Led by German-born Carl Laemmle, Universal Pictures devoted itself to winning over the German market in the interwar period. Yet the German market proved difficult to crack, owing to political risk and cultural distance. We argue that cultural differences kept most American films from becoming more successful, even those that were shown in German theaters and prior to the advent of sound film. Universal Pictures resorted to a film strategy of localization using German actors and directors, which proved a winning formula just as the Nazis came to power.

In the early twentieth century, vaudeville was the most popular theatrical form in the United States. Operating before the rise of mechanically reproduced entertainment, its centralized booking offices moved tens of thousands of performers across hundreds of stages to an audience of millions. Designed to gather and analyze data about both audiences and performers, these offices created a complex informational economy that defined the genre—an internal market that sought to transform culture into a commodity. By reconstructing the concrete details of these business practices, it is possible to develop a new understanding of both the success of the vaudeville industry and its influence on the evolution of American mass culture.

American broadcasting, unique among media industries, relied on sponsors and their ad agencies for program content from the 1920s through the 1950s. Some sponsors broadcast educational or culturally uplifting programs to burnish their corporate images. By the mid-1960s, however, commercial broadcasting had transformed, and advertisers could only buy interstitial minutes for interrupting commercials, during which they wooed cynical consumers with entertaining soft-sell appeals. The midcentury shifts in institutional power in US broadcasting among corporate sponsors, advertising agencies, and radio/television networks reflected a fundamental shift in beliefs about how to use broadcasting as an advertising medium.

This article examines how the film industry influenced prevailing gender and skin color stereotypes in India during the first four decades after Independence in 1947. It shows that Bollywood, the mainstream cinema in India, shared Hollywood's privileging of paler skin over darker skin, and its preference for presenting women in stereotypical ways lacking agency. The influence of film content was especially significant in India as audiences often lacked alternative sources of entertainment and information. It was left to parallel, and often regional, cinemas in India to contest skin color and gender stereotypes entrenched in mainstream media. As conventional archival sources for this history are lacking, the article employs new evidence from oral histories of producers and actors.

This article provides an account of the development of the casino industry in Chile. For most of the 1930s up to the 1980s the industry remained stagnant and restricted to a few locations. From 1990 the industry grew, but in particular after 2005 following a new law that permitted the creation of new casinos in all regions, with the main aim of promoting tourism. The new casinos had to operate as part of an “integral project,” which included sizable investments in the tourism sector. This was a novel business development strategy. The new industry attracted old and new investors, including foreign operators, who often associated with Chilean business groups, providing the resources needed to finance these developments and enjoying healthy profits for most of the period.

This article examines the evolution of the video game industry in Britain from its start in 1978. The industry originated with passionate hobbyists and amateurs who benefited from the national broadcaster's campaign to expand computer literacy. Unlike the regional clustering of the industry in the United States and Japan, the British industry was dispersed geographically, consisting of mini-clusters with porous boundaries. During the 2000s, the fragmented British industry was largely acquired by U.S. and Japanese multinational companies and became part of global value chains, but the development of mobile gaming and digital distribution provided opportunities for a new generation of start-ups to emerge in Britain.

This book is a worthy successor to those commissioned by the Bank of England that cover its history from its foundation in 1694. It is written by an expert, is thoroughly researched, and provides a wealth of evidence to support the judicious conclusions that are drawn. The discussion ranges from the highly technical to the narrative, indicating the command that Harold James has over his subject. For the period it covers it will become the authorized version of what the Bank of England did and why, covering the details of how it operated as a complex organization and the decisions it made that affected both the domestic and international financial systems. What emerges is how difficult decision making was after the 1970s, following the breakdown of the postwar certainties of the 1950s and 1960s. Though the title suggests that the coverage of the book extends to 2003, it largely ends in 1997. The years that followed are treated with much less depth. That is understandable, as the elephant in the room for any recent history of the Bank of England is the banking crisis of 2007–2008. As it is, the dates chosen are those between which Eddie George, governor of the Bank of England between 1993 and 2003, exerted his greatest influence, having joined in 1962. Increasingly after 1997 Mervyn King took a leading role, becoming deputy governor in 1998 and then governor in 2003. We will have to wait for another commissioned history to discover what part the Bank of England played in the first major banking crisis to hit Britain since that of Overend and Gurney in 1866. Judging from a comment made in this book (p. 432) it is possible that a full understanding of those years will never emerge. When the Monetary Policy Committee, located in the Bank of England, was set up in 1997 it was agreed that the meetings would be recorded and a full transcript of the discussion made. Subsequently, it was decided to delete the recording and destroy the transcript, leaving only the published official record of what took place. This mirrors the Bank of England's destruction of the papers relating to its role in the secondary banking crisis of 1974.