The rapid emergence of China and India as prime locations for low-cost manufacturing has led some analysts to conclude that manufacturers in the "old economies"-the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan-are being edged out of a profitable future. But if countries that historically have been at the...

As the United States rose to ascendancy in the first decades of the twentieth century, observers abroad associated American economic power most directly with its burgeoning automobile industry. In the 1930s, in a bid to emulate and challenge America, engineers from across the world flocked to...