Book reviews Full Text

Book reviewsGREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

Anne F. Sutton and Livia Visser-Fuchs, eds., The book of privileges of the Merchant Adven-turers of England, 1296–1483 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 436. 1 fig.2 maps. 4 plates. ISBN 9780197264409 Hbk. £65/$120)

Although the Merchant Adventurers competed with the Staplers to dominate the over-seas trade of late medieval England, the surviving institutional records of both organi-zations are frustratingly few. The editors of this volume include in their introduction avaluable survey of those that remain, and conclude, after recounting the efforts of earlierhistorians to trace them, that the main records of the Staplers disappeared when theirheadquarters in Calais fell to the French in 1558, and that most of the Adventurers’records almost certainly perished in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Those thatsurvived did so because of the Adventurers’ intimate relationship with the Mercers’Company. Sutton has now followed her history of the Mercers by editing this manuscript(with Visser-Fuchs) for the British Academy Records in Social and Economic Historyseries, which the Company purchased in 1967 because of the light it throws on their pastoverseas trade.

It was compiled in 1484 as a working manual for an embassy sent by Richard III to theLow Countries and comprises 36 texts of grants made between 1296 and 1483 that wererelevant to the contemporary trade of the Adventurers with the northern Low Countries.Its diplomatic purpose explains its narrow geographical focus and the concentration of thegrants in the period after 1450. Of its 12 sections, only the first contains early privileges,granted by Brabant in 1296 and 1315.There is nothing connected with the Staplers’ tradeafter the Bruges privileges of 1359, and all the others date from 1445 and were grantedeither by Antwerp or by Bergen op Zoom.The hiatus illustrates the division of interests thathad arisen between the wool-exporting Staplers and the mainly cloth-exporting Adven-turers, which developed into mutual commercial and political antagonism. It arose becausein 1363 the compulsory English wool staple was settled more or less permanently at Calais,regardless of the fact that from 1346 neighbouring Flanders had banned the sale of Englishcloth in its territory. English cloth exporters, led by the London mercers, had accordinglyto seek a market in Brabant whose rulers offered them the trading privileges they neededto use Antwerp’s fairs for the sale of cloth to merchants from northern and eastern Europe.TheYorkist kings, in particular, were acutely aware of the need to support this trade amidthe shifting Continental politics which threatened it, and the editors give an excellentaccount of the complex diplomatic background between 1477 and 1483 which led to thecompilation of the volume.

It also contains a list of brokage fees for Antwerp, and the editors have added avaluable appendix of the hitherto unpublished complaints that Antwerp merchants madein 1483 and 1486 against the English refusal to grant them complementary freedom oftrade in London. Both the complaints and the privileges show the common requests thatmedieval merchants of all nationalities made, whether trading in England or overseas.They sought freedom from local tolls and from unnecessary arrest for debt; protectionfrom piracy and shipwreck; the right to have their own courts, assemblies, and gover-nors; to own their own houses, appoint their own servants, and brew their own beer; andthey stressed the need for confidence in local weights and measures, and in those whohad charge of them.

Economic History Review, 63, 1 (2010), pp. 235–280

© Economic History Society 2009. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

The editors have printed the documents in their original languages accompanied by thefifteenth-century English translation. The total amounts to about 69 pages in Latin, 36 inDutch, 30 in French, and 117 in English. Besides their general introduction the editorshave added separate introductions to each section of the documents. These draw on animpressive body of learning which helps to disentangle the complex political and com-mercial relationships of the period.The index, glossary and bibliography will be invaluabletools for any student of the subject, particularly for those struggling with manuscriptscontaining the unfamiliar words and spellings that the editors have painstakinglydeciphered.

Inevitably a collection of privileges of this kind involves considerable repetition, as theessential conditions that the merchants sought for their trade did not alter much during theperiod to which most of the documents belong. Some change, though, is apparent. Inthe early fourteenth century Bruges was concerned with maintaining the fineness of thebullion that paid for English wool, while wool was also Antwerp’s concern. However, by thefifteenth century the privileges inevitably reflect the Adventurers’ double trade in cloth andimports of linen in which bullion played a less significant part.The documents contain littledetail of the kind that the Cely letters provide to illuminate the daily lives of the merchants,but where so much material has been lost, one can only welcome the elucidation that thesediplomatic records, and the scholarship of their editors, has contributed to a crucial, butoften obscure, period of England’s commercial history.

pamela nightingaleOxford

Chris Briggs, Credit and village society in fourteenth-century England (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 254. 10 figs. 2 maps. 23 tabs. ISBN 9780197264416 Hbk.£45/$100)

The manorial courts of medieval England record disputes arising from unpaid debts owedto and from ordinary villagers. These have been the subject of various articles, but Briggsprovides the first book-length study of debt and credit in the medieval English village. Itsets out to investigate whether, as the traditional historiography asserted, money lendingwas largely exploitative, making the poor poorer and wealthy wealthier; or whether, as newstudies on debt and credit in Continental Europe and early modern England argue, it wasbeneficial to the great majority of those involved, increasing people’s ability to weather thehard times, and invest when times were good.

Briggs comes down firmly in the latter camp, finding little evidence that the creditmarket was exploitative.Village credit was characterized by ‘horizontal links’ and ‘dissemi-nated credit’, with creditors and debtors coming from roughly the same wealth cohort, andmany different individuals acting as creditors. None of the creditors encountered seemedto have made a specialized occupation from the activity. There were no obvious examplesof peasants being tied to a single creditor with a string of repeated contracts, or losing theirlands to a creditor as a result of a spiral of debt. On the other hand, it is also shown thatthe poorer class of villagers was very largely excluded from the credit market altogether.Briggs compares the English rural credit system based on manorial courts with that foundin southern Europe at the same date based on notarial registers. Court rolls provide lessinclusive information than the notarial registers: notaries recorded all loans at theirinception; manorial courts record only disputes that arose when debts went unpaid. Insome ways the English market seems weaker: straightforward money loans were outnum-bered by loans resulting from deferred payments on various other types of transaction; andurban lenders played an insignificant role in the surrounding countryside.Yet the Englishsystem had one important advantage: the cheapness, speed, and efficiency of manorial

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© Economic History Society 2009 Economic History Review, 63, 1 (2010)

justice when debts went unpaid. Through the manorial court, a creditor could ensure thedebt was repaid by confiscation of goods if necessary, and claim compensation. Thus itseems that active and well-run manorial courts not only facilitated the credit market, buthelped create it. However, herein lies a problem, and one that dogs much of medievaleconomic history, not just that of debt and credit.

Historians are drawn to those manors with the most extensive and complete records,and the time-consuming nature of manorial studies means that only a few can be studiedin any detail. (Briggs makes use of the records of an impressive seven manors fromCambridgeshire and Hertfordshire in this book.) Yet such manors were not typical.Briggs notes that the manors he studied were all ‘midland’ in type, with relatively highproportions of unfree tenants, standard-sized landholdings, and strong controls operatedby manorial lordship on land transactions. He acknowledges that the credit market couldhave been very different, and possibly a great deal more exploitative, on an ‘EastAnglian’ type manor with more free tenants and fewer controls of land transactions. Inother words, it is entirely possible that the horizontal nature of credit relationships, andlack of evidence about tenants losing land due to debt, were a result of local landholdingstructures rather than a general feature of England in that period. There is anotherquestion too. If efficient manorial courts created effective credit markets, what happenedin those localities that lacked such courts? Did freedom from tight manorial controldepress economic development by discouraging the use of credit, or did freedom bringits own rewards? This book is at its best when looking at the structure of the creditmarket: the types of loans, and types of lenders and borrowers. Briggs demonstrates thatto understand credit properly one has to delve deeply into the nature of the villageeconomy and society, and into the institution of the manorial court. In doing so heincidentally raises fascinating details about the specialist economies of different villages,the integration (or not) of the clergy into the village economy, and the market in sub-leases for land. The book is at its weakest when trying to tease out the nuances of changeover time: the chapter on the effects of harvest failure, plague, and money supply is lessconvincing than the preceding chapter. The fragility of the evidence leaves too manypossibilities for alternative interpretations to allow firm conclusions to be drawn. This isnonetheless an excellent book: clearly written and accessible to the non-specialist, itpaints a convincing picture of the sophistication of medieval English village economies,and the importance of credit relations within them.

jane whittleUniversity of Exeter

Christopher W. Brooks, Law, politics, and society in early modern England (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 456. ISBN 9780521323918 Hbk. £65/$117)

Occasionally, unwary cliometricians try to include the common law within the array ofpotential comparative advantages enjoyed by the English economy over its rivals in thecenturies preceding 1700.This advantage is presented as one of a series of ratherWhiggishdevelopments by which individual property rights were secured, personal rights defended,and ‘Stuart absolutism’ defeated in a manner fortuitous to GDP after 1694.Those temptedto argue in this fashion would do well to read Brooks’s work before venturing further downthis path.

This book has two distinct parts. The first half (chapters 2–8) details the chronologicalevolution of legal principles between 1485 and 1642, not in abstract, but in relation to aclear, careful reading of contemporary political events and constitutional thought. Thesecond half (chapters 9–13) deals thematically with the evolution of common and equitylaw in relation to a series of issues, ranging from local government, elite power, tenures,

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household structures and the relationship between individuals and organs of government.Neither part offers much comfort to the historian seeking to trace a neat upward curvetowards increased liberty, security, or property. In particular, and much at odds withsimplistic readings of the common law in this period, Brooks’s emphasizes the complex,uncertain status of precedent in shaping judicial pronouncements. Even those such as SirEdward Coke, who used precedence as a weapon against possible royal ‘innovations’,recognized that double-edged function of the law—that common law justice required someequitable room for manoeuvre, to be secured sometimes even by the setting aside of pastauthorities. Brooks’s revisionism even extends to demonstrating that Elizabethan commonlawyers were aware of, and influenced by, developments in Continental civil law, particu-larly on matters concerning the succession and royal prerogatives. In addition, although thefocus is on criminal law, Brooks devotes considerable space to the status and authority ofthe church courts during the Reformation era, and to considering the relationship betweenCommon and Equity jurisdictions.

The complex and detailed narrative of the first half of the work and the thematic surveysof the second have a shared purpose.This is to extend the study of the law in early modernEngland in a different direction, away from dry synopses of legal change, and histories of‘crime’ devoid of law. Instead, Brooks illustrates persuasively both how the law evolved in,and as part of, processes of contemporary political, constitutional, religious, and economicdebates, and how a sophisticated ‘culture’ of law or ‘legal-mindedness’ existed. For Brooks,this can be distinguished from the custom-based, oral ‘popular culture of the law’ identifiedby social historians, but was nevertheless a genuine body of shared learning, teaching,discourse and debate conducted among a relatively wide swathe of the lawyers, landown-ers, politicians, merchants, national and local officials, and churchmen.While he is wary ofseeing this as part of a process by which ‘feudal’ elites were ‘civilised’, Brooks suggests thatthe net result of this legal-mindedness was that in the 1640s the contending forces spokethe language of constitutional principle rather than in terms of naked power politics orfactional interest.

If the first half of this volume questions the linear development of individual rights, thesecond complicates the view that common and equity law moved inexorably in thedirection of capitalist rationalization. Brooks demonstrates that, in fact, legal principles ledin several contradictory directions at the same time.While decisions in common and equitycourts did, to some extent, support Jacobean and Caroline revivals of ancient rights, theyalso tended towards security of tenure for copyholders. Similarly, in discussing lawyers’attitudes to the household, he tempers the growing belief in the sanctity of its boundaries(‘every man’s home is his castle’), with principles that stressed the limits of patriarchalauthority over wives, children, apprentices and servants.

This is a highly nuanced study, which demonstrates that in the two centuries before1640, ‘English law was in a state of ongoing contestation within a long-established andreasonably widely accepted set of conventions’ (p. 431). It shows that although thesecontests undoubtedly reinforced a widespread ‘legal-mindedness’ among many socialgroups, it also demonstrates that their outcomes were not always predictable or easy toassimilate as the ‘preconditions for growth’. In many respects, this study defines a newhistorical space in the gaps between the history of ideas, political thought, legal practice,and economic and social history. This new perspective results from both the author’sbreadth of knowledge and his enormous experience in researching many of these conven-tional subject areas over the last 30 years. This work has implications that stretch farbeyond the realm of legal history, because it demonstrates that legal principles anddiscourse evolve not in a vacuum, or at the will of economic trends, but as part of thedebates that also shape politics and society.

h. r. frenchUniversity of Exeter

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Elizabeth Parkinson, The establishment of the hearth tax, 1662–66 (Kew: List and IndexSociety, 2008. Pp. x + 186. 3 figs. 4 maps. 19 tabs. ISBN 9781906875138 Pbk. £5)

Historians have long been aware of the need to interpret hearth tax documents in theiradministrative context, though few have grasped the nature of the different lists as fully asParkinson.The publication of her PhD study on the administration of the hearth tax from1662 to 1666 is an important addition to the advice literature on this vital source.Completed as part of the British Academy Hearth Tax Project launched by MargaretSpufford, and benefiting from the expert supervision of Tom Arkell, Parkinson’s studybuilds upon the foundations laid by the late Cecil Meekings at the PRO. Meekings advisedPhilip Styles and W. G. Hoskins on their pioneering analyses of the Warwickshire andExeter hearth tax lists in the 1950s, while all those working in the last decade on theproject’s publication of hearth tax returns have benefited from Parkinson’s expertise. Thepublication of her precise and clearly written study means that all future researchers willhave access to this hard-won knowledge. Only the foolhardy will attempt to discuss hearthtax evidence without consulting it.

The great utility of Parkinson’s study is that it provides a national overview. Even the bestexisting guides—notably Arkell and Kevin Schürer’s Surveying the people (1992) and P. S.Barnwell and Malcolm Airs’s Houses and the hearth tax (2006)—draw upon case studies ofspecific areas, whereas Parkinson tackles all of England and Wales for the most importantphase of the tax. Her scholarly account provides a clear summary of the tax’s introductionin Parliament in 1662 and subsequent revisions to the legislation in 1663 and 1664.Parkinson emphasizes the vested interest of MPs in insisting on the tax being charged tooccupiers rather than owners of dwelling houses. If the tax had fallen directly on landlords,it might have been much simpler to collect—all the complexities of exemption, and theneed to record the exempt, as well as the series of experiments in tax administration thatfollowed from disappointment at the revenue returned, might have been avoided. However,the fundamental cause of the tax’s tortuous administration was that the centralizingimpulses of the later Stuart state were in conflict with an inherently localized structuringof authority. Parkinson adds considerably to our understanding of how the conflictsbetween central state and locally-orientated officials were resolved in practice, with detailedinformation on how those in the hearth tax’s ‘chain of management’ struggled to supply theexpected revenue, and the various ways they found to make the administration of the taxeasier on themselves—and, in many instances, on taxpayers. Parkinson presents a detailedanalysis of the money collected per county and borough, with south-east England, andLondon in particular, emerging as the most difficult parts of the country from which toextract revenue.

This study says little about the genesis of the tax before it reached Parliament. However,the words of the Speaker on introducing the ‘chimney bill’ to the Commons in March 1662are illuminating. He explained that the search was for a means of raising revenue withinEngland and Wales which was not—like customs and excise—vulnerable to disruptionsoccasioned by war or fluctuations in trade: ‘We pitched our thoughts at last upon thoseplaces where we enjoy our greatest comforts and securities, our dwelling houses’. He addedthat dwellings were an appropriate basis for His Majesty’s financial support since thesecurity of a home ‘is secured unto us by your majesty’s vigilance and care in thegovernment’ (p. 16).The intellectual justifications for taxing each English- andWelshman’scastle would merit further consideration. William Petty conceived of taxing hearths as areliable measure of an individual’s purchasing power—with the number of chimneysreflecting the disposable income available for building or purchasing a home. For the moreaffluent, the number of one’s chimneys was indeed an index of wealth. For those not liableto pay on their hearths, however, it was the rental value rather than the number of chimneysthat mattered most. Parkinson concludes that with regard ‘to the criteria for exemption, the

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study has shown that, although non-payment of [parish poor] rates may initially have beenthe most frequently applied criterion, the use of rental values became increasingly signifi-cant because this was the only criterion that was legally certifiable’ (p. 131). For localcollectors, valuations of the full improved rent presented a means of determining liability;those in properties worth less than 20 shillings per annum did not pay.The full implicationsof Parkinson’s finding that property values were regularly the critical determinant of hearthtax exemption have yet to be pursued.

adrian greenDurham University

Antoin E. Murphy, The genesis of macroeconomics: new ideas from SirWilliam Petty to HenryThornton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Pp. x + 234. 7 figs. 8 plates. ISBN9780199543229 Hbk. £60/$120)

Macroeconomics, which deals with the performance of aggregate economies, becamerecognized as a separate field of study in the period following the great depression of the1930s. However, as Murphy’s book shows, its key concepts have a much longer lineage.Many had their origins in the epigrammatic statements that abound in the works of WilliamPetty and which were subsequently developed in the work of Law, Cantillon, Hume,Quesnay, Turgot, Smith, and Thornton. Murphy devotes a chapter of his book to each ofthese authors. In addition, there is an introductory chapter on the genesis of macroeco-nomics and a concluding chapter entitled ‘Conclusion: new ideas from fascinating people’.

With the exception ofThornton, the writers considered by Murphy are those that appearin standard histories of economic thought. Consequently, the question which naturallyarises is: to what extent can new insight be gained from concentrating solely on thecontributions of the various authors to macroeconomic issues? Murphy’s combination ofscholarship and original archival work yields many nuanced corrections to the canon buthis most original and perhaps controversial finding relates to the treatment of money byTurgot, Hume, and Smith. Essentially Murphy argues that these authors failed to developJohn Law’s insights into the manner in which the introduction of paper money andfinancial innovation more generally could accelerate the growth of an economy. InTurgot’scase, this was excusable given that financial innovation had been stopped in Francefollowing the collapse of Law’s system. While Hume and Smith were influenced by thecollapse of the Ayr Bank, Murphy finds their conservatism on financial issues less excus-able given Scotland’s developing banking system.

Murphy acknowledges that recognition of Law’s achievement in imagining the type ofmonetary world that we live in today does not necessarily imply that the more conservativeapproach of Hume,Turgot, and Smith was inappropriate for the time in which they lived.However, by emphasizing the fact that these authors failed to develop Law’s insights,Murphy seeks to bring out the fact that progress in the evolution of economic ideas overtime has not been linear. Conventional histories of economic thought tend to conceal thisfact because they highlight the advances made by individual authors, thereby presentinghistory as a progression from error to truth.

