Business History Review articles from March 1993

Business History Review archives from March 1993

Co-evolution of information-processing technology and use: interaction between the life insurance and tabulating industries. (Industry Overview)
March 22, 1993... largest firms, along with the market-mediated shifts of the smaller firms and the role of industry associations, certainly influenced technological developments in directions that the life insurance industry as a whole saw as desirable. The...

Market structure, industrial research, and consumers of innovation: forging backward linkages to research in the turn-of-the-century U.S. steel industry. (Industry Overview)
March 22, 1993... 1990), 72-100; Abraham Berglund, "The United States Steel Corporation and Price Stabilization," Quarterly Journal of Economics 38 (Nov. 1923): 1-29; Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism (Cambridge,...

Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. and the restructuring of American capitalism.
March 22, 1993... employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs) that ask workers to participate in the firm and to link their futures with the firm's long-term performance. Yet, management remains committed, by and large, to its control position. For example, the...

The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe.
March 22, 1993... Economic, social, and business historians working on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have always had to contend with the paucity of quantitative data systematically collected then and the even smaller fragment surviving. Between the...

Keepers of the Revolution: New Yorkers at Work in the Early Republic.
March 22, 1993... In 1911 John R. Commons and his associates printed innumerable references to antebellum trade union organization in New York City in their monumental Documentary History of American Industrial Society. These sources sustained a nexus of...

Yankee Merchants and the Making of the Urban West: The Rise and Fall of Antebellum St. Louis.
March 22, 1993... Jeffrey Adler poses a strong thesis: that the external forces of eastern business and social elites and eastern capital powered the rise of antebellum St. Louis as the metropolis of the West; those same forces, along with the sectional crisis,...

Getting Work: Philadelphia, 1840-1950.
March 22, 1993... Getting work, as Walter Licht explains, "was a seemingly perpetual activity" (p. xi), and not just for individuals in quest of gainful employment. Getting work was a concern of individuals, families, religious organizations, manufacturing...

Strategic Factors in Nineteenth Century American Economic History: A Volume to Honor Robert W. Fogel.
March 22, 1993... The sixteen research papers in this Festschrift for Robert Fogel seldom exhibit the ambition and combativeness one associates with the best known of Fogel's own work, but in their painstaking efforts to assemble and analyze large historical...

The Rise of the American Business Corporation.
March 22, 1993... This short volume is a contribution to an international series entitled the Fundamentals of Pure and Applied Economics, which eventually will be collected and published as the Encyclopedia of Economics. This publishing plan explains why such a...

Regulating Big Business: Antitrust in Great Britain and America: 1880-1920.
March 22, 1993... At the beginning of the twentieth century, "the trusts" posed great public policy questions that U.S. presidential and other candidates discussed seriously. Then, very soon after the 1912 elections, the issues raised ceased to dominate the...

Franchising in America: The Development of a Business Method: 1840-1980.
March 22, 1993... Economies of scale and scope are presumed to accrue to big but not to small businesses. Yet despite the resulting cost advantage held by big business, small business is said to be the source of job growth and economic vitality in this country....

Visions of a New Industrial Order: Social Science and Labor Theory in America's Progressive Era.
March 22, 1993... This short book--161 pages of text--is a work of intellectual history of a certain: kind; that is, it is a history of intellectuals, in this case of three "policy-oriented" academics, and of what they did and wrote. Clarence Wunderlin's three...

Gordon McLendon: The Maverick of Radio.
March 22, 1993... Gordon McLendon represented the first generation of American broadcasters who were born after the emergence of broadcasting circa 1920 and thus never experienced a world without radio. McLendon and his contemporaries faced the formidable...

Textiles and Politics: The Life of B. Everett Jordan from Saxapahaw to the United States Senate.
March 22, 1993... This is a readable but thoroughly amateurish biography of a North Carolina textile manufacturer, B. Everett Jordan, who served in the U.S. Senate from 1958 to 1972. Historians remember him as a businessman-politician who assiduously protected...

The Silicon Forest: High Tech in the Portland Area: 1945-1986.
March 22, 1993... Nearly everyone these days is certain that new high-technology companies are the key to regional economic development. The explosive growth of new jobs in Silicon Valley and in Boston's Route 128 region in the 1970s and early 1980s is cited as...

Route 128: Lessons from Boston's High-Tech Community.
March 22, 1993... In Route 128 Susan Rosegrant and David Lampe have written a slight but interesting account of the development of one of the most important centers of technological innovation in the United States. Route 128, a beltway around the city of Boston,...

