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"With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet." So recalled Victor Frankenstein, reflecting on the creative act. By its end, however,Frankensteinhas less to do with the scientist's creativity and more to do with his monster's. This is why Mary Shelley inverts this Promethean moment in the book's final scene, as the monster stands over the lifeless body of his creator. Frankenstein's last words mark the inversion: his "instruments of life," he laments, had given rise to "an instrument of mischief," a creature animated by a desire for human fulfillment. To live may mean behaving instrumentally, but some instruments get the better of you. Frankenstein learns this lesson the hard way; but does his monster? He echoes his creator's words—"Fear not that I shall be the instrument of future mischief"—and promises his own end, when he will "collect my funeral pile and consume to ashes this miserable frame." One's frame is mere matter, but such an act is proof of the life that animates it. On the cusp of death, then, the monster lives.Frankensteinreminds us that the question "What is life?" can only be answered by experiment, from the medical horrors that gave the monster life to the fatal act with which he plans to abandon it. At life's end, as at its beginning, creator and creation combine; we become our instruments, or they surpass us.

Jeffrey Sklansky, The Soul's Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002)Jackson Lears, Something for Nothing: Luck in America (New York: Viking, 2003)Jerry Z. Muller, The Mind and the Market: Capitalism in Modern European Thought (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002)Allan Megill, Karl Marx: The Burden of Reason (Why Marx Rejected Politics and the Market) (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002)

Global history has come under attack. It is charged with neglecting national history and the 'small spaces' of the past, with being an elite globalist project made irrelevant by the anti-globalist politics of our age, with focusing exclusively on mobile people and things, and with becoming dangerously hegemonic. This article demonstrates that global history is intertwined with the histories of the nation and the local, individuals, outsiders, and subalterns, and small and isolated places. Moreover, global history has directly addressed immobility and resistances to flow, and remains relatively weak in the discipline, versus the persistent dominance everywhere of national history. The article offers a new short history of the rise of the contemporary idiom of global history, and a prospect for a future in which scholars may find, through collaboration, alternatives to the European weights and measures of the past, and to the dominance of Anglophone historians. It argues that we should no more reverse the 'global turn' than we should return history's gaze only to propertied white men. Rather than a retreat from global history, we need it more than ever to fight against myths of imperial and national pasts, which often underpin nationalist populisms.

This 2003 book offered the first in-depth international survey of contemporary research and debates in business history. Over the two decades leading to its publication, enormous advances had been made in writing the history of business enterprise and business systems. Historians are documenting and analyzing the evolution of a wide range of important companies and systems, their patterns of innovation, production, and distribution, their financial affairs, their political activities, and their social impact. Each essay is written by a prominent authority who provides an assessment of the state and significance of research in his or her area. This volume is a reference work that will be of immense value to historians, economists, management researchers, and others concerned to access the latest insights on the evolution of business throughout the world