American Big Business in Britain and Germany

Volker R. Berghahn has written a dozen books on German political and business history. He has also gracefully addressed the cultural and entrepreneurial interpenetration of German and American business. He thus stands uniquely qualified to present a comparative account of American business in Britain and Germany in the twentieth century. Assessing the era from 1900 to World War I, Berghahn draws imaginatively on the papers of Frank A. Vanderlip, the president of the National City Bank of New York. For the period following World War II he elaborates on insights from his previous monographic work on Otto Friedrich, the technological modernizer who helped persuade German business to abandon its cartel structure in favor of the American oligopolistic model, and on those who reconstructed cultural bridges between the two societies. Berghahn offers no fresh archival findings for the interwar period, but he delves into the business press and recapitulates an extensive literature on individual firms and macroeconomic policies

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