentionfrom scholars over the last decade, Reed’s work breaksnew ground by studying the cultural hardware behind the writtenword—printing machines and publishing businesses. Previoushistorical and literary approaches preoccupied with     

Anne Clendinning. Demons of Domesticity: Women and the English Gas Industry, 1889-1939. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2004. xvii + 352 pp. ISBN 0-7546-0692-9, $109.95 (cloth).

This book examines the role of women, both as employees andas consumers, in the English gas industry in the fifty yearsbetween the 1880s and the eve of the Second World War. By thelate nineteenth century, the gas industry was well establishedthroughout England, using coal as its main raw material andwith the provision of lighting as its main market. The historicalliterature on the     

Ernesto R. Gantman. Capitalism, Social Privilege and Managerial Ideologies. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2005. viii + 185 pp. ISBN 0-7546-4186-4, $99.95.

Is management a science or an ideology? Do management theoriesexplore the best way to maximize society’s welfare byefficiently coordinating inputs to produce the most output?Or are they window dressing concealing the exploitation of labor? An Argentinean professor, Ernesto Gantman surveys two centuriesof American management theory to argue that ideology trumpsscience. (Though the book purports to be a study of managementideology generally, it is almost exclusively about the UnitedStates.) Gantman quickly     

Douglas Brinkley. Wheels for the World: Henry Ford, His Company, and a Century of Progress, 1903-2003. New York: Viking, 2003. xxii + 858 pp. ISBN 0-670-03181-X, $34.95. * Max Wallace. The American Axis: Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Rise of the Third Reich. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. 465 pp. ISBN 0-312-29022-5, $27.95

In recent years the line dividing scholarly histories from popularones has grown blurry. Changes in how books are marketed andretailed over the past two decades have whetted the appetiteof general readers for history, and many academic historians,though trained to write for specialists, now seek to tap into this audience more broadly. The commercial success of suchscholars as Joseph Ellis and James M. McPherson has inspiredacademic historians to try to write more readable books. Atthe same time, journalists and other writers are producing ambitiousnarratives based on primary sources. Still, important differencesremain between the kinds of history that academic and popularwriters produce. These differences surface in interesting waysin two new books on Henry Ford. The author of the first, Douglas Brinkley, is a professor anddirector of the Theodore Roosevelt Center for American Civilizationat     

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     

Christopher Kobrak and Per H. Hansen, eds. European Business, Dictatorship, and Political Risk, 1920-1945. New York: Berghahn Books, 2004. xiv + 261 pp. ISBN 1-57181-629-1, $60.00.

In recent years pressure from international Jewish organizationshas led many European corporations to open previously closedarchives to historians. In Germany a number of major businessesand financial institutions also have commissioned corporatehistories by leading historians, in order to throw light ontheir activities during the Nazi period. This book is a collectionof papers (in the case of Gerald D. Feldman based on one ofthese corporate histories) presented at a series of workshops     

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     

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