Bonds of Enterprise: John Murray Forbes and Western Development in America's Railway Age. By John Lauritz Larson. (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2001. Pp. xxiii, 257. Paper, $17.95.) Bonds of Enterprise was first published seventeen years ago. book offered a comprehensive business history biography of John Murray Forbes and a carefully constructed interdisciplinary look at the so-called railroad question. In his introduction to this new and expanded edition, John Lauritz Larson reflects: I had hoped when the book came out that it would model in a small way the kind of integrated history that might reconcile claims about the impact of railroads, the plight of farmers, the intentions of political reformers, and the efficacy of government regulation-all issues about which historians, economists, geographers, and rural sociologists had argued bitterly for many decades (xi). Those acquainted with the previous edition are familiar with Larson's dual approach, which offers a commanding look at Forbes and his financial capitalist orchestrations interwoven with the sweeping historical theme of western railroad development. Now, in one of the ways good reading becomes classic reading, the University of Iowa Press reissue of Bonds of Enterprise extends an opportunity to a wider audience to discover the richness of this work and contemplate Larson's plea for the integrated historical method. book endures as a well-documented account of the professional life of John Murray Forbes. Through his acumen and dealings, we gain a better understanding of railroad expansion and its consequences. As Forbes quickly realized in his initial venture with the Michigan Central Railroad, by correcting the errors of others, fortunes could be made. Acquisitions and fine-tuning business practices from financing to operations ultimately played as large a role in the railroad question as new construction itself. Scholars of the early republic will find the first half of Bonds of Enterprise especially interesting, as later chapters focus on the railroad era beyond the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter one, The Liberal Merchant, tells how the young Forbes, having lost his father and brother, moved to China at the age of seventeen to work in a commission house. reader senses the personal hardship of such a choice with the slow transportation and communication possibilities of the early 1830s. Forbes subsequently dedicated his professional life to motivating railroad development, which accelerated the flow of information and goods to and from distant regions. That journey began in the late 1830s and early 1840s as Forbes shifted from brokering deals among traders to brokering deals among investors. Chapter two, An Assault on Space and Time, is the forbearer to the same theme in Carol Sheriff's Artificial River: Erie Canal and the Paradox of Progress, 1817-1862 (1996). …