While Murphy’s book can be regarded as a significant contribution in terms of insightand approach, perhaps its most important achievement is to make its subject matteraccessible, interesting, and exciting.This applies particularly to the chapters on individualpolitical economists in which a judicious mixture of historical and biographical detail isemployed to motivate and contextualize each author’s contribution. Murphy begins eachchapter by asking the reader to imagine a particular time and context. His pen portraits ofindividual political economists are warts and all, which reminds us that the greatestcontributions can have mean-spirited motivations. Even the stoic Smith is not left

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unscathed. As Murphy points out, Smith rarely had to have recourse to the functioning ofthe invisible hand because he was supported by the highly visible handouts of the Buc-cleuch family.

Murphy is an authority on the work of Law, Cantillon, andThornton. He is familiar withboth French and English scholarship and archival sources. While the benefits of this areevident throughout the work, the scholarship is woven seamlessly into the overall fabric.The work is well written throughout. As part of his effort to bring the subject to life,Murphy has included portraits of all his political economists except Richard Cantillon, forwhom none is available. All in all, Murphy has produced an insightful and accessible workwhich deserves a wide readership.

While it is likely that this work was conceived and written before the full extent of thepresent financial crisis was known, the emphasis placed on responses to financial disastersmakes the work particularly timely. Given that Murphy sides with the financial innovatorsrather than the regulators, it may also be controversial. One other aspect of Murphy’s workwhich may prove controversial relates to the views on capital which he attributes to Turgotand Smith. Murphy rightly credits Turgot with innovation of the concept. However, heattributes to both authors a view of capital as physical goods whereas it is arguable thatmost classical authors had a fundist rather than a materialist view of capital.

renee prendergastQueen’s University Belfast

David Hussey and Margaret Ponsonby, eds., Buying for the home: shopping for the domesticfrom the seventeenth century to the present (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xviii + 217. 1 fig.20 illus. 4 tabs. ISBN 9780754658078 Hbk. £55/$99.95)

Twenty-five years ago the number of books considering the social and cultural history ofretailing, particularly for a domestic interior, could fit on a small shelf. Shopping was, afterall, such a bourgeois feminized interest and petty merchants were the stuff of Dickensianfarce. Few might have predicted then that the subject would emerge as a critical link in thetheoretical tilt from economic structures and systems to performed economic experiences.Hussey and Ponsonby’s Buying for the home is a fine example of that new sophisticatedscholarly inquiry.Their mission is to combine two disparate arenas by ‘analyzing the waysin which the agencies and discourses of the retail environment mesh with the processes ofphysical and imaginative re-creation that constitute the domestic space’ (p. 1). In so doing,it moves the domestic into the economy and takes the market into the home. Eight of thebook’s 10 essays are drawn from a 2005 CHORD (Centre for the History of Retail andDistribution) colloquium on shopping and the domestic environment, which the editorsgroup into four sections: retail arenas and the everyday; identity and lifestyle; fashioningdomestic space; and consumption as cultural practice.

The first section includes some familiar names and themes. Previous rich scholarship onthe early modern economy allows the authors to move away from questioning the femaleconsumer at the refined shop counter to examining more quotidian tasks. ClaireWalsh asksabout the relations of mistresses and servants in provisioning the household and she isjoined by Karen Dannehl in a study of cookery as a set of marketing, equipment, andmanagement skills. Hussey adds a new kind of study combining experiences drawn fromthe diaries of five men in hopes of rescuing masculine domesticity.

While the early modern period is best addressed in the larger field, the notion of‘shopping for identity’ is perhaps the most common trope, although the two essays in thisvolume that categorize that theme push into different time periods and cultures. SoniaAshmore finds our contemporary notion of ‘lifestyle retailing’ at the nineteenth-centuryLiberty and Company and their vending of Turkish divans, Japanese pottery and even

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architectural vision to transform a summer bungalow. Juxtaposing the London departmentstore withYasuko Suga’s study of the Japanese manufacture of leather paper to produce amarketable product for the western craze for all things Japanisma creates the most satis-fying pairing of the volume and that nexus of market and state is a fine comparison to themore well-known eighteenth-century story of China’s global expansion centuries before.

In the third section, ‘Making and re-making the home’, the reader is again led onto freshground. Clive Edwards and Ponsonby challenge our historical over-reliance on the acqui-sition of new goods by demonstrating a competitive structure of auctioneers and saleswarehouses that evolved to vend second-hand furniture. Equally importantly, they ques-tion the very notion of new and old and the increasingly fashionable idea of ‘aged’ or‘antique’. The reverse of Edwards and Ponsonby’s study must be Shirley Wajda’s expla-nation of the new household’s set-out between 1850 and 1930. Home furnishings are notthe issue:Wajda asks us to think about the items that made a house a home, the small, oftenpersonal items of housekeeping, phrased as homemaking in the twentieth century. A bridalshower evolved as a means to ensure that friends and family could provide for the successof a future household.Wajda’s corrective is similarly long overdue, as it considers a culturalpractice, but also a kind of ephemera of everyday household life.

The last section carries shopping for the domestic in the twentieth century to a final areaof inquiry that pushes past British boundaries and into modern and postmodern culturalpractice. Anthropologist Irene Cieraraad surprises us by showing how Dutch homemakers’public and private lives flowed from the provisioning systems of milk delivery. Architecturalanalysis demonstrates vividly how the evolution of the doorstep/vendor relationship placesthe home metaphorically on a continuum that ultimately pushed women to the public roleof shopping at supermarkets. Lisa Taylor interrogates the environs of the home and sharedcommunity expectations through televised dreams of do-it-yourself quick garden design.

In a fine concluding essay, Judy Attfield’s ‘Taking a look at the wild side of DIY homedécor’ historicizes the modern suburban ‘do-it-yourselfer’ magnificently. The twentieth-century de-professionalization of home repair and decoration enabled the amateurmechanic and ‘practical householder’ to be thrifty, self-proficient, and creative. She inter-polates brilliantly mid-twentieth-century ideas of craft and home improvement andultimately questions the efficacy of ‘good design’ as the premier measure of taste.

The book is a rich feast.The sum at first might seem eclectic and questions arise that onemight wish to be addressed in different times and places, but that is often the value ofavowedly diverse interdisciplinary forays. Good studies in well-edited volumes like thesemake one want to know more.

ann smart martinUniversity ofWisconsin

Robert C. Allen, The British industrial revolution in global perspective (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 331. 38 figs. 10 plates. 21 tabs. ISBN9780521868273 Hbk. £45/$85; 9780521687850 Pbk. £16.99/$27.99)

This work is ground-breaking. It expounds a forceful new thesis and introduces the earlyfruits of major international comparative statistical work on growth data. All futureresearch on British industrialization and comparative global history will have to take noteand make its way in the light of this volume.

The book is didactic in tone and certain of an argument that rests on comparative wageand price data, bolstered by a simulation exercise and by narratives of inventions andinventors in major sectors. Allen argues that the reason why England was the first toindustrialize and to gain a lead in the development of labour-saving and energy-usingtechnologies was that the country had a unique combination of factor prices. Real wages

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were generally high whilst energy costs were relatively low.This conjunction did not occuranywhere else in the world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nowhere else didthe promise of future profits justify the costs of development of labour-saving technologiesfrom invention to the point of their effective innovation. It was thus neither economical norrational in any other location to struggle to invent new productivity-enhancing manufac-turing technologies, or to pay the price of developing and of innovating such new methods.Several decades later, and thanks largely to British advancement with micro-inventionswhich had no bias in favour of saving one factor more than another, factor price combi-nations in other countries began to change. Only then did incentives shift to favour thespread of innovations that substituted capital for labour so that the cotton mill, steamengine, and coke blast furnace became ‘globally appropriate technologies’ (p. 3). Expla-nations that foreground war, institutions or culture are therefore unnecessary: ‘there wasonly one route to the twentieth century—and it traversed northern Britain’ (p. 275).Indeed, ‘had the first step not eked out a profit in England, the technology might neverhave been developed, and we might still be smelting with charcoal’ (p. 237).

Allen is not the only historian to have concentrated upon the history of wages and pricesin the Great Divergence but he, with collaborators, has established new comparativeindices of wage levels for western Europe and Asia, reduced to a silver standard. He showsthat all parts of England had exceptionally high silver wages. London and the south-eastbenefited first, but rapid growth towards the end of the eighteenth century brought thenorth up to comparable levels. In real terms Allen estimates that average wages in Londonwere five or six times the level of basic subsistence, whereas poorer parts of Europe andAsia, as a whole, had average wages around the subsistence level. He argues that the highcost of labour relative to fuel created a strong incentive to substitute fuel for labour inBritain whilst the reverse was the case in China, for example, where fuel was expensivecompared to labour. By similar reasoning coke smelting was not profitable in France orGermany before the mid-nineteenth century.

High wages impacted upon the demand- as well as the supply-side of the economy.Therewards to labour, particularly skilled labour, created the foundations for the buoyantdemand for manufactured goods internally.They also made possible higher investment andachievement in literacy and numeracy and thus increased the receptivity of the populationto the acquisition of technological skills.

Allen’s story starts with the important turning point of the Black Death. He arguesrepeatedly that the huge population losses resulted in the extension of pasture, the devel-opment of longer-stapled wools and the consequent success of the new draperies whichwas boosted by the export tax on raw wool. The success of textile proto-industry in theearly modern period created the high rural non-agricultural and urban shares of thepopulation and the almost uniquely high wage economy of the eighteenth century. Thatthis success was aided by favourable institutional and cultural developments by stateformation and aggressive mercantilism is explored and subjected to some indicative butbasic statistical testing. Fortunately, Allen’s thesis does not rest exclusively on the results ofthese simulations which are stretched to their limits. The emphasis is placed upon thefactor cost outcome coupled with a fairly traditional reliance on the incidental importanceof cheap coal. These were the sources of technological innovation and of self-sustaininggrowth thereafter.

Allen’s explanation is in line with other factor endowment-driven accounts and is notnovel in this respect. Indeed, it is proffered explicitly as a prequel to the Habbakuk thesison factor-saving bias in American and British technology in the nineteenth century. Allsuch accounts rely on the premise that factor markets are more or less integrated withincountries so that surviving partial data can be used as a proxy for national cost levels and,more importantly, so that factors of production can be regarded as substitutable. Althoughthere may be grounds for such assumptions for parts of western Europe by the eighteenth

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century, in most of Asia, and in other global regions encompassing massive landmass, thisclearly did not happen and it is therefore difficult to make the international comparisonsupon which the author relies. In east Asia relatively high interest rates appear to have ledto more efficient institutions for the use of labour, creating an industrious revolution butone that had a path different from that experienced in the West. Much of the economicprogress made during the later nineteenth century was not based on the adoption ofwestern technology but upon the indigenous development of labour-intensive industriesand labour-absorbing institutions. As Kaoru Sugihara has argued: ‘East Asia would nothave industrialised without Western influence but it was the East Asian path of economicdevelopment that made it possible for the majority of the world’s population to benefit from globalindustrialisation’ (Giovanni Arrighi, Takeshi Hamashita, and Mark Selden, eds., The resur-gence of east Asia: 500, 150 and 50 year perspectives, 2003, emphasis added). In Meiji Japan,capital was substituted for labour but industrialization remained labour-intensive in a waysimilar to the dominant patterns of industrialization in the contemporary world. It iscertainly premature to return to a narrative of exclusively British precocity or the idea thatindustrialization followed a single path with later industrializers copying slavishly this assoon as factor prices were conducive. Although this is not Allen’s primary purpose, othersmay lean on his thesis to do so.

One might also question Allen’s reasoning closer to home. Throughout the book herather unforgivably refers to Britain and England as if they were interchangeable. Clearlymost of Wales and Scotland experienced much lower wages than much of industrializingand commercializing England, through the whole period of British industrialization. InAllen’s own account, the high wage economy was confined to London in the seventeenthcentury and did not spread to the north of England until the industrial revolution was wellinto its stride.The most innovative regions and sectors, technologically speaking, were thusby no means congruent with high wage areas or sectors.This highlights the wider problemof the national level of analysis and national average comparisons even for the relativelyintegrated economy that Britain presented by the eighteenth century. Allen does mentionthis as a problem but dismisses it too readily.

Allen’s rejection of the stress placed by other writers on the industrial enlightenment inBritain is also rather weaker in substance than he implies. His argument is based upon astudy of the connections between science and practical industrial applications in majorsectors by looking at the backgrounds, methods, and contacts of major inventors. Seventy-nine are studied of whom only 14 were born after 1750 which to my mind restricts theresults.These are in any case inconclusive, with those engaged in steam power innovationshaving close connections with science but others much less so, although it is accepted thatthe eighteenth century witnessed a major increase in the use of experimental methods.

This is the launch volume of the series ‘New Approaches to Economic and SocialHistory’ edited for the Economic History Society, and Allen has tailored his style to anintended market of undergraduates. He is admirably clear in his arguments but I am notsure that most bright students will thank Allen for repeating the same points many timesand for his colloquialisms (for example, ‘chucking’ fuel on the fire, p. 90; ‘hoi polloi’,p. 241).Those academics who have spent the last decade trying to keep students away fromWikipedia will not thank Allen for using the site several times as a source, though othersmay see this as a brave move.The series sets itself the difficult task of combining work thatis ‘academically ground breaking’ but which also offers a ‘comprehensive guide’ to a topicthat is ‘accessible to advanced school students and undergraduates’ in history and ineconomics (Frontispiece). This work is original and accessible but it does not aim toprovide a comprehensive guide to the industrialization process and should not perhaps bepromoted as so doing. It might also be criticized for resting such a confident and closedcase on sparse data, basic simulations, and some indicators from the collective biographiesof a restricted field of British inventors. Finally, perhaps the global perspective should be

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applied in a broader sense: in the eighteenth century the population of China rose to400 million without significant loss of living standards or demographic catastrophe.China’s share of world GDP in the early nineteenth century was around 30 per cent, Asia’s50 per cent, and Britain’s 6 per cent.Taking both a short and the longer view, we still havemuch to learn from the East as well as the West about global growth past and present.

pat hudsonCardiff University

Charles Ivar McGrath and Chris Fauske, eds., Money, power and print: interdisciplinarystudies on the financial revolution in the British Isles (Newark: University of Delaware Press,2008. Pp. 242. 2 tabs. ISBN 9780874130270 Hbk. £52.50/$56)

Can eighteenth-century print culture help illuminate the origins and nature of the ‘finan-cial revolution’? How might literary scholars contribute to studies of the British fiscal-military state? According to the introduction to this collection, interdisciplinaryapproaches support the view that it was not a ‘revolution’ at all. Rather it must be viewedas a process of evolutionary change seen through a series of spontaneous, disconnectedevents (p. 23). Frustratingly for the reader, the volume’s organization almost enacts thisview.

In the opening essay, James Hartley supplies a literary backdrop for the editors’ emphasison experimentation and competitive selection. Hartley offers Daniel Defoe as a synecdo-che for societal anomie in the face of financial innovation. Defoe’s skill at pitching hispolemics to his audiences has all but obliterated evidence for his own opinions. His writingsreveal no systematic views on trade, financial markets, or public credit, but rather arepresentative sample of the range of possible contemporary positions on these matters.While it is difficult to argue with Hartley’s reading of Defoe, the editors’ choice for thesecond essay jarringly diverts attention from the eighteenth-century reading public to atechnical account of the administration of the seventeenth-century hearth tax in Devonand Cornwall.

StephenTimmons provides a fascinating and nuanced picture of the competing financialnetworks that vied for lucrative farming contracts. He neatly explicates the conflictinginterests of local elites, London financiers, taxpayers, and the Treasury in a narrative thatagrees with existing scholarship on the Restoration public revenue.Yet most of the prac-tices and disputes he describes were not unique to the hearth tax, nor did they first appearat the Restoration. Similar stories can be told about the administration of the excises in thelocalities during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. Judgements about the pre-Civil Warorigins of these practices await a fresh study of the royal imposts. An attempt to tie thehearth tax to narratives of the ‘Financial Revolution’ should begin with William Petty’s Atreatise on taxes and contributions (1662), in which he presents Hearth-Money as the idealindirect tax.

The third and fourth essays explore the limits of the state’s financial experimentation.Richard Kleer places the founding of the Bank of England in the context of competingproposals to introduce paper currency. This accessible account of the failure of NationalLand Bank counters those that see the Bank of England as an inevitable outcome ofparliamentary supremacy over Crown finance or as an overdue facsimile of the Bank ofAmsterdam. Kleer’s sympathetic view of the ‘sensible administrative conservatism’ of theTreasury’s officials combats anachronism (p. 97). In a similar vein, Arne Bialuschewski’sreconstruction of John Breholt’s Madagascar Scheme of 1707–9 seems straight out of theannals of Sir Francis Drake. Despite Defoe’s support, the Privy Council apparentlythought better of sanctioning piracy (pp. 110–11). Some plots were best left to novelists.

Alan Downie’s reading of Gulliver’s Travels introduces Jonathan Swift’s prolific career asa mouthpiece for ‘Country Party’ objections to the new finance and those who owed their

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fortunes to it. Downie offers a valuable overview of Swift’s commitments, but why shouldthe likelihood that Swift’s audience shared his prejudices ‘offer a valuable corrective’ tothose who cling to the ‘bourgeois public sphere’ (p. 131)? Chris Fauske’s treatment of Swiftlooks to Ireland. Both the ideological and constitutional contexts for the failed attempt tointroduce a copper halfpenny in 1724 remain obscure, not least because of perennialoverestimation of Swift’s role in the affair (p. 152). Unfortunately Fauske uses this incidentto elaborate Swift’s tactics as a polemicist.

The final two essays consider the ‘financial revolution’ in Ireland. McGrath offers amuch-needed overview of Irish finances from the Civil Wars through to the 1750s. Thesection on Cromwellian and Restoration Ireland is excellent. McGrath’s emphasis on thesignificance of constitutional struggles over the public purse is convincing, but reads likeolder narratives of the English financial revolution. As Eoin Magennis demonstrates in hisanalysis of the Irish pamphlet literature in response to familiar schemes, most actorsimprovised their responses in concert with events in England and on the Continent.

