Berghahn - American Big Business in Britain and Germany: A Comparative History of Two Special Relationships in the 20th Century

AMERICAN BIG BUSINESS
IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY

AMERICAN BIG BUSINESS
IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY

A Comparative History of Two
Special Relationships in the
20th Century

VOLKER R. BERGHAHN

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright 2014 by Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street,

Princeton, New Jersey 08540

In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford
Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TW

press.princeton.edu

Jacket art: Sascha Berghahn. Reprinted with permission of
Sascha Berghahn.

All Rights Reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Berghahn, Volker R. (Volker Rolf), 1938

American big business in Britain and Germany : a comparative
history of two special relationships in the twentieth
century / Volker R. Berghahn.

pages cm

Includes index.

ISBN 978-0-691-16109-9 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. United
StatesForeign economic relationsGreat Britain. 2. Great
BritainForeign economic relationsUnited States. 3. United
StatesForeign economic relationsGermany. 4. Germany
Foreign economic relationsUnited States. 5. Corporations,
AmericanGreat BritainHistory20th century. 6. Corporations,
AmericanGermanyHistory20th century. 7. Big
businessUnited StatesHistory20th century. 8. United
StatesCommerceEuropeHistory20th century.
9. EuropeCommerceUnited StatesHistory20th
century. I. Title.

HF1456.5.E8B47 2014

338.889730410904dc23

2013047538

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Palatino

Printed on acid-free paper.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Marion, Sasch, Viv, and Mel

CONTENTS

AMERICAN BIG BUSINESS
IN BRITAIN AND GERMANY

Introduction

1. A Long Book in a Nutshell

This book is an attempt to examine three interrelated problems that not only historians but also social scientists have been grappling with at the beginning of the twenty-first century. The first one is how to deal conceptually and empirically with the role of the United States as a major socioeconomic, political-military, and cultural power since its emergence on the international stage at around 1900, and hence with the meaning and significance of Americanization and the resistance and adaptation to its impact by nations that came under its spell.

Second, there is the notion of the special relationship that America is said to have had with Britain during the period covered by this study. Its existence or nonexistence has been analyzed in most accounts of diplomatic as well as economic relations between the two countries. Some of them have even included the term in the title. However and perhaps at first glance rather more puzzlingly, this book is also concerned with yet another special relationship, that is, the one with Germany and in particular with its business community during more or less exactly the same period. As both Britains and Germanys special relationship with the United States had a major influence on European history and on international affairs more generally in the first half of the twentieth century, the third approach adopted in this book is to discuss the evolution of this transatlantic triangle in comparative perspective.

Finally, this is not business history in a strict sense concerned with case studies of individual firms. Rather this work constantly asks questions about the interaction between existing political and economic power structures within and between the United States, Britain, and Germany. In this context, it is also worth pointing out up front that this book contains a good deal of evidence that socioeconomic networks among corporations and their leaders established around 1900 or even before proved quite stable over many decades and notwithstanding considerable political upheavals. This means also that quite a few striking continuities in attitudes and practices emerge from the sources found within the broader time frame of sixty to seventy years adopted here, for example, with respect to industrial training or the stress on high-quality manufacturing in the German case, or the emphasis on teamwork in the American one, and, third, the persistence of Oxbridge-educated business and political elites in Britain. There are also continuities with respect to the growing interest in the mind, not just of ones own workers and managers, but also that of foreign businessmen, socialized into their own national cultures. However, this does not mean that I take a static view of history. After all, there were plenty of ruptures between 1900 and 1957. In this respect, this book is, next to socioeconomic transformations, particularly interested in generational change.

2. Conceptualizing Americanization
and the American Century

In 1902, the influential British journalist William T. Stead published a book with the title The Americanisation of the World; it attracted a good deal of attention at the time and has been frequently cited since then, especially in the past three decades or so when the concept of Americanization came to be used more widely in the social and historical sciences.

The chapters that follow represent my attempt to wrestle with the viability of those two concepts, though they are not driven by the ambition to examine the Americanization of the world. Rather I am concerned with the European-American relationship in the twentieth century and in particular with the role of the United States as an industrial power in relation to Britain and Germany. However, this book is not a political-diplomatic or intellectual-cultural study of the triangle. Rather it approaches its themes primarily from an economic perspective, though not from that of quantitative economic history. The hard statistical facts of transatlantic relations, to be found in the relevant literature, form the foundation upon which the following analysis has been built. Some of them are woven into the text where they reinforce the qualitative arguments put forward in the central chapters, and in in particular, all of which revolve around problems of both comparative political economy and business culture.

In other words, the main text deals with tangible experiences that shaped patterns of action; with perceptions, mentalities and practices of economic and political elites that were also informed by positive and negative stereotypes and myths; and with international communication and the circulation of knowledge about another society among those elites and American businessmen in particular. In this sense it starts from the self-description of the