To cover 400 years of American business history or capitalism is a daunting task. Fortunately, the author Bhu Srinivasan is up to the challenge.
Penguin Press, 2017. Bhu Srinivasan, 500 pages.
Srinivasan, from what appears from the blurb, is a successful venture capitalist. He evinces genuine admiration for both writing and capitalism. However, the book does suffer from what any attempt to trace 400 years of American capitalism would be constrained by. The absence of a strong overarching thesis.
To get around this constraint, Srinivasan devices a set of themes and chapters. (Without much ado, I reproduce the chapters classified under themes. The chapters that I thought were strong, I highlighted in bold.)
Chapters: Venture, Tobacco, Taxes, Cotton, Steam, Canal, Railroads, Telegraph, Gold, Slavery, War, Oil, Steel, Machines, Light, Retail, Unions, Papers, Trusts, Food, Automobiles, Radio, Bootlegging, Banking, Film, Flight, Suburbia, Television, Roads, Computing, Startups, Finance, Shoes, Internet and Mobile.
The writing is breezy, eminently readable, and concise (each chapter is only 20 pages or so). As a result, the book reads like a set of short stories. To be a master of short stories requires extra-ordinary talents and shifts in the narrative voice. I am not sure that themes really work together eventually, as they are essentially chronological, with some strong chapters.
The highlighted chapters also betray my own engineering and operations taste a bit. I thought that retail and automobile history chapters were particularly outstanding summaries. The very first chapter on the pilgrims, Venture, was my favorite chapter.
There are many interesting vignettes throughout the book. (I didn’t know Ford had been kicked out of his own firm, somewhat like Jobs; How tariffs helped Andrew Carnegie). The chapters are particularly informative when Srinivasan makes unanticipated historical connections across industries.
For instance, Srinivasan nicely interlaced how the birth of NFL (and contemporaneous decline of baseball) has to do with the emergence of television. Particularly, it is fascinating to see how two competing leagues of AFL and NFL (and the “Superbowl”) emerged as the new upstart ABC (born from a spinoff of NBC called NBC Blue) tried to compete with CBS and NBC.
Similarly, Srinivasan outlines the emergence of fast-food chains such as KFC and Mcdonalds, connecting it to the development of interstate highways, and across state travels. Similarly, the re-emergence of local government (and school districts) due to post-war suburban flight.
I suppose that the biggest appeal of the book is that it may be a good introduction to new arrivals to American history. Also, most readers are going to get something out of it. The weakest parts were around the Civil War. I felt that the book would have been stronger if it had only covered the 20th-century American business history.