Business History Review articles from December 1989

Business History Review archives from December 1989

"Old homes, in a city of perpetual change": women's magazines, 1890-1916. (journalist Charles Hanson Towne's description of women's magazines)
December 22, 1989... "Old Homes, in a City of Perpetual Change": Women's Magazines, 1890-1916 When journalist Charles Hanson Towne referred in 1926 to mass-circulation women's magazines as "old homes, in a city of perpetual change," his description resonated...

Business associationalism, the legitimation of enterprise, and the emergence of a business elite in nineteenth-century Brazil.
December 22, 1989... Business Associationalism, the Legitimation of Enterprise, and the Emergence of a Business Elite in Nineteenth-Century Brazil During the nineteenth century the business elite of Brazil struggled to ligitimize itself in order to promote...

The Bank of Nova Scotia in the Caribbean, 1889-1940.
December 22, 1989... The Bank of Nova Scotia in the Caribbean, 1889-1940 The Canadian chartered banks have been active on the islands of the Caribbean since the end of the nineteenth century, and during the interwar period they provided the largest foreign...

The development of the Cargo Fleet Iron Company, 1900-1914: entrepreneurship, costs, and structural rigidity in the northeast coast steel industry.
December 22, 1989... The Development of the Cargo Fleet Iron Company, 1900-1914: Entrepreneurship, Costs, and Structural Rigidity in the Northeast Coast Steel Industry The steel industry of Britain's Northeast Coast region experienced several major shifts in...

Mechanical and organizational innovation: the Drapers and the automatic loom. (Draper Company)
December 22, 1989... Mechanical and Organizational Innovation: The Drapers and the Automatic Loom The Draper Company's commitment to research and development was unparalleled among other nineteenth-century American manufacturers in older industries. This...

The Decline of the British Economy.
December 22, 1989... The Decline of the British Economy. The long relative decline of Britain's industrial economy has produced a voluminous literature, both polemical and academic, seeking to illuminate the causes of the phenomenon. Recent contributions to...

Modernization Frustrated: The Politics of Industrial Decline in Britain Since 1900.
December 22, 1989... Modernization Frustrated: The Politics of Industrial Decline in Britain since 1900 The long relative decline of Britain's industrial economy has produced a voluminous literature, both polemical and academic, seeking to illuminate the...

Enterprise, Management and Innovation in British Business: 1914-80.
December 22, 1989... Enterprise, Management and Innovation in British Business, 1914-80 The long relative decline of Britain's industrial economy has produced a voluminous literature, both polemical and academic, seeking to illuminate the causes of the...

Institutional Rigidities and Britain's Industrial Decline.
December 22, 1989... Institutional Rigidities and Britain's Industrial Decline The long relative decline of Britain's industrial economy has produced a voluminous literature, both polemical and academic, seeking to illuminate the causes of the phenomenon....

A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution.
December 22, 1989... A Mighty Empire: The Origins of the American Revolution Marc Egnal is nothing if not ambitious. In A Mighty Empire, he offers us a new and, he thinks, better explanation of the coming of the American Revolution. Egnal locates this explanation...

Authority and Early Resistance in Early New York.
December 22, 1989... Authority and Resistance in Early New York Conference proceedings do not often make good books, and these two volumes illustrate the problem. Both represent papers offered at conferences held in New York City under the auspices of the New-York...

New York and the Rise of American Capitalism: Economic Development and the Social and Political History of an American State, 1780-1870.
December 22, 1989... New York and the Rise of American Capitalism: Economic Development and the Social and Political History of an American State, 1780-1870 Conference proceedings do not often make good books, and these two volumes illustrate the problem. Both...

The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country, 1670-1920.
December 22, 1989... The Shadow of a Dream: Economic Life and Death in the South Carolina Low Country Peter Coclanis has written an ambitious and generally successful book. It is both brief (160) pages of text) and well documented (over 200 pages of appendixes,...

A History of the American Rice Industry: 1685-1985.
December 22, 1989... A History of the American Rice Industry, 1685-1985 This is an important and fascinating book, which has clearly been a labor of low for its author, Henry Dethloff. Rice has been an important export throughout the three hundred years of its...

Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960.
December 22, 1989... Working-Class Americanism: The Politics of Labor in a Textile City, 1914-1960 During the 1930s in Woonsocket, Rhode Island, conservative, deeply religious French Canadians joined with Franco-Belgian immigrants steeped in Marxian socialism to...

Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on Paid Labor at Home.
December 22, 1989... Homework: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on paid Labor at Home It is now a half century since the passage of the first federal legislation regulating industrial homework, the Fair Labor Standards act of 1938. In the 1940s, after the...

Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling Organizations in America.
December 22, 1989... Charismatic Capitalism: Direct Selling Organizations in America One of every five in the 1984 labor force worked with a direct selling organization (DSO), touting a product like Mary Kay Cosmetics, A. L. Williams term life insurance policies,...

The Guardian Life Insurance Company, 1860-1920: A History of German-American Enterprise.
December 22, 1989... The Guardian Life Insurance Company, 1860-1920: A History of a German-American Enterprise This is the first book in a projected two-volume history of the Guardian Life Insurance Company. It begins with the company's founding in 1860 and...

