This impressive volume explores the responses of British and Japanese firms to globalization through in-depth case studies from the perspective of comparative business history. From the viewpoint of the varieties of capitalism paradigm developed by Peter Hall and David Soskice, Britain, a liberal market economy like the United States, is very different from Japan, a coordinated market economy (CME) like Germany. Firms under different institutional settings are expected to respond differently to the same phenomenon, in this case, globalization. As government activities are given for firms, governments significantly influence firms’ conduct and constitute institutional settings for firms. Furthermore, Britain differs significantly from Japan culturally, and entrepreneurial activities vary from culture to culture, so from a cultural perspective the responses of British firms to globalization are expected to be different from those of Japanese firms. For these reasons, Britain and Japan were selected as a pair for a comparative analysis. Rather than offer clear-cut reasons for the success or failure of firms’ responses, however, this volume intends to demonstrate “the impact of the institutional setting, the influence of government and entrepreneurs, and the weight of historical contingency in conditioning firms’ responses” (p. 2) to globalization.

Globalization is generally seen to have intensified during two periods: the first occurred from the second half of the nineteenth century to the First World War (or the Great Depression) and the second from the 1980s to the present day. The first three chapters (not including the Introduction by Maki Umemura or Chapter 2 by Jon Stobart) examine cases from the first period, and the latter six chapters look at the second. Stobart focuses on a period before the first wave of globalization, and shows that in eighteenth-century England, in addition to many European place names being attached to groceries, colonial place names also came to be associated with colonial groceries, of which consumption increased. Stobart concludes that not only were eighteenth-century consumers aware of empire, but they regarded the place name's quality assurance and images as important. Aashish Velkar examines the process of adoption of a standard gauge in the British wire industry in 1883 and emphasizes that the state acted as an arbitrator between consumers and producers without reneging on its commitment to laissez-faire policies. Andrew Smith suggests that imperial sentiment and notions of ethnic solidarity influenced British investors and affected the destination of British capital export, based on his analysis of prospectuses and other primary materials. Eugene Choi shows that the nineteenth-century Japanese cotton industry acquired Western technical knowledge via Mitsui & Co., which reduced transaction costs, and this fact illustrates a feature of CMEs. He also argues that as company managers provided not only business models but also technical know-how, they integrated management with technology.

The second half of the book contains two chapters on Britain and four on Japan. Carlo Morelli shows that the British government's industrial policy, rather than protecting the industry, helped leading companies in the jute industry to diversify, first into a related industry, polypropylene, and later into unrelated industries such as engineering and electrical engineering. Judy Slinn traces the development of the Western pharmaceutical industry and points out the impediments to the industry's globalization, such as delays in standardization of core products and uniform marketing strategies. Minoru Shimamoto shows how the Japanese oil company Idemitsu Kosan, which had been family-owned and famous for its unique management practices, faced difficulty after the bursting of the economic bubble in the 1990s, and underwent an overall restructuring, including an initial public offering, in the transition to a more Western-style management. Hiromi Shioji shows that Japanese automakers today focus on middle- and high-grade vehicles in emerging markets such as China, India, and Russia and employ marketing strategies consistent with their product focus. Rika Fujioka asks why Japanese department stores internationalized, and concludes that there were two main reasons: to search for information and goods to expand domestic stores’ merchandise lines, and to sell more goods to Japanese travelers and/or Japanese dwellers abroad. Maki Umemura examines the evolution of Japanese capitalism after 1990 through an analysis of the pharmaceutical industry. She concludes that convergence of the Japanese pharmaceutical industry with those in the United States and Europe is limited, in spite of the deregulation and globalization in the industry.

This collection adopts a long-term perspective and examines various industries’ responses to globalization. It clearly shows the differences between British and Japanese companies’ responses to globalization. However, because the institutional settings change over time and differ by industry, more comparisons in the same era and industry would be more fruitful, like the comparison between the British and the Japanese pharmaceutical industries by Slinn and Umemura in this volume. Furthermore, a chapter exploring the Japanese textile industry, which declined after the 1970s and diversified significantly, or a chapter examining British retailing, which is very competitive internationally would make the comparisons more vivid. Finally, it has been argued that the first globalization era was more “global” than the second because governmental intervention was more powerful in the second. It would be nice to have some discussion of whether firms’ responses to globalization differ in the two periods. These limitations aside, this volume makes an important contribution to comparative business history by introducing the two perspectives of varieties of capitalism and cultural differences, and encouraging greater dialogue between British and Japanese scholars.