Comparative business history is not generally done well. One exception is Thomas Hughes' classic Networks of Power, which thoughtfully compares the experience of three large countries in the pioneering stages of electrification. But what of the countries that had fewer capabilities and depended on the advanced economies of Europe and North America for finance, management or technology in this field? The problems of comparative history are sometimes magnified rather than solved when multinational teams produce collective volumes but fail to sing to a common theme. This volume – by three complementary and distinguished experts in different fields of business history, with the assistance (acknowledged in specific chapters) of a wider range of contributors from France, the US, New Zealand, Canada, Norway and Italy – demonstrates triumphantly that the problems can be managed. The result is a definitive study of the neglected topic of the role of international financiers and managers in spreading electrification globally, their substantial replacement in the middle decades of the twentieth century by national (and, often, state) owners, and the more recent renaissance of electric power multinationals (about which the authors suggest some scepticism is appropriate, given the historical record).

The business organisations which spearheaded the electrification of tramways, lighting and power were among the largest enterprises of their day: American & Foreign Power, active in Latin America and Asia, had over 35,260 employees (and $534.6 million assets) in the late 1930s, while the Belgian company Sofina, active in Latin America and Europe, had 40,000 employees (and $398.6 million assets in its main holding company alone). Dannie Heineman, chief executive of Sofina, before being forced in 1940 to flee Europe for America, had a vision of a European power grid, which was only achieved many years later. The primary contribution of this work is to bring these companies and their managers out of the shadows of business history. Some of the enterprises were affiliated with well-known manufacturers who already figure prominently in our narratives, like Siemens, but others – Canadian enterprises in Brazil, British enterprises in Africa, Swiss enterprises in eastern and southern Europe – were what have sometimes been called ‘free-standing’ companies: with little organisation in their headquarters country, their staff, assets and activities were concentrated in the host economy. However, some of the analysis here demonstrates that the headquarters' function in such companies was not trivial and they were often the vehicles for the transfer of much more than finance: there is no clear boundary between a ‘free-standing’ company and a ‘classic’ multinational, though extreme cases of each ideal type can be readily recognised. It is, the authors admit, difficult to know sometimes whether the initial impulse came from the home or host economy, and the later ownership and control of many of these companies exhibits sometimes bewildering and often obscure evolutionary change according to varying local conditions, macro-changes affecting the political, technological or financial clout of their headquarters economies, and their own internal issues. The authors do a good job of situating their narrative in a statistical framework, showing changes in forms of ownership and degree of electrification in the host economies, thus marshalling complexity into comprehensible narrative form.

A constant theme is that electricity was different and special. Comparisons with the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century contractors, managers and financiers – who also transformed the world's infrastructure by building ports, canals, telecoms, railways, petroleum and gas production and delivery systems, intercity highways and their like earlier than (or concurrently with) these electrical entrepreneurs – are notable for their absence. The suggestion that electricity was different because it was more capital-intensive is unconvincing: that applies distinctively only to the pre-1914 years (before massive-scale economies in generation were widely realised). Steam railways and telegraphs had made proportionately greater capital demands on developing economies in their heyday. But asking for comparisons with other cases merely points up how much better they have served us than the historians of these other cases, who have generally not asked the analytical questions which are pointed up by this path-breaking analysis. This is a definitive study which will long be valued by business, financial and technological historians and, it is to be hoped, will also inspire new perspectives in such related fields.