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The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800-1930. By Michael Stephen Smith. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006. x + 575 pp. Index, notes. Cloth, $5905. ISBN: 0-674-01939-3.
Reviewed by Ludovic Cailluet
Michael Smith, a professor of history at the University of South Carolina, has written the first general French business history for English-speaking scholars since the publication of François Caron's Economic History of Modern France in 1980. Smith wrote the book in order to supply the French piece that had been missing from the jigsaw puzzle of Scale and Scope: The Dynamics of Industrial Capitalism, written by Alfred Chandler in 1990. In The Emergence of Modern Business Enterprise in France, 1800-1930, Smith proposes that France did not represent an exception in the development of large, successful multinational companies during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, although he admits that French companies did not reach the size of comparable industries in Germany, Great Britain, and the United States.
Smith spent fifteen years laboriously compiling an impressive list of primary and secondary material written in French, including records kept in the French National Archives and the Credit Lyonnais files and several published and unpublished doctoral dissertations that are largely inaccessible to readers outside France. He appears to have read most of the business history books published in France between the 1960s and the 1990s....