This multiauthored volume is a synthesis of recent business and economic historical research focused on the region of Savoy in eastern France. In 1860, France annexed the homeland of the King of Piedmont (literally, of the House of Savoy), as compensation for French military support of Piedmont's successful effort to unify Italy against Austrian opposition. Ostensibly, essays begin with that date; however, several contributors carefully note important lines of continuity between Piedmontese and French government actions before and after 1860. All essays proceed to trace various economic developments up to the present.

Organized thematically into long essays (up to just over one hundred pages), the book offers a series of case studies of Savoyard, French, and transnational economic history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yves Kinossian sets the stage by considering the fluidity of Savoy's Alpine borders, population, and economic productivity from 1848 to the present. Michel Boulet traces the transformation of nineteenth-century Savoyard peasant farming into large-scale agriculture after 1945. Pierre Judet and Denis Varaschin focus on increasingly vibrant regional industrial development: notably, the energy-intensive manufacturing (such as aluminum production) that emerged alongside the huge hydroelectric dams, as well as cross-national electricity generation and consumption in the Alps. Serge Tomamichel highlights the evolution of professional and technical training from 1860 to the present. In addition to a thought-provoking conclusion to the entire volume, Hubert Bonin offers a detailed study of the regional, French, and international banks in Savoy and their long-term impact on economic development.

As a synthesis with many authors, the book does not so much have an argument as a theme: the once presumably backward region of Savoy became in the twentieth century a transnational nexus of energy generation, high-tech industry, and profitable international tourism. Some of the most interesting essays make that evolution explicit with examples that should prove fascinating for business historians. Régis Boulat's essay on the manufacturers of winter sports equipment, particularly skis, is superb; he tracks the development of Alpine skiing and attendant artisanal, then industrial, production in Savoy from the late nineteenth century to the recent sales of Rossignol and Salomon to Quiksilver and Adidas, respectively. Julien Coppier's essay on both winter and summer tourism in Savoy serves an excellent complement to Laurent Tissot's work on Switzerland (Naissance d'une industrie touristique: Les Anglais et la Suisse au XIXe siècle [2000]), revealing simultaneously the regional and international character of Alpine tourism. Yves Bouvier's contribution on transport and communication reveals a farsighted Kingdom of Piedmont interested in opening up the Savoyard economy through rail before 1860, an objective later pursued by the French Paris-Lyon-Méditerranée company and then the French national rail company, the SNCF. As it turns out, the hydroelectric power of Savoy made the region an ideal place for many of the early efforts to develop and refine electric-powered trains, once again placing Savoy at the center of European—not at the periphery of French—economic development and infrastructure both before and after the emergence of the Common Market.

The book is a strong economic history. Inclusion of the word “social” in the title seems a token gesture, as only two essays even tangentially consider the social history of the region. Hervé Joly examines the local, national, and international owners (patrons) of Savoyard industrial firms, but not really their wives, children, or patterns of intermarriage as earlier laid out by Bonnie Smith regarding the Nord (Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century [1981]). Mino Faïta's essay on the building industry in Savoy builds on a deep knowledge of Italian labor in France, but those laborers are not the focus here.

Scholars of French, European, and international business and economic history are the likely audience, but that does not mean this book will not also prove useful to social and even cultural historians. The essays form a solid foundation for social and cultural historians working on related issues. History is a big tent. To get a sense of how one might cross the economic and business history of eastern France with recent cultural and social approaches, readers will want to read, alongside this volume, two new books by Anglophone historians: Catherine Tatiana Dunlop, Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French-German Borderland (2015), and Andrew Denning, Skiing into Modernity: A Cultural and Environmental History (2015).

In short, this book represents traditional business and economic history at its best. While modestly announced as a synthesis, the volume not only includes the most recent secondary sources but also springs from a deep and rich primary source base, including numerous municipal, departmental, and private archives. This large, well-edited volume is very much a travail de synthèse as only the French can do it. Et pour cause: the Savoyard regional government subsidized its publication—a reminder of just how important historical research is to French regional governments, as it is to the French state more generally. American economic historians can only dream of state governments making that sort of financial commitment to quite serious, even erudite, historical scholarship.