Business History Review

Global maritime business networks channeled the flows of people and goods for modern production and consumption societies. The principal instrument for constructing and sustaining these networks was the business trip. In the course of their travels, shipping-company and trading-company executives founded new commercial networks, established new routes and services, inspected agents, gathered business intelligence, and promoted new contacts and connections. These trips relied on a business culture that combined cosmopolitanism with national preferences and competitiveness with gentlemanly codes. Personal relationships remained fundamental to the networking process despite a bureaucratization of business structures. An examination of the business trips of Belgian, British, Dutch, French, and German maritime firms reveals the centrality of global networks in modern economies, shows how such networks were constructed and maintained, and argues that face-to-face relationships continued to characterize business life deep into the twentieth century. (Pages 1-32)

American frozen foods were originally considered a luxury product; the industry did not develop a mass market until the late 1940s. Only a few years after achieving mass-market sales, however, frozen-food producers tried to segment the market in order to increase profits. This change was partly the result of internal factors, such as technological developments and interfirm competition. The new marketing strategy also hinged on industry executives' shifting conception of the ideal consumer. Frozen-food marketers of the early 1950s envisioned themselves as providing the good life at a low cost to "average" Americans. When profits slowed in the late 1950s, they designed a variety of new products for groups according to their race, age, and class. (Pages 33-60)

After World War II, Weirton Steel remained a critical barrier to the unionization of the steel industry. Weirton kept unions at bay through a plan of high wages, welfare, and company unionism, which it combined with an authoritarian style of management. Forbidden from using intimidation by the federal courts, Weirton substituted a celebration of Americanism that associated freedom with limited government and an absence of unionism. Foreseeing a union drive in 1950, Weirton staged a pageant to dramatize its version of patriotism. The steelworkers countered with a competing version that stressed trade unionism as a way to give workers a democratic voice. This article reveals how postwar patriotic pageantry was rooted in the struggle between labor and capital. (Pages 61-91)

Otto Kahn: Art, Money, & Modern Time. By Theresa M. Collins. Reviewed by Michael Kammen.

Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment. By Emma Rothschild. Reviewed by Robert E. Prasch.

The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478-1776: From Commercial Arithmetic to Life Annuities and Joint Stocks. By Geoffrey Poitras. Reviewed by R. H. Parker.

The Reconstruction of American Liberalism, 1865-1914. By Nancy Cohen. Reviewed by Heather Cox Richardson.

Culture of Misfortune: An Interpretive History of Textile Unionism in the United States. By Clete Daniel. Reviewed by Randall L. Patton.

Strike-Breaking and Intimidation: Mercenaries and Masculinity in Twentieth-Century America. By Stephen H. Norwood. Reviewed by Melvyn Dubofsky.

Selling the Old-Time Religion: Fundamentalists and Mass Culture. By Douglas Carl Abrams. Reviewed by Peter Wosh.

A White-Collar Profession: African American Public Accountants Since 1921. By Theresa A. Hammond. Reviewed by Alexa Benson Henderson.

Airlines and Air Mail: The Post Office and the Birth of the Commercial Aviation Industry. By F. Robert van der Linden. Reviewed by David D. Lee.

My Blue Heaven: Life and Politics in the Working-Class Suburbs of Los Angeles, 1920-1965. By Becky M. Nicolaides. Reviewed by Merry Ovnick.

Renewing Birmingham: Federal Funding and the Promise of Change, 1929-1979. By Christopher MacGregor Scribner. Reviewed by Harvey K. Newman

The Cotton Dust Papers: Science, Politics, and Power in the "Discovery" of Byssinosis in the U.S. By Charles Levenstein and Gregory F. DeLaurier, with Mary Lee Dunn. Reviewed by Christian Warren.

Cotton's Renaissance: A Study in Market Innovation. By Timothy Curtis Jacobson and George David Smith. Reviewed by Sven Beckert.

Voice of the Marketplace: A History of the National Petroleum Council. By Joseph A. Pratt, William H. Becker, and William M. McClenahan Jr. Reviewed by Hugh S. Gorman.

Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago. By David Naguib Pellow. Reviewed by Louis P. Cain.

To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-Up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology. By Ross Knox Bassett. Reviewed by James W. Cortada.

Anytime, Anywhere: Entrepreneurship and the Creation of a Wireless World. By Louis Galambos and Eric John Abrahamson. Reviewed by Thomas Haigh.

The Kid of Coney Island: Fred Thompson and the Rise of American Amusements. By Woody Register. Reviewed by Robert W. Snyder.

Neon Metropolis: How Las Vegas Started the Twenty-First Century. By Hal Rothman. Reviewed by Michael S. Green.

Before They Were Cardinals: Major League Baseball in Nineteenth-Century St. Louis. By Jon David Cash. Reviewed by Steven A. Riess.

The End of Baseball As We Knew It: The Players' Union, 1960-81. By Charles Korr. Reviewed by Andrew Zimbalist.

Food Nations: Selling Taste in Consumer Societies. Edited by Warren Belasco and Philip Scranton. Reviewed by David G. Hogan.

Uplift: The Bra in America. By Jane Farrell-Beck and Colleen Gau. Reviewed by Gabriella M. Petrick.

Empire and Revolution: The Americans in Mexico since the Civil War. By John Mason Hart. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Reviewed by John E. Kicza.

States of Nature: Science, Agriculture, and Environment in the Spanish Caribbean, 1760-1940. By Stuart McCook. Reviewed by Juan Carlos Santamarina.

Capitalizing Knowledge: Essays on the History of Business Education in Canada. Edited by Barbara Austin. Reviewed by Ben Forster.

Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of Seventeenth-Century English Economic Thought. By Andrea Finkelstein. Reviewed by Martine Julia van Ittersum.

Conceiving Companies: Joint-Stock Politics in Victorian England. By Timothy Alborn. Reviewed by Bruce G. Carruthers.

The Lancashire Working Classes, c.1880-1930. By Trevor Griffiths. Reviewed by Jane Humphries.

An Economic History of London, 1800-1914. By Michael Ball and David Sutherland. Reviewed by Patricia L. Garside.

Le Démon Moderne: La Pollution dans les sociétés urbaines et industrielles d'Europe [The Modern Demon: Pollution in Urban and Industrial European Societies]. Edited by Christoph Bernhardt and Geneviève Massard-Guilbaud. Reviewed by Christopher Hamlin.

Britain, France and the Financing of the First World War. By Martin Horn. Reviewed by Hew Strachan.

Bankkredit oder Kapitalmarkt: Alternativen der Industriefinanzierung in Deutschland [Bank Credit or Capital Markets: Alternative Methods of Industrial Financing in Germany]. Wissenschaftliche Beirat des Instituts für bankhistorische Forschung e.V. Bankhistorisches Archiv: Zeitschrift zur Bankengeschichte, Beiheft 40. Reviewed by Jeffrey Fear

Mao's Crusade: Politics and Policy Implementation in China's Great Leap Forward. By Alfred L. Chan. Reviewed by Elisabeth Köll.

Capitalist Development and Economism in East Asia: The Rise of Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. By Ku-wai Li. Reviewed by Richard Lufrano.

APEC and the Construction of Pacific Rim Regionalism. By John Ravenhill. Reviewed by Richard Feinberg.

Market and Society in Korea: Interest, Institution and the Textile Industry. By Dennis McNamara. Reviewed by David C. Kang