With the word information on nearly everyone's lips, it seems an opportune time for historians to finally join the bandwagon and bless this new factor of production that apparently is giving rise to a “new economy.” (And they had better do so fast, before the darkening clouds of recession rain on the parade.) In this book, experts drawn from history departments and business schools take a look back at how we got to the present, and more than that, the unique role that information has played in economics, business, politics, and culture in the United States.

This volume explores phenomena frequently noted (yet seldom analyzed) in the scholarly literature: the profound similarities in the industrialization processes and the contemporary political economies of Germany and Japan. These parallels—not just in the early stages of industrialization, but through the experiences of depression and war, and on to the rise of postwar “miracle” economies in both nations—are often casually ascribed to the late-developer effect, to the strategic imitation of German economic institutions in Japan, or to cultural factors, from lingering “feudal remnants” to enduring “traditional” social structures. Tagging the economic regimes which had evolved in Germany and Japan by the 1970s “nonliberal” capitalist systems, the essays in this collection seek to investigate systematically “the many similarities between the two capitalisms, the no less intriguing differences between them, and the differences between the two and Anglo-American ‘standard capitalism’” (p. xiii). More specifically, this volume examines “the origins of some of the social institutions that have constrained the spread of free markets within the capitalist economies of Germany and Japan while providing them with alternate mechanisms of economic governance” (p. 5). Throughout, the contributors argue for a more subtle, historically grounded, and systematic understanding of the distinctive practices and institutions of the German and Japanese “nationally embedded capitalisms.”

Written by four leading economic historians of Indonesia from three continents, this book is an excellent account of the emergence of the Indonesian economy in the twentieth century from what was a cluster of disparate economic regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Using an innovative and, in the context of Indonesia, highly appropriate theme, the authors identify three fundamental forces that shaped the emergence of the Indonesian national economy: successive waves of globalization (and dislocation), state formation, and economic integration. The book is admirably successful in fulfilling its claim, not an easy task given the volume of literature that had to be mastered and put into perspective in order to comprehensively describe this process.

Capitalist relations do not develop “naturally,” nor are the preconditions for capitalism assured by the rise of markets alone. This paper takes seventeenth–century Massachusetts as a case in point. Class relations there were noncapitalist. A brief exploration of these class relations as well as their economic, political, and cultural conditions of existence will show how complex interaction between classes produced the conditions necessary for capitalism.

In responding to Mr. Dennen, I welcome the opportunity to clarify several points that may have been misunderstood by the readers of this Journal. Mr. Dennen makes three main criticisms, which I will deal with in the order he raised them.