Business History Review articles from June 1990

Business History Review archives from June 1990

American investment in tropical Mexico: rubber plantations, fraud, and dollar diplomacy, 1897-1913.
June 22, 1990... American Investment in Tropical Mexico: Rubber Plantations, Fraud, and Dollar Diplomacy, 1897-1913 As the nineteenth century ended, India rubber became a critically important commodity. Demand outstripped production; prices skyrocketed...

Pipeline politics: America, TAPLINE, and the Arabs. (Trans-Arabian Pipeline)
June 22, 1990... Pipeline Politics: America, TAPLINE, and the Arabs At Sidon, just forty miles down the Lebanese coast from Beirut, Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO) engineers opened a giant valve on 2 December 1950, sending a stream of Saudi Arabian...

Kennedy, oil imports, and the Fair Trade Doctrine. (John F. Kennedy)
June 22, 1990... Kennedy, Oil Imports, and the Fair Trade Doctrine President John F. Kennedy believed in the principle of free trade, but he sympathized with producers hurt by imports and recognized the political necessity of placating protectionists in...

Competition and regulation: the railroad model.
June 22, 1990... Competition and Regulation: The Railroad Model Competition has survived in American culture by assuming as many forms and shapes as two centuries of theorists and practitioners could devise. Probably no concept except democracy has been...

The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910-1960.
June 22, 1990... The Last Generation: Work and Life in the Textile Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1910-1960 The Last Generation, an oral history of New England textile workers, is aptly named. The thirty-four women and men who tell their stories in Mary...

J.C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities.
June 22, 1990... J. C. Nichols and the Shaping of Kansas City: Innovation in Planned Residential Communities "Cities are the handiwork of the real estate man. Whether our cities are physically bad or physically good is our responsibility" (p. 89). In J. C....

The Grain Traders: The Story of the Chicago Board of Trade.
June 22, 1990... The Grain Traders: The Story of the Chicago Board of Trade William Ferris's "story" is that of the traders who made the market, those who cornered it and became wealthy, those who came close and failed. It is a story told in the style of a...

Field Man: The Chronicle of a Bank Farm Manager in the 1940s.
June 22, 1990... Field Man: The Chronicle of a Bank Farm Manager in the 1940s This is certainly not a book to cuddle up with on a rainy day. It is marginally useful, and hopelessly dull. Harold Clingerman supervised farms as a field man for the U.S. National...

The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance.
June 22, 1990... The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance Who has not wondered, at least as a fearlessly naive child, how they put the lead into a pencil? This question and many others less simple or obvious are answered by Henry Petroski in this...

Control Through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management.
June 22, 1990... Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management In the first decades of the nineteenth century, most American firms were small affairs, managed by a family or a partnership, and serving only a local or regional market....

William Green: Biography of a Labor Leader.
June 22, 1990... William Green: Biography of a Labor Leader William Green served as president of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) from 1924 until his death in 1952. He directly succeeded Samuel Gompers, who had dominated the AFL since its inception in...

In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City: 1933-1966.
June 22, 1990... In Transit: The Transport Workers Union in New York City, 1933-1966 In Transit is a richly detailed and analytically sophisticated book about a remarkable organization, the Transport Workers Union (TWU), in New York City during the heyday of...

Eisenhower and Landrum-Griffin: A Study in Labor-Management Politics.
June 22, 1990... Eisenhower & Landrum-Griffin: A Study in Labor-Management Politics In important respects, the period from 1958 through 1966 represented the high-water mark of the laborite surge that began in the 1930s. The election of the most liberal...

From Monopoly to Competition: The Transformations of Alcoa, 1888-1986.
June 22, 1990... From Monopoly to Competition: The Transformations of Alcoa, 1888-1986 Monopolists are supposed to be big, bad, and inefficient. They milk patents for short-run profits, produce shoddy goods that they sell at exorbitant prices, devise...

Growth in a Changing Environment: A History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey), 1950-1972 and Exxon Corporation, 1972-1975.
June 22, 1990... Growth in a Changing Environment: A History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) 1950-1972 and Exxon Corporation 1972-1975 Bennett Wall, in his new volume, Growth in a Changing Environment: A History of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey)...

