Territories of Profit: Communications, Capitalist Development, and the Innovative Enterprises of G

This fine book is a study at least as much in economic history as in business history, and the author has successfully combined the two. Gary Fields has set his accounts of particular businesses within the broader context of economic history, and the details he supplies in chronicling these individual businesses help to bring his more general propositions to life. The book is nicely organized and well written, all in all a pleasure to read. Fields's broad theme is that the Internet followed a pattern of development in the 1990s that was similar to the course followed by the expanding railroad and telegraph systems in the last third of the nineteenth century. Each provided the infrastructure that enabled firms to operate effectively across a much wider geographic area than had been previously available to them. On the other hand, it took managerial insight to perceive the new opportunities and required both a willingness to take risks and strong qualities of entrepreneurship to exploit them. Swift, in the era of rapid construction of the railroad and telegraph, and Dell, during the rise of the Internet, were firms that effectively seized the opportunities presented to them. The book is divided into two parts, each comprising two chapters. The first chapter in each section describes and analyzes the revolutions in infrastructure that opened up the possibility of firm operations over a much wider terrain: the railroad and telegraph in one era, and the Internet in the other. These chapters are very well done. While the basic stories have been told elsewhere, Fields adds a persuasive analysis of how these developments changed the feasibility and cost of operating across long distances. The second chapters in each part are concerned, respectively, with Swift and Dell. The business histories are interesting in themselves, particularly when they