Book Reviews - Various (Incl Tooze) - Economic History Review (2007)

8/13/2019 Book Reviews - Various (Incl Tooze) - Economic History Review (2007)

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This is all extremely important for Toozes explanation of how the war eventuallycame about, and how it then unfolded. Acquiring Lebensraum of American dimen-sions required use of force. That in turn necessitated signicant investment inrearmament which, in not very wealthy and foreign-trade-dependent Germany,

involved trade-offs. Tooze is very good on a lot of subjects, but he is at his best inhighlighting the nancialin particular foreign exchangecrises from which theregime lurched, one to the other, and the ways in which commitment to rearmamenthad to be balanced against social and other economic priorities. These periodiccrises hampered the regimes preparations for war, and created a dynamic whichdictated aggression at the earliest possible opportunity. Every missed productiontarget meant that the inevitable superiority of Germanys potential enemies movedforward in time, which entailed Germany going on the offensive sooner rather thanlater. This dynamic characterized the initial years of Nazi aggression, but Toozeswork sees it as explaining also the onslaught against the Soviet Union, which, heargues, was part of a larger plan to move eventually against the United States.

Along the way, Tooze re-examines a range of debates. His take on the origins of the Nazi economic recovery has already been mentioned, for which he also pro-vides considerable new evidence. Other interpretations are even more unconven-tional and incisive. He sees the Blitzkrieg strategy, linking military strategy,technology, and industrial planning, an interpretative framework which many havecontested, as starting in 19401 rather than ending about there, as Milward hassuggested. His examination of the relationship between food and labour policy in theNazi economy is also original, seeing in them links between racial and economicpolicies. Finally, he has a lot to say about the Speer myth, not least on the basis of research by Lutz Budrass on the aviation industry in the Third Reich.

Despite its originality, the book is not without aws. The recent outpouring of

Third Reich business historiography is, for instance, acknowledged only partially.How, for instance, does the fact that many businesses seem to have been able toavoid complete politicization under National Socialism, instead choosing to pursuebusiness strategy in the longer term (and succeeding in doing so), square withthis interpretation? This is one strand of recent research which nds no place here.Why are the process and effects of Aryanizationa major theme of recentscholarshipbarely mentioned here (indeed, it is not even an entry in the index)?There are also some presentational issues, with graphs in particular sometimesdifcult to decipher.

Still, in the nal analysis, I have to echo the sentiments, if not the words, on thebooks dust jacket. This is the interpretation of the Nazi economy with which a

generation of historians will have to grapple. It is a major achievement. University of Glasgow

Andr Steiner, ed., berholen ohne einzuholen: Die DDR-Wirtschaft als Funotedeutschen Geschichte? (Berlin: Christoph Links Verlag, 2006. Pp. 190. ISBN3861533979 Pbk. 19.90)

The front cover of this book has a picture of the famous Trabant saloon car on topof a municipal skip for excessively large rubbish. It is an image that attempts toreect the books questioning subtitle: the GDR economy as a footnote of Germanhistory? The image, however, clearly represents a prejudice that Steiners excellent

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Antonio Di Vittorio, ed., An economic history of Europe: from expansion to development (London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xvi + 376. 18 gs. 5 maps. 84 tabs.ISBN 0415356245 Hbk. 95/$170; ISBN 0415356253 Pbk. 28.99/$51.95)

In a period of globalization it may not look opportune to publish a book on thedevelopment of the European economy since early modern times, unless thepurpose is to show the uniqueness of the European expansion path and to empha-size the crucial role that Europe played, and plays still, in contemporary globalmodernization. As a matter of fact, Di Vittorio, when conceiving the book, had notthe explicit intention of emphasizing this model role of Europe. Rather, he aimed todemonstrate that the recent process of European economic integration has deephistorical roots: Europes common experience, as far as economic development isconcerned, is a continuum since the fteenth century.

The book is written by six qualied economic historians, who each describe andanalyse European economic development during one century.They follow a more orless similar framework: demography, agriculture, industry, trade, money, andnance. The approaches, however, are somewhat different. The rst overviews arenot very long and are rather descriptive in their elaboration: they focus in particularon the organization of the European economy within each century and on itsinstitutional aspects.The two remaining overviews are more extensive and dividedinto several subchapters. Moreover, extra attention is paid to the dynamics of transformation. Economic growth, within each economic sector, is central to theirapproach: the chapters, therefore, have a more quantitative and a more analyticaloutlook, with statistics and graphs illustrating the interpretations.

The book is a textbook for high school and university students. From a didacticpoint of view its clear framework and its well-written text are, no doubt, extra assets.The chapters, moreover, are well-documented, in particular those on the eighteenth,nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The chapters on the previous centuries are alsowell-documented, but some bias to the Mediterranean and to Italian literature isresponsible for a few shortcomings as far as economic development in north-western and central Europe is concerned. Some additional remarks should be made.The format of the book does not conform entirely to the editors aim, as speciedin the introduction, i.e. the continuity of the European economic integration processfrom the early modern period onwards. Indeed, the subdivision of the book into achapter per century undermines the elaboration of the idea of continuity. Itweakens, moreover, the dynamic analysis of the two great cycles of Europeaneconomic development: the one from the mid-fteenth to the mid-eighteenthcentury, the other from the mid-eighteenth to the twentieth century. Moreover, bystressing the importance of inter-secular continuity in the process of economicintegration, it would also have been desirable to include a survey of the rst greatcycle of European economic integration, namely that from the beginning of thesecond millennium to the mid-fteenth century. Finally, the subdivision into chap-ters by century has an editorial drawback: it generates repetitions, for example thedouble presentation of the growth theories in the chapters on the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries.

In a one volume textbook it cannot be expected that all aspects of economicdevelopment are studied in depth, but some lacunae or errors are to be regretted. InPaola Massas chapter on the fteenth century, references to the revival of trans-continental overland trade, to the expansion of the fairs, linked with it, and to thecrucial role of both factors in launching the second inter-secular cycle of European

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economic integration, are missing. In Giuseppe Braccos chapter on the sixteenthcentury, the restructuring of the textile industry in the southern Low Countries,which followed upon the innovations of the new drapery, the light drapery, andthe new light drapery, and its very stimulating effect upon intra-European trade,

are also lacking. In Alberto Guenzis chapter on the seventeenth century, no sys-tematic distinction is made between standardized fabrics, luxury goods and special-ized artisan products: such a distinction would have claried the analysis of craftguild development during that century. In John Daviss chapter on the eighteenthcentury, the analysis of the demographic revolution should have included theparadox of rising agricultural prices from mid-century and the simultaneous rise of the population: the generalization of the proto-industrialization in the countryside(no important innovation, as the author emphasizes, but a signicant extension)would have helped to clarify the paradox.

In Giovanni Luigi Fontanas excellent chapter on the nineteenth century, adistinction should have been made between the rst and second demographic

transitions.The early successes and ultimate failure of bimetallism on the continentcould also have been elaborated in more detail. In Albert Carreras ne chapter onthe twentieth century, the tension between an overvalued pound sterling and a setof undervalued currencies on the continent during the 1920s, and the subsequenttension between an undervalued sterling area and an overvalued Gold Bloc in the1930s, could have helped in explaining the European economic crisis between theworld wars. As far as economic development during the postwar period is con-cerned, the structural crisis of the mixed economy during the 1970s and 1980sshould have been analysed in a more systematic way.

Gaps are inevitable in a comprehensive overview of Europes long-term economicexpansion and development. However, those identied here do not detract from this

textbooks many scientic and didactic merits. Leuven University

Petr Vorel, Monetary circulation in Central Europe at the beginning of the early m period: attempts to establish a shared currency as an aspect of the political cultu16th century (15241573) (Pardubice: Univerzita Pardubice, Filozock Fakulta,2006. Pp. ii + 211. 66 illus. 9 maps. 7 tabs. ISBN 807194827 Pbk. CZK198)

This is the latest in a series of studies published since 1991 by eminent centralEuropean academics on the numismatic-monetary history of the region, with par-ticular reference to the cusp of the early modern period. Another recent study, whichI have read alongside that under review, is Eugen Nicholae ( Moneda otomana inTarileRomane in perioada, 14511512 (2003)) on Ottoman money in the Romanian lands.Both contain an extended and detailed description of the individual gold, silver, andcopper coins employed in the area, providing details of their weight and neness andmonetary-exchange value, and a careful analysis of the composition of coin hoardsfound in these lands. In relation to the period c.1450 c.1570, these materials havebeen utilized to investigate two major themes.

