The financial crisis and Federal Reserve policy – By Lloyd B. Thomas

Book reviewsGREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

Paula Humfrey, ed., The experience of domestic service for women in early modern London(Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xii + 218. 3 illus. ISBN 9780754661559 Hbk. £55/$99.95)

In her introduction, Humfrey argues that women in late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century London who called themselves domestic servants were not simply young womenusing service positions as a way to earn a dowry, get married, and quit service. Rather, theseservants were independent women who could rely on service as a means of getting incomethroughout their adult lives—as single women, married women, and widows—therebyexhibiting ‘a degree of agency that took them well beyond the prescribed ambit for earlymodern women in civic life’ (p. 1). This agency, combined with the typical mobility ofservant women, meant ‘that the workforce of women in domestic service constituted anengine of capitalist proto-industrialization’ (p. 28) in early modern London. Humfrey firstassesses who domestic servants were and presents a focused consideration of the experi-ence of domestic servants in London. There then follows a series of depositions andsettlement examinations organized into five chapters. Chapters 1–3 are taken from theLondon Court of Arches records for the years 1667–75, 1690–1706, and 1715–35,respectively, while chapters 4 and 5 are taken from the St MargaretWestminster settlementexaminations for 1718–25 and 1726–35.

All extracts in chapters 1–3 are fully introduced, identifying the principal actors in thecase, the purpose of the case, and any background information the reader may need fullyto understand the contents of the depositions. Such supplemental information includes,but is not limited to, the importance of the city of Bath as a spa town, an explanation of thenature and importance of a baby’s caul, and the origin and significance of ‘stool ball’, amedieval game similar to modern-day baseball. Such explanations are welcome, and helpto elucidate the depositions.The cases show servants acting as deponents in a wide varietyof actions: applications for separations between husbands and wives on grounds of adulteryand cruelty; allegations of sexual incontinence; and accusations of defamation. Moreimportant than the testimony of these female servants in these cases, though, is what theirdepositions reveal about the experience of domestic service for women in London duringthis period. The introductions to the depositions typically identify the servant by name,marital status, and age, ably putting to rest the common supposition that female domesticservants were all young, unmarried women by the presence of servants who are identifiedas wives and widows, and are of advanced ages. Further, the depositions cast light on thenetworks servants established with employers and other servants, the wages they were paid,and the awareness they had, not only of the goings on of the household in which theyserved, but also the knowledge they gained of the values of the items in those households.The extracts in chapters 4–5 contain information about female domestic servants, given bythemselves. This includes, but is not limited to, their marital status, present and formerservice contracts, and wages.

The depositions and examinations are enthralling, and there is no doubt that it isvaluable to have these extracts gathered together in one volume for ease of consultation anddiscussion of the role of servants. Indeed, the introduction and five chapters provide afascinating glimpse into the experience of female domestic servants living in London in thelatter half of the seventeenth century and into the eighteenth. Far from being passivemembers of the households in which they were employed, these women are shown to

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Economic History Review, 65, 3 (2012), pp. 1169–1215

© Economic History Society 2012. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

possess a broad range of knowledge and abilities that extended beyond their domestictasks.This speaks to their value to the wider economy. Further, the collection highlights thepotential and importance of learning more about female domestic servants through courtdepositions and examinations. The introduction provides a welcome assessment of sec-ondary literature that deals with female servants and prepares the reader to appreciate thefollowing chapters. However, the absence of the work of Jeremy Goldberg is somewhatsurprising given the volume of literature he has produced regarding the experiences ofservants in medieval northern English towns. Given the two disparate yet complementarysources from which the cases are taken, a concluding section to the collection might nothave been amiss. It would have provided the reader with a final consideration of the valueof the sources and the information contained therein. Nevertheless, Humfrey has providedan important contribution to the study of early modern female domestic servants, one sureto encourage new considerations not only of these records, but of other, similar recordsthat can be used further to draw out the experience of women in domestic service.

cathryn spenceUniversity of Keele

Mark McDermott and Sue Berry, eds., Edmund Rack’s survey of Somerset (Bath: SomersetArchaeological and Natural History Society, 2010. Pp. xix + 417. 31 illus. ISBN9780902152229 Hbk. £45)

Mary Siraut, ed., The Victoria history of the counties of England: a history of the county ofSomerset, X: Castle Cary and the Brue-Cary watershed (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer,2010. Pp. xx + 236. 74 figs. ISBN 9781904356356 Hbk. £95/$180)

