Business History Review articles from June 1992

Business History Review archives from June 1992

From novelty to utility: George Westinghouse and the business of innovation during the Age of Edison. (electric innovators)(Thomas Edison)
June 22, 1992... As in the case of brakes, Westinghouse from the start used the patent system to secure a stronghold in the signaling business. In 1881 he acquired rights to a fundamental patent governing electric circuits that ran through railroad track and...

Lighting the path to profit: GE's control of the electric lamp industry, 1892-1941. (General Electric Co.)
June 22, 1992... Colonial Times to 1970 (Washington, D.C., 1975), E135-73. 30 General Electric Company, Annual Report for 1940, 14. Profitability figures from "Financial Data Relative to Lamp and Lamp Parts Business," 8 Aug. 1941, Reed File, Gerard Swope...

Business enterprise and the Great Depression in Brazil: a study of profits and losses in textile manufacturing.
June 22, 1992... (Rio de Janeiro, 1946), 39. 41 Stein, Brazilian Cotton Manufacture, 187. 42 Topik, Political Economy of the Brazilian State, chap. 5. 43 Fishlow, "Origins and Consequences," 339. 44 Haber, Industry and Underdevelopment, chaps. 9 and 10....

Black Property Owners in the South.
June 22, 1992... In the last three decades, an intellectual revolution in American history has urged us to "listen to the inarticulate," to tell the stories of "anonymous" Americans. This call launched a search for new primary sources that has yielded remarkable...

Nature Incorporated: Industrialization and the Waters of New England.
June 22, 1992... Historians of American business have produced many fine studies of the New England textile industry in the nineteenth century, but they have neglected the impact of textile production on nature and on the law. This book examines industrialization...

Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872.
June 22, 1992... Historians of Chicago have long believed that the Chicago fire created a "statistical dark age" by destroying important city records. In Property Rules, Robin Einhorn makes use of recently discovered documents in the Chicago City Council...

Shaping Invention: Thomas Blanchard's Machinery and Patent Management in Nineteenth-Century America.
June 22, 1992... New techniques are often understood in terms of the creativity of inventors or the needs of users. Based on the dissertation that won the Economic History Association's Allan Nevins Prize in 1987, Carolyn C. Cooper's Shaping Invention takes a...

Innovation as a Social Process: Elihu Thomson and the Rise of General Electric, 1870-1900.
June 22, 1992... W. Bernard Carlson has accomplished a remarkable stylistic feat in his informative and insightful examination of the emergence of General Electric (GE) and of the career of Elihu Thomson. Carlson has smoothly combined a scholarly monograph,...

Making Iron and Steel: Independent Mills in Pittsburgh, 1820-1920.
June 22, 1992... Americans love small business. It represents all that is good about the nation: individuality, creativity, and freedom. This love affair has recently produced a literature on small business that, while rich in the ideological conviction that...

The American Amusement Park Industry: A History of Technology and Thrills.
June 22, 1992... In The American Amusement Park Industry, Judith Adams examines the emergence of amusement parks from Chicago's Columbian Exposition of 1893 to the recent efforts by corporations to export American-style theme parks all over the world. Her book...

Buy Now Pay Later: Advertising, Credit, and Consumer Durables in the 1920s.
June 22, 1992... In the twentieth century Americans have demonstrated a growing and, to some observers, alarming taste for immediate private consumption. The satisfaction of these desires, in the form of mass ownership of consumer durables, is seen both as a...

Labors of a Modern Hercules: The Evolution of a Chemical Company.
June 22, 1992... Hercules, Inc., began life as a spin-off from E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Co., resulting from the settlement of the 1912 antitrust case against DuPont. Its pattern of development mirrored DuPont's in branching away from the explosives industry...

Eberstadt and Forrestal: A National Security Partnership, 1909-1949.
June 22, 1992... Ferdinand Eberstadt and James Forrestal played significant roles in the administrative politics of industrial mobilization and national security organization during the 1940s. Friends from undergraduate days at Princeton, in the 1920s they worked...

Pride, Prejudice, and Politics: Roosevelt versus Recovery, 1933-1938.(Brief Article)
June 22, 1992... Whenever the American economy suffers a downturn, some analysts inevitably compare the woes besetting the current economy with similar problems the nation faced during the Great Depression. Gary Best's new book is addressed to those analysts who...

Baker and Botts in the Development of Modern Houston.
June 22, 1992... Baker & Botts in the Development of Modern Houston by Kenneth Lipartito and Joseph Pratt is a thorough and well-researched account of the rise of one of America's great law firms. The authors chronicle the growth of the firm from a two-person,...

Public Service Liberalism: Telecommunications and Transitions in Public Policy.
June 22, 1992... The movie version of this book might be entitled "The Lost Treasures of American Liberalism." Slashing his way through jungles of judicial decisions, thickets of administrative laws, and a dense undergrowth of regulatory policies, the lone...

Regulation: Economic Theory and History.
June 22, 1992... Despite the pervasiveness and importance of government regulation in the economy, we know surprisingly little about its origins, how it is molded over time, the conditions under which agency capture makes sense, when regulation enhances social...

Hoffa.
June 22, 1992... The surprising election of reformer Ron Carey to the office of general president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) in December 1991 makes this new biography of the IBT's most infamous leader timely indeed. Reading this biography...