These eight essays have been deployed against a straw man.The financial revolution, likethe industrial revolution, could only be apprehended after the fact. The French andAmerican Revolutions were immediately apparent to those who lived through them. Theeditors must know this, of course, but history and historiography were conflated in theirDarwinian leitmotiv. What remains unanswered is how public trust in institutions andmarkets developed and why it endured, especially given such justifiable scepticism. Forthose wanting more, this collection was the product of a conference held at the Universityof Regina in June 2004. Electronic copies of the 16 original papers remain availablethrough the association’s website.

d’maris coffmanNewnham College, Cambridge

Robin Pearson with Mark Freeman and James Taylor, eds., The history of the company: thedevelopment of the business corporation, 1700–1914, part I: 1700–1850 (London: Pickering &Chatto, 2006. Pp. xxvi + 1676. ISBN (4 volume set) 9781851968202 Hbk. £395/$725);part II: 1850–1914 (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2007. Pp. xxvi + 1725. ISBN (4 volumeset) 9781851968213 Hbk. £395/$725)

From its very origins the modern business corporation was identified as a temptinglyhazardous venture, one that offered to its shareholders the promise of speculative earn-ings and carried the dangers of economic loss, even bankruptcy. Similarly, the advent oflimited liability brought criticisms that this new legal form ill-served society by encour-aging diminished responsibility on the part of semi-detached, or even remote investors,disengaged and distant from the supervision of the corporation that was their property.Contemporaries in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain and the US held strongviews upon these matters, as is colourfully demonstrated by the 68 texts, selected froma variety of printed sources, which are republished in this collection of eight volumes,divided into two parts. These documents are accompanied by a brief contextual com-mentary and have been chosen from a variety of publications to characterize twoperiods: part I considers the ‘dawn time’ of modern corporate capitalism (c.1750–1850,30 texts) and part II the consolidation of the system (c.1850–1914, 38 texts). Both partscomprise four volumes, entitled sequentially ‘Birth’, ‘Structure’, ‘Strategy’, and ‘Exit anddeath’. Additionally, both parts commence with an introduction that indicates majorissues raised by the scholarly literature: where part I considers ‘Theories of the firm’ and‘The business company before 1850’, part II offers ‘Politics, law and corporate regula-tion in the UK and the US,’ ‘American big business and the Chandlerian paradigm’,‘Corporate finance, concentration and regulatory response in the US’, and ‘British com-panies and the Chandlerian corporation’.

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While Alfred Chandler’s contribution to business history is both undeniable anduniquely significant, the emphasis upon the relevance of his analytical framework may resthere more upon the expected familiarity with his oeuvre on the part of the target readershiprather than its strict relevance. After all, Chandler has relatively more to say about theindustrial than the services sectors; yet it is the insurance, banking, telecommunications,and railway companies that predominate in this collection. Chandler tended to research theunusually large family firm, notably Du Pont and its associate General Motors, rather thanthe focus of analysis here: the shareholder company. Furthermore, Chandler’s analysisstressed two organizational innovations in the manufacturing sector (a species not stronglyrepresented here): first, the development of the multi-departmental managerial structureof the industrial corporation that is relevant in the era before the First World War; and,second, the multi-divisional structure that is definitely a post-1920 development. Themajor point here, however, is that whereas the Chandlerian paradigm (the dominantdiscourse in business history) accentuates the replacement of the British by a US model ofthe managerial corporation, recent research suggests that this development was a moregeneral trend common to the relatively developed economies, albeit with local variants andflavours, and that the separation of ownership from control was, contra to the suggestionof many who cite Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means classic text, The modern corporation andprivate property (1932), well-established before 1914 and outside the US.

Once this is identified, the historic and analytical importance of the documents reprintedhere becomes all the more significant. However, such recognition also begs a number ofquestions concerning the stock market, the economic environment within which theshareholder-owned company was launched, traded, sometimes prospered, and eventually,most often, died, that are not reflected here. Stock exchanges and their organization receivelittle attention here and the commercial press that informed the rank and file shareholderis somewhat neglected. In this context, it might have been very useful here to advertise theextensive and comprehensive collection of extant company reports made to the Secretaryof the London Stock Exchange; these were submitted by firms that had sought, or eventhought that one day they might seek, a quotation on the LSE. Now held at the GuildhallLibrary, these provide a rich store of the extent and quality of corporate informationgenerated before the First World War by commercial enterprises located around the globeand held for posterity in London.

The question of the provenance of the documents reprinted here raises another inter-esting aspect of this collection. Thus, while the publicity associated with this collectionreports that documents are both rare and held in seldom-used British-American archivesand libraries, this claim ought to be subjected to the same sceptical scrutiny that thecautious nineteenth-century shareholder would have applied to the prospectus associatedwith many a well-advertised Initial Public Offering: well in excess of half of the documentshere reprinted can be viewed at the British Library, these forming the large majority ofthose that relate to Britain, while many of the remainder can be found in a number of majorarchival collections or in previously published collections of historic documents relating tobusiness history. The relative novelty of the US sources in this collection, even afterdiscounting the British research orientation of its editors, may be yet more evidence of therelative late development and slow diffusion of shareholder-owned public company in theUS. Nevertheless, inspection of this collection reveals clear evidence of the temptingcompany prospectus; disputed accounting practices and model procedures for public auditenthusiasm; over-exuberance and fraud on the part of company promoters; debatingpositions taken in the face of proposed corporate legislation; repeated warnings by financialwriters against predictable and repetitive waves of self-delusion on the part of gullibleinvestors; corporate plans, reorganizations, and amalgamations; and, even, in an Address tothe Shareholders of the Gas-Light and Coke Company (James Barlow, 1825; vol. 2, p. 146), anexhortation to shareholders that they should not fall silent in the face of artful claims

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voiced by company servants that commercial secrecy guaranteed their best interest asowners at meetings where ‘Spies are present!’. In many ways the past documented herelooks a foreign but still familiar country.

peter wardleyUniversity of theWest of England, Bristol

Deborah Wilson, Women, marriage and property in wealthy landed families in Ireland,1750–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 233. 15 tabs. ISBN9780719077982 Hbk. £55/$84.95)

The decision of Manchester University Press to expand its portfolio of Irish material hasbeen welcomed by many, not least newer scholars who now have a vibrant and efficientoutlet through which to see their work acquire a new audience. This book fits into thismould, based as it is on a 2004 QUB doctoral thesis. It is a shame, however, that theassociated reading has not been meaningfully updated in the intervening half decade.Reference to the recent works of Toby Barnard in particular, while not substantiallyaltering the arguments presented, may well have improved the context of the discussion.Having said that, this book is clearly written and well structured, and throws new light onan area that has received little attention from historians of Ireland. Though the limitedindex is something of a disadvantage for those seeking to scour this book of its findings, theglossary of terms is very useful.

The first chapter is in fact the most interesting, and deals with the development of thelaw in areas concerning women and property. It is here that Irish practice diverged mostnoticeably from English precedent. Obsession with excluding Catholics from the acquisi-tion and inheritance of land led to the Irish Parliament creating novel legislation concern-ing marriage. Designed to minimize abduction, clandestine marriage, and marriagesbetween aspiring Catholic males and allegedly vulnerable Protestant heiresses, the law inIreland took innovative turns. New capital offences were created, and the state becameexplicitly not just the guardian of personal property but also the protector of the rights ofvery specific types of individuals to enjoy it.Though not their intended aim, such laws gavegreater and more continual paternal influence in property holding than was the case inEngland.

Chapter 2 deals with the provisions made for women in marriage settlements and wills.Not surprisingly the evidence here suggests that family interests, and therefore the interestsof the estate, inevitably took precedence over the best interests of female children, siblings,and relicts. However, due portions were almost invariably made available and penury didnot beckon for female members of landed families. Chapter 3 examines the enhanced rolesof women on occasions that minority and madness allowed them to become guardians.Chapters 4 to 6 each consider the roles of single women, wives, and widows in themanagement and utilization of family property. The conclusion that Irish expectationsshifted during this period from dower to jointure for widows (that is, widows would receiveregular payments from the estates of their late husbands rather than the actual share of theproperty they were entitled to under common law) is most interesting. It does of coursesuggest the increasing primacy of the interests of the estate as an entity over the rights ofwomen as individuals, but it might also suggest a simple increasing economic rationality inthe landed classes in Ireland.The overriding conclusions, however, are that Irish practicesdid not differ greatly from the English. This is perhaps not surprising given the fact thatmany of the families considered owned property in both kingdoms, and that common lawrestrictions were in place on both sides of the Irish Sea. Generally, women played marginalroles in the property interests of wealthy landed families, unless permitted to enhance theirposition by sustained male incapacity.

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It is a happy situation, then, that the 20 or so landed families from across Ireland’s toprank that are at the centre of this study display dysfunctional natures that would have suitedthem well to lead many a story in the modern tabloids. Madness, estrangement, abandon-ment, alcoholism, and simple rank stupidity all feature. The result is that Wilson canexplore the role of the female as effective head of household in many different circum-stances, and the variegated nature of the female experience is highlighted. However, certaingeneral conclusions can be drawn. In particular it seems safe to say that the system ofproperty holding and inheritance in Ireland concentrated on the defence of family interestsand the Protestant interest in general. Given that the majority of landholders were Prot-estants these areas of concern usually coincided. Females were certainly marginalized inthis system, with the law and family practice preferring to place property in male hands.Yetat the same time women were not totally excluded from becoming holders of property, andwealthy families did not pauperize their female members. It did, however, take incidents ofmale minority or insanity for female family members to come to the fore. Even then, thisrarely happened without male opposition.

neal garnhamUniversity of Ulster

Peter M. Jones, Industrial enlightenment: science, technology and culture in Birmingham and theWest Midlands, 1760–1820 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008. Pp. xii + 260.8 figs. 4 illus. 2 tabs. ISBN 978071907770 Hbk. £55/$84.95)

‘If I can promote your views as a Natural Philosopher, as a Mineralogist or as a GentlemanI shall be happy, But as a Mechanick & as an Engineer you must pardon me if I throwobstructions in your way’ (p. 158). Matthew Boulton’s ambivalent response to a Prussianvisitor desirous of visiting his Soho manufactory expresses the tension between the differ-ent social worlds he inhabited: civility and scientific enquiry demanded openness, yet tradesecrets were closely guarded. Simultaneously, it encapsulates the paradox explored inJones’s admirable study of ‘enlightened’ culture in the west midlands. How, Jones asks,should we interpret the intellectual ferment surrounding the Boulton and Watt businesspartnership—the Lunar Society, their international network of correspondents, and thethousands of visitors they entertained at Soho? What was its significance? Are we dealingwith polite curiosity or the technical cutting-edge of industrialization? Although the detailsof his answer have most to offer historians of science and culture, there is nonetheless muchof interest here for economic historians.

In particular, Jones engages with Joel Mokyr’s analysis of ‘useful knowledge’, as outlinedin The gifts of Athena: historical origins of the knowledge economy (2002). Since Jones’s titleenshrines Mokyr’s neologism, it is not surprising that he is largely sympathetic to Mokyr’sapproach. ‘ “Industrial Enlightenment” ’, Jones concludes, ‘is a valuable addition to ourconceptual toolkit, then, whether it is understood as a characterization of a particular kindof society gestated in the interstice between the Scientific and the Industrial Revolutions,or as a model of the technological preconditions for economic growth’ (p. 232). Jones,however, is by no means uncritical and the ‘industrial enlightenment’ he conceptualizes isboth more firmly anchored in the preoccupations of eighteenth-century natural philosophyand sociability than is Mokyr’s, whose focus is industrialization, and more aware of theimportance of artisanal know-how and tacit knowledge.

Even in the vast Boulton and Watt archives Jones finds it hard to substantiate thetransformation from ‘propositional’ to ‘prescriptive’ knowledge that Mokyr’s model pos-tulates and to observe ‘how natural knowledge crossed the interface and was converted intoa usable technique’ (p. 70). His solution to this linear gap between Mokyr’s savant andfabricant is to collapse it. The dual identity that prompted Boulton’s ambivalence towards

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his visitors provides Jones with the historically more accurate notion of the savant-fabricant.As he shows, for Boulton and Watt, together with many of their friends, customers,correspondents, and skilled workers, knowledge was holistic: the ‘interface’ was in theirown brains; they engaged both in natural philosophy and in technical practice; theyadvanced both understanding and technique via undiscriminating resort to books, experi-ments, workshop ‘know-how’, and polite controversy. This is clearly far removed from anexogenous, linear model that starts with propositional knowledge and ends with economicgrowth. It is rather a problem-solving enterprise, a continuum of curiosity in which bothintellectual puzzles and the pursuit of manufacturing profit and domestic comfort set theagenda and produce multi-faceted results.There is much in Jones’s account that resonateswith the fascinating studies collected by Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear inThe mindful hand: inquiry and invention from the late Renaissance to early industrialisation(2007), which focus on ‘recovering the hybrid activities involved in the intimately relatedprocesses of material and knowledge production’ (p. xvi).

Yet, while the contributors to The mindful hand find ‘historical sites where inquiry andinvention coalesced’ (p. xvi) throughout early modern Europe, Jones treats the westmidlands ‘industrial enlightenment’ as exceptional and thereby gets caught up in the hoaryquestion of why England was first. In comparing the intellectual and industrial fireworksof Soho’s savants-fabricants with the glass wall between France’s Académie des Sciences andits manufacturers and with similar disjunctions between bodies of savants and localfabricants elsewhere in Europe, he is scarcely comparing like with like. Jones’s own casestudy of Aimé Argand’s initial development of his eponymous oil-lamp with assistancefrom a member of the Académie (‘so evocative of the career of the savant-turned-fabricant’,p. 135) suggests there is scope for relaxing such tightly drawn distinctions. Revisionistaccounts of the Ancien Régime’s economic policy, in particular Liliane Pérez’s research onits support for inventors and the dissemination of inventions, likewise imply that it wouldbe worth searching for other, informal pockets of ‘industrial enlightenment’ elsewhere inEurope.

Birmingham is currently commemorating the bicentenary of Matthew Boulton’s deathin 1809 with events that include wonderful exhibitions at the Museum and Art Gallery andat the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. Visitors inspired to delve more deeply, as well asscholars of eighteenth-century English culture, will especially appreciate Jones’s accessibleand accomplished study, which demonstrates how much more there was to Soho thansteam.

christine macleodUniversity of Bristol

Adrian J. Pearce, British trade with Spanish America, 1763–1808 (Liverpool: LiverpoolUniversity Press, 2007. Pp. xxxviii + 320. 9 figs. 9 tabs. ISBN 9781846311130 Hbk.£50/$85)

A recently published study of the eighteenth-century trade of the colonies of BritishAmerica has elicited an intriguing review.Thomas Truxes’s Defying empire: trading with theenemy in colonial NewYork (2008) does a grand job laying out the steps in the subtle dancedone by British merchants during the first years of the SevenYears’ War as they continuedto exchange British goods for French sugar and Spanish silver through the Spanish port ofMonte Cristi on the north coast of the island of Hispaniola in the colony of SantoDomingo. The key to Monte Cristi’s sudden popularity was its proximity to French SaintDomingue. Because Spain was neutral during the first eight years of the war (it joined onthe side of France only in January 1762) and because the Spanish had declared MonteCristi a ‘free port’ in 1752, once war had started between France and Great Britain, it

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became the magnet for merchants from every British port on both sides of the AtlanticOcean, a trade that grew mightily. The Admiralty and the War Office deplored the tradebecause it comforted the enemy; the Treasury was largely silent on the subject (for reasonsthat will become clear in a moment); the Courts sided with the merchants. Parliamentwaffled. In passing the Flour Act in 1757, Parliament prohibited merchants based in theAmerican colonies from trade with Monte Cristi while allowing merchants based in Irelandand Great Britain to carry on trading. Successful prosecutions brought in colonial ViceAdmiralty courts against a ship or a merchant (later appealed to London) were regularlydecided for the defendant, for obvious reasons.

Those reasons are set out in Pearce’s marvellous study.The British goal had always beenunrestricted trade with Spanish America. From the time of Drake and Hawkins until theultimate successes that followed British support for Latin American wars of independence,Great Britain had done everything it could to force entry into the trade of the SpanishEmpire. Spanish silver exchanged for British merchandise and, from the eighteenthcentury, British manufactures, enticed every merchant and every government. No holdswere barred; treaties were ignored; Navigation Acts, winked at; piracy, condoned; andmilitary exigencies, relegated: by government. By government! It was not the ‘unscrupu-lously greedy’ merchant callously pursuing the main chance who engaged in every devicepossible to keep trade open, but government. Successive British governments did every-thing they could to facilitate and expand the trade with Spanish America, despite suchpetty annoyances as statutes and wars. The Spanish government tried to prevent suchtrade, then to limit it, but, as Allan Christelow once wrote: ‘The general situationwas . . . that the English would not stop the trade and the Spanish could not’ (‘Contrabandtrade between Jamaica and the Spanish Main, and the Free Port Act of 1766’, HispanicAmerican Historical Review, 22 (1942), p. 312). Merchants based in the British Americancolonies were simply go-betweens—and, sometimes, the dogsbodies and pawns of Britishimperial policy, as the Flour Act, for one, shows.

The beauty of Pearce’s book is that it makes clear at a time of transition in Britishimperial policy just what the thrust of that policy had been all along, despite the mixedsignals from Whitehall and Westminster. Clarification is required because, as all theabove suggests, what the law said and what practices ensued were not always the same.(The reviewer of Truxes’s book to whom I referred above seems, like many others, toprefer a simpler story of good and evil, punctilious administrators and avaricious mer-chants. Caught up in a false dichotomy, he is unable to accept what Truxes argues andPearce confirms: the correctness of the colonial merchants’ view of themselves as fur-thering the interest of the British Empire while furthering their own interests: SimonMiddleton, Reviews in History, no. 740 ⟨www.history.ac.uk/reviews⟩.) In 1786 ThomasIrving, the Inspector General of Imports and Exports of Great Britain, explained to theCommissioners for Trade and Plantations just how this had long been orchestrated byLondon: ‘. . . it was carried on through a kind of Connivance, in consequence (as isgenerally supposed) of Private Instructions from Home to the Governors and CustomHouse Officers of Jamaica’—and not just Jamaica, I would argue (BL Add. MS 38345,fols. 208r–v).

Pearce conveys all of this beautifully in a book that I wish I had written but am verypleased that he has. On the cusp of the ‘British century’ during which the SecondEmpire succeeded marvellously in monopolizing the trade of Latin America—ironically,with the help of the new United States of America—Great Britain seized the opportu-nities laid open by the political changes in the Spanish Empire that the American Revo-lution had helped encourage. Pearce’s is a grand and very important story, impressivelytold. Bravo.

john j. mccuskerTrinity University, San Antonio

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Philip MacDougall, ed., Chatham dockyard, 1815–1865: the industrial transformation (Alder-shot: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xvii + 410. ISBN 9780754665977 Hbk. £65/$124.95)

This publication for the Navy Records Society, the 154th volume since its establishment in1893, provides an insight through contemporary primary documents into the gradualmodernization of a dockyard, which, in 1815, apart from a newly completed sawmill, wasentirely devoid of steam machinery. Yet, by the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the startingpoint for this survey, the seven home dockyards of the Royal Navy employed some 16,000men and boys (and even some women).With a period of peace the numbers employed felldramatically, and by 1833 the Chatham workforce had been halved. Nonetheless, by theend of the period under consideration Chatham was building ships designed to accom-modate steam engines. However, the transformation to ironclad shipbuilding occurredonly in 1860 when construction of a 9,694-displacement tons, 20-gun screw propelled,four-masted armoured iron frigate began—the first such ship to be built in any royaldockyard. Completed in 1864, HMS Achilles was the harbinger of a new direction not justfor Chatham but for the other royal dockyards. It was visible proof of a step change inconstruction methods marking the long transition from entirely wood to ironclad hulls.

