Business History Review articles from June 1985

Business History Review archives from June 1985

Foundations of United States international financial power: gold standard diplomacy, 1900-1905.
June 22, 1985... During the late nineteenth century, Americans reformulated institutions and attitudes. Bureaucratic techniques and national-scale undertakings challenged older, smaller-scale ways of life at home; overseas, the United States began to flex...

Control by coercion: employers' associations and the establishment of industrial order in the building industry of England and Wales, 1860-1914.
June 22, 1985... Writing in the 1770s, Adam Smith observed that combinations of workmen were well-known while parallel combinations of employers remained obscure. "We rarely hear of the combinations of masters," Smith noted, "though frequently of those of...

Business education in Germany: past systems and current practice.
June 22, 1985... Higher education in business economics--or to use the German term, Betriebswirtschaftslehre--can be seen as a systematized technology designed to bring about certain goals. The system of education embodied in the German business schools...

The oil industry in Nazi Germany, 1936-1945.
June 22, 1985... With the oil crises of 1973-74 and 1979, Americans have become very much aware of the importance of a national energy policy. Among the many issues discussed in this context are energy self-sufficiency, the role of energy in national...

A gallery of distinguished individuals: the Biographical Dictionary of American Business Leaders.
June 22, 1985... Scholarly biographical dictionaries, it might be argued, mark the coming of age of a historical discipline. Britain's Dictionary of National Biography was completed in 1900 (in sixty-three volumes and after eighteen years' work); the...

Big business and the state in Germany.
June 22, 1985... To most American observers, the German economy has always been something of a mystery. In the nineteenth century Germany grew to be a major industrialized nation through methods very different from those of the United States. In the...

Revolution in time: clocks and the making of the modern world.(Young Adult Review)
June 22, 1985... The author of The Unbound Prometheus, a masterful analytical survey of modern industrialization published in 1969, now gives us a deeply informed, thoughtful, and lively international and comparative history of clock- and watchmaking. Some...

The papers of Robert Morris, Volume 6.
June 22, 1985... Robert Morris, appropriately honored from his day to our own as the "financier of the American Revolution," was the most important and influential public official of the Revolutionary and early Confederation eras. This definitive edition...

The railroaders.
June 22, 1985... In the last few years a number of oral histories of American working people have been published. Typically, verbatim transcripts of interviews are offered. This makes for poignant but often rambling, repetitious, and less than informative...

The Corn Belt Route: a history of the Chicago Great Western Railroad.
June 22, 1985... H. Roger Grant, professor of history at the University of Akron, whose specialty until recently was the study of communal societies in the United States, has now ventured afield in order to tackle the story of the Chicago Great Western...

The rebirth of the Missouri Pacific, 1956-1983.
June 22, 1985... This study of the Missouri Pacific Railroad (MP) covers a relatively brief but important period in the system's history. It begins with the corporation's emergence from receivership in 1956 and ends some 27 years later when the MP merged...

From the American system to mass production, 1800-1932: the development of manufacturing technology in the United States.
June 22, 1985... David A. Hounshell's evocative title suggests a sweeping, even encyclopedic study of the development of American manufacturing technology. In fact, his more modest, and more reasonable, objective is to trace the roots of modern high-volume...

Gatekeepers of black culture: black-owned book publishing in the United States, 1817-1981.
June 22, 1985... This is an excellent comprehensive survey of black book publishing in the United States. It successfully charts histori social, cultural, and political forces within and outside the black community that influenced the growth and development...

The saloon: public drinking in Chicago and Boston, 1880-1920.
June 22, 1985... Business historians have decried the lack of attention accorded small business for some time. Perry Duis has made a significant contribution to this relatively neglected area in this exhaustively researched, well-written study of the saloon...

The rise and fall of the conglomerate kings
June 22, 1985... Robert Sobel's latest history of American business covers the conglomerate merger movement that began after World War II and reached a frenzied peak in 1969. While it also discuss the DuPont--Conoco, U.S. Steel--Marathon, and Allied...

JPL and the American space program: a history of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
June 22, 1985... This is an important book for business and economic historians. In the twentienth century, especially since 1940, advanced technology has increasingly been the product of specialized, differentiated institutions whose output is only remotely,...

Markets for power: an analysis of electrical utility deregulation.
June 22, 1985... This is a tightly reasoned, well-documented analysis of four classes of proposals for electrical utility deregulation. The authors devote nearly half their book to context: the economic, technical, and institutional background of the...

Multinational excursions.
June 22, 1985... This volume on multinational enterprise consists of twenty articles, lectures, book reviews, position papers, and excerpts from congressional testimony, written between 1969 and 1983 by Charles P. Kindleberger, professor emeritus of economics...

IBM and the U.S. data processing industry: an economic history.
June 22, 1985... The extraordinary rise of the computer industry since World War II has made it probably the fastest-growing business in the world, and serious studies are now emerging to tell the industry's remarkable story. Business historians will...

Memories that shaped an industry: decisions leading to IBM System-360.(Young Adult Review)
June 22, 1985... Emerson Pugh's book is quite different, being technical and not economic in orientation. It is the second volume to be published in MIT Press's new series on the history of computing. Pugh himself is a research staff member at IBM's Thomas...

The coming of managerial capitalism: a casebook on the history of American economic institutions.
June 22, 1985... [Editor's note: It is the policy of the Business History Review not to send out for review books by members of its editorial staff. Instead, our policy is to have the author comment on the contents and purpose of his or her book.] This...

