This economic history of the United States provides an extensive and entertaining overview from the perspective of business executives in only 240 pages. The author rests his history on well-selected narratives of people and companies and goes on to discuss later economic discourse on diverse historical issues. Its twelve chapters could be assigned as reading to undergraduate students, and at the same time, it provides a scholar's choice of reference with context and clear explanation of key business and economic concepts.
The book's narrative starts in colonial times, setting the world economic stage of the period around 1500, and it ends with a discussion of the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008. All throughout, it discusses the material and the political context, like the place of business in the young nation's constitution. For the colonial period, the book provides a clear picture of the business of conquest. It details how people created joint-stock companies for colonial exploitation in England, and their operations, and how people in the North American colonies established businesses based on local natural resources they seized from the Native Americans living there. Slavery supplied significant labor in this process and the book provides a clear and brief overview of the economy of slavery and the role of the business of slavery in shaping the nation and the Civil War.
Next follows the story of factories after independence: first textile mills in New England and then the important role of canal, railroad, and telegraph companies linking the growing country. The book details how railroad managers contributed to the establishment of managerial forms that other companies later adopted and developed. It proved difficult to establish a comprehensive system of banks in a country based on sovereignty deriving from the people, not from God (or a king), and the author tells this history in fine detail. The author complements the economic history of the country's first century with a discussion of the response from labor, farmers, and trustbusters. Congress and diverse administrations shaped the national framework for business through antitrust legislation, which the book illustrates via the breakup of Standard Oil and American Tobacco.
The twentieth century saw standardized production—first at Ford and soon after at many other manufacturers—that contributed to making individual companies larger. Companies also organized through business associations that advocated less government restriction on business. The Great Depression was a massive backlash to this view and the book discusses the New Deal as a response. It sees World War II as a new start for business.
The part of the book concerned with business after World War II examines how large corporations came to dominate. Government encouraged larger corporations through funding of research and development and extensive purchases. Companies expanded through growth and mergers—often conglomerates—became fashionable. The book uses narratives to illustrate the public critiques of big business and its cooperation with government—critiques made by diverse groups including civil rights advocates and consumer protection promoters. It tells the story of how the nation's largest industrial manufacturers established the Business Roundtable, which was successful in mobilizing counteraction to government regulation starting during the Great Depression. Companies also grew through increasing international trade, which was encouraged by lower barriers to trade and cross-border capital transfer. Enterprises’ foreign markets swelled, and they moved production and workplaces abroad to countries with still lower wages. The book concludes with a discussion of the emergence of the financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, but this reviewer missed a discussion of the challenges to companies, individuals, and society by nonmaterial manufacture and distribution, like software, games, music, movies, and Internet-based services (e.g., Google and Facebook).
At the center of the book is a narrative of the United States as the land of enterprise, and business executives are the book's main actors, which could be seen as a reflection of neoliberal ideology. However, the book's discussion of the interdependent shaping of business, public discourses, and government regulation carries it well beyond this supposition. At the same time, the book's positioning from the perspective of business executives invites reflection on the degree to which this perspective allows a comprehensive narrative of the United States’ economic history. True, business executives contributed extensively to shaping the country. Many others, such as former slaves, labor, farmers, and consumers, also contributed to shaping the economy as separate actors, but the author could not address every essential economic history element in this remarkably short book. Yet his choice disregards, for example, how the former slaves and abundance of immigrants contributed to shaping labor, training, and production across the country and how factors outside the United States participated in forming the country's economy and business. For the reader, this book provides a great frame for reflection, by oneself or with students, on the limits of the dynamics in American economic history.