Merchants of Debt: KKR and the Mortgaging of American Business.
March 22, 1993... Throughout the years, American corporations have experienced various waves that have had diverse affects on their well-being. Apart from multitudinous economic booms and busts, there have been merger waves, periods of vigilant and somnolent...

The Rise of Financial Capitalism: International Capital Markets in the Age of Reason.
March 22, 1993... Reading this book has provoked a powerful urge to coin the neologism "cliometrophilia": defined as an unnatural attachment to the potency of regression analysis of simple time series as a means of rendering economic history a science. Given...

Patterns of European Industrialization: The Nineteenth Century.
March 22, 1993... This is an important book, not to be overlooked. It contains a collection of essays presented (and subsequently amended) at a meeting convened in 1988 at the Rockefeller Center in Bellagio to discuss the well-known thesis of Alexander...

International Banking: 1870-1914.
March 22, 1993... This ambitious volume examines the development of banking and the functioning of capital markets in numerous countries around the globe in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Twenty-five authors present twenty-two original...

The Nature of the Transnational Firm.
March 22, 1993... Christos Pitelis and Roger Sugden's declared aim in this volume is to pull the theory of the transnational firm closer to its related cousin, the classical theory of the firm. In particular, they argue that theories of the firm have not paid...

The Primary Textile Industry in Canada: History and Heritage.
March 22, 1993... Alan McCullough, a historian with the Parks Service, Environment Canada, has written a much-needed overview of the important role that the textile industry played in Canadian industrial development. The primary textile industry was one of the...

Merchant Enterprise in Britain: From the Industrial Revolution to World War I.
March 22, 1993... This is an important, ambitious, and indeed exciting business history, based in large part on newly available archival data. From the Industrial Revolution to the First World War, the period covered by the book, Britain was the world's leading...

The Cambridge Social History of Britain: 1750-1950: vol. 3: Social Agencies and Institutions.
March 22, 1993... These three volumes edited by F. M. L. Thompson are likely to stand as monuments to the scholarship of postwar Britain and to the increasing interest in the social history of that country. Like the distinctive subdiscipline of business history,...

Professions and Patriarchy.
March 22, 1993... The sociology of professionalism has generally been written as if it were gender neutral. Women in the professions have either been consigned to a category of "semi-professionals" or dismissed as de facto unprofessional because they are women....

Maynard Keynes: An Economist's Biography.
March 22, 1993... "We are," Richard Nixon said some twenty years ago, "all Keynesians now." But the postwar consensus on policy captured in this striking epigram and grounded in the nearly universal faith of academic economists in a new "Keynesian synthesis"...

Workers Against Work: Labor in Paris and Barcelona During the Popular Fronts.
March 22, 1993... Writing a compelling "socially oriented, comparative" history of labor in Barcelona and Paris during the Popular Fronts era, Michael Seidman challenges the way most historians have understood work and the experience of the worker in the...

Democracy at Work: Changing World Markets and the Future of Labor Unions.
March 22, 1993... Intensified international competition and technological change have forced a reorganization of work and production in advanced economies that, in turn, has led to a decline of unions and union power. But comparative analysis shows that such...

Uberlebenschancen von Unternehmensgrundungen.
March 22, 1993... Some firms flourish; some fail. This book presents the papers and discussion from a conference on what separated the winners from the losers in the German economy, 1800 to the present. Few historians have studied the rates of and reasons for...

The Political Economy of Third World Intervention: Mines, Money, and U.S. Policy in the Congo Crisis.
March 22, 1993... The early 1960s were a time of great optimism for many people, particularly those interested in Africa. The colonies of the European powers were moving toward and gaining their independence and the future looked bright. Shadows appeared all too...

"A Policy Calculated to Benefit China": The United States and the China Arms Embargo, 1919-1929.
March 22, 1993... When they describe the bloody civil wars of the 1920s, writers about modern China tend to follow a durable historical myth. It portrays those wars as deliberately fueled by foreign powers, which sought to divide and rule China by supplying...

The Japanese Economy.
March 22, 1993... For years, faculty members detailed to teach survey courses on the Japanese economy have asked me to tell them what to use for a textbook. The sad answer was that no such book existed, so that readings even for undergraduate courses had to be...

Japanese Economic Development: Theory and Practice.
March 22, 1993... This valuable synthesizing study, a part of the Nissan Institute/Routledge Japanese Study Series, attempts "to apply to the historical case of Japan some of the ideas and theories produced in recent years in the field of development economics"....