This volume is the latest contribution in what is surely a life's work concerning the history of American inward and outward investment. This particular history carries all the markings of Mira Wilkins's great talents that we know from her earlier studies. She prefers rich description, filled with many details and facts. This litany would teeter towards the tedious, but Wilkins knows well the importance of adding periodic moments of drama. At the end of this prodigious study, the student of this book has no doubt that he or she has engorged a consummate history of direct investment in the United States.

The protagonist of this history is America the emergent, though the story is not always as pristine as one may have thought. World War I transforms the United States from a debtor to a creditor nation. Although the United States had even prior to the Great War been a net exporter of foreign direct investment, it now has become a net exporter of portfolio investments as well. There are two reasons for this change. First, the immiseration of Europe following the war made capital less abundant and, secondly, the U.S. advance in productivity made it harder for foreign firms to compete.

Wilkins does not attempt to sort out the relative importance of either of these conditions. Rather, her focus is on a few important and intriguing subjects. The principal subject is the treatment of foreign property during war, for the chosen dates of her inquiry begin with the First and ends with the Second World War. During World War I, foreign property had been confiscated and assigned to American owners. German firms found it difficult afterwards to recover their capital, brand labels, and intellectual property. Nor was the procedure simply complicated by law and bureaucracy; the process was also hampered by corruption, a reminder that the administration of Warren Harding did not meet the hygienic standards assumed today to be associated with the federal government.

Given this experience and the imminent signs of American entry into war, how should German—not to mention Japanese and Italian—companies behave in the period of 1939 to 1941? It is hardly surprising that when possible, they behaved in ways to protect their property. Thus, I.G. Farben—which Wilkins describes at length in earlier chapters as the intellectual powerhouse of the chemical industry—sought by a “sham transaction” to swap American for foreign assets with an American company Jasco, with the secret clause that all could be reversed at a later date. Wilkins does not let us know much about Jasco's American owners, Standard Oil, and their thoughts. When war broke out, the U.S. government forced Jasco to release its patents for exploitation by other firms.

The complications of ownership during war and hostility are known throughout all periods of history and are surely harbingers of the current and far more sophisticated search for the “money trail” of suspicious investments. Did, for example, Japanese insurance companies operating in the United States pass on information regarding the arrivals and departure of American ships from ports—information which they would know? An investigation found no evidence that their American representatives passed on such information. The evidence regarding German and Swiss insurers was far less certain. In particular, Wilkins does not leave clear in this account or subsequent ones what Swiss firms knew, a topic of some importance in light of the controversies of the past decade. One is similarly left with footnotes and references regarding the behavior of the Enskilda Banken (and its Swedish owners the Wallenberg family) to piece together the implication that there was something fishy in the Baltic.

The story—stories would be more accurate—of the disposition of foreign assets in the United States is not, however, limited only to the hostile powers. The eventual American allies, Britain and France, also sold their portfolio holdings. A somewhat brutish Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, and a similarly inclined President Roosevelt were insistent on the sale of British direct investment as well to satisfy the American isolationists that before aid was to be given, the British had done all they could. Indeed, a few companies, American Viscose—owned by Courtaulds—being the most prominent, were sold, before common sense and perhaps a collective guilt settled in.

The war experience had also far-reaching consequences. Many foreign firms from neutral countries succeeded in maintaining their assets in the United States because of their legal organization by trust; the trust form permitted affiliates to assert they were independent of parents who may have been in close relationships with the Germans. Such was the case for SKF Industries (a Swedish ball-bearing manufacturer) and even Philips (the Dutch electronics multinational). After the war, both firms chose to maintain their trust forms, partly as a way to confirm this separation. Of course, the re-affirmation of these affiliate structures became the late lore of management school teaching on the conflict of national structures and global markets.

In addition to treatment of foreign companies during war, the book has two minor themes. The first is the importance of the growing network of finance and investment in the world economy. One of the achievements of the book is to balance the traditional emphasis on manufacturing with descriptions of agriculture and services, especially in financial sectors. In a book generally averse to allocating too much time to theories, Wilkins devotes a considerable number of pages to show the many ways in which direct investment and portfolio investment can intertwine and render obscure the national origins of firms and portfolio investors. This confusion is, of course, the basis for the travails of the American authorities later in deciphering who owned what during the war.

The ascension of the United States placed New York as a principal node in a world network of capital. From this study, it is hard to evaluate the exact nature of this network. By the lists of foreign banks, insurers, and other financial firms, there is no doubt that New York had become an international hub. But whether it challenged London is not analyzed, partly because Wilkins focuses on inward investment and does not compare the foreign position in the United States to the American position, say, in London.

