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     

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,     

Renato Giannetti and Michelangelo Vasta. L'impresa italiana nel Novecento. Bologna, Italy: Societa Editrice il Mulino, 2003. 486 pp. ISBN 88-15-09496-2, {euro}30.00.

Italian business history is not well known abroad. This is quiteobvious. Even though Italy has been industrialized since the1920s, it is a small country, with little international influence.Its historical patterns of evolution privileged the internalmarket, and although its domestic corporations have traditionallynot been very active abroad, foreign firms have also manifestedopenly their reluctance to invest in a promising but too turbulentenvironment. As a result, Italian business history has fromthe beginning been a domestic story, scarcely appealing forforeign scholars. The Italian historiographic climate was partiallyresponsible for this situation. Business history as a disciplinehas only recently been "legitimized" in Italy (still there areno chairs in the field). For a long time, the     

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     

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     

Madeleine Zelin, Jonathan K. Ocko, and Robert Gardella, eds. Contract and Property in Early Modern China. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. vii + 398 pp. ISBN 0-8047-4639-7, $65.00.

In 1887 the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society—ChinaBranch sponsored a symposium on "Chinese partnerships," in whicha number of eminent China hands such as E. H. Parker and ChalonerAlabaster shared their long experience with the subject. Thediscussants agreed, among other things, that liability for debtsof the firm was enforceable in Chinese courts, that this liabilitywas shared among the partners according to their contractuallydetermined shares in the business, and that a contractuallydesignated "managing partner" normally     

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     

Francois Caron, ed. Les grandes Compagnies de chemin de fer en France, 1823-1937. Geneva, Switzerland: Librairie Droz, 2005. 411 pp. ISBN 2-600-00942-6, {euro}41.61 (paper).

This is a book that is hard to describe and hard to review.It is certainly not an ordinary study of railway history buta kind of broad survey, based on a series of financial reportsconcerning the great French private railway companies, as drawnup between 1882 and 1936 by financial analysts of the CreditLyonnais Bank and preserved in the "Archives Historiques duCrédit Lyonnais." François Caron, dean of Frencheconomic and railway historians, has selected large parts ofthe original reports and has added his own comments and explanations.It     

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     

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     

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     

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     

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.     

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     

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     

Tom Downey. Planting a Capitalist South: Masters, Merchants, and Manufacturers in the Southern Interior, 1790-1860. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2006. xiii + 262 pp. ISBN 0-8071-3107-5, $49.95.

South Carolina’s Edgefield and Barnwell districts arenot new terrain for historical investigation, having alreadyconstituted the object of fine studies. Yet, Tom Downey’sbook definitely signals the achievement of the transition towardnew ways of writing southern history. The very word "transition" becomes central to Downey’sreading of the history of Edgefield and Barnwell as he distanceshimself from the interpretive framework into which the termsof the debate on the capitalist/non-capitalist nature of the     

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     

Gordon Boyce. Over Half a Million Careful Owners: A 75-year history of PSIS, 1928-2003. Wellington, NZ: Dunmore Publishing, 2005. 326 pp. ISBN 0-476-0129-29, NZ$29.95 (paper).

Gordon Boyce traces the history of New Zealand’s PSIS,the Public Service Investment Society, in a book commissionedby the company. Boyce, now Professor of International Businessat Queensland University of Technology after thirteen yearsof teaching business and economic history at Victoria Universityof Wellington, is well qualified for the project. His recentpublications include Co-operative Structures in Global Business(2002). Boyce fulfills his commission well, narrating an engagingstory. "Vignettes" provide personal and anecdotal details thatformer staff     

Sarah Elvins. Sales and Celebrations: Retailing and Regional Identity in Western New York State, 1920-1940. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2004. 222 pp. ISBN 0-8214-1549-2, $42.95 (cloth).

Elvins’s book is part of a growing body of historicalscholarship that interrogates the lived experience of consumersociety in the twentieth-century United States. Beginning whereWilliam Leach’s Land of Desire (1993) left off, Elvinsseeks to complicate "top-down" narratives of the homogenizationof American consumer culture into a national mass market. Takingher cue from Lizabeth Cohen’s early work on consumptionin Chicago, Elvins examines consumption on the local level in     

Roger Lowenstein. Origins of the Crash: The Great Bubble and Its Undoing. New York: Penguin, 2004. ix + 270 pp. ISBN 1-59420-003-3, $24.95 (cloth); 0-14-303-467-7, $15.00 (paper).

What happened on Wall Street from 1997 to 2002 was a financialversion of the perfect storm. Almost everything that could gowrong did go wrong simultaneously. The Securities and ExchangeCommission reforms of the 1930s had closed many of the loopholesfor chicanery, but new paths to questionable practices and debasedprinciples eventually emerged. In his examination of the originsof the "dot.com bubble" and the circumstances of the balloon’sbursting, Roger Lowenstein narrates clearly