After a short preface and introduction MacDougall groups documentary evidence withan initial commentary on each aspect around seven chapters: shipbuilding and repair;improving facilities; manufacturing and the move to steam power; storage, security, andmaterials; economics, custom, and the workforce; local management; and lastly, centralmanagement (Board of Admiralty). Primarily, sources are culled from the ADM classifi-cation at the National Archives, and good use is made of contemporary local newspaperreports.

At the apex of the production process for most of the period up to the construction ofAchilles were the shipwrights, and one would have thought that their dominance wouldhave been eventually challenged and overcome by ironsmiths. However, owing to a strikeby the latter in 1862, the Admiralty dismissed the majority of this class of worker andreplaced them with volunteer shipwrights who received training from dockyard enginesmiths, and a small number of ironsmiths who had remained outside the dispute. Before-hand the shipwrights were on the verge of redundancy, but by the construction phase ofAchilles their work had been transformed and some 500 of them were employed in platingher. Charles Dickens, in what could well be the origin of the derogatory term ‘metalbashers’—used by engineers to describe shipbuilders—memorably described Achilles con-struction in The uncommercial traveller (1865) as ‘Twelve hundred hammerers, measurers,caulkers, armourers, forgers, smiths, shipwrights; twelve hundred dingers, clashers,dongers, rattlers, clingers, bangers, bangers, bangers’!

There was of course a technological imperative to ironclad construction by the Admi-ralty in strategic response to the French who had laid down the ironclad Gloire in 1858 andordered a further five.The potential to render wooden warships obsolete was now obviousand the Admiralty ultimately responded with the construction of HMS Warrior in 1860 atthe private yard of Thames Ironworks and Shipbuilding.When completed in 1861 Warriorwas the largest, most powerful, and fastest warship of its day and had a profound effect onnaval architecture. Her sister ship, HMS Black Prince, completed in 1861 by the Govanyard of Robert Napier, was equally impressive.That the Admiralty looked to private yardsfor this step change in warship construction was an admission and indeed confirmationthat the technological impetus had in fact substantially shifted to private constructors whobuilt in iron.

In this light, the building of Achilles in Chatham dockyard can be seen as a specificresponse to burgeoning private competition to give the workforces of the royal dockyardssimilar skills. MacDougall charts the antecedents of this process of and the eventualresponse through the provision of documents relating to a series of reforms.This approach

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gives the reader a valuable insight into the day-to-day running of a major dockyard and theattendant changes to its workforce and technological capacity over time. His choice ofdocuments in a well-produced book is wide-ranging and effective, and will be of much useto students of dockyard history. However, at this prohibitive cost it is not likely that manystudents will be able to purchase it.

hugh murphyUniversity of Glasgow

Nancy Henry and Cannon Schmitt, eds., Victorian investments: new perspectives on financeand culture (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2009. Pp. viii + 250.7 figs. ISBN 9780253220271 Pbk. £18.99/$24.95)

This book covers familiar ground, savings, investment, insurance, stock markets, and jointstock companies. What draws these essays together is a desire to apply the methods ofcultural history and cultural analysis to the processes of creating meanings and under-standings. The result is mixed but instructive. The collection is dominated by a splendidessay by Mary Poovey on the importance of financial journalism. By the 1840s, inpublications like the Banker’s Magazine and the Economist, as it matured from being ananti-Corn Law League outlet, such journalism was more than lists of prices. It enabledreaders to ‘imagine’ financial institutions as part of their economy and society. It enabledsuch institutions to be understood as natural, law-governed, ‘safe’ environments aboutwhich decisions could be taken. Above all such journalism provided information crucial tothe working of any market, but also managed the tension between the needs of disclosureand secrecy in the making of a market.

Timothy Alborn examines the bonus declaration of the life insurance companies both asa piece of theatre and as an imperfect source of ‘information’.Thoughtful essays by AudreyJaffre, Henry, and Schmitt look at various ways in which financial narratives and tropeswere central to the nineteenth-century novel.The fraudulent and suicidal financier, victimsboth innocent and greedy, and narratives of failed investments all appear, but there is littleon why these themes should be so dominant, especially in light of the fact that theydisappear in the face of the obsessive interiority of the twentieth-century novel. As MartinDaunton points out in an afterword, this approach complicates matters. The activities ofinvestment (good) and speculation (doubtful) and gambling (working class and evil)proved easy to praise and condemn but they all overlapped in ways that moralists andlegislators found almost impossible to separate. The focus on cultural processes leavesproblems for the historian who seeks wider understandings and Daunton hints at some ofthese.

There is an often unfilled need to match the understanding of texts (novels, legislation,and financial journalism) with a more precise knowledge of behaviour and experience.Donna Loftus provides an insightful essay on the making of the Limited Liability Acts of1855 and 1856, linking them to a desire to ‘democratise’ investment, but does not pauseto reflect on why these Acts were so little used in the next 20–30 years. George Robb givesa passionate account of his discovery of women’s investment activity and the belief thatthey were especial victims of fraud due to their gendered lack of information.This accountneeds to be matched against our growing knowledge of women’s investment experiencegenerated by historians like David Green, Alastair Owens, Margot Finn, and Mary BethCombs. This work will allow historians to disentangle specifically female experience fromthe general experience of investors and assess female behaviour against the threatening andmocking stereotypes.

Gender rightly takes a central place but needs to be set in the context of family and oflife cycle. Gender tends to be a category rather than a relationship in these essays. There

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was a powerful tension between women, especially married women, as actors under the lawof equity and under the common law.There needs to be a closer examination of the ‘trust’which provided many middle-class women with access to investment by the period coveredby these essays. Mrs Jane Hey was a widowed lady, living in Derbyshire during this period.She brought up her children on a trust income. For 30 years she bombarded her uncle andcousin (male trustees) with her views and knowledge. The relationship was neither one ofequality nor of simple subordination. In the urban industrial communities of the periodaround 15 per cent of property was held in such trusts.Those who managed and dependedupon them were responding to the understandings created by the processes examined inthese essays. More attention needs to be given to individuals, men and women, takingdecisions, as they responded to these texts and signs, and contemplated the choice betweeninvesting in houses and other forms of real property, or personal loans within the family,or mortgages brokered by solicitors as well as the shares and life insurances (R. J. Morris,Men, women and property (2005); Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Public lives (2003);and Finn, ‘Women, consumption and coverture in England, c.1760–1860’, HistoricalJournal (1996)).

These cultural processes are crucial to historical understanding but they need to beexamined in association with economic and social relationships. Ironically, it is one of theliterary essays that is most satisfying in this respect. Here Schmitt reads Conrad’s Nostromoin association with Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins’s well-known economic history. It isa small model of what might be achieved.

r. j. morrisEdinburgh University

Sean O’Connell, Credit and community: working-class debt in the UK since 1880 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 305. ISBN 9780199263318 Hbk. £55/$110)

The quest for respectability lies at the heart of the history of working-class credit. Boththose engaged in the supply of consumer credit and their customers have been the subjectof moral opprobrium and societal disapproval.The providers of credit have been describedas, at best, ‘fringe capitalists’, or at worst, ‘loan sharks’. At the same time, the working-classconsumer, frequently female, has historically been the target of middle-class disapproval.The association of ‘tallymen’ with sharp practices and the sexual exploitation of housewivesled to them renaming themselves ‘credit drapers’ in the nineteenth century and, from the1920s, ‘credit traders’. Working-class women have been criticized for their supposedextravagance and alleged tendency to spend money on luxuries that should have been usedto provide necessities for their families. O’Connell’s timely study of working-class debt inthe UK since 1880 traces the history of forms of credit that have been traditionallydependent on personal relationships, whether provided by commercial lenders or thecooperative movement. This work describes the history of ‘traditional’ forms of working-class credit and includes chapters on tallymen, check trading, mail order catalogues, moneylending, doorstep lending, formal and informal cooperative credit, and the renewed hopefor mutuality offered by credit unions.The book follows the history of these forms of creditinto the era of postwar affluence during which tallymen and check traders moved intomoney lending as the ‘cream’ of their traditional market drifted away to new forms ofcredit. It also contrasts such commercial forms of credit with formal and informal coop-erative alternatives, ending with a chapter on credit unions, which have been championedas an alternative to expensive commercial credit and described as ‘the poor man’s bank’.

O’Connell has previously co-authored a history of mail order retailing in Britain. In thecurrent volume he places this form of credit in the context of doorstep lending, surveyingthe growth of other forms of commercial lending to the working class. He builds on

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previous studies in this area, particularly those by Margot Finn and myself. However,O’Connell extends and deepens our understanding of the growth of credit trading,particularly through his use of the business records of several significant companies. Thestudy also makes use of oral histories collected in Belfast conducted both with individualswho worked in the consumer credit industry and their customers.This is a book with manystrengths, not least in its discussion of the legislative context of credit trading. As with thebest historical writing, the narrative adeptly balances cultural and material factors, neverlosing sight of the poverty shaping the lives of the majority of those described. Thus,O’Connell notes that, despite the higher levels of disposable income of consumers in thepostwar period, habit was significant in initially maintaining the connection betweencustomer and check trader.

The author brings out the ways in which credit relationships were structured not only byclass, but also by gender, ethnicity, and religion. As he demonstrates, credit relations werehighly gendered.The growth of mail order credit during the interwar years was due to thefeminization of this form of credit, as this enabled the companies to exploit femalesociability. Illegal money lending was also based on gendered social networks.The descrip-tion of the credit union movement is particularly valuable as it offers a multinational andmulti-ethnic perspective on its development. O’Connell traces the movement’s develop-ment in Ireland where Catholic social action played an important role in the growth ofcredit unions in the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, the association of credit unionswith the Catholic Church proved to be a barrier to its adoption by the Protestantcommunity in Northern Ireland. In Britain, the creation of the credit union movementowed much to both Irish Catholic andWest Indian immigrants who drew upon experiencesin their homelands. However, as O’Connell points out, it seems likely that the strongpresence of West Indians in the movement identified the movement as alien in the mindsof white Britons. In fact, the discussion of credit unions in this volume not only adds muchto our understanding of the history of this movement, but also offers much food forthought, not just for historians and social scientists, but for policy makers too. As theauthor points out, the initial optimism about the ability of credit unions to rescue poorcommunities from doorstep lenders has gradually given way to the realization that themovement has not yet proven itself fully capable of achieving this goal. However, the needfor a practical solution to the problem of financial exclusion is more urgent than ever as thecurrent credit crisis illustrates. O’Connell has produced a valuable addition to the literaturewhich adds much to our understanding of this topic.

avram taylorNorthumbria University

Daniel M. Jackson, Popular opposition to Irish Home Rule in Edwardian Britain (Liverpool:Liverpool University Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 288. 15 figs. ISBN 9781846311987 Hbk.£65/$95)

A welcome trend in recent treatments of Irish politics in Britain has been to focus onpopular engagement with Home Rule. Eugenio Biagini’s latest book, British democracy andIrish nationalism 1867–1906 (2007), argues that Home Rule was a substantial plank ofpopular liberal politics at the end of the nineteenth and very beginning of the twentiethcentury, helping humanitarian sentiment to become part of the political mainstream.Jackson’s book examines the Unionist flip-side to Biagini’s Home Rule liberals, arguingthat opposition to Home Rule was a key part of late-Edwardian popular politics. SituatingIrish politics firmly within a broader British context, Jackson succeeds in suggesting thathistorians should place Unionist opposition to Home Rule on a par with socialism,syndicalism, and suffragism as key concerns of the years leading up to the Great War.

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The book’s historiographical point of departure is Alvin Jackson’s claim that Home Rulepolitics (both pro and anti) was unpopular in England. Structured around a narrative of SirEdward Carson’s campaigns in Britain from 1912 to 1914, Jackson explores how thesetours engaged with popular Unionist, Protestant, and imperial politics, demonstrating the‘passionate reaction of ordinary Britons’ (p. 15) to the Home Rule crisis. The book isbrimful of detail, making exhaustive use of the provincial press to reconstruct a blow-by-blow account of Carson’s visits to various towns and cities across the country. Thismeticulous examination of Carson’s travels, the crowds that met him and the enormousmeetings held in the Unionist cause, however, is central to the book’s argument; Jacksonsuggests that, in the Edwardian era, crowds and their behaviour were a crucial part ofpolitics and that the performative elements of Carson’s demonstrations deserve consider-ation. Indeed, a salient feature of this book is its use of newspaper photographs to illustratethis argument, such as those printed by the Liverpool press of the vast crowds that metCarson at the Pier Head on a rainy Sunday morning in September 1912. Jackson’scomparison of Unionist political theatre to interwar fascism, although tempting given theirshared passion for torch-lit processions, feels a little stretched and raises F. X. Martin’s oldcanard that described militant Unionism in this period as proto-fascist.

Examining Unionist activism from 1912 to 1914, Jackson fleshes out Ewen Green’sanalysis of how conservatives used Protestantism and defence of the union as counters toLiberal social reform and Lloyd George’s land campaign, demonstrating the traction of‘militant Carsonism’ (p. 22) in popular politics. Chapter 1 examines how Ulster Unionistslearnt the lessons of the large, well-choreographed demonstration at Craigavon duringSeptember 1911 and sought to apply them to Britain in the years that followed. Buildingon the important work of Don MacRaild in this field, this chapter establishes the inter-connected nature of the ‘Northern British industrial zone’, not just in economics, but alsoin politics. Jackson rightly identifies the members of the Irish Protestant diaspora whoinhabited this zone as strongly amenable to anti-Home Rule politics and keen to mobilizein defence of the Union. The next four chapters follow Carson’s progress around Britain,from the Edwardian citadel of popular Protestantism, Liverpool, to more religiouslycontested cities, such as Glasgow, Leeds, and Norwich. Chapter 3 (‘Echoes of Midlothian’)details Carson’s first round tour of Britain during the summer of 1913, identifyingCarson’s exploitation of popular sectarianism, the emergence of the British League of theSupport of Ulster and the Union, and the mobilization of Unionist women campaigners asindicators of evolving support for Unionism. In the final two chapters, Jackson designateslate 1913 and 1914 as marking the height of popular Unionism, arguing that the Britishpublic’s response to such Unionist set-pieces as the Curragh ‘mutiny’ and the Larnegun-running in 1914 was effusive, culminating in a mass rally in Hyde Park in support ofthe Curragh officers and the signing of a British Covenant (echoing the Ulster Covenantof 1912 that cohered Unionism at the beginning of the Home Rule crisis) by up to1.5 million people. Jackson conveys convincingly the fevered atmosphere of the summer of1914, when armed resistance to Home Rule by Unionists in both Ireland and Britainappeared likely and infected such upright, respectable characters as Leo Amery’s dentist.

This book argues that the late Edwardian era was the last period in which ‘Irelandseriously mattered in British politics’ (p. 243). Importantly, Jackson indicates the continuingtraction of sectarianism in British politics, rightly returning anti-Catholic politics to itsplace in mainstream political activity at the very end of the long nineteenth century.Although focused on a case study of Carson, this is a vital contribution to our understand-ing of the interconnections of Irish and British politics and suggests how a study of Irishpolitical activism in Britain can add considerably to our understanding of broader politicalculture at the beginning of the twentieth century.

d. a. j. macphersonUniversity of Bristol

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Frederic Lee, A history of heterodox economics: challenging the mainstream in the twentiethcentury (London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Pp. x + 354. 39 tabs. ISBN9780415777148 Hbk. £75/$125)

The heart of this book is an account of the history of certain groups of heterodoxeconomics (primarily post-Keynesian, marxist, and radical economics) in the US andBritain since the 1960s.This is based on participant observation (Lee has been active in themovements he discusses), on quantitative analysis of citations, publications, and member-ship lists, and on archival sources. The result is a rich picture of these groups thatconstitutes a mine of information for anyone interested in the subject. However, the bookis not just an exercise in intellectual history, for Lee, as the driving force behind thecreation of the Association of Heterodox Economics (AHE), wants to make the case for aparticular conception of heterodox economics. For Lee, this is premised on the notion thatheterodox economics involves complete rejection of the mainstream. Outside that sharply-defined boundary he argues both that heterodox economists have developed a pluralisticapproach and that they should do so: this is the basis for the case that there is a meaningfulentity that can be described as heterodox economics.

The most valuable parts of the book, which alone make it worth reading, are thosedealing with the emergence of heterodox movements within economics in the US andBritain in the 1960s and 1970s. In the US, Lee covers radical economics, interpreted asmarxism and the New Left, out of which the Union of Radical Political Economy (URPE)emerged in 1968.There follow histories of the establishment of post-Keynesian economicsbetween 1971 and 1995, and of the building up of heterodox economics in the 1970s. Aparallel story is told for Britain, centred on the Conference of Socialist Economists (CSE),which began in 1970 and the building of a post-Keynesian-heterodox identity distinct fromthe marxism of the CSE.The value of the book lies in the detailed sociological analysis ofinstitutions and the networks of economists involved. In the case of post-Keynesianeconomics, the account draws heavily on the fascinating correspondence between JoanRobinson and Alfred Eichner that Lee edited and published a few years ago. There aredifferences between the two countries, notably that workers’ education movements had animportance in Britain that it appears not to have had in the US, and that a small numberof marxists could survive in top British universities in a way that was impossible in the US.However, in both, the story is of a tiny, beleaguered minority managing to establish afoothold in the discipline, culminating in the intellectual and organizational comingtogether of heterodox approaches represented by the AHE.

The section on Britain includes two chapters on the Research Assessment Exercise(RAE), covering its impact on heterodox economics and its role in establishing a main-stream within economics. (It is worth noting that, though Lee focuses on heterodoxeconomics, many of his criticisms would be echoed by economists doing applied work thatwould not meet his criteria for heterodoxy.) This leads on to a discussion of rankings.However, rather than arguing for a principled rejection of rankings (which would not havebeen surprising), he develops a method for ranking departments according to their supportfor heterodox economics. When applied to Britain, universities appear in an order that isvery different from those emerging from the RAE.