Rack’s Survey of Somerset is a remarkable document, compiled over a six-year periodbetween 1781 and 1787. It was originally intended to provide information for Revd JohnCollinson’s three-volume History of Somerset (1791), although only a fraction of the surveymade it into this publication. Rack was a Quaker who retired from trade to pursue hisliterary interests in Bath. He was secretary of the Royal Bath and West of England Society(an agricultural society) and appears to have taken on the survey as a means of generatingfurther income. He gathered information through a series of personal visits to mostparishes in Somerset, supplementing this with the responses to questionnaires sent out tolocal clergymen.The result is a detailed and very personal account of the county, one thatencompasses a huge range of information and insight into (mostly rural) settlements in thelate eighteenth century.

In some respects, the survey follows a similar pattern to modern Victoria CountyHistories (VCH), dealing with each parish in turn and offering descriptions of theirtopography, economy, and society, with much attention focusing on land ownership, thechurch, and major houses.What makes Rack’s account so fascinating is the level of detail.Among many other things, we are told about local poor rates, the amount of window andland tax paid, the number of christenings and burials, the endowment of almshouses, thedimensions of churches, the value of livings, the number of public and ale houses, thelocation of springs and other water supplies, fairs and markets, and even the price oflabour—usually, as at Wincanton, 1s. per day plus beer. The coverage is by no meanssystematic, a reflection of the information available to Rack (population totals weresometimes left blank) and his apparent desire to say something, but not everything, abouteach place he visited. Indeed, what is most appealing about the survey is the descriptivedetail: the blue arches and vaulting in Broadway church; the mahogany communion tableand singers’ gallery in East Coker; the dimensions of a massive tree on the turnpikebetween Bristol and Bridgwater; and the list of paintings hung at Halswell House inGoathurst parish.

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© Economic History Society 2012 Economic History Review, 65, 3 (2012)

Rack was keen to record anything he thought was interesting, from the wild beauty ofWookey Hole, through antiquities such as the standing stones at Stanton Drew, to con-temporary economic developments, including the linen industry at Wincanton. More-over, Rack was willing to add his own personal perspective. Sometimes he saw the needfor improvement: Bath was ‘one of the most elegant, pleasant and convenient spotsin Europe’ (p. 19), yet some of its streets were too narrow and its buildings old andruinous; while agriculture was frequently ‘not well attended to’ (p. 180). More often,he found things to celebrate: the ‘excellent boarding school’ at Corston (p. 296); the‘romantic and delightful’ situation of Chiselborough (p. 163), and the ‘awful sublime’countryside around Burrington (p. 57). The challenge is to know what to do with all ofthis detail. Collinson ditched much of it when writing his history, but the current editorshave provided a full and faithful transcription, with references to the folios should thereader wish to refer to the original. Their place and name indexes are helpful, but dolittle to open up the text to broader analysis, which is a pity as there is much here thatwould be useful to the economic and social historian who is willing to sift through andsort the material. Something of this has been done by the authors in their research forthe latest VCH volume on Castle Cary and the Brue-Cary watershed. The geographicalscope of the book is limited, comprising just 10 parishes centred on the small town ofCastle Cary, which together form the northern part of Catsash Hundred. The reasonsfor taking such a small and apparently unremarkable area are unclear, but it means thateach parish can be examined in considerable detail. This is both a strength and a weak-ness. The parish surveys run through the usual sections, with particular attention givento land ownership, agriculture, and religious history. This provides a richness of detail(backed up by very thorough footnoting of archival sources) that is invaluable to thelocal historian; yet at times it descends into a list of ‘facts’—everything that can be foundout about the village. Although such detail is an essential feature of the VCH, the lackof a clear overall narrative for the area makes it difficult to place the parish surveys intocontext.