The rst, an examination of the impact of the expansion of the borders of theTurkish Empire deep into central Europe in the years up to the battle of Mohcs in1526, is well represented in Nicholaes study. This demonstrates that present-dayRomania, embracing the medieval lands of Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania,

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was in the early modern period a part of the trading-monetary systems of the BlackSea lands. Importantly, Nicholae eschews the alleged link between the extension of Turkish political hegemony and use of the Ottoman silver asper and copper fals. Hisstory starts just as a massive increase in European imports of gold into the Levant

was coming to an end. Initially, from c.1395 c.1425, passing from the mines of upper Hungary via Sopron and Lemberg (Lvov) to the Trans-Pontine steppe andthen from c.1418 c.1432 over the German Road to the Fondaco de Tedeschi and onVenetian ships bound for the Levant, a virtual gold monometallism was establishedin Tartary during the rst half of the fteenth century. Even at mid-century thiscontinued to leave its impact on the Romanian monetary system, Tartar gold actingas a money of account, even though no Ottoman gold pieces from the reigns of Mehmed II (145181) or Bayazid II (14811512) have been found in Romania.During those years it was the Ottoman silver asper and copper fals that circulatedtherein. Because of weak contacts to the west-central regions of the Balkans, coinsminted in the mining regions of Serbia and Bosnia, which experienced a major

production boom from 14651524 under Turkish rule, are only representedslightly within the circulatory media. Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvaniaremained throughout the period of this study a part of the trading-monetary systemsof the Black Sea lands. For the 1460s there is evidence of Turkish aspers in hoards,amongst which coins of Buzau and Valachie are most numerous with signicantsubgroups from Asia MinorAmasya, Ayaslik, and Bursa.The mint at Serez is bestrepresented in Moldavia. In the 1470s, Novar and Edrina disputed the premierposition and Serez provides a large percentageAmasya, Ayaslik, Bursa, andKonstantanye are weakly represented. Coins minted in Serbia-Macedonia are onlyfound in small numbers in Moldavia. In the 1480s, the only nd is from Piua Petrii(comprising Konstantanye and Asia Minor pieces), representative of the temporary

billeting of Turkish troops in the area. With respect to the aspers of Bayazid II(14811512), the supremacy of Novar should be noted and the coins of Karatova,Serez, Edirne, Konstantiya, and skp are well represented. Coins minted inSerbia-Macedonia and the central Balkans are again only represented in smallnumbers in Moldavia.The rarity of coins from the end of Mehmed IIs reign, andthe beginning of the next, indicate weak penetration in the 1480s and 1490s. A stateof war and a blockade of Moldavia,Transylvania, and Hungary impededWallachiancommerce. It is at this time that Wallachia ceased striking money and towards theend of the century began striking imitations of Ottoman aspers. The circulation of the asper was not, as Nicholae shows, however, imposed or regulated by the OttomanEmpire, but by local authorities who controlled its exchange value with other coins

and organized its subsequent post-1493 replacement with copper and locally-produced lightweight copies of the Turkish pieces.The second theme, an examination of the impact of American silver on the

monetary systems of central Europe, is also well represented in Vorels study. Thespatial focus is the extensive lands of the Empire: that highly fragmented politywithin which numerous different authorities minted a bewildering variety of coins.In conditions of stable specie supplies, this posed problems enough in establishingexchange values between the multiplicity of coin types. When such specie suppliesincreased, rst, between 1450 and 1540 as a result of the contemporary centralEuropean mining boom and then, between 1540 and 1570, with greatly increasingsilver supplies from the Americas, the central European monetary system was

reduced to chaos.Vorel discusses at length the largely unsuccessful political attemptsto achieve stabilization and monetary union undertaken between 1524 and 1573. In

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attempting to explain why these attempts failed, he compares interestingly policyimplementation at this time with the political agreement of 1857 which provides adirect central European analogy to the Imperial Minting Orders of the sixteenthcentury. Both sets of monetary policies were formulated in conditions of high but

fairly stable supplies of monetary metals. Both collapsed when silver production, inthe 1570s from Potos and in the 1870s from the Comstock Lode in Nevada,increased enormously, introducing major inationary pressures and acute exchangeinstability into the international economy. In the nineteenth century, alternative,stable supplies of monetary metal, utilized in the establishment of the gold standard,went some way to resolving the problem. In the sixteenth century, no such alterna-tive existed and monetary disorders continued, culminating in the crisis of 161923the Kipper und Wipperzeit . In the nineteenth century, these monetaryproblems gave birth to what was probably the nest contemporary body of eco-nomics literature.The analogous problems of the late sixteenth century have beenlargely neglected. Vorels perceptive book goes a long way towards lling that gap.

It is hoped that this brief survey of two representative studies concerning thenumismatic-monetary history of early modern central Europe will encourageEnglish readers to explore this important body of current research. They will ndtheir journey through the literature both enjoyable and rewarding.

Edinburgh University-CEU Budapest

Amos Nadan, The Palestinian peasant economy under the Mandate: a story of colbungling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi + 370. 45 gs.5 maps. 3 plates. 24 tabs. ISBN 0674021355 Pbk. 12.95/$19.95)

I should state at the outset that a good portion of this book (especially part II) takesissue with my own work, both my jointly authored (with Oded Kaplan) The Jewishand the Arab economies in Mandatory Palestine (published in Hebrew, 1990) and mysole authored The divided economy of Mandatory Palestine (1998). While rejectingtotally most of Nadans objections and quibbles concerning our estimates of Arabproduction in the interwar years, I shall limit my remarks on them to the necessaryminimum and try to provide as unbiased a review as I can.

The book deals with a variety of issues concerning the Arab peasant economyunder the British Mandate. Part I touches upon, although without much novelinsight, old political economy questions derived from the complexity of MandatoryPalestines triangular relationships among government, Arabs, and Jews. Part IIconcentrates on the performance of the Arab peasant economy, and part III analysesits institutional structure and government policies aimed at improving the peasantswelfare and material lot.

Considering the particulars of the book, the most interesting ndings and dis-cussions are contained in part III, in chapters 5 and 6. Here the structure andfunctioning of the Arab rural credit market and land regime are illuminated, andtheir rationality convincingly argued.To do this, Nadan combines skilfully archivalsources which he newly uncovered (particularly at Barclays Bank), together withpublished primary and research material, and with illustrative fragments of oralhistory (generated by extensive interviews he conducted with contemporaries).Those familiar with the literature, however, will undoubtedly realize that chapter5 on the rural credit market (pp. 21260) is virtually identical to Nadans The

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competitive advantage of moneylenders over banks in rural Palestine, Journal of theEconomic and Social History of the Orient (2005). Strangely, this article is nevermentioned in the book; nor does it appear in its bibliography.

Another interesting and informative discussion is provided in the section on

irrigation in chapter 2 (pp. 5369). Nadan outlines carefully here, on the one hand,the potential advantages of irrigation for the intensication and development of Arab agriculture, and on the other hand, stresses the scarcity of capital and variouslegislative and policy constraints (such as the vagueness of property rights in water)that limited its expansion in the Mandate period.This chapter contains also usefulmicro data on crops and livestock in Arab farming, which are presented within adetailed account of its composition (pp. 82108).

On the whole, however, the book suffers from a number of serious weaknesses.Noticeable among them is the widely-observed tendency to make unsubstantiatedclaims just by stating them repeatedly. To illustrate, take the assertion that Jewishland purchases and employment policies resulted in rising unemployment among

low-skilled Arabs before the Second World War (pp. 1012). This claim, which ispresented as part of the books main (but wrong) thesis that the Arab peasanteconomy stagnated before the war, is asserted ex cathedra without any supportingquantitative evidence. A related difculty is the authors disturbing neglect of relevant studies and the selective reading and misinterpretation of others. Forexample, he ignores the treatise by Anita Shapira, Futile struggle (1977), in which shedemonstrates how futile were the attempts to prevent Arab workers from beingemployed in the Jewish (citrus) economy in the 1930s, and presents instead adistorted picture, implying that such attempts were successful (pp. 56). Likewise,he fails to mention, let alone use, recent suggestive estimates of the number of Arabtenants dispossessed by Jewish land acquisition (Kamen, Little common ground (1991); my own The divided economy of Mandatory Palestine), and avoids confronting,by disregarding, my contention that Arab peasants could, and did, exploit in the1930s advantageous opportunities for non-farm employment.