The result is a book that, in my view, is very uneven. His account of neo-classicaleconomics should be treated with considerable scepticism, for the history of dissent withineconomics is much more complex than he claims. Lee is too committed to his heterodoxperspective whose story he is telling to be willing to historicize the question of what hasbeen considered good economic analysis, which is the key to understanding the boundariesof work that is taken seriously in leading journals and departments. The most importantdissenters arguably come not from heterodox economics, as Lee understands the term, butfrom within the mainstream—figures such as George Akerlof, Amartya Sen, Herbert

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Simon, and Joseph Stiglitz. In my view, Lee’s analysis in terms of blasphemy does no morethan clarify the beliefs that motivate Lee’s own role in the movement whose history he haswritten. On the other hand, where Lee focuses on heterodox groups, writing a sociologi-cally informed history, the book contains much that is valuable, clearly embodying, as heexplains at the outset, many years of labour. The institutional and statistical informationalone would be difficult to compile from other sources. For someone, like this reviewer, oldenough to have encountered many of the people and organizations he discusses, but tooyoung and too much of an outsider to know the full story, it is fascinating to see the jigsawbeing pieced together.

roger e. backhouseUniversity of Birmingham/Erasmus University Rotterdam

Guy Ortolano, The two cultures controversy: science, literature and cultural politics in postwarBritain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. 308. 2 illus. ISBN9780521892049 Hbk. £55/$99)

As an astonished observer of F. R. Leavis’s 1962 onslaught on C. P. Snow and all his works,I wondered then what was driving it. Now Ortolano has published a full-scale study of the‘two cultures’ controversy and its role in the cultural politics of the 1960s. Ortolano’saccount is an excellent piece of work, well-structured and encompassing a mass of carefullyresearched detail that really illuminates the contemporary context of the Snow-Leaviscontroversy.

Why should readers of the Review be interested in a re-run of this episode of culturalpolitics? Chapters 1 and 2 are valuable for charting the prior careers of Snow and Leavisrespectively, and for expounding their distinctive philosophies. Snow is identified as atechnocratic liberal; Leavis as a prophet of radical liberalism.The reader is thus alerted toviews that the two men shared, such as their mutual commitment to a meritocratic societyand elitism, as well as the many fundamental points on which they differed.

However, the real interest for economic historians comes in the later chapters, in whichOrtolano draws out the connections of the controversy with three contemporary debatesabout economic history.The first is the famous ‘standard of living’ debate sparked by T. S.Ashton (chapter 4). Snow wanted to establish that science-based industrialization andurbanization had improved the lives of the bulk of the population. Leavis dismissed thisreading of the nineteenth century as a complacent simplification of a transition of poignantcomplexity. Snow then made common cause with Peter Laslett’s introduction of statisticalmethods into historical demography, while Leavis found himself sympathizing withEdward Thompson’s critique of the pretensions of social scientific history, despite hatingThompson’s socialist politics.

The second linkage Ortolano makes is to the thesis of British economic decline (chapter5), which took canonical form in the 1980s in the writings of MartinWiener. Earlier, Snowhad warned repeatedly of Britain’s imminent economic decline, unless greater prioritywere given to the promotion of science and technology.This theme was eventually taken upby HaroldWilson, who made Snow a minister in his newly formed Ministry ofTechnology.Leavis, for his part, sided with Michael Polanyi and others in decrying any attempt by thestate to plan science. He conceived of national greatness as re-imagining national purposein terms other than those of material expansion, which he ridiculed as dreams of ‘jamtomorrow’.

Ortolano’s third linkage is with the literature on post-colonial economic development(chapter 6). Snow’s belief in the mass welfare benefits of industrialization brought himclose to the modernization theory of development, for example W. W. Rostow’s ‘stages’ ofeconomic growth. Although not motivated by Rostow’s anti-communist agenda, Snow

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wanted large-scale transfers of capital and personnel to Asia and Africa. Leavis againchallenged the premise, asking whether a bushman or an Indian peasant is not just as fullyalive as any member of a modern society, and found solace in the conservative developmenteconomics of Peter Bauer.

In tracing these connections, Ortolano emphasizes that the Snow–Leavis encounter wasnot really about the gulf between science and the literary arts. Rather it was a clash of twoideologies, the technocratic world view colliding with its radical liberal critics. Ortolano’sresearch certainly suffices to uphold the view that the clash was not just about scienceversus the arts, and this is pre-eminently the contribution of this book. However, it mighttempt the reader to conclude that the Snow–Leavis bout had nothing whatever to do withthe science–arts opposition. That would be a mistake.

Ortolano gives us widescreen, wrap-around cultural history of postwar Britain. It is quitedetached from what had gone before, and thus does not address Eric Hobsbawm’s recentcontention that ‘in a sense the [Snow–Leavis] debate was about the 1930s’ (London Reviewof Books, 26 Feb. 2009, p. 19). David Edgerton had a similar interpretation when he calledSnow’s account of science ‘antiquated in style and substance; [Snow] was a technocratwith the past in his bones’ (Warfare state (2006), p. 200). Of this past we learn little fromOrtolano except for occasional paragraphs (pp. 33–4, 173–4).The encounter then appearssimply as the contest of two Cambridge men with contrasting liberal ideologies.

Chapter 7 traces the decline of the ‘meritocratic moment’, but what about tracing therole of scientists in its previous rise to dominance? Glancing across from Cambridge toOxford might also have helped. Before the Second World War, no scientist had been thehead of an Oxford College since Charles I imposed William Harvey on Merton College in1645–6. In 1942, Sir Henry Tizard, Rector of Imperial College London, was electedPresident of Magdalen College, but did not thrive there. Ironically, his chief supporter wasA. J. P. Taylor who, when later writing his English History, 1914–45 (1965), told thepublisher: ‘I don’t think I shall include science—I don’t understand it’ (Kathleen Burk,Troublemaker (2000), p. 303). Two cultures—or what?

john toyeUniversity of Oxford

Sheryllynne Haggerty, Anthony Webster, and Nicholas J. White, eds., The empire in onecity? Liverpool’s inconvenient imperial past (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008.Pp. xiv + 237. 4 figs. 10 plates. 16 tabs. ISBN 9780719078873 Hbk. £55/$89.95)

The chapters in this collection derive from a conference held at the Merseyside Mari-time Museum in 2006. The agenda, reasserted by the editors in their introduction, wasthat historians of Liverpool should recognize the importance of empire in the develop-ment of the city, and that historians of empire need to pay more attention to the role ofLiverpool. It is suggested that Liverpool’s transatlantic connections and even its involve-ment in the slave trade have been over-emphasized at the expense of other imperialconnections. Paradoxically, Liverpool has also been interpreted too much as the centreof global activities, and the city’s specific imperial operations have been noted too little.Hence the title The empire in one city is offered—in preference to Liverpool’s now pre-ferred tag ‘The world in one city’. The force of this distinction is less than it might seem,since the editors and some of the essays include informal empire within the scope of theinquiry.

That the volume is intended to open a debate is implied by the question mark whichfollows the first part of the title, although it seems to be expunged by the assertion inthe second. In fact, some of the chapters answer the question posed, if at all, in nuancedfashion. For instance, Haggerty’s business history of Liverpool’s slave trade c.1750–75 is

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principally concerned to demonstrate that the slave trade was commercially a high-riskenterprise and that a diversity of trading operations was a more secure way to make andretain a profit. Webster’s chapter addresses the issue more directly by demonstrating howbetween 1800 and 1850 Liverpool merchants lobbied politically (and, in due course,profitably) to break into Asian markets, inside and outside the formal empire. Thischapter also concludes that the London-centric thesis of ‘gentlemanly capitalism’advanced by Peter Cain and Anthony Hopkins therefore needs to take more account ofprovincial enterprise. By contrast, Rory Miller and Robert Greenhill argue that between1850 and 1928 the many Liverpool companies engaged in the city’s once hugely impor-tant trade with South America were persuaded for financial and political reasons to shifttheir headquarters to London, implicitly reducing Liverpool’s imperial connections.Likewise, White, though looking at a still later period, 1945–73, shows how the Oceangroup of companies responded to the political and economic challenges caused bydecolonization and nationalism in east and south-east Asia by moving the centre ofoperations to London, and by diversifying into other markets and businesses, leavingLiverpool the poorer. Stephanie Decker’s chapter on John Holt & Co. from 1945 to2006 is only a partial modification to this story of disengagement. The company, firstfounded in Liverpool in 1897 and in 1969 absorbed by Lonrho, may have becomefree-standing in 2001, but its headquarters in Liverpool thereafter employed only adozen people whereas its subsidiary in Nigeria employed 900. Moreover, the terms onwhich it operated do not invite a positive answer to the question posed in the chapter’stitle: ‘Return to imperial trade?’

Other chapters address the social and cultural impact of empire on Liverpool. MurraySteele describes local participation in imperial exhibitions, celebrations, and royal eventsbetween 1886 and 1953; and with respect to Liverpudlians he rejects Bernard Porter’snotion that they were ‘absent-minded imperialists’, a conclusion which disturbs thecommon view that Liverpool was the location of a left-wing and implicitly anti-imperialist culture. A subtle chapter by Zachary Kingdon and Dmitri van den Bersselaarfocuses on the African cultural artefacts collected by what is now the World MuseumLiverpool. They acknowledge that the interpretation placed by curators on these objectswas affected by imperial ideologies, but more importantly they show that many pieceswere offered by Africans, as gifts and trade goods. Africans therefore had agency in theirmaking and distribution. However, this chapter does not consider what role the collec-tions may have had in disseminating imperial values. John Herson goes further in ques-tioning cultural impacts, by concluding that in spite of the millions passing throughLiverpool from 1825 to 1913 this was not a cosmopolitan or ‘diasporic city’. Emigrants,mainly Irish or Continental Europeans, apparently made little mark locally. However,with respect to immigrants, his use of census data for the whole of the city tends tounderemphasize their localized concentrations, and there is not the space to explore thesocial and cultural impact of such minorities. This is something which Diane Frost doesattempt by describing and explaining social hostility to white women, especially those inthe Liverpool 8 district, whose partners were black men. Here—and not uniquely toLiverpool—may be seen a legacy of empire (though racism is not confined to westerncultures).

The chapters in this book are selective in their themes and diverse in their approachesand conclusions. John MacKenzie in his ‘Afterword’ reviews what has been offered.Whilehe concludes that Liverpool ‘was and indeed is, in many ways, an imperial city’ (p. 226),he also sets out an attractive agenda for further research.The promotion of fresh thinkingand more inquiry is indeed the purpose of the book as a whole.

stephen constantineLancaster University

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GENERAL

Jacob Soll, The information master: Jean-Baptiste Colbert’s secret state intelligence system (AnnArbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 277. 11 illus. ISBN 9780472116904Hbk. £55.50/$65)

This extraordinary intellectual history of Colbert’s statecraft, which eschews historiogra-phy’s traditionally economic emphasis in favour of a cultural history of knowledge, willsurprise many. Aiming to ‘bring to light the traditions that Colbert harnessed for govern-ment’ (p. 2), it focuses on the encounter between mercantile practicality and eruditehumanism, whose fusion gave rise to the modern art of government.

The introductory chapter, of likely interest to a very wide readership, describes the riseof an expert culture of knowledge, economic and historical, and its role in the developmentof state information-systems, from the city-states of Renaissance Italy to the Europeanempires of the seventeenth century and, of course, the Catholic Church. Surveying thisvast topic, Soll is careful to point out the importance and limitations of early modern ‘webs’of knowledge and their governmental applications. Homing in on France, Soll demon-strates how feudal remnants in the administration meant that official papers still belongedto individual officeholders rather than the office itself, even under Richelieu, and thatFrance had thus failed to develop ‘a state bureaucracy in the Weberian sense’ (p. 29).Thischanged with Colbert, whom we follow from relatively humble beginnings to his death asone of the most powerful men in Europe. With great verve, Soll recreates Colbert’sinstitutional and intellectual ecology, his habits, and the practices he imposed upon hisnetwork of informants and analysts, his family, and even Louis XIV.

Apart from his better-known efforts to organize the Kingdom’s finances, Colbert’sproject was, for Soll, gathering all conceivably relevant information into one cataloguedand searchable system of information. This could include anything from details of manu-facturing production in distant provinces to the state of competing nations to possibilitiesfor commercial expansion in the colonies, though Soll emphasizes Colbert’s lack ofcuriosity with regard to colonial issues not directly related to institutionalized categories ofpaperwork (p. 115). Colbert’s construction of one of the world’s greatest archival libraries,and his incessant work to foster networks for knowledge gathering, produced an informa-tion hub akin to a ‘state research institute’ on the model of Solomon’s House in Bacon’sNew Atlantis (p. 97). From that hub, his administration sought, not always successfully, topolice the intellectual world of France. Initially, it would seem that all this was to unravelwith Colbert’s sudden death, with rival factions wresting away control of the powerembedded in his information matrix, but his efforts actually bequeathed to the world alegacy of government technologies.

The information master eloquently challenges our conception of the rise of the centralizedstate in seventeenth-century Europe and radically changes our understanding of the‘tenuous symbiosis’ between a growing ‘public sphere’ and the exigencies of secrecy ineffective statecraft. Having produced something like a cultural history of political economy,Soll is able to conclude that ‘Colbert’s legacy was not necessarily mercantilism, but ratherhis vision of learned administration’ (p. 162). ‘Colbertism’, he concludes, ‘should bedefined as the idea that a large-scale state would need to centralize and harness encyclo-pedic knowledge to govern effectively, and that all knowledge, formal and practical, couldbe used together in one archival system to understand and master the material world’(p. 163). Soll skilfully presents the ‘affair of the Règale’ as a case study of how successfullythis system could be harnessed for Louis XIV’s political purposes, yet while this certainlyjustifies his argument, it would have been valuable for Soll more explicitly to relate theinformation system to the economic policies that lionized Colbert at the time and that, forcenturies, have invested his name with such emotive power. How did catalogued reports of

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Stuart economic policy galvanize projects of industrial emulation in France, or summa-rized dispatches from Italy’s declining city-states inform Colbert’s conception of politicaleconomy? Economic development was doubtlessly a competitive endeavour at the time,and the mastery of information, Soll demonstrates, was no less contested, but the connec-tion between these two manifestations of early modern interstate competition is here onlyadumbrated. One can hope that, in a future work, he will demonstrate the importance ofinformation also for the more economic aspects of Colbert’s reign, thereby showing howthe ‘information master’ he has so masterfully revealed and the economic strategist oftraditional historiography were, in effect, different facets of the same, brilliant prism.

‘In another time and place’, Soll argues tellingly, ‘the Colberts might have been patri-cians in the mold of the Medicis’ (p. 34), and the analogy is apt. In Leon Battista Alberti’sc.1434 Della famiglia, Gianozzo compared the head of a Renaissance merchant family to a‘spider’ in its web. Colbert was the greatest spider of his time, spinning a ‘worldwide web’feeding the French state archives with constant streams of knowledge about domestic andinternational affairs.The rise and demise of this complex system, as well as its echoes in ourcontemporary politics of knowledge, cannot but interest us deeply. In weaving its splendidtale, Soll has done scholarship a great favour.

sophus a. reinertUniversity of Cambridge

André Burguière, The Annales School: an intellectual history (Ithaca and London: CornellUniversity Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 309. ISBN 9780801446658 Hbk. £24.95/$45)

This is an insider’s intellectual history. Burguière was appointed secrétaire de rédaction of theAnnales in 1969, at the age of 30, and has been a key figure on the journal ever since,serving as a full member of its editorial board from 1981. He has contributed no fewer than10 articles to the journal, including a piece on ‘The birth of the Annales’ to mark thejournal’s fiftieth birthday in 1979. His own work on rural society and family history isAnnaliste to the core: perhaps above all his first book, Bretons de Plozévet (1975), a longuedurée study of a village in Brittany and the fruit of a large-scale collaborative project. In thisnew study he refuses to identify an essence to the Annales approach to history: instead heemphasizes tensions (‘Agreements and disagreements’, chapter 2), change over time(‘From total history to global history’, chapter 6), and ‘moments’, such as ‘The Labroussemoment’ (chapter 5). He is also alive to challenges (‘Return to the political’, chapter 10)and uncertainties (‘Must we be done with mentalities?’, chapter 9).

Although this is the work of an insider and an Annaliste, it is not really an Annalisteintellectual history of the School. Where the Annales School has typically foregroundeddeep structures and disavowed a history based on great men, this study certainly attributesagency to the key figures—Marc Bloch, Lucien Febvre, Ernest Labrousse, and, of course,Fernand Braudel. It is thin on structural explanation. The rise to ascendancy of thisjournal, with its sharply-defined mission, owes a great deal to the structures and mentalitiesof French academic life: it would have been unimaginable in either Britain or the US, anda comparison with the fate of Past and Present would have been illuminating here. However,Burguière deliberately eschews the sociology of knowledge or the comparative perspectivesthat would have allowed him to delineate these structural conditions.

There are some revealing omissions. François Furet is one: not a surprising omission,but a very significant one. Furet was much more than an Annaliste, but he served aspresident of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales for eight years, and thegenesis of his hugely influential critique of the ‘revolutionary catechism’, itself published inthe first place in the Annales ESC, cannot be properly grasped except against the back-ground of the Annalistes’ traditional antipathy to French marxist historians’ obsession with

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the French Revolution. Interestingly, Furet, like Burguière, published no fewer than 10articles in the journal. This is a revealing illustration of an important fact about Frenchacademic politics: articles were (and are) placed in this journal not because of someassumed hierarchy of prestige, nor necessarily for reasons of narrow specialism, butessentially in order to declare the author’s allegiance to one academic clan rather thananother. Furet never published in the Annales Historiques de la Révolution Française, themajor journal of revolutionary history but also the house-journal of the so-called ‘marxist’school. Burguière’s book is curiously blinkered in showing no interest in placing theAnnales against the broader transformations of French intellectual and political life, and forme this is a weakness.

That said, this is a very good book which has original insights into what is, in many ways,a familiar story. Burguière’s most important contribution is his incisive analysis of thetensions between Bloch and Febvre, especially on the question of mentalités. Burguière alsogives a full account of the intellectual origins of the Annales project, and gives duerecognition not just to the obvious cast (Fustel de Coulanges and Durkheim, for example),but also to François Guizot, whose political career had the effect of obscuring his role inthe genesis of sociological history. Guizot is not so much as mentioned in previous studiesof the Annales—Peter Burke’s The French historical revolution (1990), for example, or StuartClark’s edition of The Annales School: critical assessments (4 vols., 1999). For Burguière,Guizot’s ‘conception of collective psychological realities governing both society’s operationand its historicity strikingly prefigured the notion of mentalities’ (p. 67).

