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.     

Ronald Seavoy. Origins and Growth of the Global Economy: From the Fifteenth Century Onward. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. 275 pp. ISBN 0-275-97912-1, $70.95.

Few scholars are confident enough to believe that they can describethe history of the "origins and growth of the global economy"in 275 pages. But Ronald Seavoy, an emeritus professor of historyat Bowling Green State University, uses that history to illuminatetwo themes: to show that the global economy is built on thefoundation of European commercial imperialism and "to show thatthe global economy as it is currently evolving is capable ofproducing     

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     

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.     

Richard K. Lester and Michael J. Piore. Innovation: The Missing Dimension. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. ix + 223 pp. ISBN 0-674-01581-9, $24.95.

Interpretation and analysis are two antithetical ways of thinking,yet both must happen simultaneously to achieve innovation. Sostate Richard Lester and Michael Piore in explaining the needto better understand the role of interpretation in new productdevelopment. Lester leads the Industrial Performance Centerat the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and this bookis largely a work in industrial policy. Still, this     

Peter Hayes. From Cooperation to Complicity: Degussa in the Third Reich. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xx + 373 pp. ISBN 0-521-78227-9, $40.00.

Over the past few years, many histories of German companiesduring the Third Reich have been published. They are a responseto the attempts by survivors to obtain restitution from firmsinvolved in the commission of crimes against humanity duringthat period. Peter Hayes’s portrayal of one of the enterprisesthat was most deeply involved, Degussa, is among the best. Hayes begins his work with a disclaimer that "this book is designednot as an all-embracing     

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     

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     

Stuart B. Schwartz. Tropical Babylons: Sugar and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1450-1680. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. xiii + 347 pp. ISBN 0-8078-2875-0, $59.95 (cloth); ISBN 0-8078-5538-3, $22.50 (paper).

This volume examines the surprisingly complex history of thewestward shift in sugar production from the Mediterranean toAmerica in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. Many factorsinfluenced this shift, including those most often studied: therise and growth of merchant capital, slavery, and technologicalchange. The local-level studies aggregated here reexamine thisdevelopment and thereby reveal the complex evolution and thegreat     

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     

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     

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     

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     

Walter A. Friedman. Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 356 pp. ISBN 0-674-01298-4, $27.95.

Given the centrality of selling to the emergence of the modernbusiness corporation, it is surprising that there has been nofull-length study of the subject before. Walter A. Friedman’spathbreaking Birth of a Salesman is a truly welcome attemptto fill this void. While he begins with earlier developmentsin selling techniques, Friedman’s real focus is on theemergence of "modern" selling, when the selling process becamesystematically organized and managed. Friedman maintains thatthis came about in the United States, not in Europe,     

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     

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     

Gijs Mom. The Electric Vehicle: Technology and Expectations in the Automobile Age. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. xiii + 423 pp. ISBN 0-8018-7138-7, $54.95.

Automotive historians have long dismissed the electric vehicle;who would want a car with limited speed that had to be rechargedevery hundred miles? But in 1905, Gijs Mom reminds us, "morethan half of all commercial vehicles in the United States wereelectric powered," and by 1940 tens of thousands of electriccars and trucks had been produced (pp. 206, 265). In the UnitedStates and Europe, electric vehicles appeared as taxicabs, deliveryvans, and even fire engines, as     

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     

Thomas C. Owen. Dilemmas of Russian Capitalism: Fedor Chizhov and Corporate Enterprise in the Railroad Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005. xiv + 275 pp. ISBN 0-674-01549-5, $49.95.

Fedor Chizhov (1811–1877) has long been undervalued inthe history of Imperial Russia, despite his manifest importancein journalism, Slavophile ideology, the development of industry,railroads, banking, and economic thought. The reasons for thisneglect are twofold. From a practical point of view, the sourcethat most illuminates Chizhov and his context—the candidand detailed diary he kept from the age of fourteen—hasnot been available to western researchers until recently, andSoviet (and later Russian) researchers made little use of it.The reason     

David L. Mason. From Buildings and Loans to Bail-Outs: A History of the American Savings and Loan Industry, 1831-1995. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xii + 349 pp. ISBN 0-521-82754-X, $50.00.

This book provides a long-term history of the savings and loanindustry in the United States, outlining and developing fourthemes. First is the history of the enterprises themselves,from their earliest years to the crisis-ridden deregulationperiod of recent history. Author David Mason also charts thegenesis and impact of collective activity—the trade associationsthat attempted to represent or regulate the industry. Third,he chronicles the relationship between the sector and government;and finally, the author aims to assess the