Similar problems of misinterpretation and selective reading are revealed inNadans criticism of Kaplans and my output and value added estimates for Arabagriculture. Misinterpreting high on average for sustained, he repeatedly accusesus of characterizing Arab agricultural and total production as exhibiting sustainedgrowth in the interwar years, a term which we obviously never used nor implied. Onthe contrary, while showing that Arab agricultural (and overall) production wasindeed growing fast on average in the interwar and the entire Mandate periods, Idwelt explicitlyin a discussion ignored completely by Nadanon the highly

uctuating and volatile nature of this growth experience. Equally wrong is thebooks assertion that the Arab peasant economy remained stagnant before theSecond WorldWar.While drawing on our gures ( The Jewish and the Arab economiesin Mandatory Palestine, pp. 278), this assertion derives from their totally erroneousreading and misinterpretation. Contrary to Nadans false claim, our estimates revealunmistakably a strong upward trend of Arab non-citrus agricultural output andproduct between 19339, sufcient to offset the lack of growth (perhaps even slightdecline) of 192133 so as to generate a healthy 2.8 per cent average growth rate perannum of output (2.7 per cent of value added) between 1921 and 1939. Thesegeneral patterns remain unchanged even when the output gures for 192134 areraised by 30 per cent (instead of our original increase of 10 per cent), as a sensitivity

check on Nadans complaint (pp. 1345) that our agricultural output gures for192234 are too low due to under-reporting.

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To summarize, it is a pity that Nadan anchored his book on wrong arguments,false claims and misguided debates. Had he concentrated, and possibly expanded,on his original and independent lines of investigation, in which he studied thestructure and operation of the Arab peasant economy and the policies affecting it, he

could have produced a much better volume. The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Sherman Cochran, Chinese medicine men:consumer culture in China and Southeast(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 242. 40 illus. ISBN0674021614 Hbk. 29.95/$45)

In his history of Chinese-owned pharmaceutical companies operating in China andsouth-east Asia throughout the rst half of the twentieth century, Cochran hasproduced another welcome contribution to a eld that is beginning to explore thediverse nature of consumer society in the pre-Communist period. Building uponcultural critiques of consumption which have emphasized the agency of consumersamidst the homogenizing tendencies of globalization, Cochran instead celebratesthe plucky initiative of the local businessman. Refusing to approach the subject of Chinese consumer culture by focusing on the encroachment of western-ownedmultinationals onto the Chinese market in the early twentieth century, Cochraninstead revels in the ability of local entrepreneurs to create their own nationalmarkets. Moreover, that they did so was against the odds. The Chineses entrepre-neurs story needs to be told not only because they contributed to a thrivingcapitalist economy, but because they did so in spite of the interventions of biggovernment, rst under the state-capitalist interference of Chang Kai-sheks nation-alism and second under the overt plundering of Japanese colonial occupationbetween 1937 and 1945. The book focuses, therefore, on how Chinese-ownedbusinesses used various strategies to evade government policies, overcome politicalbarriers, and reach national and international markets . . . Despite governmentsofcial interventions, the Chinese businesses that are described here capturednational and international markets more successfully than their Western rivals wereable to do in China and Southeast Asia (p. 10).

Just how did Chinese businessmen pull off such an impressive feat? Through theuse of expertly-selected case studies which build on his existing research intoChinese business history, Cochran develops four themes throughout his book: thefrontiers of long-distance trade, the evasion of political barriers, the processes of localization whereby international trends were adapted to specic circumstances,and the homogenizing tendencies of the mass market. He refuses to accept aconventional dualism of modern western medicine pitted against traditionalChinese medicine. Instead, he describes how some Chinese drug companiesexpanded by modelling their stores on traditional medicine shops. Other Chinese-owned rms, however, embraced the new medicine and advertised and promotedtheir goods as explicitly western.The promotion of patent medicines was, therefore,not simply undertaken by foreign multinationals. Chinese rms participated increating consumer culture and they did so according to their own models. Nationaldrug companies did not, for instance, adopt impersonal hierarchical managementstructures. Instead, they relied upon social networks inuenced by birthplace andkinship, which enabled them to consider local differences while maintaining control

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of distant store managers. Chinese businessmen were also adaptable. Not only couldthey negotiate their own national markets and those across south-east Asia, but theydid so under strained political circumstances. Heads of Chinese pharmaceuticalrms may well have appropriated western techniques, but they also proved adept at

locating their commercial imagery with the rhetoric of Chang Kai-sheks national-ism. For those operating out of Shanghai during the Japanese occupation, difcultnegotiations were undertaken with the Japanese leader, Tojo Hideki, in order thatthey might continue their trading activities.

Cochran chooses to locate his entertaining narrative under the analytical umbrellaof agency, a term he readily admits is usually employed in response to consumersinteractions with commerce and the world of goods.To some, invocations of Michelde Certeaus notion of poaching might seem a little peculiar when discussingChinese businessmens adaptability to changing political regimes. They mightinstead prefer the term collaboration (one of the businessmen studied did indeedknow what he had been up to and hot-footed it to Hong Kong after the Japanese had

been defeated), but Cochran prefers instead to dwell on the persistent presence of Chinese rms during this period of what he terms proto mass consumer society. Bytheir endurance, he argues, Chinese drug companies became nonelite culturalbrokers in local societies (p. 164): that is, they took many of the concerns of Chinasintellectual elitethe advocacy of western medicine, economic nationalism, andwomens liberationand sold them to a mass market.

Again, to some, the analysis might seem inappropriate. There are other ways of explaining, for instance, the transformation of womens rights into images of scantily-clad sales mannequins. Moreover, the simplicity by which Cochran sets uphis dualistic terms (globalization versus localization; agency of producer versusagency of consumers) does not do justice to the multitude of approaches developed

in consumer studies. Cochran is to be congratulated, however, for complicating ourunderstanding of Chinese consumer society as being neither a post-1989 phenom-enon nor the product of westernization. Chinese medicine shops were not always thetraditional, pre-modern alternative of the orientalists imagination: many were, infact, the products of a highly developed manufacturing, distributive and marketingsystem pioneered by Chinese businessmen. For this point and others, we must begrateful to Cochran, though, as he acknowledges, there is still far more to be learntabout the worlds new consumer economy.

University of Birmingham

Miwao Matsumoto, Technology gatekeepers for war and peace: the British ship revolutionand Japanese industrialization (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave in associationwith St Antonys College, Oxford, 2006. Pp. xv + 248. 20 gs. 34 tabs. ISBN1403936870 Hbk. 55/$85)

This book examines the institutional structure of technological transfer in thelate-nineteenth and early-twentieth century between Britain, a long-establishedindustrial society, and Japan, a country with little previous experience of industrialsociety. It takes as its case studies two key technologies behind the revolution in shipdesign and construction during this timethe experimental tank and the marineturbine.The key area of focus, states the author, is the dynamic interaction betweenthe professionalization of science and technology on the one hand, and social change

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in the two societies on the other, and this book adopts a sociological approach toanalysis of the process whereby technology was transferred.The gatekeepers of thebooks title are dened as collective agents (not individuals) fullling certain roles,examination of whose actions can reveal the institutional structure of networks and

behaviour. These gatekeepers were the key to bridging the technological gapbetween the two countries. In particular Matsumoto argues for a composite modelof Japanese industrialization within which both public and private sectors acted asstrategic gatekeepers in this sense. Big players in the story are private sector Japaneserms, especially Mitsubishi, and a state-promoted militaryindustrialuniversitycomplex, in which engineering training institutions, such as the Imperial College of Engineering and Tokyo University, worked with the Imperial Japanese Navy andprivate sector rms to create a situation of knowledge spin-off (state institutions toprivate rms) and knowledge spin-on (private rms to state institutions) accordingto time and circumstances. While this situation appears to have been highly suc-cessful in enabling some catch-up in Japanese technology, Matsumoto contends

there was no question of a simple success trajectory. Over time the structuralintegration achieved could not eliminate the possibility of functional disintegration.This book has a number of strengths. The author is highly knowledgeable about

the chosen case studies; these have been researched exhaustively through archivalsources and are presented in considerable detail. Any reader seeking better tounderstand changes in shipbuilding technology will nd much of interest. Theauthor also treats the ndings from the case studies with due caution, makingmoderate claims for the wider applicability of his ndings. More broadly, thesociological approach has much to offer economic historians, not least that attemptsof this kind to analyse behaviour and process can help us to look inside institutionsthat too often remain something of a black box.At the same time, though, this book

is in some ways frustrating for economic historians, and there are seeming incon-sistencies in its analysis. While the author swipes rightly at catch-up growth as acatch-all explanation, he also makes extensive use of this concept for explanatorypurposes, for example in chapter 5 with its focus on latecomer industrialization.More seriously, Matsumoto makes revisionist claims for his work that will appearboth grandiose and misplaced to many economic historians, and there is a certainamount of tilting at what are, in the economic history world, essentially straw men.For example, the need to recognize that Japanese development in this period was acomposite of the public and the private is hardly new. Historians of Japans economylong ago moved away from simplistic top-down vs. bottom-up models, and it comesas no surprise to be told that the strategy of the government would have been less

effective without the role of the private sector. Moreover, much recent work by Japanese economic historians has analysed the dynamic nature of the role of thestate, and the adherents of the simple success model of Japanese developmentwhom Matsumoto criticizes are very few indeed.