First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000.
December 22, 1989... First the Seed: The Political Economy of Plant Biotechnology, 1492-2000 This is an ambitious and important book. Jack Kloppenburg, a rural sociologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, analyzes the political economy of plant improvement...

The Bell System and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South, 1877-1920.
December 22, 1989... The Bell System and Regional Business: The Telephone in the South, 1877-1920 Kenneth Lipartito's book, an extension of his Nevins Prize-winning doctoral dissertation, is the fourth and latest issue of the Johns Hopkins--AT&T Series in Telephone...

Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth.
December 22, 1989... Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth. Technology and the Pursuit of Economic Growth successfully debunks several myths dealing with the use of research and development to provide economic gains. Though not writing ostensibly a business...

Blue Magic: The People, Power and Politics Behind the IBM Personal Computer.
December 22, 1989... Blue Magic: The People, Power and Politics behind the IBM Personal Computer. Blue Magic lives up to neither its title nor its subtitle. It cannot, because it was written without access to the sources that would make the full story of the IBM...

Corporate Takeovers: Causes and Consequences.
December 22, 1989... Corporate Takeovers: Causes and Consequences. Conference proceedings are notorious for comprising collections of second-rate papers that would not otherwise find their way into print. This conference volume, however, is an example of the...

Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco.
December 22, 1989... Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. What do you think of the following from the frst page of Barbarians at the Gate? On the horizon, the sun was a sinking red ball. Below, delicate snowy egrets poked through the reeds of the...

The Irony of Regulatory Reform: The Deregulation of American Telecommunications.
December 22, 1989... The Irony of Regulatory Reform This book is worth reading for several reasons. It is thoroughly researched, effectively organized, and unusually well written. It deals with important subject matter analytically and raises interesting and...

The Thrift Debacle.
December 22, 1989... The Thrift Debacle I am of two minds concerning the savings and loan crisis. As a taxpayer I become apoplectic at its mere mention, but as a financial historian I delight that it will be the subject of a vigorous debate long after my fiscal...

Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States.
December 22, 1989... Accumulation & Power: An Economic History of the United States Richard B. DuBoff behaves entirely like an economist, despite the subtitle, in his brilliant, concise augury, Accumulation & Power: An Economic History of the United States. The...

A Concise Economic History of the World: From Paleolithic Times to the Present.
December 22, 1989... A Concise Economic History of the World Why are some nations rich and others poor? This is the big question that Rondo Cameron takes as his unifying theme in what is primarily an economic history of Europe. His justification for the focus is...

Gainful Pursuits: The Making of Industrial Europe, 1600-1914.
December 22, 1989... Gainful Pursuits: The making of Industrial Europe, 1600-1914 The emergence of industrial Europe is one of modern history's great problems. In recent years fresh scholarship has been challenging the long-dominant idea of a rapid and...

Worktime and Industrialization: An International History.
December 22, 1989... Worktime and Industrialization: An International History In a landmark article in Past and Present (1967), E. P. Thompson laid out a framework to characterize the history of worktime and industrialization from the mid-eighteenth to the...

Canadian Papers in Business History, vol. 1.
December 22, 1989... Canadian Papers in Business History, Vol. 1 Canadian business history has yet to emerge as a field with a systematic research tradition, although more academics are focusing on the specialty. These eleven papers were first presented at the...

Studies in the Business History of Bristol.
December 22, 1989... Studies in the Business History of Bristol This elegantly produced and well-illustrated series of essays on the business history of Bristol during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is most welcome. Little has been written on the history...

The First Privatisation: The Politicians, the City, and the Denationalisation of Steel.
December 22, 1989... The First Privatisation: The Politicians, the City, and the Denationalisation of Steel This is a short study of the privatization (or denationalization) of the steel industry in Britain during the 1950s. It draws heavily on the archives of the...

The Process of Technological Change: New Technology and Social Choice in the Workplace.
December 22, 1989... The Process of Technological Change: New Technology and Social Choice in the Workplace The Process of Technological Change looks at telephone exchange modernization at British Telecom (BT) between 1981 and 1985. The book was produced by a team...

The Money Doctor in the Andes: The Kemmerer Missions, 1923-1933.
December 22, 1989... The Money Doctor in the Andes The history and historiography of United States--Latin American relations in rife with stories of military and diplomatic intervention by the "colossus of the north." Paul Drake has chosen to write on a much...

The Prados of Sao Paulo, Brazil: An Elite Family and Social Change, 1840-1930.
December 22, 1989... The Prados of Sao Paulo, Brazil In 1974 Darrell Levi completed a pioneering dissertation tracing the elite Brazilian family named Prado from its emergence into priminence in the 1840s to the end of the Old Republic in 1930. This constituted a...

State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt: 1918-1952.
December 22, 1989... State, Private Enterprise, and Economic Change in Egypt, 1918-1952. Between 1956 and 1961 the Egyptian government expropriated the bulk of the country's privately held, large-scale industrial and commercial enterprises. Although these firms...

Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan's Prewar Experience.
December 22, 1989... Managing Industrial Enterprise: Cases from Japan's Prewar Experience. Harvard's history department began in the 1970s to encourage its doctoral candidates studying in Japan to write dissertations that examined the history of Japanese business...