This article examines the nuances and complexities of business-government relations in the British paper-pulp industry between 1950 and 1980 through the prism of interactions between Wiggins, Teape & Co., a paper company, and various U.K. government departments in the postwar period. It highlights the complexity of business-government and interdepartmental relations and tensions, set against the global and domestic paper industry competition and the United Kingdom's international economic position. Long-standing industry underinvestment and interdepartmental tensions in government are identified as principal contributors to the failing competitiveness of the industry and of British businesses more generally in the twentieth century.

IBM has been the subject of considerable study by historians, economists, business management professors, and journalists. This essay surveys the various writings on the company, placing their contributions in a roughly chronological account of the company's history, from its early days in tabulating through to its dominance of global markets in computing. The essay includes well-known studies of IBM in addition to more obscure accounts. It emphasizes the need to consider the company's culture along with its technological and managerial changes in order to grasp the reasons for its longevity.

Leslie Berlin's book Troublemakers is an engaging and insightful people-first exploration of the roots of Silicon Valley, from the late 1960s to the early 1980s. Berlin portrays seven individuals who played important roles at critical junctures in the development of technologies we now take for granted: the Internet; personal, connected computing and communications devices; genetic engineering; software as a service (SAAS); streaming video; massively multiplayer online games; and democratized access to the world's information. They helped lay the foundation for the economic powerhouse called Silicon Valley.

Sir Christopher Wren was the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, in which he is buried in a simple tomb with a famous Latin epitaph, which can be paraphrased for our purposes as “if you are searching for a monument, look about you.” Joshua Freeman, in his sparkling history of the factory, says much the same about his book's subject: if you want a monument to the factory, look about you, to your house, your study, your clothes, or your desk. What is there that hasn't been manufactured in a factory? And yet Freeman's book is also something of an epitaph to a business model. We live, we are often told, in a postindustrial age. The factory has lost its ability to awe or to amaze (though not, perhaps, the ability to produce indignation and anger). The factory as technology's avatar has been replaced by the high-tech campus, where things are not made manually but digitally, keystroke by keystroke. Still, we are very much products of the age of the factory.

We live in an age of extraordinary corporate power and frequent corporate scandals: malfeasance at American defense contractors, savings and loans, and health-care companies in the 1980s and 1990s; grossly manipulated financial statements at major companies in the 1990s and early 2000s; blatant schemes of tax evasion in the same decades, conjured up by leading law and accounting firms; major safety lapses at Toyota, General Motors, and British Petroleum; rampant bribery of foreign officials by Siemens; and widespread deceptions/manipulations associated with the securitized mortgage markets, emissions standards by automakers such as Volkswagen, the setting of interbank interest rates, and the creation of unauthorized accounts at Wells Fargo.

Tumbling barriers once heralded globalization's ascent. The abolition of capital controls propelled the integration of financial markets from the mid-1970s, and the free movement of capital, goods, services, and labor soon became foundational commitments for the European Union. Multilateral trade reforms, orchestrated after 1995 by the new World Trade Organization, lowered barriers to commerce, while telecommunications and transportation technologies slashed the costs of long-distance transactions. In a stunning development, the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 showcased the incapacity of even totalitarian regimes to contain the desires of ordinary citizens for freedom, openness, and global engagement. Recalling that halcyon moment, when a bifurcated Cold War subsided and a new era of globalization and openness took tangible form, the journalist Edward Luce invokes Wordsworth: “Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive.”

The sprawling volumes in the long-running Oxford History of the United States series are intended to serve as comprehensive surveys for a general audience, a task at which Richard White's nearly thousand-page chronicle of the postbellum decades admirably succeeds. But the main interest of such syntheses for historians lies in their reconsideration of the master narratives that organize divergent developments at multiple levels into a cohesive account of American society as a whole in a pivotal period, constructing a framework for past scholarship and a platform for future work. The author's previous field-shaping studies of Native American history, Western history, environmental history, and business history make him well-suited to offer an overarching understanding of an era of climactic upheavals in all of these realms: the age of the last Indian wars and the extensive development of the Great Plains, the slaughter of the buffalo and the industrialization of agriculture, unprecedented class warfare, and the ascendance of big business, along with the meteoric career of Reconstruction and the violent restoration of white supremacy in the New South.

Late in the spring of 1349, Petrarch, famous for his lyrical cries for peace on the Italian peninsula, wrote the priors of Florence urging the city to war. Two of the poet's dearest friends had been attacked while passing through the mountainous terrain controlled by the rural Ubaldini clan, renegade Ghibellines who menaced crucial trade routes between Florence and Bologna and were taking advantage of Florence's vulnerability in the wake of the 1348 outbreak of the Black Plague. The two campaigns that Florence launched against the Ubaldini, one in 1349 and one in 1350, although little known (overshadowed by the plague on one side and, less so, by the 1351–1353 Florentine war with Milan on the other), are better documented than any contemporary war and, as such, serve as the perfect material for William Caferro's new book, Petrarch's War, whose declared subject is “contradiction” and whose method, ultimately, is the subjection of received ideas and fashionable methods to interrogation in the face of the experience of rigorous and self-conscious archival research (p. 1). “Archives are subversive,” Caferro says, and this is, in many ways, a subversive book (p. 13). Resolutely revisionist and sometimes demandingly démodé—in an age of “big data” and global history and “usable” history—Caferro embraces the problematic and the anomalous, the short term and the small scale. Together with his impressive and prizewinning 2006 book, John Hawkwood: An English Mercenary in Fourteenth-Century Italy, Petrarch's War secures Caferro's place as one of the most important economic historians working today.