What the reader will not glean from this book is that the Annales has suffered aspectacular decline in its international standing. Once it was the world’s pre-eminenthistorical journal, at least in terms of the impact of its approach to the discipline; but noone could now make that claim for it. The roots of this decline may go back a long way,suggested as early as 1986 by Lynn Hunt’s presciently traced ‘French history in the lasttwenty years: the rise and fall of the Annales paradigm’ (Journal of Contemporary History).However, it is now unmistakeable, and parallels the erosion of the prestige enjoyed byFrench historiography in the international historical profession.

h. s. jonesUniversity of Manchester

Peter Clark, European cities and towns, 400–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.Pp. xiii + 412. 6 figs. 8 tabs. ISBN 9780199562732 Hbk. £50/$100; ISBN9780198700548 Pbk. £19.99/$39.95)

Over the last generation a great deal of research has taken place on European urban history.The recent literature reflects the activities of a group of scholars, mostly European, whosemany conferences and colloquia have cut across national boundaries in a rapidly integrat-ing Europe. Of course, these ties and the participants are all urban, wherever they mayreside. Clark, sometime of Leicester and now active in Helsinki, has been one of the leadersin the movement, and his book promises to be a product of Europe’s new inter-urbanexchanges as well as a study of how the individual cities developed over the long run.

The organization of the volume is rather straightforward. The long period covered isdivided into three, with breaks in 1500 and 1800, and the continent into four regions alongcompass point lines. Of course, any division raises questions: in time, because Europe’scities did not develop in lock step; in space because Central Europe is awkwardly sub-sumed. Each part opens with a chapter devoted to overall trends (mainly growth and typeof towns) in the regions and sub-regions (nations); there follow chapters on the economy,social life (including demography), culture and landscape, and governance. Clark oftenfinds it useful to break up the treatment to cover sub-periods. While the structure chosenis clear and logical, it does result in a certain amount of repetition.

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The economic historian will, if this reader’s response is typical, note an emphasis onmid-level generalizations rather than sweeping arguments. Clark’s main concern is with thevariety of urban experience, and the book abounds with illustrations of each point made aswell as of the inevitable qualifier to it.The examples have obviously been chosen to give awide and diverse slice through the historical record, and they are, to this reader, the bestthing in the book. Though the well-documented western core of Europe, from Italy toEngland, still furnishes its full share, Clark has laboured hard to incorporate the towns ofthe periphery, notably northern Europe. If one can quibble with this embarrassmentof riches, it is to wish that Clark had sometimes stopped to probe further into his nuggetsof fact or told us how we can know that they are so. One troubling feature of the book isits total absence of references, despite a fairly substantial (but unavoidably idiosyncratic)bibliography.

Subjectively, the balance between the economic historian’s central concerns and those ofcultural and political historians tilts rather toward the latter. Clark never forgets the humancosts of urban development, crisis, and strife, nor the people—new migrants, women,minorities, the poor generally—who mostly pay them. If anything he seems to me to slightthe opportunities urban life promised and often delivered, and thus the role of urban pull(versus rural push) in motivating migration. Perhaps as a result, he attaches great impor-tance to institutions—voluntary and coercive, religious and secular—aimed at controlling,assimilating, or assisting turbulent and needy urban populations.

Early on, Clark asserts that ‘cities have been an essential driving force in Europeantransformation’ (p. 13). One very much wants to agree, and indeed to make this theme acore concern of European urban history. Not only does the region’s path-breaking mod-ernization constitute an inescapable centrepiece of its history, but in addition the role ofcities in the process turns out to be rather elusive. On the one hand, the innovations thatmany agree underpin the transformation, from the rise of knowledge (books, science, massliteracy) to commerce (credit, joint-stock companies, accounting) and institutions(markets, banks, limited government) were resolutely urban. Yet not only did the urbanproportion of Europe’s population not increase materially during the early modern run-upto industrialization, but many crucial developments, such as manufacturing for a massmarket and convertible husbandry, took place in rural areas. Cities, meanwhile, oftenfought to retain traditional controls on markets and worried about the dislocation that anindustrial proletariat, or even the railway, might threaten. It is therefore disappointing thatthe book does not really tackle the question explicitly.

In sum, then, Clark offers a richly detailed, if necessarily broad survey of a complexhistory. Informative and well written, it would nonetheless be more compelling if he hadengaged more boldly with the ideas as well as the factual material in recent scholarship.

paul m. hohenbergRensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Richard A. Goldthwaite, The economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, MD: JohnsHopkins University Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 649. 2 figs. 5 maps. 12 tabs. ISBN9780801889820 Hbk. £29/$55)

Goldthwaite, the leading economic historian of renaissance Florence, is best known for Thebuilding of Renaissance Florence (1980) and Wealth and the demand for art in Italy, 1300–1600(1993).The former challenged the dominant interpretation of Florentine economic historyas established by Robert Lopez, who had argued that elite spending on culture wassymptomatic of huge wealth inequalities and ultimately damaged the Florentine economy,bringing the Renaissance to an early end. Goldthwaite rejected the notion that thefifteenth-century economy underwent a crisis, and argued instead that significant levels of

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disposable wealth found their way into investments in art and architecture which eventuallyenriched the artisan class and spread throughout society. One reviewer in 1981 referred tothis as a ‘trickle-down theory’.

This new book represents the culmination of Goldthwaite’s distinguished researchcareer, reinforcing his overall interpretation of Florentine economic history while rootinghis views in a broader chronological and geographic context. The broad story told here isone of Florentine commercial, industrial, and financial success over the course of a periodof five centuries during which Florence’s economy made a number of important shifts. Insome ways the first three chapters of the book annotate and expand Lopez’s The commercialrevolution of the middle ages (1971) from a Florence-centred perspective, carrying the storybeyond 1350. These chapters, which constitute the first half of the book, focus on thestructures (the firm, the florin, geographic networks, credit instruments, governmentfinance) of the city’s international merchant-banking systems between the thirteenth andthe sixteenth centuries. The book’s second half, ‘The urban economy’, explores the wooland silk industries in Florence, the city’s artisans and workers, local banking structures,public policy and the economy, the Tuscan regional economy, and wealth distribution inFlorence. In his conclusion, Goldthwaite criticizes the picture created by historians whohave focused on moments of Florentine economic crisis at various points between thefourteenth and sixteenth centuries, demonstrating that, if taken as a composite, theseepisodes would amount to an almost constant downturn from the early fourteenth centuryuntil 1600. The book as a whole uses a variety of sources and arguments to showconvincingly that, despite occasional setbacks, the Florentine economy remained persis-tently healthy between 1100 and 1600.

Goldthwaite’s discussion of Florence’s economic fortunes is attentive to geography andto the spatial configuration of human and material resources. The growth of the woolindustry in Florence was driven by import substitution and was facilitated by the resourcesmade available by the Arno River.The need for grain to feed the city’s growing populationof wool workers (and the search for markets and raw materials to support that industry)initially pushed Florentine traders to develop commercial networks abroad. These net-works enabled Florence’s merchants to establish themselves as international bankers aswell, setting up greater numbers of international offices than their rivals.The absence of aninternational emporium in Florence itself, whichTuscan geography rendered a ‘peripheral’location, was another incentive to internationalize. In the fifteenth century, Florentineartists established patronage relationships abroad, and this cultural diaspora accounted forthe city’s artistic pre-eminence.

Goldthwaite is interested in the ‘spirit of capitalism’ that animated Florentines, butacknowledges that the city’s economic sensibilities were also medieval and corporatist.Thismindset began to change after the late sixteenth century, when the Medici dukes began toplay a more interventionist economic role, distinguishing the Renaissance from the earlymodern period. Goldthwaite calls for precise studies of the ways in which the political andeconomic interests of the Florentine elite informed each other, wondering whether politicalfactions were sharpened by conflicting economic interests. One of the strengths ofthis book is its identification of a host of such questions, surprisingly left open by thehistoriography. The author also synthesizes a great deal of recent secondary literatureon Florentine economic history, providing an overview without equal in the existinghistoriography (though the absence of a separate bibliography is a drawback).

This account leaves a few questions open. On the one hand, Goldthwaite seems toassume that the key element of a given economy is its export sector; indeed, the bulk of thebook is dedicated to detailed analysis of two key exports: textiles and commercial-financialservices. However, in his discussion of the contraction of the city’s international networkduring the sixteenth century, he argues that this did not necessarily weaken the Florentineeconomy as a whole. This leads one to wonder how Goldthwaite conceives of the relative

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importance of different sectors of the Florentine economy during the period studied.There is very little here on agriculture or the land market (eight pages in total): even if only43 per cent of the rich had more wealth in land than in other investments (see p. 567), thisis still a significant amount, and might have merited more attention.

matthew vesterWestVirginia University

Martin Dean, Robbing the Jews: the confiscation of Jewish property in the Holocaust, 1933–1945(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. x + 437. 6 illus. ISBN9780521888257 Hbk. £45/$60)

Dean’s study of Aryanization and confiscation in Nazi-occupied Europe is an importantcontribution to the extensive literature on the Holocaust. Drawing on a wealth of publishedlocal, regional, and national studies, Dean provides readers with an encyclopedic overviewof the wartime seizure of Jewish wealth and property. However, the study is not only avaluable synthesis of a large secondary literature. It also draws upon a wide variety ofGerman sources, as well as Dean’s earlier research into the occupied USSR. Arrangedbroadly chronologically and geographically, Dean begins in Germany in the 1930s, movingout from there to Austria, the occupied Soviet territories, occupied western Europe, thesatellite states in central and southern Europe, before finishing in Switzerland. With sucha broad geographical scope, there are some places, for example Poland, that are ratherneglected. However, this is, in the main, an extremely comprehensive study of the evolutionof Aryanization and confiscation policies within the Reich and elsewhere in occupiedEurope.These policies were a massive bureaucratic undertaking. Between 1933 and 1938,an estimated one-third of German Jewish wealth had been ‘eroded’ (p. 49) by the Nazistate.The radicalization of confiscations in the aftermath of the Anschluss and Kristallnachtpogrom in 1938, meant that, as Dean memorably notes, ‘by 1939, not even the silvercutlery in the cupboard was safe from the legalized depredations of the Nazi state’ (p. 127).In the aftermath of the mass deportations, the homes of deported German Jews and theircontents were auctioned, with large numbers of financial officials in the process benefitingfrom purchases made at low prices.While individuals could, and did, benefit from buyingformer Jewish owned goods, it seems that the Reich profited little given the costs of thebureaucracy of confiscations.

Moving away from the Reich, Dean points to the efficiency of confiscations in theNetherlands compared to those allies of Nazi Germany where there was greater localautonomy. Although Dean provides less on the ‘perspective of Jewish victims, who had todeal with mounting economic persecution on a daily basis’ (p. 2) than promised, he doespoint to the multiple ways in which the very public process of confiscations drew in a widerange of administrative and financial personnel and institutions, as well as the localpopulations both within and outside Germany. Aryanization and confiscations involvedeveryone from bankers, real estate agents, and stockbrokers, to police men, second-handbooksellers, and housewives. At times this led to competition between various agencies andcorruption.

Where Dean draws on primary sources within the study he is quick to note that the sheerquantity of paperwork means that he has not worked with a representative sample butrather examples ‘that serve to reveal the main processes at work’ (p. 5). He introduces casesfrom the archives throughout with wording such as, ‘some idea . . . can be gleaned fromthe case of . . .’ (p. 63), ‘. . . is a good example’ (p. 68) or ‘this case demonstrates severalof the main hindrances to . . .’ (pp. 72–3). Although Dean is explicit about not offeringrepresentative samples, my sense is that introducing examples this way does tend to suggestthat they are broadly representative.

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Although primarily concerned with how policies evolved, Dean does touch on the biggerquestion why. While he is convincing in pointing to the importance of economic anti-Semitism and opportunism alongside racial ideology in explaining the Holocaust, he israther less so in demonstrating that the ‘seizure of property acts as an important catalyst inaccelerating the downward spiral across the threshold to genocide’ (p. 15). There aresuggestive hints of this here, with Dean pointing to the close links between the seizure ofJewish property in the occupied Soviet Union and the extermination programme. Forexample, Enisatzgruppe A were reporting the delivery of over 30,000 items to Berlin inJanuary 1942 from Jewish apartments in Lithuania including 2,850 teaspoons (p. 194).Dean also signals the ways in which confiscations reduced Jewish chances for survival,claiming that the ‘seizure of Jewish property was not just a byproduct of Nazi genocidalpolicies, but an integral part of the murder process’ (p. 221). However these links arepointed to rather than fully explored and analysed. Dean does demonstrate that confisca-tions did not simply follow deportations, but also preceded both deportations and killings.He is right to signal the need to integrate ‘private and state greed . . . into the narrative ofthe Holocaust’ (p. 395), but the ways in which economic concerns were a ‘catalyst forgenocide’ (p. 379) are ones that require further detailed research. One key starting pointfor such research will be Dean’s impressively wide-ranging study.

tim coleUniversity of Bristol

David Marsh, The Euro: the politics of the new global currency (New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 2009. Pp. xii + 340. 22 illus. ISBN 9780300127300 Hbk. £25/$35)

In 2008, the European Central Bank celebrated 10 years of existence with a distinct air oftriumph. Jean-ClaudeTrichet was justified in crowing a bit about putting to rest the doubtsthat had been expressed by his ‘friends across the water’ about the long-run viability of thesingle currency project. Those Anglo-American economists questioned the wisdom ofcreating a single currency for a set of sovereign nation-states that were at quite differentlevels of economic development, possessed distinctive fiscal regimes, and were exposed todifferent kinds of external shocks. Moreover, the initial members of the Eurozone had nooverarching political authority capable of redistributing resources among them to cushionshort-run shocks in the absence of flexible exchange rates or adjustable tariffs (see thediscussion in my The economics of Europe and the European Union, 2008).

Whatever the economic issues at stake, the political issues that arose with the reunifi-cation of Germany in 1990 proved decisive. Marsh provides detailed insights into thepolitical calculations, and recalculations, of the major French and German policy makersover the last 30 years that delayed the introduction of the euro until 1999 and that havedetermined the actions of the European Central Bank (ECB) until 2009. Interviews withmany of the advisors responsible for official documents provide Marsh with dramaticmaterial that goes well beyond the journalist accounts available to date. He develops indetail the underlying argument between the ‘economists’ and the ‘monetarists’ that devel-oped among Europeans whether economic convergence should precede political conver-gence or political convergence should precede economic convergence. Depending on one’sview, adoption of a single currency had to wait for economic convergence (the Germanview) or for political convergence (the French view). In the events that led up to theMaastricht Treaty of European Monetary Union in 1992, however, neither the economicnor the political convergence desired for a viable single currency had been achieved. Toexplain why the euro came into existence nevertheless requires us to understand thepolitical concerns of France and Germany in light of the sudden reunification of Germanyin 1990. Marsh focuses on these two powers to the exclusion of roles played by eitherBritain or the United States.

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Britain’s ignominious flight from the European Monetary System in 1992 removed itsinfluence over monetary developments in the European Union thereafter. Apparently theUS lost its influence even earlier than Britain when it let the BrettonWoods system collapseat the beginning of the 1970s. Future historians may find more evidence in the archives ofthe respective central banks to show more substantive financial influence by either theBritish or the Americans on the creation and subsequent course of the euro. In themeantime, Marsh has helped the current generation of economic historians to understandthe political backdrop of the birth and childhood of the new European currency created byFrance and Germany.

Marsh lays out the internal divisions within both the German and the French gov-ernments that led to the historic bargain struck between President Mitterrand of Franceand Chancellor Kohl of Germany—let Germany reunify on condition of giving up itscurrency in favour of a European currency administered by a European Central Bank.Powerful arguments and political interests were arrayed against such a bargain by figureswithin both governments. One of the strongest opponents of Mitterrand’s vision, ironi-cally enough, was Trichet, then director of the French Treasury. When he became gov-ernor of the Banque de France in September 1993, however, and realized the potentialof a central bank independent from the Ministry of Finance (and from a governmentplagued by cohabitation of a Socialist president and a Gaullist Prime Minister), Trichethad an epiphany that has driven him ever since. Marsh attributes much of the successof the ECB to Trichet’s governance since he became its head in 2003. An unnamedsource comments: ‘it is incomparably better to have a French ECB president carryingout a Bundesbank-style policy in Frankfurt than a German president carrying out aBanque de France-type policy in Paris—a possible outcome if the ECB had been locatedin France rather than in Germany’ (p. 226). To add to the irony, Trichet’s success hasgreatly strengthened the economic power of Germany within the European Union, adevelopment he opposed as a French Treasury official (as did Mitterrand). By the endof the book, when the worldwide financial crisis that began in 2007 was still deepeningand presenting fresh challenges to the ECB, Marsh makes a more measured and lessreassuring assessment than Trichet of the euro’s long-run viability in a world of flexibleexchange rates and capital mobility.

larry nealUniversity of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign/LondonSchool of Economics and Political Science

Jane Flaherty, The revenue imperative (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009. Pp. x + 229.7 tabs. ISBN 9781851968985 Hbk. £60/$99)

The ‘revenue imperative’ discussed in this book is the one that confronted the UnitedStates in 1861, when it was unclear whether the North would be able to surmount the fiscalchallenges raised by the CivilWar. As Flaherty puts it, ‘how do you pay for a war when yourvaults are nearly empty, your credit impaired and the “money” of the nation is comprisedof 7,000 different types of hole-ridden scraps of paper?’ (p. 59). As it shows how the Northcreated a fiscal system that helped it to win the war, this book investigates the role ofpartisan party politics in the making of that system. In this time of national crisis thatdemanded quick solutions, Flaherty concludes, Republican Party ideology took a back seatto pragmatism.

Drawn largely from Congressional debates and other published sources, Flaherty’sconcise account of US revenue policies in 1861–5 adds relatively little to what otherhistorians have already provided. Indeed, readers seeking a clearly written summary ofthose measures would be better off turning to another source, such as the relevant chapters

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in Heather Cox Richardson’s The greatest nation of the earth: Republican economic policiesduring the CivilWar (1997). While Flaherty mentions important economic measures suchas the creation of a national banking system and the North’s giant war bond drives, hermain subject is taxes. During the Civil War, Congress enacted significant increases in thetariff and excise taxes. In the summer of 1862, it also created two important new taxes: a3 per cent tax on manufactured goods and a graduated tax on individual incomes over$600 a year, with rates running from 3 to 7.5 per cent. Two years later, the tax onmanufactures was raised to 5 per cent, and the income tax rates were raised so that theyranged from 5 to 10 per cent. Although revenue from the increased tariffs and taxes wasslow to appear, by the end of the war it covered about a quarter of the North’s massive warexpenditures.

