Developmental investment abroad was an integral part of the industrialized nations' foreign policies in the decades before World War I. A notable case was the German Empire's investment in the Anatolian Railway. Inspired by the astounding success of North American railroad development in settling vast untilled areas and creating great quantities of cheap food grains, the Germans built a railroad into the thinly populated central plain of Turkey. But the hoped-for revolution was limited by social and political factors that overrode the purely economic, as Professor Quataert demonstrates in a study with broad implications for present-day development programs in third-world countries.

Herbert Hoover's seven years as Secretary of Commerce raised that department to a level of prestige and influence it has not known since. In the prosperity of the 1920s, real wages rose rapidly, the wage-earners' standard of living began to resemble that of white-collar groups, and all that remained, it seemed, was to replace the traditional antagonism between employer and worker with a system that would give the latter a voice in plant decisions. In this climate, “welfare capitalism” and company unions, encouraged by Hoover's department, flourished for a time. Professor Zieger shows that Hoover never realized that the wage-earner could have no effective representation through company-sponsored schemes. By the late 1920s, some academic experts posited the virtual demise of the labor movement unless it found a means of transcending the limitations that the circumstances of the New Era and its own weaknesses imposed.

One of the most durable theories explaining the remarkable rise of German industry in the generation before World War I was that of the critical role of the Kreditbanken, the great commercial and investment banks of which the Deutsche Bank was the most prominent. Recently, however, historians have begun to question the power of the banks, and even to suggest that they were a drag on German economic development. In this brief study of how Georg Siemens, of the Deutsche Bank, kept the peace between the two leading German electrical equipment manufacturers, Professor Neuburger shows that the crucial factors were not merely the financial strength or weakness of the Bank, but also the diplomatic skill with which its leaders navigated the rapidly shifting currents of the era.

The advent of high-technology industries around the turn of the century created the modern industrial research department and placed a new emphasis upon the search for patentable innovations. While some of this research led to advances in basic scientific knowledge, and much of it produced product or process improvements that were directly applicable to a firm's business, a great deal was undertaken to enhance firms' bargaining powers with each other in order to preserve monopoly positions. In the early years of radio, the structure of the industry changed repeatedly with every innovation in apparatus or circuitry, a situation that led, as Professor Reich shows, to heavy investment in “non-productive” research.