This is an extremely important book, not least because of its contrasts. It is very long indeed, but it also has a concise set of messages. It is about a single firm, but could be about any of a number of others (had the records for the others been as rich). It is about Americanization of a business organization, but refuses to deal with that concept lightly, and convincingly deploys it while at the same time problematizing it. It is a work of business, accounting, and German history that deals with timeless lessons that apply to any number of countries and firms. And it is a book that devotes a large amount of space to biographical details that at the same time focuses heavily on more or less abstract management and accounting systems. Jeffrey Fear has produced a remarkable volume that simultaneously does justice to business and accounting history, German history, and management studies. Along the way, the author makes more than a passing nod to the role of the individual in history and the ways that architecture embodies contemporary organizational, economic, and political realities.

The introduction starts off with a review of a range of themes and literature, much of it theoretical (e.g., Ronald Coase, Jeffrey Williamson, and William Lazonick) and/or structural-historical (e.g., Alfred Chandler, Jr.). It is thus somewhat surprising that, following a short overview of the first of three chronological parts of his story, which deals over several chapters with Thyssen & Co. between its founding in 1871 and 1914, Fear moves decisively in chapter one away from theory and structure (at least at the outset) and toward a fairly traditional and detailed consideration of the person at the center of the company, “August Thyssen, Victorian Entrepreneur.” The chapter title belies its content to some degree: Thyssen may have been a man of his age in many ways (in terms of social conservatism, some of his politics, and his work ethic), but he was highly unusual—indeed even forward looking—in others. He was highly successful, expanding his business rapidly. He also turned over a great deal of power—along with responsibility—to associates, some of whom were quite young. And, despite heading up a family firm (or set of firms) that he had founded until the very end of his quite long life, August Thyssen was in a real sense one of the first salaried managers of a major corporation or holding company: an 1885 divorce settlement transferred ownership of the Thyssen holdings, though not their control, to the divorced couple's children.

Separation of ownership and management, not incidentally, is one of the hallmarks of the emergence of the “modern” corporation according to Chandler and others, and Fear neatly turns the Thyssen case into a challenge to the idea that the modern corporation started in the United States and then, through a process of “Americanization,” emanated throughout the world. The Thyssen companies were faced with many of the same challenges as were contemporary American firms: not just separation of ownership and management, but also rapid growth, technological change, multiple production sites, and so on. And they responded to them in ways that were sometimes very similar and sometimes very different from comparator companies in the United States, with Thyssen preferring multiple subsidiaries to a unified corporation for instance, vertical integration to horizontal combination, product diversification to mass production.

In all of this, people mattered. Thyssen and his deputies made decisions, decisions that resulted from extensive to and fro, infighting, and politicking. Personalities and personal interactions were important, and Fear focuses on top managers throughout the book, which deals with the movement of Thyssen to a Konzern, or multi-subsidiary company, and then into a vital component (not least since its linchpin, Heinrich Dinkelbach, came from Thyssen) of the massive United Steel Works corporation, which was founded as a “rationalization company” in 1926 and underwent a major reorganization in 1933/4 as the Nazi era began. Fear ends his story as he began it, with a biographical treatment, this time of Dinkelbach, whose profound influence on the firm and on German business as a whole stretched from the mid-1920s well into the post-1945 period.

Dinkelbach is one of many examples that Fear uses to show that people matter, but so do the systems they create. The Thyssen-related companies used various management and accounting systems to “organize control” throughout the period that Fear covers, and they did so in a context that was radically different from that in the United States (e.g., legalized cartel arrangements, smaller market, heavier impact of political upheaval). Fear describes these systems in some detail. It is surely rare to be able to characterize a discussion of various accounting techniques and reporting ratios as “lively” or “incisive.” But they are in this case. Fear has done his homework in the archives. He has done his calculations. And he also knows the theoretical literature. He is convincing, not least by example, that accounting as “bookkeeping” needs to be read as closely—and as critically—as any other historical source. And he provides a substantial appendix as a primer in “new accounting theory” to help historians and others who might feel a bit squeamish when faced with this prospect.

Fear concludes this appendix with a plea that “We need a good deal more on the history of European management inside the business firm” (p. 787, my emphasis), and he is surely right. He provides a model for this, dealing not only with sometimes dry, but very important, systems of reporting and accounting, but also with sometimes very juicy and venomous politicking. But his book is especially important because it considers the inside of the company not just in its historical context, but also in international perspective. Long it may be, but it is equally rewarding.