Business History Review

Insurance is a business in which trust is the corollary of risk taking. One problem for the insurance industry in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain was how to bridge the gap between the world of business based upon personal trust, and the emergence of new commercial relations where moral hazard was mass produced and where a commanding knowledge of personal reputations was virtually impossible. This paper examines the imperfect methods devised by early life and fire insurance offices to assess both physical and moral hazard and postulates a relationship between the two. The responses to two particular moral hazard “problems” identified by contemporary underwriters—insurance by the Jews and the Irish—are explored. (Pages 1-36)

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A review of theories of competition and business strategy over the last half-century reveals a fairly linear development of early work by academics and consultants into efforts to understand the determinants of industry profitability and competitive position and, more recently, to add a time or historical dimension to the analysis.The possible implications of the emergence of a market for such ideas are also discussed. (Pages 37-74)

The Electric Vehicle Company (EVC) and its affiliated operating entities (1897–1912), along with similar electric taxicab ventures in London and Paris, figured prominently in the early history of the automobile industry. Long dismissed as a quintessential instance of business failure resulting from the choice of inferior technology, the picture of EVC that emerges from new archival evidence suggests a different view. Seen within the continuing electrification of urban transit, traditional centralized approaches to transportation management, and genuine uncertainty about future automotive technology, EVC constituted a significant, if incremental, extension of traditional, service-based concepts of transportation. The goal of the owners of EVC was to offer an integrated, all-electric urban transportation service that included road- and rail-based components. The failure of EVC represented not simply the victory of internal combustion over electric propulsion but also the triumph of a decentralized, product-centered view of mobility, in which individuals owned and operated their own vehicles. (Pages 75-110)

Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando. By Richard Foglesong. Reviewed by Susan G. Davis.

Advertising Progress: American Business and the Rise of Consumer Marketing. By Pamela Walker Laird. Reviewed by William L. Bird Jr.

Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust from Wedgwood to Dell. By Nancy F. Koehn. Reviewed by George David Smith

The Monied Metropolis: New York City and the Consolidation of the American Bourgeoisie, 1850-1896. By Sven Beckert. Reviewed by David Nasaw

The Conquest of Labor: Daniel Pratt and Southern Industrialization. By Curtis J. Evans. Reviewed by Susanna Delfino

The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North, 1865-1901. By Heather Cox Richardson. Reviewed by Michael S. Green

Wealth, Waste, and Alienation: Growth and Decline in the Connellsville Coke Industry. By Kenneth Warren. Reviewed by David R. Meyer

Contesting the New South Order: The 1914-1915 Strike at Atlanta's Fulton Mills. By Clifford M. Kuhn. Reviewed by Bess Beatty

The Path to a Modern South: Northeast Texas Between Reconstruction and the Great Depression. By Walter L. Buenger. Reviewed by Glenn Feldman

Industrial Cowboys: Miller & Lux and the Transformation of the Far West, 1850-1920. By David Igler. Reviewed by Don Mitchell

Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California. By Lawrence B. DeGraaf, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor. Reviewed by John Ingham

The Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality. By Eric Arnesen, Kevin Mulroy, and Quintard Taylor. Reviewed by Francille Rusan Wilson

Merging Lines: American Railroads, 1900-1970. By Richard Saunders Jr. Reviewed by Clifton Hood

The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism. By Adam Rome. Reviewed by Patricia Burgess

Much More Than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921. By Robert Fredrick Burk. Reviewed by Steven A. Riess

Sematech: Saving the U.S. Semiconductor Industry.By Larry D. Browning and Judy C. Shelter. Reviewed by Andrew Davies

Three Strikes: Labor's Heartland Losses and What They Mean for Working Americans. By Arnold J. Bauer. Reviewed by Kevin Boyle

Goods, Power, History: Latin America's Material Culture. By Stephen Franklin. Reviewed by Marie Francois

Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Colonial Oaxaca, 1750-1821. By Jeremy Baskes. Reviewed by Cynthia Radding

Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family and Business in the English-speaking World, 1580-1740. By Richard Grassby. Reviewed by John Smail

Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. Edited by Patrick O'Brien, Derek Keene, Marjolein 't Hart, and Herman Van Der Wee. Reviewed by Wim Klooster

Urban Achievement in Early Modern Europe: Golden Ages in Antwerp, Amsterdam and London. By Patrick O'Brien, Derek Keene, Marjolein 't Hart, and Herman Van Der Wee. Reviewed by Wim Klooster

Time and Work in England, 1750-1830. By Hans-Joachim Voth. Reviewed by Penelope J. Corfield

Jewish Immigrant Entrepreneurship in New York and London, 1880-1914: Enterprise and Culture. By Andrew Godley. Reviewed by Michael French

Gentrification and the Enterprise Culture: Britain 1780-1980. By F. M. L. Thompson. Reviewed by Peter T. Marsh

An Irish Working Class: Explorations in Political Economy and Hegemony, 1800-1950. By Marilyn Silverman. Reviewed by David M. Emmons

Capitalists in Spite of Themselves: Elite Conflict and Economic Transitions in Early Modern Europe. By Richard Lachmann. Reviewed by William D. Rubinstein

When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850. By Daniel Headrick. Reviewed by Bertho Lavenir

Gold for the Sultan: Western Bankers and Ottoman Finance, 1856-1881. By Christopher Clay. Reviewed by Priscilla Roberts

L'Occupation, l'État français et les enterprises [The Occupation, the French State, and Business]. Edited by Olivier Dard, Jean-Claude Daumas, and François Marcot. Reviewed by Donald Reid

Statistics and the German State, 1900-1945: The Making of Modern Economic Knowledge. By J. Adam Tooze. Reviewed by Harold James

Recovery and Restoration: U.S. Foreign Policy and the Politics of Reconstruction of West Germany's Shipbuilding Industry, 1945-1955. By Henry Burke Wend. Reviewed by Raymond G. Stokes

The Multinational Traders. Edited by Geoffrey Jones. Reviewed by Ray Barrell

Prosperity, Region, and Institutions in Maritime China: The South Fukien Pattern, 946-1368. By Billy K. L. So. Reviewed by Angela Schottenhammer

The Economic History of India, 1857-1947. By Tirthankar Roy. Reviewed by Susan Wolcott

From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry. By David G. McKendrick, Richard F. Doner, and Stephan Haggard. Reviewed by Steven W. Usselman

Peasant Cotton Revolution in West Africa: Cote d'Ivoire, 1880-1995. By Thomas J. Bassett. Reviewed by Robert L. Tignor

Wheels and Deals: The Automobile Industry in Twentieth Century Australia. By Robert Conlon and John Perkins. Reviewed by David T. Merrett