It must be accepted that Matsumoto is writing within the framework of the socialhistory of science and technology and the sociology of technology transfer, andmakes no claims to be an economic historian. We may think, for example, thatreference to Gerschenkrons ideas might have sharpened Matsumotos analysis of the technological gap, or those of Schumpeter might have assisted understanding of what Matsumoto refers to as the irrational risk-taking actions of the MitsubishiCompany, but there are plenty of other ways of framing such analyses. However, the

relative absence from the bibliography of key recent economic history texts on Japanese industrialization, and a failure to engage with a literature that could have

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offered so much to this analysis, has weakened fundamentally this work and limitedits broader appeal. For readers of this journal, the book will be important reading forthe detailed case study material, but it is doubtful how far it will change ourunderstanding of Japanese industrialization, or of Britains role in it.

London School of Economics

Mark Metzler, Lever of empire: the international gold standard and the crisis of liberalismin prewar Japan (Berkeley, CA and London: University of California Press, 2006.Pp. xxii + 370. 10 gs. 9 tabs. ISBN 0520244206 Hbk. 32.50/$49.95)

This is a remarkable addition to the literatures on the gold standard and worldeconomic history. Japanese monetary policy and its historical consequences are hereintegrated into a worldwide perspective, taking into account its manifold social andpolitical implications. Following this innovative approach in nancial history,Metzler studies how Japanese monetary policy in the twentieth century was inter-twined with the biographies of two bankers: the Japanese banker, Inoue Junnosuke,and the second-in-command of the Morgan Bank in NewYork,ThomasW. Lamont.Metzler chose the period 191932 as the chronological frame for this study, as thiswas when a worldwide policy of deationary stabilization was implemented. Dea-tionary stabilization was the theory and practice of governmental-induced economicdepression that was recommended enthusiastically by Lamont, and with tragicconsequences for Inoue who, supporting staunchly the policies suggested by hisAmerican friends, was to be assassinated in Tokyo in February 1932.

The book begins with Japans adoption of the gold standard in 1897, this basedon the indemnity deposited by the Chinese in the City of London after the war withChina. It was at this point that Inoue and another signicant gure of this period,Takahashi Korekiyo, entered the world of international nances.These men repre-sented the opposite strategies of positive and negative economic policies of theyears after the First World War when Japan began building its empire and monetarysphere of inuence. Soon the new gold regime in Japan appeared to be linked toeconomic depression and a two-party system developed along the lines of economicexpansion and retrenchment. Borrowing abroad allowed the Japanese governmentto nance the heavy industry required by its military expansion. In fact, the goldstandard was adopted to negotiate loans with the international nancial markets.Trade decits, paid by additional borrowing and domestic austerity measures,permitted the expansive, positive economic policy.The years from 1897 to 1914 were the era of Japanese dependent imperialism,when territorial expansion and the smooth functioning of the international nancialorder worked together in apparent harmony.The gold standard would have implieda deationary, negative policy without foreign credit supporting it. The increasingcontradictions between nancial austerity and imperial industrial expansion endedduring the boom years of the FirstWorldWar.The period of warring European statesprovided Japanese leaders with the opportunity to expand aggressively in China andto imagine a vision of nancial independence from the Anglo-American-centeredworld economic order as a whole (p. 81). The economic boom was followed by aninterwar depression with few alternatives. During the 1920s, economic stabilizationpolicies were implemented worldwide and Lamont wrote about Inoues activities:The whole thing is shaping up to a return to the gold standard in the early months

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of 1930 (p. 212).That did come about in January 1930, but of course by then theWall Street crash had occurred and the world economy was heading towardsdepression. In the words of a contemporary economist: Finance minister Inouescareless and unprepared lifting of the gold embargo at the old parity has thrown our

industry into difculties and is exactly like deliberately leaving the door open in astorm (p. 221). Industrial workers suffered a decline of wages due to deationarypolicies: from the view of the aggregate statistical indices, wages fell. From the viewof each individual worker, wages were cut. As a consequence, more than 244,000workers went on strike between 1929 and 1932 (p. 225).The situation deterioratedfurther when silk prices plummeted due to the sharp fall of US demand and Chinesecompetition. In September 1931, following the bankruptcy of certain central Euro-pean banks, the international nancial system began to collapse. In Japan thesituation of farmers was critical: lines of starvation were advancing and farmersdaughters were sold to prostitution districts inTokyo and Osaka. In the internationalarena the occupation of northern China initiated a military takeover by stages of the

Japanese state (p. 235).The economic nationalism of TakahashiInoues old colleaguefollowed thedemise of the deationary policy and Japan adopted what has been termed militaryKeynesianism. This new economic orientation implied a cooling of the formerlyclose tie between Japanese and Anglo-American circles (p. 252). Metzlers out-standing contribution goes beyond the historical information compiled so impres-sively in this book. His analysis shows that monetary policy is essentially linked tothe particular interests of economic agents.The gold standard regime, occasionallyimposed by violent means, was the monetary expression of world dominationpolitical strategies. Japanese economic, social, and political events are shown in theirmany interrelations with world historical developments. Historians of Japan, world

and economic historians, and economists in general would prot very much fromreading this study, which is going to become a classic in the historiography of Japanese and world economic history.

University of the Pacic

Kaoru Sugihara, ed., Japan, China, and the growth of the Asian international econom18501949 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xv + 295.12 gs. 3 maps. 63 tabs. ISBN 0198282716 Hbk. 75/$140)

This excellent book expands an ongoing theme in Sugiharas work: the developmentof intra-Asian trade. It contains 11 essays that draw considerably on Japanesescholarship related to this issue.The book does not offer a comprehensive discussionof all aspects of intra-Asian trade and factor ows, but eight essays that focus onaspects of the ChinaJapan relationship and two that discuss related issues, whileSugiharas introduction spells out the common theme of the book. Altogether, theysubstantiate the view that the growth of trade between Japan and Asia was crucial tothe prewar industrialization of Japan.

Sugiharas introduction explains why the subject of the book is so pertinent andwhy it escaped close scrutiny hitherto. The literature has long regarded Asia asincapable of technological and institutional change, requiring transfusions of bothfrom the west as a precondition for sustained growth. In addition, most economichistory of Asia consisted of country studies that tended to focus on the interaction

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Communist Revolution in China in 1949 and the adoption of import-substitutingindustrialization regimes throughout Asia in the 1950s. The gradual dismantling of both may have caused a resumption of processes towards an Asian internationaleconomy that started more than a century earlier; then, as now, with Japan and

China as key engines. Australian National University

Reviel Netz, Barbed wire: an ecology of modernity (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan Uni-versity Press, 2004. Pp. x + 267. 2 gs. 10 maps. ISBN 0819567191 Hbk. 18.50/$24.95)

A thorn in the esha painful jab, a wound that worsens the more you resist, a painthat penetrates the mind, so that eventually you do not even try to resist. Theinnovation of barbed wire made the fear of pain cheap enough to deploy almostanywhere, as a tool of subordination and control. Barbed wire is an enduringtechnology, like the railways and like wire-borne communications, two other Victo-rian spatial networks with which it was often associated and applied. Netz followsthe unfolding historical consequences of this innovation with pacing and panache.He is primarily an historian of ancient Greek science, not a trained economichistorianbut that hardly shows: his research is informed by much that will be neweven to those, like this reviewer, who have spent years with its subject matter. Thetechnology emerged in the 1870s as a Toynbean instance of challenge and response:it facilitated the division of the American west for grazing and cultivation morecheaply then any other means available.Then, in a few brief decades, it reproducedhectically across the globe as the indispensable instrument of oppression and con-tainment. First to feel the pain, and rst to internalize its message, were the simpleminds of cattle.The same device eventually served to reduce men and women to thehelplessness of livestock.

