Enterprise and Society Advance Access originally published online on August 31, 2009
Enterprise and Society 2009 10(4):871-873; doi:10.1093/es/khp035
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Business History Conference. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Stanley Buder. Capitalizing on Change: A Social History of American Business
Stanley Buder. Capitalizing on Change: A Social History of American Business. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. 578 pp. ISBN 978-0807832318, $45.00 (cloth).
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Broad interpretive syntheses are out of fashion among professional business historians these days. Yet they are sorely needed if historians wish to inform the public discourse on the nature and future of capitalism that has accompanied the recent economic crisis. Stanley Buder's Capitalizing on Change—a sweeping synthesis of American business history from the eighteenth century to the present—is hence especially timely.
Buder argues that since the colonial era American attitudes and values toward business have been characterized by a unique embrace of individual entrepreneurial initiative and economic change. "No other nation has expressed more consistently
University of the Pacific