Books by "David George Haskell"
4 books found
When Charles Martin Hall patented the process for refining the metal in 1886, it was far from self-evident that the new technology would be a business success. Problems involving the technology had to be solved. Capital and a labour force were needed. The most pressing entrepreneurial dilemma was the need to develop markets for what was then a novelty product. George David Smith examines how Alcoa met these problems, with special attention to innovation, from Alcoa's beginnings through its development into one of the most successful monopolies in American history. By World War II, no other American corporation had developed its industry's markets more dramatically and then dominated them more completely. The book then analyzes the undoing of Alcoa's monopoly by war and antitrust, and examines how the firm adapted to evolving forms of oliogopolistic and global competition.
At the turn of the century American industrialist J.B. Duke set his sights on one of North America's greatest and most spectacular rivers - the Saguenay. In Amassing Power David Massell chronicles thirty years of international intrigue as Duke manoeuvred to gain access to, develop, and sell the tremendous hydro-electric potential of a remote river in Quebec. The damming of the Saguenay brought industrialisation on a grand scale to rural Quebec in the form of newsprint and aluminum manufacture. Tapping into rich and diverse sources in Canada, the United States, and Europe, Massell provides an interdisciplinary, cross-border study of American capital and Canadian resources. He shows us how ever-larger amounts of capital yielded increasingly massive and sophisticated applications of hydroelectric technology. Grand industrial plans, in turn, encroached upon provincial water rights and farmers' lands, which drew the attention of the state. He examines the protracted power struggle between public and private interests - between American capitalists and the nascent bureaucracy of the province of Quebec - and describes the origins and evolution of the events that led to state control over hydraulic resources in the province. In doing so he provides vivid portraits of Duke and of Quebec politicians of the period and gives a dramatic account of the protracted battle of wits between Duke's chief engineer, William States Lee, and Quebec's chief of Hydraulic Service, Arthur Amos. Amassing Power speaks to the integration of North American economies, vividly illustrating the process by which American capital drew Canada's resource-rich North into the economic orbit of the United States.