TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 175 withholding payments and discounting invoices. A generation of goodwill evaporated. The point was not to make profits, as typically understood, but to generate enough cash flow to take advantage of the trumped-up depreciation allowances that cheated the tax man. This was, in Seymour Melman’s memorable phrase, profits without production. And, relentlessly, the Japanese machine tools kept com ing, their quality unmatched and their price, owing to the overvalued dollar of Ronald Reagan’s military Keynesianism, unmatchable. Quibbles with such a successful case study can be few. Holland has the historian’s eye for detail, and the journalist’s ear for turn of phrase, but occasionally his explanations are too thin. One instance is Burgmaster’s transition from making machine-tool accessories to successfully manufacturing machine tools themselves. Launching the manufacture of world-beating machine tools must have entailed some difficulty, but Holland’s source interviews have not recaptured this complexity. Similarly, while Holland is evenhanded in his treatment of corporate financing, I could not follow the rationale behind the “pot of gold” that motivated institutional investors to back leveraged buyouts. In the event, the 1979 leveraged buyout netted commonstockholders a whopping 436 percent profit in 1986 when Kohlberg, Kravis, and Roberts engineered a second deal to recapitalize the conglomerate’s staggering debt. Holland explains the profits as a move to appease the original equity investors; I wondered how they justified such a rate of return on a company going down the tubes. Ultimately, Holland blames government’s militarization of the economy and management’s abandonment of sound manufacturing principles for Burgmaster’s demise. His is a penetrating case study in the decline of American manufacturing. As Holland insists, there are few, if any, villains; rather, there are a dozen fundamental changes in government policy, managerial practice, and financial regulation that appear necessary if American manufacturing is to avoid additional tragic tales of when the machine stopped. Thomas Misa Dr. Misa, assistant professor of history at Illinois Institute of Technology, is completing a book dealing with the science, technology, and industrial structure of steelmaking in America from 1865 to 1925. Lancashire on the Scrapheap: The Cotton Industry, 1945—1970. By John Singleton. Oxford: Pasold Research Fund and Oxford University Press, 1991. Pp. xiii + 256; tables, notes, appendix, bibliography, index. $89.00. Britain’s cotton industry has all but vanished. The thesis of this study is that it was inevitably doomed because, from the 1920s, comparative advantage shifted in favor of Far Eastern countries and 176 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE their low labor costs. However, John Singleton argues, the process might have been delayed by government intervention and protection. In a rounded analysis, the author investigates three large areas: the role of government, the role of labor, and the role of capital. Students of the history of technology will be most interested in the last. The first two are not unrelated, however. A range of options faced government in trying to save the British cotton industry in the 1940s and 1950s. Hugh Dalton, the wartime president of the Board of Trade (and Labour member of the coalition government), favored amalgamations to “push the bone-heads out” (p. 28). This route to larger operating units and new technology was rejected by owners as the Trojan horse for nationalization. Government action in interna tional markets, employers and unions agreed, would be an optimal way to halt decline: either by market sharing or by further protection in imperial markets or, most controversially, by using the powers of the Allied Occupation to stifle the rebirth of the Japanese cotton industry. In the event, the postwar Labour government’s efforts to achieve rationalization and competitiveness for the industry ended in abject failure, hobbled by resistance from both employers and unions. Cotton did contribute to the postwar export drive, so important in countering a deepening balance-of-payments crisis, but much more could have been done. Unsurprisingly, the rapid resurgence or rise of Asian cotton industries halved British yarn production and cut employment by two-thirds between 1950 and 1970. Japanese competition in overseas markets and Hong Kong and Indian and Pakistani competition in the domestic market only belatedly...
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Sep 1, 2021
Michael Cornett 
Open Access