Apart from its initial impact on farmers and cattlemen, barbed wire was rst usedin anger during the Cuban uprising against Spain at the end of the nineteenthcentury, when large slices of the island were fenced off to contain the insurgency.During the South African War, British troops prevailed over mounted Boer com-mandos by bisecting the veldt with long fences, punctuated at intervals with block-houses, with armoured trains along some stretches in support. Barbed wire enfoldedthe static entrenchments of the Russo-Japanese war, and this innovation (somewhatlike the cheap mine and torpedo in naval warfare) immobilized the battleeld forabout two decades, until the countervailing emergence of the tank and aeroplane.During the First World War, the agonies of infantry impaled on the wire took timeto register in the minds of army generals. Like the cattle when rst confronted by thewire, armies continued to hurl attacks on a deceptively transparent, but deadlyobstacle.

In order to prevail in the Boer War, the British army swept the veldt clean of itssheltering homesteads. Women and children were herded into tents and huts, andeventually surrounded by barbed wire stockades. These concentration camps hadthe same labour-saving attribute as cattle enclosures: the inmates were kept withinby the deterrent power of their own imaginations. When millions of prisonersmaterialized during the First World War, the concept of the camp was available foruse. During the war, its design was further rened, nally emerging as an orderly

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array of huts, set within one or more rectangles of parallel horizontal strands of wirerising taller than a mans height, in full view of armed guards sitting above onunapproachable watchtowers.

Like another simple concept, the seaborne cargo container, this model had

enormous leverage. It supported, indeed made possible, an entirely new level of repressive achievement. Railways carried millions of people across continents to theenclosures that awaited them, in replication of the means, methods, and scale of thetransport of livestock for slaughter in the American west. A system rst deployed todemarcate property rights in a possessive-individualist democracy worked just aswell for repressive dictators in central and eastern Europe.The Soviet Union reliablyherded and held millions of people in the service of its murky and murderousobjectives.The modern civilization of Germany was captured by a cluster of zealots,who used railways, telegraph, and wire even more efciently for their project of industrialized murder. Barbed wire continues to work silently at the interfaces of conict all over the globe. A fast-paced and absorbing journey takes us from the

Great Plains, one of the continental landscapes of modern economic growth, intodarker and deadlier territory, culminating in Auschwitz, where the reader is nallyleft shaken and disturbed at the transformative potential of technology. It is a shortbook, whose grip never fails. It should be read widely; economic historians inparticular will nd it a timely reminder of how growth, development, and innovationhave the power to disrupt human welfare, as well as to enhance it.

All Souls College, Oxford

Vaclav Smil, Creating the twentieth century:technical innovations of 18671914 and their lasting impact (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. ix + 350. 115 gs. ISBN0195168747 Hbk. 19.99/$35)

Vaclav Smil, Transforming the twentieth century: technical innovations and their conse-quences (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 358. 191 gs. ISBN0195168755 Hbk. 26.99/$45)

These books provide comprehensive coverage of the technologies that have alteredour world since the invention of the dynamo in 1867. They are a must read forthose interested in the details of technological change and they should be on theshelves of all students of economic growth, a valuable resource for browsing andreference.

They can be read as technological history. Creating the twentieth century (hereafterCreating ) deals with the introduction of commercially-generated electricity, internalcombustion engines, new materials, new chemical syntheses, and new methods of information and communication. Transforming the twentieth century (hereafter Trans- forming ) deals with the fossil fuel society, materials new and old, rationalizedproduction through mechanization, automation, and robotization, and new methodsof transportation, communication, and information: automobiles, high-speed trains,commercial aviation, containers, and computers. The coverage is comprehensive,dealing with the precursors, inventors and their inventions, innovators, and subse-quent applications and improvements. Case studies illustrate that there are fewsimple generalizations concerning technological change. For example, although

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inventors are sometimes successful innovators, often the prots are reaped byindependent entrepreneurs.

If there is one aspect of this excellent treatment that is weaker than the rest, it isthe inducements leading to the innovations. For example, the innovations of the

Japanese car industry are discussed without mentioning the key postwar policies thatcreated a protected market too small for production at the Minimum Efcient Scale(MES) associated with US techniques. In response, Japanese rms developed newtechniques that reduced their MES. They invented just-in-time inventories (dis-cussed by Smil), and redesigned machines in important ways (not mentioned bySmil), such as developing dies changeable in minutes rather than the hours requiredby US rms. The costs associated with these lower MESs turned out to be belowthose associated with the MESs of US techniques, allowing the Japanese to chal-lenge western manufacturers. In addition, Paul Davids explanation of the origins of the QWERTY arrangement of typewriter keys is repeated without reference to hisclassic 1985 article and without noting the recent challenges to Davids explanation

or the resulting debate.Furthermore, Smil states that the complex history of machine tools is surelyamong the most neglected topics in the study of modern technical advances(p. 173), while making no mention of Nate Rosenbergs seminal 1963 article onmachine tools. The impact of CADs on aircraft design is also studied in detailwithout mentioning its important result in greatly reducing the wasteful margins of error, studied by Rosenberg, that had to be incorporated into aircraft designed onthe drawing board. Moreover, and surprisingly, lasers, one of the most multi-purpose of modern technologies, are only mentioned once (p. 11). However, theseare but minor complaints about this study of the vast majority of the periodsimportant inventions and innovations.

These books also make a strong but controversial case for the technologicaluniqueness of the period 18671914, arguing that this was a time when the greatesttechnical discontinuity in history took place (p. 4; all further references are toCreating ), such that The fundamental means to realize nearly all of the twentiethcentury accomplishments were . . . in place even before the century began (p. 5)with Neither the pre-1860 advances nor the recent diffusion and enthusiasticembrace of computers and the Internet . . . comparable with the epoque-makingsweep and with the lasting impacts of that unique span of innovations that domi-nated the two pre-[FirstWorld]War generations (p. 25). Earlier innovations had noscientic foundation (p. 13), while the pace of later innovations has not acceleratedand, in agreement with Robert Gordon (in the Journal of Economic Perspective,

2000), the New Economy of the late twentieth century has not measured up to thetruly great inventions of the past (p. 5).Smil sees ve major characteristics of this period: rst, the impact of the . . .

advances was almost instantaneous (p. 8); second, there was an extraordinaryconcatenation of a large number of scientic and technical advances (p. 9); third,the [rapid] rate with which all kinds of innovations were promptly improvedafter their introduction (p. 11); fourth, the imagination and boldness of newproposals (p. 11); and fth, the epoch making nature of these technical advances(p. 12).

Undoubtedly, the period 18671914 contained a massive number of technologi-cal inventions and innovations. In particular, electricity and the internal combustion

engine laid the foundations for much that followed. Indeed, electricity is one of themost pervasive general purpose technologies of all time, a technology whose

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complementarities are shown whenever a city suffers a power failure. However, thedevelopments before this period were not as ad hoc as he claims. In my jointlyauthored (with Kenneth Carlaw and Clifford Bekar) study, Economic transformations: general purpose technologies and long term economic growth (2005) (hereafter LCB), wedetail: rst, the continued mutual feedback between early modern discoveries inscience and the development of the steam engine; second, the mechanization of thetextile industry over two centuries, following a programme laid out by Leonardo diVinci in a path-dependent process that was anything but unsystematic, and whichwas greatly aided during the eighteenth century by the permeation of British societywith a knowledge of Newtonian mechanics; and third, how knowledge of magnetismand electricity developed slowly along a trajectory begun by Gilberts De Magneta in1600 and was replete with understanding of commercial possibilities, which becamereal when the voltaic cell was invented in 1800, and appreciated fully when theinvention of the telegraph in 1836 began the communication revolution. No doubtthere was an acceleration of technological advance after 1867, and no doubt there

was a much closer relation between science and technology as scientic knowledgeexpanded into non-mechanical areas and research laboratories were developed.However, we see this as thickening an existing interrelationship between science andtechnology rather than as a major discontinuity.

It is arguable that the pure scientic discoveries after 1914 were in some sense lessfundamental than, and heavily dependent on, what went before, although it is hardto argue that the electronic computer was not a development of the post-1914periodalbeit with roots in earlier developments. However, I dispute the positionargued by Smil (and Robert Gordon) that the structural changes caused by thelater-twentieth-century ICT revolution paled in contrast with those caused by theinnovations of the earlier period. We have given our reasons (LCB, pp. 11419) soI only note here that our incomplete list of transformation caused by the ICTrevolution covers several pages, including those in the structure of production andmanagement, new methods of surgery, work moving from rms to homes, changesin the distribution of income, pervasive use of chips in consumers and producersgoods, control of most transportation vehicles, computerized translations, and afundamental alteration in international policy negotiations due to the surveillancefrom NGOs and their ability to organize protests quickly.

