Richard Sennett. The Culture of the New Capitalism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006. 214 pp. ISBN 0-300-10782-X, $25.00 (paper).

Richard Sennett is among the most prominent sociologists ofwork and labor in the English-speaking world, and he has writtenanother in his recent series of books on how major changes incorporate culture are effecting the personal experience andsocial outlook of workers of various kinds. Given the importanceof his focus on human impacts in a time when most economic discussionis about technology and money, it is hard to pass up this book.At the same time, it is equally hard to believe that one willlearn anything new. We     

Julia Adams. The Familial State: Ruling Families and Merchant Capitalism in Early Modern Europe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005. xi + 235 pp. ISBN 0-8014-3308-8, $35.00 (paper).

This book is an ambitious attempt to reinterpret state creationin Early Modern Europe, from a theoretical point of view andalso because of the choice of the case study that centers theattention of the empirical research on the Dutch state. To begin with theory, Julia Adams goes back to Weberian theoriesabout the ideal type of patriarchal patrimonialism. Patrimonialpractices were traditional, but Max Weber stated that they couldset in motion fundamental     

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     

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’;     

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     

Richard E. Caves. Switching Channels: Organization and Change in TV Broadcasting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. ix + 360 pp. ISBN: 0-674-01878-8, $39.95 (paper).

Economist Richard Caves has taken on the daunting task of explaininghow and why the U.S. television "industry" produces what itdoes. He does this, notably, by treating public policy and contentcriticism—the themes prevalent in most scholarship ontelevision issues—as two among numerous other explanatoryfactors. His approach is decidedly that of an economist, nota historian, so his aim is to produce a well-supported, cohesiveeconomic model—which he does. Caves argues that one should consider     

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     

Victoria de Grazia. Irresistible Empire: America's Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. 586 pp. ISBN 0-674-01672-6, $29.95 (cloth).

There is no doubt that the twentieth century is America’scentury, but the terms of that conquest and dominance are lesscertain and apparent. Of course, military force has much todo with the creation of this hegemony, despite periodic boutsof isolationism. But even in these moments of vaunted withdrawalfrom the political and military systems of the world, thereis nothing to suggest a withdrawal in an economic sense. Indeed,during the isolationist 1920s, as de Grazia describes it, theUnited States was having     

Anne G. Hanley. Native Capital: Financial Institutions and Economic Development in Sao Paulo, Brazil, 1850-1920. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005. xviii + 286 pp. ISBN 0-8047-5072-6, $55.00 (paper).

Anne Hanley presents a lucid and impressive narrative of theevolution of financial markets in São Paulo, Brazil.She traces the evolution of the banking sector and SãoPaulo stock exchange from the end of the Empire (Brazil wasan empire with a constitutional monarchy between 1822 and 1889)through the first three decades of the Republic (1889–1920)and the contemporaneous evolution of capital markets from theirearly "personalistic" stage to "maturity" in the early twentieth     

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     

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     

Pamela Walker Laird. Pull: Networking and Success since Benjamin Franklin. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006. xiv + 439 pp. ISBN 0-674-01907-5, $29.95 (paper).

Success is as much about whom you know as it is about what youknow and how you perform. Networks, mentors, and role modelsplay pivotal roles in corporate climbing and entrepreneurship.Although the business lexicon only recently incorporated theseterms into its vocabulary, Pamela Laird convincingly arguesthat these forms of social capital, which she calls pull, havealways helped determine success. Moreover, because they existprimarily among individuals who see each other as belongingto the same cohort, success     

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     

Thomas Dublin and Walter Licht. The Face of Decline: The Pennsylvania Anthracite Region in the Twentieth Century. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005. x + 277 pp. ISBN 0-8014-8473-1, $24.95 (paper).

Talk of deindustrialization among both academics and the publictypically provokes images of closed factories and displacedauto and steel workers from the 1970s and 1980s. In this context,industrial decline is associated with the end of a golden postwarage of economic prosperity. It is often cast in terms of notonly a loss of ability among U.S. manufacturers to compete withtheir German and Japanese counterparts but also a general declensionin American society, featuring domestic     

Kent H. Hughes. Building the Next American Century: The Past and Future of American Economic Competitiveness. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005. xxiii + 542 pp. ISBN 0-8018-8204-4, $55.00 (cloth); 0-8018-8203-6, $24.95 (paper).

It is paradoxical that the United States, a nation so recentlytriumphant in the Cold War, should be so gripped by anxietyabout its economic future. A burgeoning national debt and ayawning current account deficit, among other pressures, obligeAmericans to question how—and if—the next one hundredyears will bring another "American Century." Into this debatesteps longtime Washington insider Kent H. Hughes, who sets outwith the ambitious agenda of considering "America’s economicfuture and its economic past" while seeking to define a     

John Franch. Robber Baron: The Life of Charles Tyson Yerkes. Champaign, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 2006. vii + 374 pp. ISBN 0-252-03099-0, $45.00 (paper).

Robber Baron, John Franch’s biography of Charles TysonYerkes, provides a fascinating window into the workings of laissez-fairecapitalism. Yerkes, one of the most notorious self-made menof nineteenth-century America, embodied the drive, avarice,and unscrupulousness of his age—taking each to its limits.Robber Baron is an academic work that should appeal to a wideraudience. Yerkes’s dealings are fascinating: the samemen did business with him time after time as they tried to getthe     

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