When the Machine Stopped: A Cautionary Tale from Industrial America.
June 22, 1990... When the Machine Stopped: A Cautionary Tale from Industrial America Burg Tool Manufacturing Company was founded in 1946 by Fred Burg, a Czech immigrant with a yen to tinker and dissatisfaction with his job in dry goods in Illinois. The...

The Political Economy of Regulation: The Case of Insurance.
June 22, 1990... The Political Economy of Regulation: The Case of Insurance The Political Economy of Regulation contributes to an ongoing debate among political scientists and economists about the process of government regulation and the degree to which that...

The Transformation of Corporate Control.
June 22, 1990... The Transformation of Corporate Control This volume represents a sociologist's critique and revision of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand (1977). One can appreciate how Neil Fligstein was goaded to the effort, because the analytical...

The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices.
June 22, 1990... The Measurement of Durable Goods Prices Although the title of this volume gives an accurate flavor of its approaches and analyses, the results are far more important than "price measurement" suggests. Technical progress embodied in new and...

The Commercial Fishery of the Canadian Great Lakes.
June 22, 1990... The Commercial Fishery of the Canadian Great Lakes This short study, prepared for Parks Canada in 1985, appears in its monographic series. In fourteen brief chapters, which in total comprise fewer than eighty pages of text, the book provides a...

The Political Economy of Mexican Oil.
June 22, 1990... The Political Economy of Mexican Oil The energy crisis of 1973-80, in one of its more fortunate consequences, sparked interest in the study of oil in many parts of the world, including Latin America. The English-language literature on oil in...

British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d'el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960.
June 22, 1990... British Enterprise in Brazil: The St. John d'el Rey Mining Company and the Morro Velho Gold Mine, 1830-1960 J. Fred Rippy once estimated that the English invested in close to four hundred mining companies in nineteenth-century Latin America, of...

Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350.
June 22, 1990... Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, professor of sociology and historical studies in the Graduate Faculty at the New School for Social Research, in this stimulating work of synthesis adopts the...

The Merchants Adventurers and the Continental Cloth-trade 1560s-1620s.
June 22, 1990... The Merchan Adventurers and the Continental Cloth-trade (1560s-1620s) Wolf-Rudiger Baumann, in The Merchants Adventurers and the Continental Cloth-trade (1560s-1620s), investigates the effect on the German economy of the transfer of the English...

Pay Up and Play the Game: Professional Sport in Britain, 1875-1914.
June 22, 1990... Pay Up and Play the Game: Professional Sport in Britain, 1875-1914 Histories of sports and games are not new, but for the most part they have tended to concentrate on the social function and activity of sports. Or they have been very much...

Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British Computer Industry.
June 22, 1990... Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British Computer Industry These two books make important and highly complementary contributions to our understanding of the British computer industry. With the aid of extensive archival...

ICL: A Business and Technical History.
June 22, 1990... ICL: A Business and Technical History These two books make important and highly complementary contributions to our understanding of the British computer industry. With the aid of extensive archival resources not previously mined by historians,...

Prekare Selbstandigkeit: Zur Standortbestimmung von Handwerk, Hausindustrie und Kleingewerbe im Industrialisierungsprozess.
June 22, 1990... Prekare Selbstandigkeit: Zur Standortbestimmung von Handwerk, Hausindustrie und Kleingewerbe im Industrialisierungsprozess This excellent volume brings together much of the most recent German research on the evolution of the artisanate and...

Internationale Kartelle und Aubenpolitik.
June 22, 1990... Internationale Kartelle und Au[beta]enpolitik We live in a time of stubborn trade imbalances and difficult debates about the proper roles of unfettered competition, antitrust policy, and state-guided coordination in managing the nation's...

British Business in Asia since 1860.
June 22, 1990... British Business in Asia since 1860 In the last few years the historical records of several British companies that are active internationally have become accessible to scholars, and a sequence of studies have been published. However, the...

The Japanese Business Community and National Trade Policy: 1920-1942.
June 22, 1990... The Japanese Business Community and National Trade Policy, 1920-1942 This is a sharply focused study of Japanese trade policy between the two world wars, emphasizing the role of the business community. William Fletcher found that, although...

Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan.
June 22, 1990... Fueling Growth: The Energy Revolution and Economic Policy in Postwar Japan This is a well-researched tracing of early postwar economic policy that uses the energy sector between 1945 and 1960 to explore the origins of contemporary Japanese...