| Book Review | The American Historical Review, .

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Book Review

Comparative/World

Mira Wilkins and Harm Schröter, editors. The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy 1830–1996. New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xxi, 480. $95.00.

Reading this book made me feel a bit like Molière's Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1671), who was amazed to discover that he had been speaking "prose" for over forty years. In 1988, I coauthored a book with H. V. Nelles entitled Southern Exposure: Canadian Promoters in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1896–1930, in which we examined the activities of a group of entrepreneurs who established a clutch of electrical utilities south of the Rio Grande before World War I. Incorporated in Canada, these companies were financed largely in Great Britain and relied heavily upon engineering skills and equipment from the United States. Since it was only in that same year, 1988, that Mira Wilkins published her article, "The Free-Standing Company, 1870–1914: An Important Type of British Foreign Direct Investment" (Economic History Review), my coauthor and I failed to realize that we were providing one of the few monographic accounts about the financing and operation of a group of free-standing companies (FSCs). Over the past decade, however, economists and business historians have been prosing busily about this new typology suggested by Wilkins, and the volume under review here contains revised versions of papers presented at the 1994 Economic History Congress in Milan, along with several specially commissioned additional essays on the subject. . . .

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