This book is ambitious. It seeks to use the experience of American big business and its leaders in Great Britain and Germany during the first one-half of the twentieth century to explore “the interaction between existing political and economic power structures” within those three countries. Businessmen and business culture form its center, but it is not business history in a strict sense; and nor is it economic or political history. Instead, it is a fascinating hybrid mixture of all three. The author, Volker Berghahn, is a distinguished German-American historian, who has lived and worked in (and on) all three of the countries studied here and was, perhaps, predestined to do the three-way comparison the book offers. The rich variety of primary and secondary sources cited in his text and footnotes reflect this.

The study proceeds at two levels: at the level of foreign policy, which is believed to be shaped largely by economic interests; and at the level of interaction between American business ideas and practices and the business ideas and practices they encountered in Britain and Germany (including the reception of American techniques of industrial organization and business methods that interaction produced). Berghahn's argument throughout is based on what he calls “qualitative evidence”—mostly the observations of the contemporary business and political elites he quotes at length, supplemented by his assessments of the secondary literature.

The exposition is chronological and begins around 1900. “Americanization” (a British idea born at this time) is seen as a challenge and opportunity which dictated that Britain seek a partnership with the United States, thus preserving the British Empire and Britain's role as World Power as well as providing it with insurance against what Britons saw as “the German challenge.” This view, however, only occasionally harmonized with American interests. It was definitely not shared by American big business. Thus, in the first round of interactions which began around 1900, American business not only enjoyed a more positive reception to many of its practices and products in Germany than in Britain, but its leaders also found much to admire in the German institutional environment (vocational education, science-industry relations), whereas the impression of entrepreneurial conservatism and backward-looking industrial relations dominated their views on British business. Even when war between Britain and Germany threatened, they held on to their German connections.

For Berghahn's interpretation German-American business relations are the main story, a fact that becomes apparent in the discussion of the 1920s, when the Dawes Plan eased profitable renewal of the connection, and even in the later-1930s, as “wishful thinking” characterized American business assessments of the Nazi Regime. Finally, despite the greater presence of government, this emphasis also pervades the last chapter on the period of Pax Americana (1941–1957), when Cold War considerations encouraged ending the Morgenthau Plan and launching the Marshall Plan, and as decartelization and even the “European Coal and Steel Community” surprisingly found much German support. Here Berghahn insists that not a conservative restoration, but a “recasting” of German industry along American lines, was taking place in these years. I would agree, but also point out that much is missing from his sketch of German industrial capitalism, for example, the role of the banking system, with its big private banks, quasi-public savings banks, and the credit cooperatives, not to mention the total absence of a capital market resembling Wall Street. In addition, not just American anti-trust ideas, but cheaper food and more consumer purchasing power helped promote the growing domestic market of the “Wirtschaftswunder” of these years as well.

The virtual neglect of British business is an odd asymmetry of the book. This is surprising, since “British Personal Capitalism” (as Alfred Chandler saw it) would fit Berghahn's interpretation perfectly. Britain, however, seems to only become important to the story at the level of foreign policy and in treatment of the two world wars. His comments on World War I favors Britain as he notes that, despite its aristocratic trappings, it was a basically democratic country, whereas Germany (as American businessmen also observed), with its archaic and undemocratic polity, could mobilize its economic power without regard to its business leaders to assert international political claims and risk war. It is noteworthy that Berghahn's interpretation makes no concession here to the recent Christopher Clark book, The Sleepwalkers, and assigns sole responsibility for the war to German policy. When war broke out, American interests at first dictated neutrality, but events later pulled them into the war on Britain's side and into what has come to be called a “special relationship.”

World War II had a similar scenario. By 1940 American support of Britain had become, in Berghahn's account, a political and economic strategic necessity. In the aftermath of both wars, however, the United States downgraded the “special relationship,” in the 1920s using its financial power to shore up the German economy and remaining skeptical about British attempts to restore its role as the world financial hub (e.g., with its “Return to Gold” in 1925). In the post-1945 era, the United States actually disapproved of British hopes to maintain its role as colonial power and employed its economic might to aid the West German economy, in American plans the “pivot” of Western Europe's recovery—and—according to Berghahn – the basis of a very different kind of “special relationship.”

From the perspective of the late-1950s these plans had been enormously successful. Less so for Britain, burdened by the costs of the war, its “welfare state,” and, in Berghahn's view, still clinging to its Commonwealth and role as colonial power until the “Suez Crisis” of 1956, when U.S. policy, no longer so Anglophile, put an abrupt end to it.

Berghahn´s book asks big questions. Its answers may not always satisfy, but they do give much food for thought. Historians of the period should definitely read it.