We examine the formation and growth of the distressed asset investment industry during the late twentieth century, with specific focus on the strategies of the leading firms. The distressed asset investment industry is dominated by firms based in the United States and is relatively concentrated, due in large part to early movers developing distinctive investment capabilities through participation in landmark transactions, relationship-specific resources, and exploitation of scale effects. We argue that the participation of these firms in the bankruptcy and corporate restructuring markets has resulted in private-sector workouts becoming more competitive and more efficient over the last thirty years, especially in the United States.

This article analyzes the German dye business in India before 1947 as an example of expanding German-Indian commercial relationships. German dye manufacturers showed great interest in India's economic potential in the absence of discriminatory tariffs, while Indian elites were interested in non-British Western partners, which could support their struggle for industrial self-reliance. This particular alignment of interests facilitated cooperation and shows that the so-called European experience is more diverse than research has shown so far. The analysis highlights global trading networks beyond the political boundaries of formal empire and offers an alternative perspective on Indian business history, which reveals more competition between multinationals of different origins and more strategic choices available to Indians.

Thomas K. McCraw is justly admired as a consummate prose stylist, a talented editor, a perceptive historian of the United States, and an inspiring teacher whose mastery of the biographical form led to a string of elegantly written prize-winning publications that are widely read and often taught. The publication one month before McCraw's death in November 2012 of his last book, The Founders and Finance, provides the occasion for this essay, which contends that McCraw also deserves to be remembered as a founder of two thriving academic subfields—policy history and the history of capitalism—despite the fact that he trained relatively few history PhD students, and rarely appeared in public during the final years of his life as the result of a debilitating illness that greatly limited his mobility.

Headquartered in the United States, the Singer Sewing Machine Co. did business all around the world in the early twentieth century. It regularly encountered wars, economic nationalism, and revolutions; in response, it normally created subsidiaries or gave in to expropriation. After the revolution in Mexico (1910–1920), Singer's marketing organization maintained normal operations and even prospered. The company succeeded, in part, by constantly associating the sewing machine with the idea of “modern” womanhood in Revolutionary Mexico. By revealing Singer's marketing strategies and focusing on gender, this article shows that multinational corporations and Latin American governments were not always at odds and could sometimes forge a profitable relationship.

Four giant volumes (plus a companion one on Humble Oil) appeared between 1955 and 1988 on the history of Standard Oil Company (New Jersey) and its successor (as of 1972) Exxon Corporation. These well-documented volumes took the story to 1975. As related by the publisher and author of this book, about four years after the 1999 megamerger of Exxon and Mobil and the formation of ExxonMobil, the merged unit gave a collection of its historical files—containing some four million documents—to the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (DBC) at the University of Texas at Austin. When the document transfer was made, in 2003, William Hale, a thirty-year Exxon/ExxonMobil manager (most recently in the public relations department) suggested that it was time for a fifth volume of Exxon history. ExxonMobil's top management approved, and in 2005 the DBC asked Joseph Pratt to write it. He agreed, and the book under review, which covers the period 1973 through the merger to 2005, was written by Pratt “with the assistance of William Hale” and published by DBC.

Few Americans can match the honors and adulation accorded Wilbur and Orville Wright. The brothers emerged as great international heroes with their first public flights in Europe and America in the high summer of 1908. They were no longer the shadowy figures whose claims to have flown an airplane as early as 1903 were widely discounted; now kings, queens, presidents, and prime ministers flocked to see them fly and showered them with awards. Newspapers on two continents chronicled their triumphal progress across Europe and return to the United States in 1909. Wilbur's death from typhoid in 1912 was reported in bold headlines around the world. In the decades that followed, the Wrights' joint achievement would be commemorated with a great national monument, enshrinement in Greenfield Village (Henry Ford's grand tribute to the heroes of American ingenuity), and membership in good standing in the pantheon of brilliant inventors whose work reshaped history.

Barry Eichengreen's new book Hall of Mirrors is a detailed, excellent, and somewhat pessimistic comparison of the two most serious financial crises ever—their causes, development, and consequences. Readers well versed in the comprehensive literature on the Great Depression and the Great Recession in the United States and Europe will not find much information in Hall of Mirrors that is completely new, but most others will. What is new is the comparative approach: the detailed and analytically successful search for similarities and differences between the Great Depression and the Great Recession.