Business History Review articles from June 1991

Business History Review archives from June 1991

Industrial relations and the industrial revolution: evidence from M'Connel and Kennedy, 1810-1840. (cotton-spinning firm)
June 22, 1991... Using the record books of M'Connel and Kennedy, a leading cotton-spinning firm in Manchester, this article traces the development of managerial strategies to elicit effort from workers during the Industrial Revolution. Contrary ...

Collective diversification: Manchester cotton merchants and the insurance busienss in the early nineteenth century.
June 22, 1991... It has been claimed that the diversified mercantile capitalist of eighteenth-century Britain was replaced by the specialist industrialist of the nineteenth. This study of Manchester cotton merchants who moved into fire insurance ...

The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex: Essays in Atlantic History.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1991... This collection of essays is a very readable study of the creation, development, and decline of one of the most significant regional systems in world history, a system unified by the Atlantic Ocean and centered on slave plantations in the...

Agriculture and National Development: Views on the Nineteenth Century.
June 22, 1991... This book, the latest in the Henry A. Wallace Series on Agricultural History and Rural Studies, is a collection of thirteen essays relating to changes in agriculture in the United States in the nineteenth century. The essays, which were...

Enterprise: The Dynamic Economy of a Free People.
June 22, 1991... Stuart Bruchey, retired professor of history at Columbia (although--like many retired professors these days--as active as ever), has presented us with a magisterial economic history of the United States. He begins his story in Europe before the...

Poor Richard's Legacy: American Business Values from Benjamin Franklin to Donald Trump.
June 22, 1991... Poor Richard's Legacy is a history of American business values over the last 250 years. Peter Baida, a Harvard English major and a Wharton MBA now working at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, wrote this work when he found that nothing of...

When Ladies Go A-Thieving: Middle-Class Shoplifters in the Victorian Department Store.
June 22, 1991... If some authors overinflate their titles to fatten sales or to impress tenure committees, Elaine Abelson has been overly modest. For, although women shoplifters are the subject of this book, they serve chiefly as a means of illuminating a...

The Quanah Route: A History of the Quanah, Acme and Pacific Railway.
June 22, 1991... American shortline railroads have long attracted railroad enthusiasts. Seemingly, the smaller the carrier the more popular. There is extensive "buff" coverage of such obscure roads as the San Joaquin & Eastern, Uintah, and Waynesburg &...

Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse.
June 22, 1991... Lawrence Goodheart's biography of Elizur Wright offers an excellent portrait of a complex and distinctive social reformer in the changing culture of the nineteenth century. Based solidly on research in rich collections of sources, including...

A Celebration of Work.
June 22, 1991... Norman Best's A Celebration of Work is a memoir of a working man in the twentieth century. It fits into a genre that includes autobiographies of workers such as Charles Walker's 1922 volume Steel: The Diary of a Furnace Worker and Englishman...

Competitive Advantage on the Shop Floor.
June 22, 1991... Trenchant critiques of neo-classical economics represent a growth pole in contemporary scholarship. When combined with a focus on the history of industrial labor processes and management-labor relations, as in William Lazonick's wide-ranging...

Sons and Daughters of Labor: Class and Clerical Work in Turn-of-the Century Pittsburgh.
June 22, 1991... Ileen DeVault's Sons and Daughters of Labor is an analysis of recruitment to clerical work in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, during the years 1890-1910. Although a wide variety of sources are consulted, the guiding perspective comes from an overview...

Rights v. Conspiracy: A Sociological Essay on the History of Labour Law in the United States.
June 22, 1991... As Europe and the United Kingdom attempt to draw together more closely, the search for a model law to govern their labor relations is on. Anthony Woodiwiss reports in alarm that the United States "represents a believable utopia to certain...

Making American Corporate: 1970-1920.
June 22, 1991... Ever since the publication of Alfred D. Chandler, Jr.'s The Visible Hand (1977), gaping questions have remained open in American social history. Who were the people who staffed and operated the emerging big business firms? From where in...

Beatrice: From Buildup Through Breakup.
June 22, 1991... This is an abbreviated and somewhat disconnected story of the building of the great Beatrice conglomerate, from the time of the company's founding by George E. Haskell and William W. Bosworth as a partnership in Beatrice, Nebraska, in 1894,...

The Separation of Commercial and Investment Banking: The Glass-Steagall Act Revisitied and Reconsidered.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1991... This volume does not fall into the category of mainstream history; its focus is public policy, and its purpose is to make a strong case for the repeal of the 1933 law that separated commercial banking and investment banking activities into...