The second theme is the importance of politics and the state. Wilkins makes clear in early chapters that the United States was not a liberal haven for foreign capital. Foreign investment was restricted in communication, transportation, and banking, among other industries. Where federal law did not restrict such investments, state laws did—though it should be recalled that state laws in banking impeded even cross-state banking. Because of federal laws, many firms exited the United States, including German and Japanese companies due to war, British breweries due to Prohibition, Marconi due to communication regulation, and in the case of Courtauld, due to duress. In addition, American antitrust law was far more aggressive than the cartel-friendly law of Europe. The United States increasingly under Roosevelt sought to put back teeth into the Sherman Act. Of great importance, the increases of corporate and personal income taxes made the state a major even if passive residual claimant.

The hegemony of the United States at the end of World War II was surely as much military as it was financial. In many ways, its ascendancy masked that the United States had taken the massive lead forward in productivity, incomes, and production during the first quarter of the century. The world wars made the dollar into an international reserve currency, and the United States became the major creditor to other nations. It took a decade, but by the 1950s—we know from other studies, the United States had come to understand that power and economic liberalism were the handmaidens of hegemony; Bismarck had made no less a comment in a different century regarding the United Kingdom. It was forgotten that the United States of the 1930s was deeply worried about “hot money”, as Wilkins describes in detail and with the aid of the rare graphs showing the volatility of inward and outward flows. In this debate appear well known names such as Henry Morgenthau and also William Douglas, head of the SEC and later Supreme Court Justice.

There are many hidden treasures in the book—the metaphor is apt as one does fall upon them in a way that a child might wander upon a pirate's lair. For example, at the end of chapter 5, Wilkins discusses the continued confusion over the statistical definitions of foreign direct investment: in shipping, 75 percent equity ownership was required; for radio, 80 percent; aircraft, 51 percent. These numbers are far above the 10 percent that came later to prevail. This variation reflects many things, but above all, it reflects the wide variation in categorization of emergent social phenomena. This type of confusion is reflected in general in the history of economic statistics and is of interest because the final convergence in definition reflects an arbitrage of cognition and power. After all, it is not a minor difference to judge whether an industry is foreign-dominated when using a definition of 10 percent or 80 percent! Many of these definitions came to light from the 1941 Treasury survey of foreign investment in the United States motivated by the need to know the national ownership of these assets. This material is a sociological sandbox in which the statistical categories come to define our subsequent cognition about what is foreign and what is domestic. No surprise then that politics and statistics are often bedmates.

There is a cost to Wilkins's narrative, as there would be for any history. The size of the project demands trade-offs. By focusing on chronology that is divided into unequal panels, we lose the rhythm of daily time and life. To recover, for example, the remarkable history of Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match king, one has to recover the collage from the various chapters. There is a loss not only of drama, but at times, of sense making.

One suspects that Mira Wilkins is not as oblivious to these considerations as she is dismissive. She occasionally mentions theory, but not too often; she occasionally mentions hypotheses, such as whether foreign investments “caused” the Great Depression, but she dismisses them largely—as would anyone confronting such unqualified statements; she states that she does not doubt that her period shows considerable technology sharing, but chooses not to regard the studies on these phenomena; she caricatures the view that direct investment is one-way, or sectoral rather than multidirectional as she has shown; she notes the world looked more global in 1914 than in 1945, but does not enter directly into this arena now fairly well studied.

For her, much like a French poet, it is the music above all that counts and count she does. The reader is bound to ask over 600 pages: why am I reading so many pages about company entries, exits, investments? Yet, there emerges an answer and it is a very compelling one, for behind these names of companies and people lie more than just dollars, sterling, mark.

The amounts of direct investment in the United States by today's standard were not very high, measuring from one to just under five percent of American GNP during this period. We might be puzzled by the weight of this superb book and the relative unimportance of inward direct investment. But the numbers do not capture the personal histories and the vestiges that lie embryonic, waiting for the clock hands to turn. When the U.S. hegemony began to weaken, and the capabilities and financial reserves of foreign countries inevitably improved, how rapidly did the United States turn from creditor to debtor. No doubt, the macroeconomic and geopolitical mistakes of the United States deserve their share of the credit. Yet, this cannot explain it all. What allowed history to turn so rapidly were these small histories of companies and people who persisted in their American investments and adventures, absorbing the local knowledge, developing their technologies, and understanding the markets.

For history, time is indeed an arrow. The United States may have for a rare number of decades been able to ride above the rest, but in the details of everyday life, the world had already changed and become considerably smaller and more multinational. Wilkins knows this and she waits patiently for the reader to make the same discovery at the close of her magisterial study.