The disagreement arises partly from a confusion between the pure technology of the innovations which may be less fundamental now than previously, and inducedchanges in the socio-economic structure of the economy (what LCB calls thefacilitating structure), which are hard to see as less important today than a century

ago. Although we might argue about magnitudes, qualitatively everything Smilsays about the ve characteristics of his period can be said about the later ICTrevolution.

Smils is a valuable statement of arguments for the technological uniqueness of the period 18671914. Many would agree with him in his comparison with theearlier period, and some with respect to the later period, while LCB presentsopposing views.These debates are important in determining how we see the past asleading to the present. For example, the belief that we were not experiencing a majorICT-driven economic and social transformation in the last three decades of thetwentieth century delayed many necessary governmental and private-sector reac-tions. Thus does debate need to be carried on at greater length elsewhere.

. Simon Fraser University

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Steven Medema and Peter Boettke, eds., The role of government in the historyeconomic thought (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2006. Pp. vii + 450.13 gs. 6 tabs. ISBN 0822366525 Hbk. 38/$59.95)

Readers who are familiar with the discourse on the History of Economics Societies(HES) listserv will be aware from various discussions over the last two years howparticular topics (e.g. inequality, economic growth and the free market) have gener-ated a lot of heated debate. Echoes of these discussions are to be found in this livelycollection of essays. As the editors note in their introduction, the economic role of government touches on a wide range of economic topics, but there has been a limitedamount of work done by historians of economic thought on the broader based issuesarising from individual studies. The purpose of this volume, which stemmed frompapers presented at the 2004 History of Political Economy conference, was to bringtogether a group of scholars who had written on the subject of the role of governmentin the history of economic thought and who had a variety of different perspectives and

ideas.The volume is divided into three parts, which offer 13 chapters on the Britishclassical tradition, analyses of the American experiences and how economic doctrineand economic policy co-exist. A chapter fromWarren Samuels, which goes some waytoward weaving the three parts together, concludes the volume.

There are some interesting offerings for the economic historian throughout thebook. In the rst two parts of the volume, Levy and Peart examine economic policyin British classical political economy.There is a ne essay by Malcolm Rutherford onWalton Hamilton and the economic role of government in America during theinterwar years. There are chapters on the economic ideas of David Hume, AdamSmith and a stimulating chapter on the role of race and eugenics in America byThomas Leonard. However, the most interesting chapters (for this reviewer) appear

in the nal part of the book. The chapter by Roger Backhouse on the rise of freemarket economics is the best chapter in the volume precisely because it illustratesthe multitude of dimensions to a complicated subject, and in so doing, addressessome of the aims and objectives of the editors. Backhouse suggests that it is difcultto measure the change in economists attitudes towards the role of the state,although he could have considered the 1990 survey by Ricketts and Shoesmithwhich surveyed almost a thousand British economists on precisely this question.Rather than suggesting that working with other social science disciplines might offera way forward, he concludes rather lamely that no simple story will ever be adequateto explain it. David Colanders thoughtful contribution on blackboard economics(theories which work in the classroom but do not seem applicable when applied to

the real world) draws upon John Neville Keynes, Marshall, Pigou, Robbins, andLerner to make the case against the suggestion in many microeconomic textbooksthat pure theory gives direct guidance for policy.When it comes to macroeconomiclessons being taken from the classroom to the policymakers in the real world,YakirPlessner andWarrenYoungs chapter on Israel between 1974 and 1985 suggests thateconomists can do a great deal of harm. However, this chapter needs some archivalwork to provide us with internal discussions that support their conclusion thatIsraeli economists imparted erroneous advice with disastrous results for the Israelieconomy, for the evidence they do advance is unconvincing that Israels disasters(hyperination and the banking crisis of 1983) had anything to do with academiceconomists. Moreover, anyone familiar with how the core executive can capture

academic economists or outside advisers would play down the power of the econo-mists role within government.

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Academic economists can talk past governments and are frequently guilty of talking past each other.The latter case has become increasingly clear in many of thediscussions on the HES listserv, and is encapsulated beautifully in some of WarrenSamuelss comments in the concluding essay. Samuels also addresses issues with

which some historians of economic thought have wrestled over the last decade, andmakes a compelling case for why these scholars should retrieve their undergraduatenotes on meaning, language, and rationality from a social research methods class.Samuels concludes the volume with a call for historians of economic thought to takea more objective, a more analytical, and a more profound approach to a foundationconcept [the role of government] widely associated with our discipline (p. 422).Whether historians of economic thought are able to do this without drawing on awider ontological base (which Samuels seems to shun) will be a big challenge for thediscipline.

. cole Suprieure de Commerce de Rennes

Timothy J. Hatton and Jeffrey G. Williamson, Global migration and the world economy: two centuries of policy and performance (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.Pp. xi + 471. 52 gs. 48 tabs. ISBN 0262083426 Hbk. 32.95/$50)

This book surveys comprehensively the literature concerning international migra-tion in the last 150 years, a literature to which the authors have made manyimportant contributions. The rst half covers the same ground as their 1998 book,The age of mass migration.The most important contribution of that earlier study wasthe comparative real wage data set developed at Harvard, with migration rates fromEuropean countries related to the real wage gap, the real domestic wage, the birthrate (lagged 20 years), and the stock of immigrants in the destination country. Themodel leads to several important conclusions.

A key insight is the idea of a migration life cycle. Migration is initially constrainedby ignorance and poverty and eventually by wage convergence with the destinationcountries.This depends, of course, on whether real wages in the origin and desti-nation countries did converge before 1914. There are several countries where,according to their data, signicant convergence between home and destinationwages did not occur, including Britain, Germany, and Ireland (pp. 556), while twoof the countries where convergence did occur (the Netherlands and Denmark) hadvery low emigration rates.This is not surprising. Returns to both labour and capitalwere higher in the US than in Europe as the US economy was on a differentproduction function. The authors discussed the implications of complementarycapital and labour movements in their previous book, where they estimated howmuch migration would have occurred in the absence of capital movements. I havetwo other criticisms. First, the stock of potential emigrants is measured by thenumber of births lagged 20 years. Surely it would be preferable to run the regressionusing an emigration rate weighted by the actual number of young people. Secondly,the signicance of the stock of emigrants in the destination countries (one perthousand increase in the immigration rate after ve decades) seems very low, and isat variance with their discussion of path dependency.

Other conclusions for the pre-1914 period include that emigration fromnineteenth-century Spain and twentieth-century Britain was caused by economicfailure.The fall in skill levels in the early twentieth century was because of a shift in

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the origins of the emigrants.The improvement in the terms of trade of the tropicalperiphery explain immigration, especially from India. Rather more controversial istheir view that there was continuity between pre-1914 and later-twentieth-centurymigration, and that this was caused by falling transport costs. Is there no role for the

divergence of income levels?The later chapters seem rather less satisfying, partly because there are no new datasets compared with those for the period before the First World War. Moreover, adiscussion of, for example, government policy and undocumented migration is lessamenable to elegant classical analysis. Important issues are discussed, however.Immigration restrictions in the 1930s were partly a reaction to a fall in the qualityof immigrants. The US, Canada and Argentina acted to protect their unskilledworkers.The post-Second World War chapters reiterate the view that the costs andbenets of migration are crucial.This means that emigration rates would have risenand emigration spread to even more countries in the absence of restrictions. Fewwould dissent with this view, of course. Asylum applicants are probably economi-

cally selected, as are undocumented immigrants because entry is expensive (they say$4,0005,000 on average). A more controversial, but very interesting conclusion isthat chain effects had become so important that by the 1990s, policy changes in theEC were too late to have reduced the immigration rate.The effect on labour marketsin destination countries was small, as long as labour markets were well integrated. Inother words, internal movements could compensate for the effect of immigration onthe local wage. The effect on developing country labour markets is much greater.Using a simple redistribution experiment, the authors argue that remittances prob-ably more than compensate for the effect of the brain drain on LDC income. Itfollows that an increase in Third to First World migration would be a more efcientway of redistributing income than aid, though, of course, this is unlikely to occur.

This is an important and challenging book. It addresses the key issues in themodern economic history of the causes and consequences of emigration. It isexceptionally well presented and there is a comprehensive bibliography. Naturally,the book is not without some faults. The data sets on which the argument rests arerarely qualied and the assumptions are not always made explicit. Nor are theremany references that would allow the interested reader to examine the data sources.The use of language is seductive, with frequent use of words like powerful orcompelling. Naturally, all markets clear, and if emigration does not change aspredicted, there must be a (predictable) reason for it. Even so, this is a veryimpressive piece of work.