Phoenix: The History of Southwestern Metropolis.
June 22, 1991... Bradford Luckingham has written a solid, richly detailed study of Phoenix, now the ninth largest city in the United States. Based on a wide range of secondary sources, this urban biography presents the city's economic, political, and social...

The American Synthetic Rubber Research Program.
June 22, 1991... In our age of perennial debate about the most effective form of government involvement in research and development, Peter Morris has written an insightful account of the synthetic rubber program of 1940-53. Although his study concentrates on...

The American Radio Industry and Its Latin American Activities: 1900-1939.
June 22, 1991... The researcher of Latin American communication history who comes across this title and seeks out the volume in the expectation of uncovering a substantive new work will be disappointed. At the same time, the dependency theorist who eagerly...

Resisting Protectionism: Global Industries and the Politics of International Trade.
June 22, 1991... At a time of increased international competition and U.S. economic decline, this book investigates the forces at work that prevent states from engaging in economic protectionism. Helen Milner studies the impact of international economic...

Markets and Manufacture in Early Industrial Europe.
June 22, 1991... The debate on "proto-industrialization" flourished during the 1970s as historians like E. L. Jones, F. Mendels, and Hans Medick sought explanations for the transition from feudalism to capitalism or the reason for industrialization in "the...

Transport and the Development of the European Economy: 1750-1918.
June 22, 1991... Few would deny the fundamental importance of transportation in European industrialization, urbanization, and social change. And yet, as Simon Ville correctly notes in the preface to this work, there is a dearth of surveys on European transport...

Married Women's Separate Property in England: 1660-1833.
June 22, 1991... Susan Staves has produced a much-needed study of the legal history of women's separate property in eighteenth-century England. Beyond providing both legal and social historians the facts about how the legal system worked for women during this...

A Biography of Sir Charles Hartley, Civil Engineer: 1825-1915.
June 22, 1991... Ever since Samuel Smiles identified the leading British engineers in the public imagination, it has been difficult to add any names to the list. The engineers about whom Smiles wrote in the mid-nineteenth century--John Smeaton, James Brindley,...

Fyffes and the Banana: Musa Sapientum. A Centenary History: 1888-1988.
June 22, 1991... Fyffes and the Banana is a continuation of Peter Davies's work on the Elder Dempster and Royal Mail shipping groups. This new book, however, considers more than ocean transport; it also examines the entire scope of the banana trade, from...

Montague Burton: The Tailor of Taste.
June 22, 1991... Eric M. Sigsworth has produced a readable book about a leading figure in twentieth-century British retailing, Montague Burton, concerning whom little has been written. The study of business history is enjoying a current vogue in the United...

Protectionism and Economic Revival: The British Interwar Economy.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1991... Michael Kitson and Solomos Solomou claim that the General Tariff of 1932 provided a stimulus to the British economy, resulting not only in cyclical recovery, but also in a trend improvement of the growth rate. They argue that the tariff made...

Swiss Banking in an International Context.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1991... The opening sentences of this book with an intriguing title appear to promise much of interest to banking and business historians: "All economic institutions have their roots somewhere in the past, and Swiss banking is no exception. This is why...

New Profession, Old Order: Engineers and German Society: 1815-1914.
June 22, 1991... Kees Gispen examines the German engineering profession within the larger nineteenth-century political-social context. The analytical model is the familiar Sonderweg school of German historiography, which contends that a Junckerized Bismarckian...

The Soviet Economy in Turmoil: 1929-1930.
June 22, 1991... Just as the tractor-driver remains the icon of collectivization, so the recurrent image of the Soviet industrialization drive under joseph Stalin is the steely-muscled worker with his eyes fixed firmly on the bright future. In a detailed...

Emigrant Entrepreneurs: Shanghai Industrialists in Hong Kong.
June 22, 1991... Beginning with the onset of the last stages of the Chinese civil war in 1946, a steadily surging flood of wealthy, successful businessmen and capital gushed into Hong Kong, peaking with the Communist takeover in 1949. Siu-lun Wong's volume...

Monetary Problems of an Entrepot: The Hong Kong Experience.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1991... In this brief monograph, with its 20,000 words of text, lengthy but too often irrelevant tables, some interesting figures, and a relevant but outdated bibliography, joseph Tom intends to answer two important questions: how should a particular...

The Birth of the Japanese Labor Movement: Takano Fusataro and the Rodo Kumiai Kiseikai.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1991... Over the past decade, American historians working in japanese sources have deepened our understanding of the history of japan's labor movement. Sheldon Garon and Andrew Gordon have prepared valuable overviews of the evolution of...