Download Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson. Reimagining Business History.

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Reviews of Books
PHILIP SCRANTON and PATRICK FRIDENSON. Reimagining
Business History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press. 2013. Pp. x, 260. Cloth $50.00, paper $24.95.
Reimagining Business History is an important and provocative book, not only in terms of business history but
also in terms of the wider discipline, as the authors’ plea
for greater interaction with other historians. This is perhaps understandable given that the field of business history is not only of recent evolution but also is a house
divided between those who think as the authors do and
those who want to remain close to business. The book
is also unusual in that the authors recommend hopping
around among the various sections rather than reading
it straight through. That is not the only oddity. The most
unusual feature is that the heart of the book can be
found in the one-page preface, a brief introduction, and
an even briefer afterword. These sections tell us a great
deal.
Philip Scranton and Patrick Fridenson are senior
business history scholars. It is their opinion that a dialogue with fellow historians has to be advanced “in
tandem with stepping away from . . . reliance on economics, economic history, and management science”
(p. 9). This implies a need to step away from the business community as well. Although the authors contend
that there is “no arc of development or critique” (p. ix),
no “central spine” (p. 9), no “core directive” (p. 240),
there clearly is one. The central core directive of the
book is “to broaden the field’s scope and extend its
reach” (p. 1) in order to place “business and business
history at the center of large events and dynamic processes, as well as at the heart of everyday performances
in culture and society” (p. 241).
The authors go on to identify three important issues:
American hegemony, the European perspective in the
field, and globalization. They associate American hegemony with Alfred Chandler and what they call traditional business history. Indeed, one could subtitle this
work “Business History Post Chandler.” Chandler was
the Isidor Strauss Professor of Business History at the
Harvard Business School, a position first established in
1927. While not the first holder of the professorship
Chandler is the person who is credited with establishing
business history as a discipline, with a focus on the organizational complexity of large corporations.
A logical response to the book’s European perspective is to ask about the Asian perspective, since Asia
represents a larger part of the global economy than Europe. The authors cover this gap in the afterword by
acknowledging ignorance of Asian, Latin American
and, I suspect, non-U.S. perspectives.
There can be little argument with their contention of
the need to understand globalization. However, their
dismissal of the centrality of great firms seems a bit of
a stretch. Against this backdrop they turn to the body
of the book and devote four future-oriented sections
dealing with traps to be avoided, opportunities to be
explored, prospects to be further explored, and resources to aid future exploration.
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
Each part or section contains ten to twelve entries,
ranging anywhere from 1,200 to 2,500 words with some
more or less commonsensical suggestions. The part
dealing with traps to be avoided concludes with a particularly good section on the “Rush to the Recent,” although the authors’ identification of business schools as
the problem is misplaced.
There are a number of worthwhile suggestions of opportunities to be explored, including microbusiness,
nonprofits and quasi enterprises, as well as the centrality of failure. The section on prospects, which is distinguished from the section on opportunities as areas
where scholars are already at work, may well be the
most useful section of the four with excellent suggestions around professional services, projects, and the
need to reassess classic themes.
The fourth and final section deals with resources—
concepts and frameworks that the authors hope “may
add new tools to the business historian’s constitutive
imagination” (pp. 8–9). The entry on memory is especially important, although the suggestions of memories
to be probed could well be expanded beyond injustice,
deception, and corruption (p. 216).
In the afterword the authors quite rightly anticipate
that some readers will feel like “tossing this book into
a metaphorical fireplace” (p. 24). Nevertheless, it is an
important contribution to business history writing in
the twenty first century.
The book is a clear challenge not only to traditional
business history but also to the notion of a grand narrative. The authors have written a common sense “how
to” book, which could draw business historians closer to
their colleagues in other fields of history. They want to
move away from business and business sources, in other
words to take the business out of business history. This
reviewer respectfully disagrees. Given the importance
of business in society it is a field that has been neglected, and that neglect should be corrected.
JOE MARTIN
University of Toronto
MICHAEL SALER. As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality. New York: Oxford
University Press. 2012. Pp. x, 283. Cloth $99.00, paper
$27.95.
In his previous works Michael Saler has questioned the
simplistic characterization of modernity as an age of
secularism, positivism, and scientism by exploring the
subjects of medieval modernism and secular magic. In
his latest book, As If, he continues the project through
an insightful and entertaining analysis of modern enchantment, specifically on the topic of fictional worlds
that took on lives of their own in the imagination of
their consumers. As Saler asserts in the first sentence
of the book: “The modern West has been called ‘disenchanted,’ but that is a half-truth” (p. 3). We are familiar with enthusiasts of Star Trek, Star Wars, The Lord
of the Rings, and Harry Potter forming magazine-based
and online communities, writing fan fiction, and gath-
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Comparative/World
ering in conventions dressed as characters in the stories.