Castle Cary is afforded most space and emerges as a town with a somewhat chequeredhistory. Its market was never successful, despite the provision of a substantial markethouse, though it developed a good range of retail services through the eighteenth andespecially nineteenth century when the local textile industry (initially horsehair and laterlinen weaving) grew significantly. Most of the surrounding rural parishes shared verysimilar social, economic, and religious histories: land ownership was generally dispersed;enclosure began relatively early and resulted in the development of dairying and appleorchards; population peaked in the early to mid-nineteenth century and then declined, andthe Anglican church predominated, despite the presence of non-conformist chapels inseveral villages. These common elements make local differences all the more important.Kingweston is exceptional in the impact of its major land owner, the Dickenson family,who emparked substantial parts of the parish and affected many agricultural improve-ments. Keinton Mandeville, by contrast, grew as an industrial village; its streets lined withterraced housing occupied by stonecutters who worked in the numerous quarries thatsurrounded the village. Ansford, otherwise unremarkable, developed in the early nine-teenth century as middle-class residential location for professionals and businessmen inneighbouring Castle Cary. These exceptions prove the rule in an unremarkable corner ofrural England. In many ways, the picture presented of these communities could be retoldin many parts of the country—including something of a demographic revival in the laterdecades of the twentieth century. This point is noted for several parishes, but littlecomment is made on the reasons for this or the extent to which it might constitute arenaissance of rural life. Indeed, there is a general neglect of twentieth-century develop-ments in favour of medieval history; an imbalance which makes it difficult to situate thepresent in the past.

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These two volumes offer very different approaches to the (local) history of Somerset.Rack’s survey provides a lively, idiosyncratic, but sometimes patchy view of rural commu-nities; theVCH is more systematic and measured, noting everything yet missing somethingof the vitality and currency which Rack brought to his subject.

jon stobartUniversity of Northampton

Martin Robson, Britain, Portugal and South America in the Napoleonic Wars: alliances anddiplomacy in economic maritime conflict (London and NewYork: I. B.Tauris, 2011. Pp. xv +336. 8 illus. ISBN 9781848851962 Hbk. £65/$99)

Did Britain want to incorporate the Portuguese and Spanish American colonies into itsformal empire during the Napoleonic Wars? Indeed, did Britain prefer empire-building inthe Atlantic at the expense of defending its allies in Europe? Robson’s fascinating bookanswers these questions through a meticulous study of archival documents, primarilydrawing on British Admiralty, Foreign Office, andWar Office papers for the period 1806–8.Although at times the text slips into a narrative relating each new piece of informationarriving in London referring to diplomatic rumours and naval manoeuvres, this doeseffectively draw out and illustrate the problems politicians had in responding to perceivedthreats and opportunities in Europe and across the continent.

Chapter 1 assesses the strategy of the ‘Ministry of all the Talents’, led by Grenville.Chapter 2 asserts the importance of Portugal, something which British cabinets came torealize because of Lisbon’s crucial position as a staging-post into the Mediterranean.Robson shows convincingly that fear of French possession of Lisbon was a fundamentalaspect of British policy during the war years. Chapters 3 and 4 engage with the Portuguesecrisis of 1806, focusing in particular on the views and activities of the British representa-tives there, Viscount Strangford and the Earl of Rosslyn. The account is detailed andinsightful, though one wonders whether the overall interpretation might have changed hadany sources in Portuguese been consulted (the same point for sources in Spanish could bemade for other chapters). Certainly the revelation (p. 55) that Rosslyn, who led a specialBritish diplomatic mission to Lisbon in 1806, was authorized to threaten that Britainwould invade Brazil if Portugal did not cooperate with British demands, falls into line withhistorical interpretations that stress Britain’s predatory and imperial ambitions in SouthAmerica in this period. Robson’s analysis is particularly good at drawing out the commu-nication obstacles that prevented effective action, as well as the geographical ignorance andpolitical indecision that shaped the formulation of policy in the first place.

Chapter 5 switches attention to South America. It shows quite convincingly how SirHome Popham’s opportunistic raids on Buenos Aires and Montevideo in 1806 and 1807were received in London with ‘triumphal carnival parades’ (p. 90). One wonderful detail isthat the ‘Talents’ cabinet believed that Popham’s capture of the city of Buenos Aires meantthat Britain exerted control over the entire province bearing the same name, and thatBritish power and commerce would now reach up the River Plate and into the Andes. AsRobson writes, ‘everyone was clearly getting carried away’ (p. 94). These pages show howBritish policy and action in South America in 1806–8 were based on a combination ofignorance, wishful thinking, desire for commercial expansion, and opportunistic navalbuccaneering. Behind all this, as Robson shows most convincingly, was fear of the French,and particularly fear that France might step into Spain’s American colonies and then usethem against Britain. The great number of plans, proposals, and draft attacks referencedhere by Robson show just how deeply that fear affected British policy-making towardsSouth America in the years under study.

