Business History Review articles from December 1991

Business History Review archives from December 1991

Making cars and making money in the interwar automobile industry: economies of scale and scope and the manufacturing behind the marketing. (Industry Overview)
December 22, 1991... 57 See--reading carefully between the lines-- Laurence Todd's exculpatory retrospective, "General Motors Baffles the A.F.L.: Auto Combine Too Strong," in Labor's News: The News Magazine of the Labor Movement, 7 March 1929, 1. 58 In this...

The modernization of production in the French automobile industry between the wars: a photographic essay. (Industry Overview)
December 22, 1991... Mass production was established in the United States between 1910 and the early 1920's, at a speed disconcerting to outside observers. French industrialists and engineers were stunned, but they watched the phenomenon closely. Louis Renault,...

Strategy and irreversibility in supplier relations: the case of the U.S. automobile industry. (Industry Overview)
December 22, 1991... must focus their efforts, clustering together the most fruitful areas for information exchange.(91) Theoretically, a firm could act as a holding company for several such clusters, but this seems impossible in practice. First, there is no way...

The corporation nobody knew: Bruce Barton, Alfred Sloan, and the founding of the General Motors "family."
December 22, 1991... sufficient public recognition. As for the notion of this corporation as constituting a "family" of owners, managers, and workers, the effect of Barton's campaigns is impossible to measure.(69) Certainly some workers must have dismissed such a...

Determinants of firm entry into the Brazilian automobile manufacturing industry, 1956-1968. (Industry Overview)
December 22, 1991... would be better positioned with Kubitschek's administration if it already had a project accepted by SUMOC.(65) Wolfsburg was reluctant to commit itself. VW president Heinrich Nordhoff doubted whether the Brazilian government could guarantee the...

Habits of Industry: White Culture and the Transformation of the Carolina Piedmont.
December 22, 1991... In Habits of Industry, winner of the Charles Sackett Sydnor Award of the Southern Historical Association, Allen Tullos has attempted a different kind of history, juxtaposing historical and biographical narratives in different voices to build up...

A Maritime History of the Pacific Coast: 1540-1980.
December 22, 1991... James Hitchman's short monograph is a very useful teaching tool and an accessible data set on the maritime history of the Pacific Coast from contact to recent times. It is not, however, a historical analysis of his topic, being descriptive and...

The North Carolina Railroad, 1849-1871, and the Modernization of North Carolina.
December 22, 1991... In the mid-nineteenth century North Carolina was often known as the Rip Van Winkle State. The state had no good seaports, few navigable rivers, and terrible roads. In 1853 when Frederick Law Olmsted discovered that his stagecoach had left...

The Power That Governs: The Evolution of Judicial Activism in a Midwestern State, 1840-1890.
December 22, 1991... In the history of mid-nineteenth century America, Illinois occupied a noteworthy place. The land of Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, no state encompassed more completely the socio-economic and political tensions shaping the North's slide...

Labor in Massachusetts: Selected Essays.
December 22, 1991... This is a useful book for the historian interested in labor issues in Massachusetts. Its three parts deal with the transition toward wage labor, the rise and fall of craft unionism, and the plight of unions in today's economy. Kenneth...

Cleveland: The Making of a City.
December 22, 1991... Whatever else Cleveland: The Making of a City may be--paean of praise, labor of love--it is not history as present members of the discipline practice it. First published in 1950 and reissued in 1990, the book is a chronological compendium of...

Damming the Colorado: The Rise of the Lower Colorado River Authority, 1933-1939.
December 22, 1991... Mention of the Colorado River evokes in most people images of the Grand Canyon and the Hoover Dam, of the 1,500-mile watercourse that ultimately trickles into the Gulf of California. But running just shy of 1,000 miles, exclusively within the...

Boeing: In Peace and War.
December 22, 1991... The history of the Boeing Company reads like that of most other aircraft companies fortunate to survive into the 1990s. William Boeing, a wealthy young man thrilled by flight, started his company in 1916, in a photogenic shack. His...

Forty Years of Firsts: The Recollections of a Dow Corning Pioneer.
December 22, 1991... Dow Corning may not be as well known as IBM or Xerox, but it is one of the success stories of post-1945 America. It certainly did not look that way at the end of the Second World War. Overnight the war contracts that had underpinned the early...

