cover image Empires of Profit: Commerce, Conquest and Corporate Responsibility

Empires of Profit: Commerce, Conquest and Corporate Responsibility

Daniel B. Litvin. Texere Publishing, $29.95 (312pp) ISBN 978-1-58799-116-5

In recent years, multinational corporations have been blamed for everything from the theft of domestic jobs to economic imperialism to exploiting child workers in Asia. Litvin, a consultant and former correspondent for the Economist, offers a thoughtful and balanced view of these""inherently clumsy, partially sighted giants,"" including their interactions with host countries and the ways they face the social and political problems that confront them. Litvin begins with histories of the great, early multinationals: the British East India Company, the British South Africa Company, the South Manchurian Railway Company and the United Fruit Company. These firms--arrogant, imperialistic, and corrupt--were often malevolent forces in their host countries: they arranged assassinations, waged wars and exploited native workers. But not all of a multinational's impact on a host country is negative, Litvin argues. The United Fruit Company assisted in a coup that deposed the popularly elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz Guzman, in 1954, but it also cultivated land and built houses, railroads and hospitals. Indeed, even a recent transgressor, Nike, has been shown to have given child workers a means of escaping worse alternatives, such as scavenging, street hawking or harsh physical labor. Also, foreign investment by multinationals is frequently the only means by which Third World countries can hope to improve their standard of living. What Litvin illustrates is the cultural complexity corporations confront abroad. Even firms that intend to limit their activities strictly to business often find themselves drawn inadvertently into local politics. But Litvin (who previously drafted human rights guidelines for a multinational) leaves open the question of whether tougher regulations of these giants should be instituted, smartly leaving readers to come to their own conclusions.