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Capital Moves: RCA's 70-Year Quest for Cheap Labor. By Jefferson Cowie. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998. x + 273 pp. Bibliography, figures, illustrations, index, and notes. Cloth, $29.95. ISBN 0801435250.
Reviewed by Tami J. Friedman
In Capital Moves, Jefferson Cowie has crafted a fresh and provocative piece of scholarship that ought to shake up conventional modes of historical thinking for some time to come. His excellent study charts the circuitous migratory path that the Radio Corporation of America followed as it fled from one production site to another, leaping across regional and finally international boundaries in its relentless pursuit of a pliant, low-cost (read: young and female) labor supply. Beautifully structured, cogently argued, and packed full of insight, Capital Moves is a rare pleasure to read.
In what he calls a "comparative social history of industrial relocation" (p. 2), Cowie weaves a tale of four cities-or four tales, really, that meld into one-in which working people's lives were and are irrevocably altered by both capital's arrival and its eventual flight. In 200 pages, he traces RCA's movements, from its beginnings in Camden, New Jersey, in the Roaring Twenties; to its escape into the hinterlands of Bloomington, Indiana, at the tail end of the Great Depression; to its disastrous crash landing in Memphis during the turbulent 1960s; to its 1968 debut at Ciudad Juarez, a haven for globetrotting multinationals just across the Rio Grande. Cowie carries us along on a whirlwind tour of diverse and dynamic places, each with its own distinctive history and its own special constellation of social forces yearning to be unleashed. And yet,...