Out of Thin Air: A History of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., 1940-1990.
December 22, 1991... This fiftieth anniversary history of Air Products and Chemicals, Inc., should please its primary audience--company employees--but it will leave academic readers unsatisfied. Although better written and more balanced than most...

IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems.
December 22, 1991... Business historians will find this massive history challenging, at times maddening, but, I think, ultimately rewarding. It is the second in a series of technical histories of IBM computers written by IBM employees and published as part of the...

The Baseball Business: Pursuing Pennants and Profits in Baltimore.
December 22, 1991... "We . . . think a man sometime in his life should have a chance to decide his destiny" (p. 192), warned Orioles third baseman Brooks Robinson in 1973. The man whose glove (or in a pinch, chest) had sealed the fate of thousands of potential base...

From New Day to New Deal: American Farm Policy from Hoover to Roosevelt, 1928-1933.
December 22, 1991... Central to twentieth-century America, Ellis Hawley writes, has been "the difficulty of reconciling a modern industrial order, necessarily based upon a high degree of collective organization, with democratic postulates, competitive ideals, and...

The Federal Role in Urban Mass Transportation.
December 22, 1991... When I finished a book on urban transportation (From Streetcar to Superhighway, 1981), a few polite colleagues asked if I planned a sequel. My analysis ended in 1940, but I saw little point in assessing recent trends in mass transit....

Wall Street.
December 22, 1991... Wall Street is an important, authoritative, and frustrating volume. The title misleads; it implies a full-scale history of America's financial center, but it is largely a study of the New York securities market from 1791 to 1840. There is in...

Regulating a New Economy: Public Policy and Economic Change in America, 1900-1933.
December 22, 1991... In this work, Morton Keller provides us with the first installment of a projected three-volume sequel to his Affairs of State (1977). Based on a critical reading of historical works and thorough immersion in the periodical discussions of the...

The Consumer Movement: Guardians of the Marketplace.
December 22, 1991... This book is perhaps the best brief introduction to issues involving and surrounding the modern consumer movement that took form in the 1960s. Following the generally accepted chronology, Robert Mayer observes that the modern movement is the...

Fluctuating Fortunes: The Political Power of Business in America.
December 22, 1991... This clearly organized and balanced book successfully achieves its two main objectives: to describe the "fluctuating fortunes" of American business in relations with government between 1960 and 1988 and to explain why these fluctuations...

The Politics of Regulatory Change: A Tale of Two Agencies.
December 22, 1991... Why was Ronald Reagan's attempt to "get government off our backs" so important? Because, political scientists Richard A. Harris and Sidney M. Milkis argue, Reagan's effort reveals much about change in the American polity and political economy...

The Political Economy of World Energy: A Twentieth-Century Perspective.
December 22, 1991... This book is really two books; the inclusion of both in one volume raises difficulties in judging the contributions to scholarship. The first book, covering chapters 1 through 8, gamely if not always clearly and cogently presents an overview of...

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power.
December 22, 1991... No one, to my knowledge, has ever before tried to tell the whole, epic story of international oil. Daniel Yergin, who detects in petroleum the prize behind most diplomatic and economic events of any consequence, obviously wanted to. And through...

The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development.
December 22, 1991... This volume collects various papers presented at a 1987 Yale University conference celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Ronald Coase's article "The Nature of the Firm" (Economica, 1937). The volume is particularly timely given Coase's...

The Power to Manage? Employers and Industrial Relations in Comparative-Historical Perspective.
December 22, 1991... Ordinarily, a scholarly collection of this kind presents the reviewer with the task of finding some coherence in the assemblage of stubbornly disparate essays. That is not in the least true of the book that Steven Tolliday and Jonathan Zeitlin...

Governments, Industries and Markets: Aspects of Government-Industry Relations in the UK, Japan, West Germany and the USA since 1945.
December 22, 1991... This is a useful though uneven collection, consisting of eleven essays on aspects of business-government relations plus a brief introduction. Eight of the papers discuss the United Kingdom, and there are also separate essays on West Germany,...

Nationalism, Capitalism, and Colonization in Nineteenth-Century Quebec: The Upper St. Francis District.
December 22, 1991... J. I. Little takes a fresh look at an old topic--the Quebec colonization movement--by examining the understudied Eastern Shore from the perspective of both French Canadian nationalism and large-scale business enterprise. He draws an interesting...

