Book Reviews: Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion. By Lisa Rofel, and Sylvia J. Yanagisako,. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. xiii + 377 pp. Photographs, references, appendix, notes, index. Cloth, $104.95; paper, $28.95. ISBN: cloth, 978-1-4780-0029-7 ; paper, 978-1-4780-0045-7 .

Fabricating Transnational Capitalism: A Collaborative Ethnography of Italian-Chinese Global Fashion. By Lisa Rofel and Sylvia J. Yanagisako. Durham: Duke University Press, 2019. xiii + 377 pp. Photographs, references, appendix, notes, index. Cloth, $104.95; paper, $28.95. ISBN: cloth, 978-1-4780-0029-7 ; paper, 978-1-4780-0045-7.

The fashion industry is central to the history of global business, and this fascinating book presents the results of a multivocal ethnography of transnational capitalism with a focus on the relation between Chinese and Italian entrepreneurs and workers in the fashion industry. It demonstrates the dynamic and shifting character of the interactions between Italian and Chinese firms and their financial, technical, social, and aesthetic capital. The integrated analysis put forth by the authors goes beyond problems on the order of negotiation, translation, or corruption to unpack these firms’ complex entanglements with the processes of networking, family ties, the relation between public and private capital, and the transfer of skills at the domestic and international levels. The authors—along with fashion industry expert Simona Segre Reinach, who signs chapter 4—have carried out long-term research in China and Italy, interviewing a group of fashion industrialists and workers who represent the range of businesses in the industry in terms of size, prestige, and product. An essential strength of the book resides in its selection of interviewees. Though names have been changed for reasons of privacy, the reader gets the sense that the authors deliberately assembled a group that is highly representative of the various levels of authority and seniority in the profession, from workers to firm owners, across at least two generations in China and in Italy.

The book's structure is thematic and organized into three parts. The first part addresses the negotiation of value and offers an in-depth theoretical discussion of the nature of Chinese-Italian capitalism in the fashion industry. The second part addresses questions of historical legacies and revisionist histories aimed in particular at profound changes—in China from the Mao era to today and in Italy upon the relocation of part of the activity of local industrial clusters in the context of the financialization of global luxury groups. The third part of the book considers kinship and transnational capitalism and engages directly with business history literature, from the classic works of Alfred D. Chandler to the...