Business History Review articles from June 1995

Business History Review archives from June 1995

G. Harold Powell and the corporate consolidation of the modern citrus enterprise, 1904-1922.
June 22, 1995... In 1921, the California Fruit Growers Exchange (CFGE), a marketing cooperative organized as a corporation, sold $121,000,000 worth of citrus fruit to the wholesale trade. Its best-known board name, Sunkist, was becoming a household word. Its...

Organizing and reorganizing the World Bank, 1946-1972: a comparative perspective.
June 22, 1995... While historians have in recent years acquired a much better understanding of the processes and implications of organizational change in the private sector, they have done substantially less work on long-term institutional change in the public...

Corporate culture and marketing in the American railway locomotive industry: American Locomotive and Electro-Motive despond to dieselization.
June 22, 1995... In the late autumn of 1945, Joseph Ennis, a senior vice-president at the American Locomotive Company (ALCo), spoke to an interviewer from Railway Age, the leading trade journal of the railroad industry. Ennis's company was among the 200 largest...

Alternative Tracks: The Constitution of American Industrial Order, 1865-1917.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Paul Miranti Professor Gerald Berk's concise volume, an addition to The Johns Hopkins University Series in Constitutional Thought, provides a reinterpretation along corporate liberal lines of the factors leading to the rise of the...

Working Women, Working Men: Sao Paulo and the Rise of Brazil's Industrial Working Class: 1900-1955.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by John D. French The failure to study "independent rank-and-file activism," Joel Wolfe believes, has led to the incorrect conclusion that "Brazilian workers were less radical than their counterparts elsewhere in Latin America, and...

Technological Innovation and the Development of Transportation in Japan.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Seiichiro Yonekura Nowadays, Japanese transportation technologies, such as railroads, automobiles, shipbuilding, and shipping, are undoubtedly considered world class in terms of quality and quantity. Many foreigners who visit Japan...

Technology and Industrial Development in Pre-War Japan: Mitsubishi Nagasaki Shipyard, 1884-1934.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Peter N. Davis This latest addition to the Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Studies Series utilizes the archives of Mitsubishi's Nagasaki shipyard to provide a ease study of the transfer of technology in the shipbuilding...

Japanese Government Loan Issues on the London Capital Market: 1870-1913.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Ranald Michie The least impressive aspect of this book is its title, which is as off-putting as it is possible to be. It conjures up such a narrow and specialized topic that only the most dedicated of financial historians would...

The Japanese Iron and Steel Industry, 1850-1990: Continuity and Discontinuity.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Patricia O'Brien The most valuable contribution of Seiichiro Yonekura's book is the historical perspective it provides on the development of Japan's iron and steel industry from its inception in 1850 until the beginning of its...

Models of Management: Work, Authority, and Organization in a Comparative Perspective.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Bruce Kogut In 1956, Reinhard Bendix published his Work and Authority in Industry: Ideologies of Management in the Course of Industrialization. The book is a study of how in the course of the breakdown of the family economic unit,...

Logs for Capital: The Timber Industry and Capitalist Enterprise in the Nineteenth Century.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Forest Reinhardt Chew's title does not really convey his book's scope. Most of Logs for Capital is about the operations and strategy of a few firms in the lumber business in Ontario, Quebec, and New Brunswick, during the second...

Insider Lending: Banks, Personal Connections, and Economic Development in Industrial New England.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Richard H. Keehn In Insider Lending, Naomi Lamoreaux utilizes information on early nineteenth century New England banks and bankers to establish the importance of insider lending as a means of overcoming asymmetric information...

The English Gentleman in Trade: The Life and Works of Sir Dudley North, 1641-1691.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by David Hancock There was perhaps no more important occurrence in 17th-century England than the rise of the merchant from an economically useful, but politically powerless position to a place at the center of economic, political, and...

Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-60.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Nelson Lichtenstein Here is a book of enormous import. Elizabeth Fones-Wolf offers a wealth of evidence to demonstrate the extent to which the American business community sought to discredit New Deal liberalism and undermine the...

Women's Work, Men's Work: The Informal Slave Economies of Lowcountry Georgia.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Loren Schweninger Beginning in 1982-84, with Philip Morgan's seminal articles on the task system, rice culture, and property ownership among lowcountry blacks in South Carolina, and Georgia, a number of scholars have analyzed...

City Bankers: 1890-1914.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Geoffrey Jones This book is an English translation of the author's 1982 University of Geneva Ph.D, which was published two years later as Les Banquiers de la Cite a lepoque Edourdienne. The core of the study is a sample of 460...

Erie Lackawanna: Death of an American Railroad, 1938-1992.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Craig Miner Burdened with an early history that started with the "Erie War" (made famous by one of the earliest muckraking articles), plagued by such epithets as "Erie Lack-of-Money" and "Weary Erie," and saddled with an awkward...

The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Thomas W. Blomquist Professor Edwin Hunt in this study of what he terms the medieval "super-companies" undertakes a re-examination of the Florentine international business enterprises of the Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli in the...

Enterprise and Technology. The German and British Steel Industries, 1865-1895.
June 22, 1995... Reviewed by Steven W. Tolliday The German and British steel industries have often been portrayed as emblematic of the shifting relative performance of these two economies in the late 19th century. Yet this formidable and meticulous study by...