European multinationals followed a different path of development from that pursued by United States firms, but European multinational manufacturing began even earlier than did American, and its story is no less significant. Dr. Franko offers a range of relevant data and analysis about the evolution of direct foreign investment by Western European manufacturers.

Professor Stopford explores the patterns of British direct investment in overseas manufacturing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, paying special attention to the quality of Victorian entrepreneurship and the opportunities and problems presented by the Empire and then the Commonwealth.

This examination of the role of foreign enterprise in Russian and Soviet industrial development from 1632 to the present indicates that it was a significant one. Tsarist and Soviet Russia used foreign enterprise to their own advantage very skillfully by periodically acquiring advanced industrial technology and thereby reducing their own “backwardness” relative to the West. In doing so, they succeeded in remaining firmly in control of their own economic affairs, an achievement that often eluded other countries.

Professor Yoshino traces the evolution of direct investment in overseas manufacturing by Japanese enterprises in the postwar era. Much of that expansion is of very recent origin, and the prospects are for the spread of considerably more Japanese investment abroad in the future.

Most analyses of American direct investment abroad focus on the post-World War II era, and on manufacturing. Professor Kindleberger examines United States direct investment in a range of undertakings in France — finance, insurance, trade, marketing, services, and manufacturing — and concentrates on pre-1950 developments.

Generalizations are always difficult, especially in the context of varied national experiences. But by looking at the evolution of oil company activity in the 1920s in South America and by examining the range of relevant business functions — marketing, refining, production, exploration, transportation — the author throws light on the development of business-government relations in that part of the world, where the hostility of host nations to multinational enterprises was to grow so strong.