Flaherty argues that North’s wartime tax policies amounted to a pragmatic responseto an immediate crisis. Republicans in Congress and Treasury officials, she contends,responded to the revenue imperative with measures that were practical, not partisan.Flaherty supports this claim with the book’s most original substantive contribution: anextended discussion of government finance in the US and Britain during the centurybefore the Civil War. Employing this long-run perspective, the book explains how thedecentralized system of ‘fiscal federalism’ in antebellum America made large-scale warfinance difficult. It also shows that American legislators, when pressed with the Civil Waremergency, drew deliberately on British models to fashion new revenue measures suchas the income tax. More revolutionary alternatives, such as a national sales tax, wererejected. All in all, Flaherty concludes, the Republican politicians who crafted theNorth’s war revenue system ‘relied on well-established precedents, rather than a newideology’ (p. 130).

This central argument is convincing, but only if it is applied rather narrowly. Flahertyis right to suggest that some of the North’s revenue measures might have been enactedby any desperate nineteenth-century wartime government, regardless of the agenda ofthe party in power. Certainly, on the eve of the Civil War, few Republicans sought toerect the sort of graduated income tax system that would soon be adopted by the Northand South alike. However, many of the other economic measures that Congress passedduring the Civil War years, including the high tariff, were consistent with the Republi-cans’ partisan agenda of protectionism and national government spending on transportinfrastructure. The book’s strong claims about the irrelevance of ideology, in otherwords, do not apply to the whole of the North’s revenue system, let alone to the largerbody of wartime legislation.

This book helps point the way for future studies of the subject, which will benefitespecially from its emphasis on antebellum developments and transatlantic influences.There remains plenty of room for improvement and new research. Although parts of thisbook are nicely written, much of its prose is too choppy and repetitive to engage non-expertreaders. It contains some helpful quantitative analysis, such as charts that show long-runchanges in tariff rates, but it fails to provide other essential information, including annualfigures on various sources of wartime revenue. One of the greatest opportunities forscholars who seek to make new contributions to this subject may come from the use ofsources other than the staples of high political history that Flaherty and others have mined.By turning to equally rich but seldom-used sources such as Treasury Department records,manuscript income and manufacturers’ tax returns, and court records, future studies maytell us a great deal more about the economic and political struggles associated with CivilWar-era revenue collection.

mark r. wilsonUniversity of North Carolina at Charlotte

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Raymond L. Cohn, Mass migration under sail: European immigration to the antebellum UnitedStates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xv + 254. 11 figs. 27 tabs. ISBN9780521513227 Hbk. £45/$85)

Mass migration under sail is a comprehensive economic history of European migration tothe US before the American CivilWar, with its seven substantive chapters addressing manycore topics in the economics of immigration. In the context of American immigrationhistory, these topics have received extensive attention in the post-bellum period, but arerelatively underexplored in the decades before 1860.

Chapters 2 to 5 focus on the size, timing, and character of antebellum immigration.Chapter 2 is a careful reconstruction of the number of migrants likely to have enteredthe US between 1815 and 1860. One of the key findings here, that there is a break inthe size of migrant flows around 1830, is explored in detail in chapter 3. Chapter 4 linksfluctuations in migrant flows to economic factors, with particular emphasis placed oneconomic cycles in the US. Chapter 5 offers a detailed examination of occupationalpatterns over time and across source countries. Chapter 6 considers important featuresof the voyage to America, drawing attention to the financial cost and health risks asso-ciated with an ocean voyage under sail. Chapters 7 and 8 focus on residential andemployment outcomes among immigrants, and the broader impact of migration in thisperiod on the wider American economy. These substantive chapters are bracketed by abrief introduction and conclusion.

Mass migration under sail is particularly successful in highlighting the importance ofantebellum migration to the US. Analyses of transatlantic mass migration usually beginin the 1850s, and Cohn makes a compelling case for an earlier turning point in thevolume of migration flows. The attention drawn to the permanent nature of these flowsalso has considerable merit. Unlike many migrants later in the nineteenth century, vir-tually all antebellum movers arrived in the US with the intention of settling there per-manently. The cost of migration, both financial and otherwise, meant that returnmigration was impossible in the vast majority of cases. The irreversibility of the move,combined with the costs and conditions associated with ocean voyage, should have sharpeffects on the type of migrant willing to move under these conditions. As Cohn dem-onstrates, flows were rising rapidly before the shock of the Irish Famine, and largenumbers of migrants arriving under highly selective conditions ought to have had sig-nificant implications for the development of American labour markets and the broaderUS economy. This is an important episode of international migration that deserves thethorough scholarship contained in this book.

While Mass migration under sail will compel scholars to reconsider the economics ofmigration in the antebellum US, I felt that the book was somewhat less successfulin pinning down answers to all of the questions posed. The analysis of push and pullforces in chapter 4 boils down mainly to the link between immigrant inflows and pat-terns of industrial production in the US. Cohn recognizes issues of causality here, andone might also wonder to what extent other factors explain the dips and peaks in theimmigration series in Figure 4.1. In assessing occupational outcomes among immigrants(chapter 7), it is not clear how to disentangle labour market assimilation from selectionif immigrant cohorts cannot be tracked. Cohn provides an intelligent discussion of howimmigration may have affected the antebellum US economy (chapter 8), but offers fewfirm conclusions. These limitations are inevitable in a period of study where quantitativeevidence is often thin on the ground; indeed, much of the best evidence available is adirect result of Cohn’s extensive research over the last 25 years, particularly as summa-rized in the excellent chapters 5 and 6. On the whole, the book offers a thoroughnon-technical discussion of key economic ideas, and is appropriately sensitive to anyof the deficiencies of the type noted above. It is a combination that will motivate

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future researchers to delve further into a fascinating episode of international economichistory.

chris minnsLondon School of Economics and Political Science

Paul Lucier, Scientists and swindlers: consulting on coal and oil in America, 1820–1890(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. Pp. xiii + 426. 35 illus. ISBN9780801890031 Hbk. £34/$65)

This is an important book. The history of the practice of geology has been scandalouslyneglected, in favour of its more academic, theorized, aspects. Lucier has best highlightedthis neglect in his 1999 paper, ‘A plea for some history of applied geology’ ⟨http://www.shpltd.co.uk/lucier-plea.pdf⟩. This is despite the fact that geology is, and could havebeen since 1805, the science behind the world’s biggest industry, the search for rawmaterials to satisfy mankind’s ever increasing thirsts, whether, as here, for coal (and thuskerosene) and oil; or cement, water, limestone, iron-ore, and so on.The search for the firstthree of these are considered separately, in parts 1 to 3, of this path-breaking study.

The importance of geology, as science, was highlighted in 1851 by the man votedCanada’s ‘most important scientist’ in 1998,William Logan (1798–1875), founding direc-tor of the Geological Survey of Canada, who appears in this volume. In 1851 he wrote ofthe ‘vast importance’ of the geological investigations made in the US by about 70 geologistsover a period of 20 years, and how ‘negative results are of value chiefly in regard tocoal . . . the eminent geologist Sir R. I. Murchison computes that the money expended inEngland alone, before geology was understood, in searching for coal where it would nowbe considered madness to expect it, would be sufficient to effect a correct general geologi-cal examination of the whole of the crust of the globe’ (Scobie’s Canadian Almanac (1851),p. 69).

Lucier’s book comprises a short introduction on ‘Money for science’, 10 chapters (fouron coal, two on kerosene and four on petroleum), and a thought-provoking epilogue on the‘Americanization of science’. To find such varying materials, of course, needed verydifferent scientific skills. Finding coal, a stratiform mineral, needed stratigraphy; obtainingkerosene additionally needed chemistry, to disengage it from those rocks supposedlybearing it; while oil, as only became known in the century subsequent to Lucier’s study,really needed geologists (who could separately find both source and reservoir), rather thanthe ‘oil men’ who claimed they could.The history of such investigations in North Americaare here outlined by Lucier, within this period, in such places as Nova Scotia, NewBrunswick, Pennsylvania, and then in expanding searches throughout equally expandingNorth America, until the Californian oil boom of the final chapter. Lucier makes use ofpublished, and especially unpublished, surveys, consultants’ reports, and law and patentsuits in his wide-ranging study. However, the words scientists and swindlers of the title, inwhich the second is set in over twice-sized type, find an inverse relationship in the index,which devotes over four times more entries to scientists.

The book is very well documented, through 70 pages of notes, although there is noseparate bibliography of sources, and so hunting for particular authorities, or discoveringthe recentness of the literature used, is more difficult. There is also a separate, and highlyuseful, 12-page essay on sources. A single criticism, which is part of the neglect of appliedgeology which Lucier so well brings to light, concerns the initial chapters, which set thescene for the American story told, and its sources. By 1816, four years before Lucier’sstart-date, a collection of stratigraphically arranged English fossils, with its 170-page MSScatalogue, had arrived in Philadelphia, in the hands of the Moravian missionary HenrySteinhauer (1782–1818). He had followed in the pioneering footsteps of William Smith

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(1769–1839) who had founded scientific mineral prospecting in Britain by 1805 and whohad solved, using such fossils, what Abraham Werner in Germany had been unable to,namely the problem of ‘repetitious lithologies’, which had so long confused prospecting, atleast for stratiform minerals in Europe, before Smith. Then another of Smith’s pupils,Richard CowlingTaylor (1789–1851), who is much cited in this book, arrived with anothercollection in 1830. Both of these were carefully arranged in standard stratigraphic order toexplain Smith’s vital contribution to mineral prospecting, and both would have beenavailable for use by American mining consultants who wished to understand Britishordering of strata. Such collections need to be considered by historians trying to under-stand the complex world of ‘applied geology’, where, as Tom Vallance showed in hisIndo/Australian study (‘The fuss about coal’, in Denis Carr and Stella Carr, Plants and manin Australia (1981)), exporting knowledge of this kind from one distant country to anotherwas a highly complex, and thus vexatious matter. Lucier’s fine book deserves to be widelyused in furthering its exploration.

hugh torrensMadeley, Crewe

Eliot Sorel and Pier Carol Padoan, eds., The Marshall Plan: lessons learned for the 21st century(Leeds: OECD Publishing, 2008. Pp. 125. 8 figs. 28 illus. 2 tabs. ISBN 9789264044241Pbk. £17/€24/$32)

There have been many publications about the Marshall Plan since it was launched in 1947.These have generally concluded, first, that the Plan played a critical role in facilitating therecovery of western Europe after the 1939–45 war; secondly, that it launched the longproject of European integration; thirdly, that it created a lasting transatlantic partnershipbetween the US and the countries participating in the scheme; and fourthly, that it was oneof the foundation stones of an international order dedicated to multilateral trade andpayments and to international cooperation. This collection of essays, written for a confer-ence held to mark the sixtieth anniversary of the Plan, does not deviate from the conven-tional wisdom.

The result is something of a curate’s egg. Gerard Bossuat’s essay makes some interestingobservations, notably that the Marshall Plan was central to the development of a new,‘Euro-American’ society. This involved the transformation of the values underpinningEuropean society. Post-1947 Europe absorbed not only American investment and organi-zation and methods at work but also American popular culture. Yet the argument is notdeveloped, and its expression is often highly obscure and hard to follow. Bossuat is followedby Volker Berghahn, who provides some useful historical background. The essays byBronislaw Geremek and Barry Machado are less convincing, however.They tend to rehasha good deal of the old conventional wisdom. Geremek exaggerates the part played by JeanMonnet in the creation of an integrated western Europe while failing to build on the workof historians such as Alan Milward who have shown how national economic interests drewparticipating countries together. The maintenance of full employment, so critical to thelegitimacy of the postwar nation-state, was not possible on the basis of economic self-sufficiency. French steel producers could not meet their output targets unless they hadaccess to Ruhr coking coal, and this is why Monnet’s Planning Commissariat was centralto the launching of the Schuman Plan. Farmers and manufacturers required exportmarkets, which led them to advocate a European common market. There were deeperforces at work here than the agency of highly motivated and idealistic internationalists.

Machado is more openly dismissive of Milward’s work, seeing in it a cynical obsessionwith economic statistics and a rather sinister attempt to use history as a means ofdebunking US foreign policy in the 1980s. This is all rather odd, and in any case fails to

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engage with two of Milward’s most important conclusions, namely that by 1947 a strongeconomic recovery was taking place in western Europe and that the type of integration thatdeveloped there did not owe very much to the models of the Washington policy plannersresponsible for the Marshall programme. The problem with Machado’s essay, and in factwith a good deal of the work in this collection, is that the dominant view is usually the onefrom Washington. Milward, however, built his powerful argument on extensive materialfrom the archives of west European governments.The result was a picture much closer tothe realities of early postwar Europe than what was to be found in the earlier work ofcommentators such as Joseph Jones, Allen Dulles, Richard Mayne, or evenWalter Lipgens,the first two of whom had written to a ColdWar agenda and the last two to a federalist one.

The essays by John Killick and Daniel Danianu have some interesting and timelyobservations about the prospects facing the global economy and the international systemtoday. Killick, writing in the first half of 2007, delivers a shrewd analysis of the structuralweaknesses in the world economy which led to the onset of the crash later that year. In sodoing he provides more evidence to contradict the politicians and bankers who haveclaimed that nobody could have foreseen the seriousness of the current crisis. Danianubrings the collection to a sober end and questions whether contemporary multilateralpolitical and economic cooperation can survive the imbalances and inequalities beinggenerated by globalization and free market economics. While not advocating a politico-economic alternative to capitalism, he draws on Adam Smith’s Theory of moral sentiments topoint out that it must be underpinned by ethical values if it is to survive. This much wasclear to those who framed the Marshall Plan.Will the global economic crisis, together withthe abundant evidence of poverty amidst plenty, even in developed nations, and thecatastrophic implications of global warming, lead to a more general acceptance thatunfettered materialism and the pursuit of personal accumulation are poor foundations fora sustainable international order? Or is the current system doomed to end ‘in the commonruin of the contending parties’? The question remains open.

scott newtonCardiff University

Helen Yaffee, Che Guevara: the economics of revolution (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,2009. Pp. xiii + 354. 1 fig. 2 tabs. ISBN 9780230218208 Hbk. £70/$110; ISBN9780230218215 Pbk. £19.99/$34.95)

This is not the romantic figure of the Motorcycle diaries, but the Che of Alberto Korda’siconic 1960 photograph: hard, and above all revolutionary. In a much recounted story,Fidel Castro asked a late-night meeting of the Council of Ministers for a ‘good economist’to take over leadership of the National Bank of Cuba. Che volunteered. When Castroprofessed surprise that Che considered himself an economist (Guevara’s university train-ing had been in medicine), Che responded that he thought Castro had asked for a ‘goodcommunist’ (p. 21). Central banking, it seemed, was not his strong suit.

In besieged 1960s Cuba, the commanding heights of government were a logical place forrevolutionary armed struggle to flourish, as if central planning were a means of warfare.Guevara was committed to state ownership under socialism. The abolition of bourgeoisproperty rights on the island was to be the work of the Cuban Revolution in the first halfof the decade. The intellectual framework within which these changes were to occur isknown as the ‘Great Debate’ of 1963–5. In essence, the debate turned on a persistent issuein Cuba: the role of material incentives in a socialist economy. Could one build socialismin the absence of the productive infrastructure of an advanced capitalist economy? Weremoral (rather than material) incentives sufficient to produce equitable growth and devel-opment? Was the law of value, then, a truly universal, if not axiomatic, principle?

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The principal contribution of this extremely well-researched study is an account of theeconomic actions, ideas, and contributions of Guevara to this process before he left Cubain 1965 to test his theory of what Régis Debray called ‘revolution in the revolution’. It hasbeen stated that nothing remains to be said about Guevara, especially after the publicationof Jon Lee Anderson’s biography, Che Guevara: a revolutionary life (1997). Yaffee’s workclearly demonstrates otherwise.

Six chapters form the core of the book. ‘Education, training and salaries’ focuses on waysin which Guevara, as part of his Budgetary Finance System, worked through the Ministryof Industries ‘[to undermine] the operation of the law of value in labour allocation’ bybreaking the link between work and remuneration, or work as a social duty (p. 99).‘Administrative control, supervision and investment’ extends the analysis. In the absence ofthe law of value (that is, market prices and capitalist institutions), some administrativemechanism would be necessary to allocate goods and resources. Unsurprisingly, Guevarawas impressed by the management system of General Motors.Yet this was an economy inwhich production goals would be formulated democratically by workers on the factoryfloor, rather than by management. Thus ‘Collectivising production and workers’ partici-pation’ surveys the attempt to devolve control to the workers without relying on materialincentives; that is, the process of creating a new consciousness and new social relations. Forreasons thatYaffee believes were largely related to the hostility of the US to the revolution,and in particular to the economic blockade that began in late 1960, the success ofdecentralizing management was limited. ‘Science and technology’ considers the ways inwhich Guevara’s interest in technology impacted on the economy. Citing Che’s experiencewith cutting sugar cane as self-described ‘slave’s work’ (p. 173), there is an interestingdiscussion of the campaign to mechanize sugar harvesting, something never possible inGuevara’s day. ‘Consciousness and psychology’ considers the role of psychological factorsin the attempt to replace capitalist incentives with socialist solidarity. Work would evolvefrom a social duty into a social pleasure. In ‘Critique of the Soviet Manual of politicaleconomy’, Yaffee perhaps provides something that many readers of this Review wouldappreciate. I am not being facetious when I say that Paul Romer would surely agree withsome of Guevara’s analysis of the relationship between technological development andcompetition. It was only in military technology, Guevara observed, that Soviet technologi-cal development had not stagnated relative to the West.

This is really an excellent study. I suspect that few ‘bourgeois’ economists would be evenslightly persuaded byYaffee’s arguments, much less Guevara’s, but considered as a mono-graph, Yaffee’s book is exhaustively researched, interesting, coherent, well-organized andwritten, novel, and, frankly, quite provocative in places. On trial for the assault on Batista’sMoncada Barracks in 1953, Fidel Castro famously argued that ‘history will absolve me’.We shall see. For both Fidel and Che Guevara, to paraphrase Mao, it is too soon to tell ifla economía will be as forgiving as well.

richard j. salvucciTrinity University

Ritu Birla, Stages of capital: law, culture and market governance in late colonial India (Durham,NC and London: Duke University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 346. ISBN 9780822342458 Hbk.£66/$84.95; ISBN 9780822342687 Pbk. £14.99/$23.95)

European visitors to Indian port towns in the seventeenth century observed that in India,significant social interaction with other communities was forbidden to merchants, bankers,and skilled artisans. Merchants lived in an insular social world, and mercantile law existedas social conventions of endogamous guilds. Once seen as an obstacle to capitalism, theoverlap between community norm and business practice was reassessed more positively by

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later historians. In the presence of these insular and wealthy communities in the latenineteenth century, the British Indian state was caught between two contradictory goals:to establish a modern, universal, and capitalistic legal infrastructure that would overridethe community and privilege the individual; and to recognize mercantile customs ascommon law, which would amount to strengthening the community. The interplaybetween these two projects occurred in the courtroom as well as in legislation, and gave riseto a large discourse on practices and rights.