Economics and world power: an assessment of American diplomacy since 1789.
June 22, 1985... This is an important and timely contribution to an already considerable body of literature on United States foreign economic policy. It is significant for several reasons. One is the interpretative focus of the study. The authors have...

Guide to American foreign relations since 1700.
June 22, 1985... Here is a useful item. Richard Dean Burn's patient supervision has produced a one-volume bibliography of the history of American foreign policy that is a more than worthy replacement for Samuel Flagg Bemis and Grace Gardiner Griffin's...

The image of the architect.
June 22, 1985... The architect's profession must have been designed by a committee; like a camel, the job is a pastiche of seemingly incompatible elements. Is the role that of an artist, working in three dimensions on a monumental scale? Or is an...

Financier: the biography of Andre Meyer. A story of money, power, and the reshaping of American business.
June 22, 1985... The subtitle of this tightly organized, well-written biography correctly defines its subject's chief preoccupation as an investment banker. Andre Meyer, the all-powerful senior partner at New York's Lazard Freres & Co. from 1943 through...

Essays in Canadian business history.
June 22, 1985... Business history of a separate field does not exist in Canada. There is no publication equivalent to this review. The first conference devoted exclusively to the history of Canadian business was held this past summer at Trent University....

Feudal assessments and the political community under Henry II and his sons.
June 22, 1985... Norman and Angevin England is universally regarded as the homeland of systematic feudalism. A telling indication of that systematic spirit is the production and preservation of great surveys, among which the Domesday Book (1086) is the...

The penny capitalists: a study of nineteenth-century working-class entrepreneurs.
June 22, 1985... This book examines modes working-class businessmen in Britain, during the nineteenth century, with particular focus on the decades close to 1900. John Benson claims that 40 percent of all working-class families run some sort of business on...

The rise of merchant banking.
June 22, 1985... This volum was designed to fill a prominent gap in the literature on financial history--namely the absence of a comprehensive synthesis focusing on the many individual firms active in British merchant banking during the nineteenth century....

Nineteenth century railway history through the Illustrated London News.
June 22, 1985... Nineteenth Century Railway History through the Illustrated London News. Edited by Anthony J. Lambert. (North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1984. 128 pp. $27.00.)

The railway builders: lives and works of the Victorian railway contractors.
June 22, 1985... The Railway Builders: Lives and Works of the Victorian Railway Contractors. By R. S. Joby. (North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1983. 200 pp. $19.95.)

A regional history of the railways of Great Britain. Volume 14. The lake counties.
June 22, 1985... A Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain. Volume 14. The Lake Counties. By David Joy. (North Pomfret, Vt.: David & Charles, 1983. 270 pp. $23.50.) Reviewed by David Jenkinson It is at least plausible that the...

The archaeology of the consumer society: the second industrial revolution in Britain.
June 22, 1985... Kenneth Hudson has issued a manifesto in the guise of a well-organized, profusely illustrated, and fact-packed guide to researching and writing about the industrial revolution of the twentieth-century. The field has been neglected by...

German yearbook on business history 1983.
June 22, 1985... This volume is the third in an annual series sponsored by the GErman Society for Business History, in cooperation with the Institute for Research in Banking history, and compiled for the commendable purpose of making a sampling of recent...

Die Deutsche inflation (The German inflation).
June 22, 1985... This bilingual volume consists of fourteen essays and an introduction by Gerald D. Feldman, a leading American economic historian of Germany. Although its traumatic socian and economic consequences are well known, the German hyperinflation...

Management and labor in Imperial Germany: Ruhr industrialists as employers, 1896-1914.
June 22, 1985... About fifteen years ago Charlotte Erickson, who was then teaching at the London School of Economics, told me that my interest in British capital exports in the nineteenth century was typical of young German economic historians, who for the...

The nitrate industry and Chile's crucial transition: 1870-1891.
June 22, 1985... Thomas O'Brien's examination of the relationship between the Chilean nitrate industry and patterns of Chilean economic and social development in the late nineteenth century is a somewhat incomplete, but extremely valuable, contribution to...

Brazil and Mexico: patterns in late development.
June 22, 1985... The thesis of these chapters by political scientists, sociologists, and economists is that Brazil and Mexico, two large industrial states, have developed on parallel paths to produce similar results: a high rate of growth with great social...

Coffee and conflict in Columbia, 1886-1910.
June 22, 1985... Charles Bergquist has written a remarkable study, a fundamental contribution to the history of Colombia. This book is a meticulously researched, tightly argued, and lucidly written analysis of Colombian history during the period when the...

Airlines of Latin America since 1919.
June 22, 1985... R. E. G. Davies, the leading authority on the historical evolution of the world's airlines, characterizes this work as "an historical reference book" (p.x). Beyond its reference functions, however, it provides a general narrative history of...

An economic history of Africa from the earliest times to partition.
June 22, 1985... Each of these works contributes in a different way to the fields of African economic and business history and their still semi-iluuminated intersection. Indeed they are so different--in scope, subject, technique, even definitions of what...

Tanzania: a political economy.
June 22, 1985... Neither Wickins's general treatise nor Andrew Coulson's "political economy" of Tanzania is an original presentation in the sense of either substantially new evidence discovered or fresh ideas propounded. While appropriate generality and some...

Land reform in China and North Vietnam: consolidating the revolution at the village level.
June 22, 1985... With respect for private property near the top of their value system, most Western readers react with horror to stories of landlords being forcibly dispossessed and publicly humiliated or killed. If wealth must be redistributed, let it be...