Saler shows that this phenomenon of creating “virtual
reality” to celebrate and participate in fictional worlds
began in the late nineteenth century, as a way of bringing enchantment back to a disenchanted world. The
first two chapters of the book provide a succinct historical context of this development, particularly on the
subjects of the various ways in which sections of modernist culture reacted against the secularizing and positivist tendency in the fin-de-siècle period, the growing
intellectual recognition of the importance of the faculty
of the imagination in exploring reality, and the rise and
enormous popularity of New Romance literature. The
subsequent three chapters deal in detail with the cases
of Arthur Conan Doyle’s world of Sherlock Holmes,
H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle-Earth narratives.
In the introduction and the initial chapters, Saler asserts that while there have been many fictional worlds
and characters that were popular and celebrated prior
to the late nineteenth century, they could not garner the
following of fans who expressed their enthusiasm by
treating them “as if” they were real places and real people because of traditional cultural attitudes toward
imagination that regarded the faculty as, at best, suspect. It was only in the modernist period when imagination was appreciated as both an essential tool of understanding and a means to counter the materialist
outlook of the age that people felt free to indulge in the
enchantment of fantastic fiction. In his elaboration of
the cultural and intellectual scene that made modern
enchantment possible, Saler introduces useful concepts
of “animistic reason,” a form of rationality that works
in conjunction with imagination rather than in opposition to it, and “ironic imagination,” through which
one indulges in the fantasy of the “reality” of fictional
worlds without deluding oneself into believing in its literal actuality. The specific works of fiction that are analyzed originate in New Romance, a literature that encompassed a wide variety of narratives including those
of high adventure, detective fiction, horror, science fiction, and fantasy that defied mainstream realist fiction’s
primary interest in character and description of everyday life. Saler makes the essential point that while some
of those works featured wildly imaginative plots, they
managed to capture the imagination of the readers of
popular fiction because they also incorporated many
writing techniques of realism as well as historical and
scientific works. The use of maps in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1883) and H. Rider Haggard’s
She (1887), scientific ideas in Lovecraft’s horror stories,
and historical chronology and entire linguistic systems
in Tolkien’s Middle-Earth books helped readers imagine their worlds as rational as well as fantastic, real as
well as fictional. This is different from fantastic works
of past eras, which tended to be heavily allegorical or
metaphysical with little attempt to provide their worlds
with “reality effects.” Saler’s characterization of this Janus-faced rational-fantastic nature of New Romance as
its distinguishing feature is insightful, but perhaps it
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needed to be contrasted more sharply against earlier
fantastic fiction, especially gothic fiction (which Saler
only mentions briefly) of the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, when the faculty of the imagination was also lauded by late Enlightenment vitalists and
romantics, albeit for different intellectual and aesthetic
purposes.
In the book’s in-depth discussions of Conan Doyle’s
Sherlock Holmes stories, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos,
and Tolkien’s Middle-Earth novels, Saler deals with the
negative views of such works and their fan-following as
forms of “escapism” as well as the embodiment of racist, nationalistic, and irrational ideas. Despite his creation of a character who was described as a “perfect
reasoning machine,” Conan Doyle was a spiritualist and
a believer in fairies; Lovecraft a xenophobe and a racist;
and Tolkien, whose works had a following among white
supremacists, a nationalist with a nostalgia for AngloSaxon England. But Saler nuances such views by pointing to the evolving views on race and nationalism on the
part of Lovecraft and Tolkien, and the testimony of fans
who claimed to have become more engaged with other
human beings and concerns of the real world through
their love of fictional worlds.
This wonderfully enlightening and terrifically wellwritten book finally makes the philosophical point that
the practice of indulging in fictional worlds “as if” they
were real is not a mere act of escapism but also the
consideration of the ever-changing, contingent, and
subjective nature of the “real” world that constantly
eludes the attempt to describe it as “just so.”
MINSOO KANG
University of Missouri-St. Louis, and
JUSTIN SO
Miskatonic University
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TUDOR PARFITT. Black Jews in Africa and the Americas.
Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. 2013. Pp.
xiii, 225. Cloth $29.95.
Tudor Parfitt is a historian and documentarian whose
work over the last thirty years has focused on the Beta
Israel of Ethiopia and the State of Israel, where they
became known as “Ethiopian Jews.” In his latest book,
Parfitt traces the construction of racial identity as applied to blacks and Jews from the Middle Ages to the
present day, focusing on sub-Saharan Africa and the
United States. This racialized construction developed
mainly in Europe but involved the participation of both
groups and was imported through colonialism to Africa
and the Americas.
The majority of this book is a history of ideas, tracing
biblical and rabbinical notions of “blackness,” European Christian thoughts about the “blackness of Jews”
and the “Jewishness of some blacks,” and finally the
internalization of these ideas by the subjects themselves. While Parfitt understands that the imparting of
black or Jewish identity can be either sympathetic or
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