Mexico's Merchant Elite, 1590-1660: Silver, State, and Society.
June 22, 1992... Replete with insights and offering a fresh perspective on the mature colonial period, Louisa Hoberman's book represents a significant advance in the study of merchants and the larger business world in Spanish America. Most previous works on the...

Predators and Prizes: American Privateering and Imperial Warfare, 1739-1748.
June 22, 1992... Between 1689 and 1815, Britain fought six expensive and exhausting wars with France. In this age of almost serial warfare, the two nations and their shifting coalitional allies battled not just for strategic control of parts of Europe and more...

Piero Sraffa - Unorthodox Economist (1898-1983): A Biographical Essay.
June 22, 1992... This book is, for those of us fortunate enough to have known him, quite reminiscent of Piero Sraffa himself: terse, at times enigmatic, often charming, always engaging. Much like the masterful but all too scarce scholarship Sraffa left behind, it...

International Technology Transfer: Europe, Japan and the USA, 1700-1914.
June 22, 1992... International technology transfer, as the editor of this volume and several contributors note, is a subject pregnant with policy implications. A generation ago, historical investigations of the topic proliferated, as academics and administrators...

Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939.
June 22, 1992... I agree with Robert J. Samuelson (Newsweek, 30 Sept. 1991) that Barry Eichengreen's Golden Fetters, a history of the interaction between the gold standard and macroeconomic stability in the interwar period, is "a brilliant new book." The volume...

American Management and British Labor: A Comparative Study of the Cotton Spinning Industry.
June 22, 1992... This monograph undertakes a comparative study of technology in relation to business management and industrial relations in the United Kingdom and the United States. The central theme is the dualism between manufacture by machine and production by...

Competitiveness and the State: Government and Business in Twentieth-Century Britain.
June 22, 1992... Britain's long-run relative economic decline has become not just the leading problem--or, possibly, obsession--of that nation's modern history but, more broadly, a major preoccupation of contemporary political economy. However, as Donald...

The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis.
June 22, 1992... In Diane Kunz's view, "economic diplomacy defined the course of the Suez crisis from beginning to end." Her illuminating study of the economic underpinnings of the events leading up to the British-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in the winter of...

Le coton et ses patrons: France, 1760-1840.
June 22, 1992... This seven hundred-page tome is billed as a "shortened" version of Serge Chassagne's doctoral thesis; and although it bears the relevant hallmarks (extensive documentation of primary material and a reasoned if not an inspiring methodological...

Alternating Currents: Nationalized Power in France, 1946-1970.
June 22, 1992... This fine history of Electricite de France (EDF), the giant nationalized power utility created in 1946, makes an important set of arguments about business, labor, and technology in postwar France. In many respects EDF has been a success story....

Replacement Costs and Accounting Reform in Post-World War I Germany.
June 22, 1992... Informative accounting is needed most when an economy is under stress. Unfortunately, this is also a time when accountants may fail to respond adequately because of the constraints of rules worked out in more "normal" times. In some cases, these...

Die Mannesmannrohren-Werke 1888 bis 1920: Organisation und Unternehmensfuhrung unter der Grunderfamilie, Bankiers und Managern.
June 22, 1992... The focus of this book is on how management structure developed in a particular enterprise, the Mannesmannrohren-Werke (MW). It claims not to present a new theory, but to apply existing models at a micro level, especially Alfred D. Chandler,...

Politik, Wirtschaft und Internationale Beziehungen: Studien zu Ihrem Verhaltnis in der Zeit zwischen den Weltkriegen.
June 22, 1992... During the 1970s and early 1980s, the Volkswagen Foundation in West Germany funded a number of projects that focused on the interwar period. The papers in this volume, which were originally presented in December 1983 at a conference in Berlin,...

America's Germany: John J. McCloy and the Federal Republic of Germany.
June 22, 1992... Thomas Schwartz's America's Germany compares American politics with the politics of the Federal Republic of Germany in the period 1949-55. The emphasis is on the first three years, when John J. McCloy was the American High Commissioner in...

The Corporation under Russian Law, 1800-1917: A Study in Tsarist Economic Policy.
June 22, 1992... Will the collapse of Communist rule and the search for viable market economies in the former Soviet Union spark a renewed interest in Russian business history and lead to the maturation of what Thomas Owen aptly describes as an "embryonic field"...

Industrial Training and Technological Innovation: A Comparative and Historical Study.
June 22, 1992... This volume grew out of an Anglo-Japanese conference on the role of industrial training in Britain and Japan; two papers were later added on the United States to broaden the comparison. The contributors are scholars from history, economics,...

Technology and Investment: The Prewar Japanese Chemical Industry.
June 22, 1992... Barbara Molony's account of Japan's prewar chemical industry demonstrates convincingly that despite superior access to capital and resources, firms belonging to the old zaibatsu (financial conglomerates) did not necessarily act as the originators...

Japan's Software Factories: A Challenge to U.S. Management.
June 22, 1992... Michael Cusumano's accurately titled book deals with the emergence, first in the United States, of the concept of a software "factory" designed to rationalize the process of software production, and with the adoption and implementation of this...