Global Electrification

William J. Hausman is Chancellor Professor of Economics at the College of William & Mary. He was president of the Business History Conference, 2006-2007. Hausman has written extensively on the history of the electric utility industry. His recent publications include Webs of Influence and Control: Personal Financial Networks in the Formative Years of the US Electric Power Industry in Annales Historiques de l'Electricite; (with John Neufeld) The Market for Capital and the Origins of State Regulation of Electric Utilities in the United States in the Journal of Economic History; and US Foreign Direct Investment in Electric Utilities in the 1920s in Mira Wilkins and Harm Schroter, eds., The Free-Standing Company in the World Economy. Peter Hertner has just retired as Professor of Economic and Social History at the Historical Institute, Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg. He is now working at the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. He is an expert on the history of German foreign investments. In his numerous publications, he has made fundamental contributions on the banking and electrical industries in Germany, Italy, and Spain, as well as on the history of multinational enterprise. His current work is on German investments in the electrical industry in South America. Mira Wilkins is Professor of Economics at Florida International University. She is a former president of the Business History Conference and in 2004 was given the Life Time Achievement Award by that organization. Her The Emergence of Multinational Enterprise and The Maturing of Multinational Enterprise documented the history of American business abroad from the colonial era to 1970, while her The History of Foreign Investment in the United States to 1914 and her Foreign Investment in the United States, 1914-1945 cover inward foreign investments. She has published numerous articles and other books on the history of multinational enterprise.

Part I. Concepts: 1. Invention and spread of electrical utilities with a measure of the extent of foreign ownership; 2. Multinational enterprise and international finance; Part II. Changes: 3. Every city, 1880–1914; 4. War, the first nationalization, restructuring, and renewal, 1914–29; 5. Basic infrastructure, 1929–45; Part III. Conclusions: 6. Summary of the domestication pattern to 1978; 7. Coming full circle, 1978–2007, and a global perspective.