London School of Economics

David Bell and Joanne Hollows, eds., Historicizing lifestyle: mediating taste, consumtion and identity from the 1900s to the 1970s (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. x + 178.6 gs. ISBN 0754644413 Hbk. 45/$89.95)

Historicizing lifestyle takes its cue from the contemporary growth of lifestylemediaall those cookery, gardening, and home decoration features on televisionand in the press and magazinesthat seemingly occupy more and more air-time andcolumn inches. It sees this burgeoning area of the contemporary media as intimatelybound up with the increasing individualization of social life in which social actorsare thrown into a world of greater choice and ethical reection. This is a world in

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which the chains of custom and tradition have slipped away, and in which individu-als are propelled towards seeing their lives as a project of self-development, drivenby the search for new identities and forms of self-fullment. For the editors andcontributors, lifestyle media are central to this process, offering expert or quasi-

expert guidance to individuals as they negotiate their way across the uid terrain of late modernity.Historicizing lifestyle is guided by a concern to demonstrate that the process of

what the editors awkwardly call lifestylization and lifestyle media themselves arenot entirely novel but have a longer history.To this end, the collection focuses on theperiod from the 1920s to the 1970s in order to challenge the presentism of muchcontemporary work on lifestyle media and to suggest this longer historical formationof the phenomenon.Thus, rather thanTrinny and Susannahs What not to wear, orChanging rooms or Arena magazine, this collection offers us analyses inter alia of the British Good Housekeeping of the interwar period; Raymond Postgates postwarsocialist homage to good eating, the Good Food Guide; the black American styleguide, Ebony, from the 1940s to the 1970s; and the 1960s bachelors bible, Playboy.The empirically focused chapters are generally effective and engaging pieces of cultural analysis. Like much contemporary work that falls within the ill-dened eldof consumption studies, they ll in the gaps in our knowledge of particular genresor forms of commercial culture without adding much conceptually to the place of commercial culture in larger social or cultural histories of this period.This is culturalanalysis in the phase of whatThomas Kuhn would call normal science: the workingthrough of established paradigms, rather than paradigm-shaping innovation. In asense, this is a perfectly honourable endeavour, though it tends, in this case, to leavethe reader wondering about the signicance of the cultural forms that are offered upfor interrogation.

However, it is the claim of the book to bring an historical imagination to thephenomenon of lifestyle that is most problematic. Again and again we are told of the need to situate contemporary lifestyle media within a longer history, or thatlifestyle projects have historical precursors in the form of conduct books or self-helpmanuals.We are taken back at one point in the introduction to the court of ElizabethI and the riot of consumption into which its noblemen were drawn.A little later, therational recreations movement gets a few mentions in order to qualify claims aboutthe contemporary novelty of lifestyle.These rather eclectic references serve to revealhow deeply unhistorical the book really is. It offers no sustained attempt to periodizethe phenomenon it describes and does not justify the 1920s through to the 1970s assignicant in terms of the historical processes at work.What undoubtedly limits the

historical pretensions of the book is its indebtedness to a set of inuential, but verycontestable, sociological narratives. Looming large here is the gure of AnthonyGiddens. His Modernity and self-identity (1991) is a key touchstone for Historicizing lifestyle and there is undoubtedly much that is suggestive in Giddenss claims aboutthe rise of secular forms of self-identity and self-fashioning within the late modernworld. The problem with Giddenss work, however, is that it rests on that just sostory of sociology as a discipline: the transition from traditional to modern society(and thence,late or post-modern).Within this founding disciplinary narrative, themodern world is formed out of a process of de-traditionalization in which,amongst other things, new forms of self-reection emerge to displace the ascribed orrelatively xed forms of traditional self-hood. These are trends that then accelerate

within late-modern societies. Such a conception of epochal, categorical socialchange sits uneasily with more nuanced historical approaches to social and cultural

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change and is limited by the dualism of its before-and-after conception of change.This sociological reductionism certainly haunts Historicizing lifestyle and the bookremains conceptually hamstrung by this particular borrowing.

University of Essex

Alain Chatriot, Marie-Emanuelle Chessel, and Matthew Hilton, eds., The expert consumer: associations and professionals in consumer society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006.Pp. ix + 209. 3 tabs. ISBN 0754655016 Hbk. 47.50/$94.95)

This collection of articles is the product of an international colloquium on thehistory of consumer expertise and of consumer associations which took place inParis in 2004. The editors, as well as the assembled authors, arewith a fewexceptionswell-known scholars in the eld who are at the moment nishingstudies that promise to be major contributions to our knowledge about the emer-gence of the modern consumer since the eighteenth century. In their introduction,the editors address what they perceive as a gap in the academic literature: that is, theidea of professional experts, of civil society groups and associations who profess tospeak on behalf of consumers. The focus of the book is, therefore, less on actualconsumption practices or on the socio-cultural meaning of consumed goods andservices. At the centre of all texts are notions of politically organizing consumers andof imagining a consuming subject in a world characterized by war, scarcity,and rationing before the late 1940s, a global struggle between two political systemsin the 1940s and 1950s, and the ensuing economic afuence and abundance afterthe Second World War.Accordingly, the chapters are organized in three main sections which largelyfollow a chronological order. The rst section deals with early forms of consumeractivism. Lawrence Glickman reviews early modern consumer activism in theUnited States, Julien Vincent traces the origins of moral debates about the con-sumer in late-nineteenth-century Fabian and Christian thought in Britain, andMarie-Emmanuelle Chessel studies the genesis of the French consumers leaguessince 1900. The second section deals with the issue of consumer politics andconsumer expertise in the interwar, war, and immediate postwar years. CarolynGoldstein revisits the role of the US Bureau of Home Economics in the making of ideas of scientic consumption in the 1920s and 1930s, Jolle Droux studies therole of nutrition experts in wartime Switzerland, and Katherine Pence offers asurvey over the highly politicized debates on consumption in the two cold-warGermanies. The last section probes into the often uneasy relationship betweenstate(s) and consumer groups since the end of the SecondWorldWar. Alain Chatriotlooks at how this relationship in France was constantly reworked and redened after1950; IselinTheien presents a case study of social-democratic consumer planning inNorway and Sweden after the war; Robert Mayer provides an analysis of theorganizational and nancial strategies of grass-root consumer groups in the UnitedStates; Odile Join-Lambert andYves Lochard discuss the changing self-perceptionof Parisian residents associations between notions of the resident (that is, citizen),the (passive) consumer, and the user of public services; and, nally, MatthewHilton rounds up this collection with a study on the emergence of a global consumermovement since 1945.

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What holds these impressive chapters together is the common interest of allauthors in the question of who speaks on behalf of the consumer. What the editorsand their authors confront is the paradox that in modern consumer societies theauthority on consumption is more often than not the politician, the diplomat,

the town planner, the government statistician, the social scientist, the industrialist,the retailer and the advertising guru, instead of the consumer. Although theconsumer stands at the centre of each of these voices of expertise (p. 3), all thedifferent contributions stress that the consumer as agent and identity needs to besituated within changing frameworks of social and cultural politics which view therole of consumers, and of consumption, from often astonishingly different ideologi-cal and socialphilosophical standpoints.The core strength of this collection is thatthe various chapters not only look in detail at the different actors in the cacophonyof voices who profess to guide consumers (legislators, trade unions, cooperatives,planners, religious activists, etc.), they also position these different actors withinspecic national cultures and the respective national traditions of debating and

politicizing consumption as an activity.This consistent perspective leads successively to a complication and partial rejec-tion of American models of the historical development of modern consumerism.The editors stress that throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a two-way trafc in consumerist ideas took place across the Atlantic (pp. 8, 1213, 656).This assertion stands in stark contrast to notions of Americanization recently elu-cidated by Harm Schrter, Victoria de Grazia, and other eminent historians. Thevolume could have been improved by a chapter on professional advertising andmarketing as one voice of consumer expertise which doubtlessly increased in impor-tance over the course of the twentieth century, but interested readers will nd moreon these and other questions in the original conference papers which the editors

published with Editions La Dcouverte in 2004. Queen Mary College, London

Leonard Seabrooke, The social sources of nancial power: domestic legitimacy and international nancial orders (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2006.Pp. xvii + 223. 9 gs. ISBN 0801443806 Hbk. 25.50/$45)

This book has at least three purposes. The rst is to make the argument thatlower-income groupings (LIGs in Seabrookes terminology) represent a signicantsource of a countrys nancial power. To ignore their capital resources puts aneconomy at risk competitively with countries whose governments recognize anddevelop LIG capacity. The second is to reveal the role of legitimacy in state policymaking, and the third, highly implicated with the second, is to demonstrate howeconomic constructivism, especially a Weberian version, improves our analyticcompetence.