Timothy Eaton and the Rise of His Department Store.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1991... Joy L. Santink's Timothy Eaton and the Rise of His Department Store is an excellent study of a major North American retail establishment. It joins a small but growing number of scholarly examinations of such institutions, and many others are...

The Development of Large Technical Systems.
December 22, 1991... Almost a decade ago, the historian Thomas Hughes published an exceptional book, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western Society, 1880-1930 (1983). The event was a landmark for several reasons. The work was an impressively detailed...

British Privateering Enterprise in the Eighteenth Century.
December 22, 1991... David Starkey's aim in this book on eighteenth-century privateering is to refute its reputation as an activity little better than licensed piracy. Instead, he argues, privateering stimulated the shipbuilding industry through the demand for...

Coping with City Growth during the British Industrial Revolution.
December 22, 1991... Jeffrey Williamson presents a bold hypothesis: Britain, the first country to experience significant urban-industrial growth, offers lessons from its nineteenth-century experience that may help analysts and policymakers understand contemporary...

Child Labor and the Industrial Revolution.
December 22, 1991... In this book Clark Nardinelli uses neoclassical economics to examine the role of child labor in Great Britain during the Industrial Revolution. The result is an interesting, if not completely convincing, reinterpretation of the economics of...

Women Assemble: Women Workers and the New Industries in Inter-War Britain.
December 22, 1991... Historical research on the labor process has been dominated by debates on skilled males in manufacturing industries. Our strongest image of assembly line work is that of men in the car factory, whether working for Ford or fighting Fordism. In...

State Capital and Private Enterprise: The Case of the UK National Enterprise Board.
December 22, 1991... State Capital and Private Enterprise is a book with a message. Daniel Kramer argues the case for state provision of venture capital in Britain. In his eyes, the now defunct National Enterprise Board (NEB) could act as a model for future...

Britain Ascendant: Comparative Studies in Franco-British Economic History.
December 22, 1991... To re-read an author's collected essays updated to accommodate the accumulation of scholarship is like revisiting the family home after long absence. The structure is recognizable, but the furnishings have been rearranged or reupholstered, and...

Charles Morel: Un constructeur dauphinois sous la III Republique.
December 22, 1991... Jean-Pierre Borgis has written an informative monograph on the inventor Charles Morel (1848-1914) and his machine-making ventures in Third Republic France. Morel was a classic self-made man. Son of a truck gardener, he displayed an early...

Industrielle Interessenpolitik und Staat: Internationale Kartelle in der britischen AuBen- und Wirtschaftspolitik wahrend der Zwischenkriegszeit.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1991... This study, accepted as a habilitation thesis at the University of Bochum in 1983-84, focuses on the relations between economy and state. It is also part of the Volkswagen Foundation's project on the European economy in the interwar years....

Die I. G. Farbenindustrie AG: Wirtschaft, Technik und Politik, 1904-1945.
December 22, 1991... This book is the first extended scholarly study of the giant IG Farben corporation to appear in Germany. It is particularly welcome in view of the success there of two quite unreliable and sensationalist books on the same subject, Joseph...

Nazi Economics: Ideology, Theory, and Policy.(Brief Article)
December 22, 1991... This interesting book is an essay in intellectual history, not economic or business history. Avraham Barkai is interested in showing that Nazi economic thought can be characterized as a more or less consistent economic model and that Nazi...

The Imported Pioneers: Westerners Who Helped Build Modern Japan.
December 22, 1991... Neil Pedlar's central purpose in his collection of forty-two essays is to explore the struggles of a variety of Westerners who lived and worked in nineteenth-century Japan and who assisted in the industrialization and modernization of that...

The Colonial Origins of Korean Enterprise: 1910-1945.
December 22, 1991... The rapid growth of South Korea has kindled an interest in its economic history. One wants to know how and why the past has influenced the prosperity of such a fast-growing late-industrializer, if at all. Given this curiosity, Dennis McNamara's...

Australia in the International Economy in the Twentieth Century.
December 22, 1991... This book is designed as a text for undergraduates in economics, politics, and history. It is divided into four parts, covering the periods before 1914, from 1914 to 1941, 1942 to 1959, and since 1960, although the most detailed coverage is...