Business History Review articles from September 1995

Business History Review archives from September 1995

Enterprise and state in the West German Wirtschaftswunder: Volkswagen and the automobile industry, 1939-1962.
September 22, 1995... The core of Germany's post-war economic success has been its remarkable performance as an exporter of manufactured goods, with machinery, chemicals and automobiles playing a dominant role. Yet there are very few studies of the nature and roots of...

Businessmen against pollution in late nineteenth century Chicago. (Illinois)
September 22, 1995... The history of industrial pollution and pollution control provides an excellent vantage point from which to examine some of the most serious costs of industrial development: the environmental costs. Industry's degradation of the environment began...

Financing the micro-scale enterprise: rural craft producers in Scotland, 1840-1914.
September 22, 1995... Independent craft producers have received scant attention from business historians.(1) Little is known about the economic characteristics of the very small or micro-scale end of the business spectrum. Yet, socially and politically, small scale...

The Cooperative Edge: The International Politics of International Cartels.(Brief Article)
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Daniel Barbezat Debora Spar has written an interesting book about the institutional framework around which international cartels have arisen (or failed to have arisen) in the diamond, uranium, gold, and silver markets. The book is...

Other People's Money and How the Bankers Use It.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Richard P. Adelstein This new edition of Louis D. Brandeis's famous broadside against the Money Trust is one of a series of volumes intended by St. Martin's Press for classroom use. "Each book in this series," write the series...

The CIO: 1935-1955.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Steven Fraser Robert H. Zieger has written an enormously useful history of the tumultuous career of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, one bound to be treated as the definitive account for years to come. His book displays a...

International Business History: A Contextual and Case Approach.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Geoffrey Jones This book examines the history of international business through a series of case studies. There are five parts which deal with Europe, North America, Central and South America, Africa and Asia. In each part there...

The Sports Franchise Game: Cities in Pursuit of Sports Franchises, Events, Stadiums, and Arenas.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Glen Gendzel Sportswriters and fans who question whether professional athletes are proper role models for American youth might well subject the owners of major-league teams to the same standard. In recent years, these sultans of...

The Federal Civil Service System and the Problem of Bureaucracy: The Economics and Politics of Institutional Change.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Margaret C. Rung In this timely study, Ronald N. Johnson and Gary D. Libecap offer a new interpretation of the evolution and possibilities for reform of the federal bureaucracy. By looking at the institution's historical roots,...

New Deals: Business, Labor, and Politics in America, 1920-1935.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Elizabeth Fones-Wolf Was the New Deal good or bad? Was it conservative, liberal, or radical? These kinds of questions dominated the early debate on the nature of the New Deal. While liberals praised the reforms of the era, New Left...

The Regulated Economy: A Historical Approach to Political Economy.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Richard Vietor This collection of eight papers is the product of a 1993 conference on historical political economy, supported by the National Bureau of Economic Research. All of the papers deal with state or federal regulatory...

American Technological Sublime.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Robert W. Rydell When the American Hegelian philosopher Denton J. Snider visited the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, he marveled at engineer George Ferris's giant, revolving wheel on the Midway. "It is sublime," he...

The Origins of Japanese Industrial Power: Strategy, Institutions and the Development of Organisational Capability.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Jeffrey Berstein The Origins of Japanese Industrial Power is a slim book with a weighty title. It contains eight chapters, including an introduction by the editors. Of the remaining chapters, three are completely or largely devoted...

Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and its Technology.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Steven W. Usselman For the past decade, no one has written more prolifically or more authoritatively about IBM than Emerson Pugh. As an original participant in the company's official technical history project and later as its...

International Organization and Industrial Change: Global Governance since 1850.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by George C. Lodge This is an original and timely analysis of the evolution of international organizations from 1850 to the late 1980s. Craig N. Murphy argues that the thousands of governmental and non-governmental organizations that...

To Steal a Book is an Elegant Offense: Intellectual Property Law in Chinese Civilization.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Mark Rose In late May 1989, as tensions rose in the developing conflict between the Tiananmen Square protesters and the elders of the Chinese Communist party, the United States refused to press the Chinese to negotiate with the...

The Battle for Homestead, 1880-1892: Politics, Culture, and Steel.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Judith E. Vichniac Paul Krause has written an extremely interesting and important book on the Homestead strike of 1892, which pitted the steelmakers Henry Clay Frick and Andrew Carnegie against the largest trade union in the United...

The Business of Newspapers on the Western Frontier.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Elizabeth M. Neiva Newspapers are a peculiar industry. Both the product itself and the individuals who produce it are atypical. For example, although daily newspapers are made from flimsy sheets of low-grade paper and have a...

World of Fairs: The Century-of-Progress Expositions.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Roland Marchand In World of Fairs, Robert Rydell has undertaken the first major comparative study of the great international expositions of the period from the mid-1920s through the 1950s. Several excellent essay-length analyses of...

The Economics of Power: The Private Finances of the House of Foix-Navarre-Albret during the Religious Wars.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Gerard F. Denault Early modern European historians have applied Lawrence Stone's insight into The Crisis of the Aristocracy in England, 1558-1641 to various societies and epochs, some having little to do with his original insight....

Trade, Industrial, and Professional Periodicals of the United States.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by David O. Whitten Kathleen L. Endres has edited a guide to a small part of the trove of primary source materials for historians of American business - trade journals. To place any firm or industry into the larger framework of its...

Public and Private Ownership of British Industry: 1820-1990.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Terence R. Gourvish This is an ambitious attempt to analyze the structure, conduct and performance of publicly and privately owned "network technology" industries in Britain over the period 1820-1990. By "network technology"...

Entrepreneurial Politics in Mid-Victorian Britain.
September 22, 1995... Reviewed by Peter Botticelli In this finely crafted work, G. R. Searle offers an insightful analysis of English politics from the perspective of the "entrepreneurial Radicals," that group of mid-Victorian politicians who managed to...