The subject of the book is this ‘anxiety’ of the colonial state about the indigenouscapitalist. It is argued that colonial law upheld ‘universal models of modern marketpractice’ (p. 5), while admitting exceptions for indigenous capitalism, for example, byplacing kinship-based firms under the jurisdiction of personal law. By doing so, colonialauthorities legitimized a private space within the economy where status ruled, and made itinferior to the public space where contract ruled. Indigenous capitalists saw themselvesthrough the colonial lens, and negotiated with the state the contents of the private space,making much of it public in the process.The argument contributes to a field of scholarshipknown as post-colonial studies, which is interested in the problem of hegemony, orregulation by shaping mentalities. It investigates how colonialism created ‘colonial sub-jects’, who began seeing themselves through westernized ideas about the indigenes.Whilepost-colonial studies concentrate on the English-educated Indian elite, the book considerseconomic actors living in an age of commercialization and ruled by a legislating state thatat times understood Indian custom by means of a western vocabulary of rights. It issuggested that indigenous capitalists at first challenged and then absorbed this vocabularyin their desire to legitimize themselves as modern subjects.

The argument is illustrated with richly detailed examples. One connecting threadthrough many of these examples is the fear that the insularity of the family and communityas units of business would increase scope for secrecy and opportunism.This fear informeddebates over how to subject the so-called Hindu Undivided Family (HUF) to taxation(chapter 1). Similarly, the Negotiable Instruments Act tried to standardize local andinformal contractual usages. Debates on organized betting touched on the desirability ofregulating an activity that carried shades of community tradition and entertainment(chapter 4). Moving on to the communities’ response to personal law, chapter 5 shows howdebates over marriage practice within the Marwari community ‘deployed the category ofthe HUF to promote the institutions of the joint family’ (p. 30). A second connectingthread is social spending. Historians of Indian business have noted the importance thatmerchants placed on charity and philanthropy, which had the effect of cementing com-munity ties. In a fascinating and insightful analysis spread over two chapters (2 and 3), itis shown how law tried to recast the act of giving as a contractual relation.

Although dealing with a theme of considerable interest to the economic historian, thebook does not quite speak to the latter. For example, the introduction criticizes a constructthat it calls the ‘universal history of capital’ (p. 7). It is not clear to me what is meant bya universal history of capital, seeing that economic historians disagree so much on theorigins of international economic inequality in the era of world capitalism. Furthermore,in studying law, the book’s aims are quite different from those that would motivate aneconomic historian to take an interest in law. In this book, law is meaningful as a tool of‘governmentality’, an awkward term that post-colonial studies use to mean, in this context,attempts to make the colonized think like the colonist. For economic history, on the otherhand, law is particularly relevant in the presence of transaction costs. Politics and colo-nialism are important if they impinge on the choice of institutions regulating marketexchange. Current economic history scholarship, moreover, distinguishes many types ofcolonial rule and institutional choices; whereas post-colonial studies work with a relativelyundifferentiated picture of colonialism.The difference in aims is fundamental, and has keptthe two historiographies of the non-western world wide apart. This syndrome persists in

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the book, which is interested in ‘the fictions of law’ (p. 143) more than in the reality of themarket. Despite its hope to generate a conversation between economic history and post-colonial studies (p. 6), the book deepens the divide.

Nevertheless, economic historians cannot fail to notice the relevance of the examplesdiscussed. What the book calls the ‘secrecy’ of family firms will be called informationasymmetry in another historiography. A close, if patient, reading of the book, therefore, willbe eminently rewarding to all concerned with colonialism and law.

tirthankar royLondon School of Economics and Political Science

Jos Gommans and Harriet Zurndorfer, eds., Roots and routes of development in China andIndia: highlights of fifty years of the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient(1957–2007) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2008. Pp. xxxix + 454. 1 fig. 2 maps. 6 tabs. ISBN9789004170605 Hbk. €93/$149)

In 2008, the Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) commemo-rated its fiftieth anniversary with two notable events. The first was a grand jubilee held inLeiden on the theme ‘Empires and Emporia: the Orient in world-historical space andtime’; and the second the publication of this volume, edited by two recent JESHOeditors-in-chief: Zurndorfer, a specialist in Chinese history, who served from 1991 to 2000,and Gommans, a specialist in Indian history, who has served from 2006 onward.

In this publication, Gommans and Zurndorfer have reprinted 13 articles that haveappeared in JESHO over the span of 50 years, and they have introduced this selection witha substantive co-authored introduction, ‘Connecting the giants through a global perspec-tive’. The editors note that, during the past half century, China and India have bothundergone a remarkable transformation from economic underdevelopment to a newposition as ‘global superpowers’ (p. ix). However, their objective here is to assess the waysin which historians of India and China have developed new approaches during this sameperiod. Their introduction effectively illustrates how, beginning in the mid-twentiethcentury, historians emerged from long-established philological traditions (Sinology andIndology) to employ integrative and comparative approaches that have aided in theproduction of more meaningful social and economic histories. The editors further dem-onstrate that JESHO has played an important role in that process.

The volume is divided into two parts.The first, focusing on China, includes seven essays(original date of publication in parentheses) authored by DenisTwitchett (1959), E. Balazs(1960), Robert Hartwell (1967), Jung-Pang Lo (1969), Patricia Ebrey (1974), TimothyBrook (1981), and Kenneth Pomeranz (2001).Taken collectively, these essays provide botha brilliant insight into the developing field of Chinese history, and a wealth of knowledgeregarding the social and economic history of China from the Han period into the modernera. An especially notable historiographical trend is the rise of the ‘new Chinese history’ inthe 1970s, as historians tended to set aside approaches that employed traditional sourcesand emphasized uniformity and the centralized state in favour of mining new types ofsources to investigate diversity in terms of regional and local identity, ethnicity, and class.What emerges in these pages is a much more dynamic and complex understanding ofChinese state and society, from antiquity to the late imperial era.

The second part focuses on India and is equally informative and stimulating as that onChina. This includes chapters authored by A. L. Basham (1957/8), J. Duncan M. Derrett(1964), George W. Spencer (1969), Kenneth R. Hall (1978), Vijaya Ramaswamy (1985),and Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui (1986). The trajectory of Indian history during the pasthalf-century differs from that of China as, instead of challenging presuppositions ofuniformity and centralization, historians have grappled with the spread of certain elite

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cultural features across India in the absence of penetrating governing institutions. Theeditors have done a marvellous job selecting essays that effectively chart the course bywhich historians have revised the image of India as a region with a relatively timelessexistence, the only dynamic feature of which was a lengthy cultural and economic declineset in motion by successive waves of invaders from the north-west. The essays includedhere highlight the dynamic nature of Indian social systems, directing attention to some ofthe ways in which historians have begun to appreciate the fact that Indians—peasants,merchants, rulers and others—were interactively engaged with the larger web of regional,inter-regional and world historical processes.

For more than 50 years, JESHO has served as a critical medium through whichhistorians have improved our understanding of the social and economic histories of bothChina and India, and the essays that Gommans and Zurndorfer have assembled toconstruct this volume are among the best of that tradition. Of course one might askwhether such a volume as this is really necessary, as all 13 of these essays are readilyavailable in library collections and through online research databases. However, returningto the editors’ introduction, which lays out the careful logic behind their selections andframes the development of these two divergent, but perhaps converging fields, one findsthat this excellent volume is much more than the sum of its parts.

scott c. leviOhio State University

Tomoko Shiroyama, China during the great depression: market, state, and the world economy,1929–1937 (Harvard, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. xvi + 325.18 figs. 17 tabs. ISBN 9780674028319 Hbk. £29.95/$45)

Did China suffer from the great depression? Shiroyama’s answer to this question is stronglyaffirmative as she considers the great depression a ‘watershed in the making of modernChina’ (p. 1). Her study presents an important contribution to the literature on theeconomic history of the Republican period which in the past two decades has seen a heateddebate between so-called optimists and pessimists, depending on their negative or positiveassessment of China’s development during the global crisis.

The first part of the book explores the economic trends in China before 1931. At thetime China was the only country adhering to a silver standard in an international monetarysystem based on the gold standard. As Shiroyama argues, the Chinese government wasunable to control the in- and outflows of silver, and fluctuations of the international silverprice brought instability to the Chinese monetary and economic system. Selecting Chinesecotton mills and mechanized silk-reeling factories in the lowerYangtze area as case studies,she introduces China’s key industries in the early twentieth century which became inte-grated into a system of international competition, and which suffered from an unstable rawmaterial supply of mainly domestic cotton and the impact of global silver depreciation. Inresponse to the deteriorating business situation, Chinese textile entrepreneurs had to raisemoney through loan contracts from financial institutions in order to keep their businessesalive.

The financing of China’s textile enterprises through bank loans based on collateralinstead of personal trust during the Republican period is well known. Shiroyama’s analysis,showing the weakness of the loan contracts due to the vulnerability of the silver priceexchange rate, is convincing. However, there is another part to the story. The financialinstitutions trusted the collateral in form of real estate only up to a point and constantlyreviewed their risk management methods.The fact that creditor-banks inserted themselvesactively into the management of enterprises such as Dasheng or the Shenxin mills for manyyears tells us something about the lack of expert financial management in those enterprisesbefore and during the crisis.

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The second part of the book addresses the depression years directly and looks at theimplications for various sectors. The agricultural sector suffered due to a decrease inagricultural prices and dried up both cash and loans for rural households. The aftermathof the 1929 depression hit the textile sector due to declining demand for Chinese textilesand a higher exchange rate of the yuan when many countries began to devalue theircurrency towards the end of 1931. This devaluation continued through 1934 and causedgreat distress for the financial sector due to outflows of silver and a simultaneous declinein commodity and real estate prices. Introducing a currency reform in 1935, the Chinesegovernment attempted to take charge of the Chinese monetary system which until thenhad lacked a central bank and allowed domestic banks to issue notes without depositinglegal reserves. As Shiroyama convincingly argues, moving off the silver standard led to astabilization of the exchange rate and short-lived economic recovery, but also to greaterinvolvement of the nationalist government in directing China’s economic development.Although the government was not able to provide financial aid to China’s textile industry,higher exchange rates and increased domestic demand benefited the industry. However,government efforts to improve the financial situation in rural areas were limited andwithout long-term success.

Shiroyama’s perspective on the dilemma faced by the Nationalist government followingthe 1935 currency reform is insightful: in order to keep the value of the new currency andachieve a balanced budget, the government was unable to pursue a more expansivemonetary policy through bond and note issue which limited the aid available for Chineseindustry and rural initiatives. Although her sympathetic view of the Nationalist governmentprovides an interesting argument, it would be more convincing if it were embedded in adiscussion of the complex ideology that drove the Nationalist government’s economicpolicies and agenda at the time.

With her intention to explore ‘key links in the Chinese economy: between its cities andvillages, its banks and industrial enterprises, the government and the market, the domesticand the world economy’ (p. 229), the author has set an ambitious agenda for herself whichmight go beyond the scope of any single study on the great depression in China.This pointbecomes obvious with regard to the recognition of regional differences, which areextremely important in any discussion of China’s economic development. Although Shi-royama makes a good case for why she selected theYangtze Delta for her case studies in thetextile industry, there is no direct evidence from her findings that the great depressionshould have had the same impact on different regions and different industries acrossChina. In this context it would have been informative to see a deeper engagement withthe work of scholars such as Thomas Rawski’s Economic growth in pre-war China (1989)or David Faure’s The rural economy of pre-liberation China (1989) who, with differentapproaches and conclusions, have challenged the notion of a uniformly negative economicimpact of the depression in China. These issues aside, Shiroyama’s book has provided animportant point of departure for much-needed further studies on the great depression andits impact on the Chinese economy.

elisabeth kollHarvard Business School

Douglas J. Puffert, Tracks across continents, paths through history: the economic dynamics ofstandardization in railway gauge (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 360.18 figs. 16 tabs. ISBN 9780226685090 Hbk. £38/$55)

For some time, path dependency and contingency (luck) have proved highly useful con-cepts for scholars interested in technological innovation and change. In Tracks across

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continents Puffert applies these notions to the development of the railways’ track gauge, thedistance between the rails. He argues that while there were systematic elements in theselection of appropriate gauges, ‘the choices of idiosyncratic individuals’ (p. 6) and ‘nonsystematic events’ (p. 7) lay at the root of the emergence of a dominant but probablysub-optimal gauge of 4 ft 81/2 in (1432.5 mm). Chosen by Robert Stephenson for theLiverpool & Manchester Railway and applied to Britain’s emerging network—Brunel’s 7 ft01/4 in Great Western famously excepted—it spread not only because it optimized connec-tion and the exchange of traffic but also because it often optimized the choice of railwayrolling stock. A discussion of path dependency in the first two chapters is followed by aseries of historical case studies: Britain and Ireland, North America, Continental Europe,India, Australia, and the ‘wider world’ (Africa, South America, China, and Japan). Here thecentral themes of technological change, geography, and institutional choice are explored.The most interesting case study is that of North America, where the diversity produced byno fewer than nine regional gauge networks in the 1860s was eventually resolved in favourof the Stephenson gauge. At the same time, a persuasive case is made for the adoption ofnarrower gauges, such as the metre or 3 ft 6 in (1067 mm), in circumstances whereeconomy of construction was critical.

At times the author’s treatment tends to be rather one-dimensional. He does not reallyexplore the related concepts of sunk costs, first mover advantage, or Oliver Williamson’snotion of asset specificity. All of these are important to an understanding of technologicalchange in an industry such as the railways, where the resolution of diversity differs inphysical scale from that produced by the famous path-dependency cases of Paul David’sQWERTY typewriter or the VHS video cassette. Some of the force of Puffert’s argumentis weakened by his observation that in gauge decision-making optimality depends on thetype of railway (whether high-speed passenger or lower-speed freight, for example) and thenature of the traffic carried (p. 32). Furthermore, the operating restrictions and trafficexchange barriers created by the choice of load gauge surely deserves more attention thanit receives here. For example, it remains an important factor limiting the exchange of trafficbetween Continental Europe and Britain via the Channel Tunnel. Inevitably, given theambition of the work, the case studies rely heavily on secondary sources. In relation toBritain, with which this reviewer is familiar, the importance of railway diplomacy inshaping the network might have been given more emphasis. Captain Mark Huish, generalmanager of both the Grand Junction and the London & North Western (not ‘London andNorthwestern’, as in Puffert) railways was the arch-diplomatist of the critical period to1860, his machinations responsible for both the advancement of the 7 ft gauge and itssubsequent restraint. Reference to the work of Geoffrey Channon and (more recently)Mark Casson would have been useful here.

These criticisms should not be taken to blunt the overall impact of an important book.Puffert is to be congratulated for making a substantial contribution to the study ofstandardization and the economic dynamics of technological choice. Part 3 of the bookrepresents a tour de force of model-building. Some of the findings have appeared earlierin journal articles, but here a fuller exposition, reinforced by material available viathe author’s website ⟨http://trackgauge.net⟩, provides a convincing delineation of path-dependence in action. Here, then, is a genuine blend of historical and economic analysis,following the approach of Brian Arthur, where technical choices are to be explained byassessments of both stand-alone benefits and the increasing returns deriving from theextent to which a technique is adopted by others (network integration benefits).This workis important, and in some ways it is a pity that it was written before another impressivepiece of model-building, that of Casson on the development of Britain’s railway network,was completed.The synergies between the two approaches will doubtless prove instructive.Finally, Puffert concludes with an observation which readers of this journal will surelyapplaud: ‘Economists need to account for history if they wish to explain outcomes. They

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need to account for the choices, the individuals, and the circumstances that took theselection process along one path rather than another’ (p. 316).

terry gourvishLondon School of Economics & Political Science

Elhanan Helpman, ed., Institutions and economic performance (Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2008. Pp. vii + 611. 45 figs. 56 tabs. ISBN 9780674030770 Hbk. £40.95/$55)

While edited books remain out of fashion, Institutions and economic performance shouldcommand a large audience. It belongs in the libraries of scholars from a variety offields—economic history, development, and political economy, for starters—on theirreading lists, and in the hands of their graduate students.

Part I addresses economic history. Avner Greif illustrates his basic approach to therelationships between institutions and economic development. Joel Mokyr explores thecultural and social roots of technical innovation in Britain’s industrial revolution, whileMauricio Drelichman and Hans-Joachim Voth address the sources of Spain’s relativedecline. Focusing on the relationship between variation in slave holding and inequality onthe one hand and subsequent growth on the other, Nathan Nunn tackles the Engleman-Sokoloff hypothesis and, in doing so, calls for its revision. Daron Acemoglu, Maria AngelicaBautista, Pablo Querubin, and James A. Robinson explore the origins of inequality inCundinamarca, Columbia; in doing so, they offer yet further reason for economic histo-rians to focus on the politics of development.

Part II should command the attention of political economists, or at least those interestedin political institutions. Abhinay Muthoo and Kenneth Shepsle in one paper and DanielDiermeier and Pohan Fong in another create models that integrate institutional featureswhose impact has hitherto been explored singly: bicameralism, term structures, and thepresence or absence of concurrent elections in the first paper, and coalition formation,proportional representation, and budget making in the second. Gene Grossman andHelpman analyse the role of pork barrel spending in electoral competition.While the paperby James Fearon focuses on conflict rather than institutions, it is, in the judgement of thisreviewer at least, one of the strongest papers in this volume and a significant step forwardin the formal literature on this form of politics.

The papers in part III combine both formal theory and empirical research and explore thepolitical economy of development. In their study of a shanty town in Nairobi, SiwanAnderson and Patrick Francois offer evidence that informal and formal institutions arecomplements rather than substitutes, a theme that resonates nicely with the arguments setout by Avinash Dixit in Lawlessness and economics (2004).The remaining three papers focuson democracy and development.The relationship between them has proven to be elusive andin their paper,Timothy Besley and Masayuki Kudamatsu illustrate why: some autocracies,they indicate, are so structured that political incentives lead to the production ofdevelopment-oriented policies. Torsten Persson and Guido Tabellini focus on short-rungrowth rates and argue that while transitions to democracy may not increase the rate ofgrowth, countries that fail to make that transition grow at lower rate.Their work is notablefor its methodological contributions to the cross-national analysis of data. Philippe Aghion,Alberto Alesina, and FrancescoTrebbi focus on longer-run growth and make an analyticallyand empirically suggestive case for a relationship between democracy and technical change.

This is an important—indeed, a very important—volume. The papers will be quicklyassimilated into the research programmes of the fields they address.

robert h. batesHarvard University

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