Among the factors that have assured the success of units of “multinational” firms like the International Telephone and Telegraph Company, according to Professor Little, is the willingness of the parent's home government to use its diplomatic strengths to assure that a host government lives up to its contractual obligations, even after radical changes in its leadership. Using diplomatic correspondence of the United States with ITT and the Spanish Republic of the 1930s, he demonstrates the vital nature of these strengths at a time when the tensions between “communism” and “fascism” were new and vigorous, and reaches a startling conclusion about the sameness under the skin of the two ideologies where the rights of foreign concessionaries are concerned.

Against the widely accepted view of the nineteenth-century Mexican peon as a hapless individual caught in perpetual debt bondage to the “company store” of the hacienda on which he spent his short life of drudgery, Dr. Cross places some unique hard evidence drawn from the account books of one such hacienda. He finds that, in this case at least, the number of peons in debt at any one time was very small and the debt well within their ability to repay, thanks in no small part to a system of payment of a large part of their wages in kind. The exceptions reflected in most cases debts incurred either to pay the local priest's stiff fees for administering such sacraments as baptism and marriage, or for funds to invest in the peasant's own agricultural enterprises.

Where virtuoso talents were required by the courts, great and small, of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe, the protectionist system of guilds was suspended, according to Dr. Stürmer. In a society where status had to be attested to by conspicuous consumption, of which the sovereign himself was the most avid practitioner, the finest artisans in the fields of interior decoration and furnishings often attained the status of “court artisans,” in which they enjoyed many of the freedoms of laissez-faire that members of the guilds denied themselves as well as their competitors. In the end, however, the Revolution that swept away the guild economy also destroyed this expedient whereby excellence and entrepreneurship had been fostered.

As is generally known, the 1790s was the first decade in which the American banking system expanded. Professor Klebaner has taken the trouble to ascertain the fate of the state-chartered banks founded in that decade. He has put his material into lists that we are glad to publish as a unique source of banking history.