Seabrooke does offer an interesting comparative account of the social sources of nancial power. By focusing on the extent to which the state intervened to improvethe credit of LIGs, his counterintuitive nding is that the British government wasmore interventionist in nancial policy than the Germans in the early twentiethcentury and the US more than the Japanese in the late twentieth century, particu-larly in ways that improved the access to credit and investment of a larger proportionof the population.This in turn led to an increase in the supply of capital, which helps

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explain the relative success of Britain vis--vis Germany and the US vis--vis Japanin international nance.

The claim is an important one, and it makes sense. Seabrooke documents hisargument with an impressive command of the secondary literature and some origi-

nal archival research. However, to make his case stick, we need to know whatconstitutes the LIGs in a particular society at a particular time.We learn a bitbutnot enoughabout the ultimate effect on them of changes in nancial policy, but wenever really know who constitute the LIGs. What is the income range? How manypeople are included in this category? What is their proportion of the society? Whatare their occupations? How many reside in the countryside? How many are unem-ployed? What political and economic resources do they possess in order to exerciseinuence?We learn far more about those who resist them and the government policymakers who take or fail to take their interests into account. Only Figure 3.2 (p. 78)provides some of this kind of information in a systematic form, and it comes near theend of the chapter on Britain. We only get hints in the other chapters.

The discussion of legitimacy is even more awed and even less convincing.Although we get a sense of what is at issue in the discussion of Weber (pp. 4252),the denition of this key concept remains imprecise. More tellingly, the rst andthird of the mechanisms Seabrooke lays out on p. 51 are not really analysed in thecase studies.We get some grasp of the redistribution of political and economic assetsand opportunities but no sense of the contestation by low-income groups thatprecedes the policy reform, let alone how they call upon ideational and normativeresources. Nor do we get much of a sense of the subsequent propagation of ideasby the state.

Seabrooke is absolutely correct in emphasizing the key role of belief-drivenactions, but he offers neither a listing of what such actions are or would be in each

case, nor documentation (in the form of direct evidence and rarely even footnotes)that they take place. Only by a close reading of the text can we begin to discern whatmight constitute contestation: demands for tax increases on the wealthy, votes for oragainst a government because of its scal policy, protests, and even withdrawingmoney. We need more systematic evidence of these behaviours, and we need hardevidence of the oppositional and normative beliefs that drove them. This requiresin-depth investigation of the deliberations and organizations representing the LIGsand a tracing of the process whereby norms are converted into action. I understandfully how difcult such an enterprise is, having undertaken it myself, but withoutthis effort the claims about belief-driven action remain vacuous.

There is another major problem. Each case study concludes with an assessment

of whether legitimation was high (US), moderate (Britain and Japan), or low(Germany), yet there is no metric of legitimation by which to judge Seabrookesclaims. By my reading of the material provided here, Seabrooke can make the sameargument without any reference to legitimacy at all. His is an interest group accountin which the nancial ideology of governmental leadership has a role. I shareSeabrookes conviction that interests and bargaining power are only part of thestory, but he is less than persuasive that his variant of economic constructivismoffers an alternative approach. His long list of concepts, constructs, and mechanismsprovides little, if any, analytic leverage.This is a shame since the issues he raises areones we need to address: how belief-driven action by citizens interacts with agovernments need for legitimacy to produce policy outcomes.

University ofWashington, Seattle

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PaulW. Rhode and Gianni Toniolo, eds., The global economy in the 1990s: a long run perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi + 319. 49 gs.54 tabs. ISBN 0521852633 Hbk. 45/$80; ISBN 0521617901 Pbk. 19.99/$34.99)

This book comprises a series of papers delivered at a conference held at DukeUniversity in 2004, which brought together some of the worlds leading economichistorians to consider the 1990s in historical perspective.The result is a fascinatingseries of papers in which historical knowledge illuminates many of the debates of thepast decade.The 1990s were by any denition a period of signicant change. In theiroverview chapter, Paul Rhode and Gianni Toniolo list these as including the end of the Cold War, the introduction of the Single European Market, the US productivityrevival linked to information and communications technology (ICT) and the rise of China and India as global players. The overriding theme of the book is that thesignicance of these changes can only be evaluated by taking a long-run perspective.

Many papers also focus on the impact of ICT, contrasting it with major innovationsof the past, including electricity and the internal combustion engine.Successful collected volumes require a good overview chapter, and that by Rhode

and Toniolo is a commendable example. Nevertheless, the meat is in the individualchapters, and these cover a wide range of topics. A group of papers considerexplicitly aspects of the global economy.The rst of these is by Nicholas Crafts, whoplaces the 1990s in the context of world long-run economic growth, contrastinggrowth across regions, including mature economies and prospects in Europeanaccession countries. He considers the ICT revolution and argues that it has had asignicant impact on growth but is far from the miraculous transformation of growth prospects claimed in some quarters (p. 41).This is complemented by Barry

Eichengreens chapter which considers the rise of globalization in the 1990s. Heargues that the expansion of international transactions in the 1990s represented acontinuation of trends from earlier periods, although there is evidence of an accel-eration in international transactions sensitive to ICT. Eichengreen suggests that thelevel of globalization has now increased to an extent that poses challenges foreconomic management, some of which have been addressed, with otherssuch asreducing povertystill outstanding.The chapter by Peter Lindert reviews develop-ments in the welfare state across a range of countries and regions, thus taking aglobal as well as an historical perspective. The paper by Riccardo Faini considersEuropean pessimism on growth and concludes that the evidence for Europesrelative economic decline is less compelling than previously thought.

A second group of papers considers topics related specically to the use of ICT,with those by Alexander Field and Peter Rousseau taking contrasting positions onthe importance of this innovation and its depiction as a General Purpose Technol-ogy. This debate is complemented by Gavin Wrights paper which considers inter-actions between major technological changes and labour markets. His examinationof history advocates considering the causal inuence from labour markets to pro-ductivity, whereby higher wages generate innovations, rather than the more conven-tional approach that runs from productivity to wages.

Many of the papers deal with contrasts between the 1990s and past eras identiedas periods of signicant historical change. Thus the paper by Robert Gordoncontrasts the 1990s and the slowdown in 20001 with the 1920s and early 1930s,

combining the literature on the causes of the great depression with that on theimpact of major technologies.This group also includes the analysis by Peter Temin

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of the 1990s as a post-(Cold) war decade, contrasting this with experience in theimmediate aftermath of both World Wars. Eugene Whites paper considers boomsand busts of the stock market in the 1920s and 1990s and the policies adopted bythe Federal Reserve. Gordons paper highlights the importance of good policy in

preventing the early twenty-rst century downturn from mirroring the severity of the 1930s experience.The policy environment in the US in the 1990s is consideredin the nal paper by Michael Bernstein, which traces its origins to earlier periods.

While these papers lead to interesting conclusions and t well within the theme of adopting a historical perspective on the near contemporary world, a drawback is thatmany are focused solely on the US.This is odd in a book entitled The global economy.Many papers would have beneted from taking a more global perspective. Forexample, a policy discussion ts well as the nal chapter but would have benetedif it had also included the books global theme. Similarly much of the discussion of the impact of ICT relates solely to the US. Nevertheless, this volume containspapers of consistently high quality which are a valuable source of information for

both researchers and students of economics and economic history. University of Birmingham

Deirdre N. McCloskey, The bourgeois virtues: ethics for an age of commerce (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 616. 3 gs. 8 tabs. ISBN 0226556638Hbk. 20.50/$32.50)

This is the rst of a projected four-volume series, which carries forward AdamSmiths theory of moral sentiments toward the development of an ethic for acommercial society.This rst book serves to introduce the topic but many importanttopics remain to be covered later in more depth.

McCloskey argues that seven virtuesprudence, temperance, courage, justice,love, faith, and hope, derived from Aristotelian and Christian teachingsare insome way fundamental rather than a matter of mere preference and opinion. Theother virtues are derivable from them as combinations. The author views the basicseven as a system, resulting in a good society only if adopted as a group and properlybalanced. These seven become spe

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Book Reviews - Various (Incl Tooze) - Economic History Review (2007)