Electricity is one of the most transformative innovations of the modern era, yet we know very little about its global spread through multinational business. Global Electrification is therefore a welcome and significant addition to the literature. It is well-researched, not only by its three leading authors, but also by a plethora of contributors from around the world in what amounts to a quasi-edited volume. The reader is presented with a solid array of qualitative and quantitative information on scale, financing, and ownership structure and the book is a tour de force in sourcing. More than one-third of it is devoted to footnotes and appendices filled with archival information. The authors weave through the material with consummate skill, providing a defining narrative on multinational business, finance, and electrification over the last 130 years.

Technologists and those interested in numbers will welcome the excellent first chapter. New inventions as developed by great inventors in a variety of countries such as Allessandro Volta (Italy), Zénobe Théophile Gramme (Belgium), the Siemens brothers (Germany), Sir Humphrey Davey (England), and Thomas Edison (United States) are covered succinctly, while the statistical backdrop is impressive. In particular, the authors present the first estimates of foreign ownership of electrical utilities over the twentieth century in countries in Europe, Australasia, Africa, Asia, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, North America, and the Middle East, which is an essential reference point for the reader as they move through the subsequent narrative. The pattern of high foreign ownership in the early twentieth century and the reversal by the mid-to-late twentieth century through what the authors describe as a process of “domestication”—is striking. These data are meticulously sourced in an appendix and will be invaluable for economic and business historians.

The authors expertly cut through the complexity of the subject matter by working through the material chronologically. They isolate five main epochs: 1878–1914, when global electrification was dominantly spurred by multinational enterprise and financial intermediaries; 1914–1929 when governments became more central in the supply and diffusion of electricity as the world generally started to retreat from globalization; 1929–1945 when crises the Great Depression and the Second World War saw further retrenchment of cross-border investment; 1945–1978, which witnessed a backlash against the multinationals as governments, sometimes through expropriation, sought to domesticate the provision of electric light and power; and 1978 to the present, which witnessed a resurgence of multinational activity in response to privatization and deregulation. Within this chronological setup, two main areas feature prominently. First, the sheer organizational complexity associated with undertaking global business in electrification, especially via holding companies, which were used to mitigate risk, rationalize management, and facilitate financial leverage. Second, the stark reversal of foreign direct investment in favor of domestication as electric utilities, for a variety of reasons such as pricing and security concerns, came under the growing control of governments.

A major strength of this work is the ability of the authors to cover an immense amount of ground without losing the reader or detracting from the main argument. The chronological framework they set out certainly helps. They deal with the history of individual firms and countries in some detail as well as integrating the broader history and political economy of development over time. There are also brief detours as concepts and definitions are clarified such as the differences between foreign portfolio and foreign direct investment, how corporate governance works in an international context and the operation of networks. By setting these out in a clear way upfront (those with existing knowledge can easily bypass the granularity), the reader is in a much better position to comprehend the historical material. The authors capably blend passages that delve into detail with those that offer broader, evidence-based generalizations.

This book is typical of a new approach to global business history that seeks to use rigorous statistical data and archival material to extrapolate patterns of causation from the collective experience of individual countries. It is no easy task to cover one of the world's major innovations across the globe over such a long time period. Yet the authors do an excellent job of going beyond the details of countries and firms to provide a coherent and informative account of the phases of global electrification. They balance the tradeoff between breadth and depth particularly well, so the reader is presented with details of the major actors in the overall context of the rise, fall, and recent resurgence of multinational enterprise in the provision of electric utilities. One might argue that the lessons learned from the history of electrification laid out in just three pages in the final chapter are somewhat cursory, but this is a trivial objection to what is overall a very fine, well-written, and skillfully researched book.