Chapter 6 shows how strategy changed with the incoming Portland ministry. Theincoming Foreign Secretary, Castlereagh, was quick to learn from previous mistakes, and

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assert that military operations ‘cannot well be expected to lead to any permanent nationaladvantage’ and that it would be better to approach South America ‘only as traders, ratherthan as enemies’ (cited p. 107). The subsequent study (chapters 7–9) of the Portuguesecrisis of 1807 shows how Britain had to work hard to convince other powers that its policyhad changed. Indeed many historians of Latin America still use the example of 1806–7 toargue that Britain pursued imperial goals in the continent throughout the nineteenthcentury. In 1807 Britain managed to safeguard the Portuguese royal family from Frenchattack, and to evacuate them from Lisbon to a new imperial capital at Rio de Janeiro inBrazil. The British expected, and received, considerable commercial benefits from theirrole in the royal escape from Napoleon: Robson provides lots of superb detail on thejustifications for this policy, and on the preparations for, and completion of, the escape.

The final chapters deal with British policy towards Iberia and South America in 1808,as Napoleon’s decapitation of the Spanish monarchy (by replacing the Spanish king withhis own brother, Joseph) produced political vacuums. By this stage, Robson sees Britishpolicy towards South America as ‘controversial and tangled’ (p. 195) and ‘vexed’ (p. 196).Direct military intervention in South America (both naval and terrestrial) was this timeconsidered at length by the Portland cabinet. Robson’s conclusion is that ‘British strategywas certainly to be “imperialistic”, but not “realist” in terms of conquest’ (p. 202). Thisstatement provides a useful counterpoint to much recent work on Latin American inde-pendence, stimulated by the bicentenaries of the events described here. Historians of LatinAmerica have focused overwhelmingly on the internal causes of their countries’ emanci-pation from colonial rule, be they ideological, political, commercial, or cultural, and less soon the geopolitical and imperial factors that shaped independence. Robson’s work showsclearly how, if the geopolitical situation had been otherwise, and had Latin Americans notdefied British pretensions at Buenos Aires and Montevideo, their post-independencehistories could have been very different indeed.

matthew brownUniversity of Bristol

Matthew Smith, Thomas Tooke and the monetary thought of classical economics (London andNew York: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xx + 300. ISBN 9780415583930 Hbk. £85/$140)

Thomas Tooke (1774–1858) was one of the most influential political economists in GreatBritain over the course of five decades. He entered the trade with Russia at an early age andbecame a partner in one of London’s largest commercial houses. Early in his career Tookebegan gathering price data on various commodities, eventually publishing seven books ofdata and analysis and four more publications focusing on currency and monetary policy.Smith assesses Tooke’s career as a monetary thinker and ‘provide[s] a comprehensiveaccount of the contribution of Tooke to economic science, with an evaluation of thatcontribution’ (p. 2). The focus is on the structure of Tooke’s work. Thus, while Tooke isnoted as the foremost collector of economic data of his time, he was never an atheoreticalnumber cruncher. Smith perceives a theoretical framework underpinning Tooke’s analysis,that of the classical approach to economic theory. In its modern embodiment, this approachis found in the works of Piero Sraffa’s school, being based on the nineteenth-century Britishclassical surplus approach to economics, an ‘adding-up’ approach.

Tooke’s first book to focus on monetary issues, Considerations on the state of the currency(1826), revealed him to be a moderate bullionist, whose theoretical viewpoint was influ-enced by Adam Smith, in particular, his conception of the ‘dual circulation’ ofmoney—wholesale and retail—with differing monetary needs. Tooke adhered to the viewthat, in the longer run, the value of the metallic standard determined the general pricelevel. In chapter 4, Smith lays outTooke’s explanation of agricultural price movements, one

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of short and long views.This approach stemmed from Tooke’s bewilderment with the lackof attention given to weather in determining crop yields (p. 59).Tooke’s investigative workenabled him to develop a framework for explaining agricultural prices, which, in turn,enabled him to develop a general explanation of price movements, which Smith discussesin chapter 5.

Chapter 6 covers the transformation of Tooke into an advocate of the Banking Schoolapproach to monetary theory. Smith argues that historians have generally overlooked ‘thedissenting nature ofTooke’s pre-banking school views on orthodox monetary theory whichled him on the road to his banking school position’ (p. 125). Smith’s ‘view places Tooke’spre-banking school monetary thought close to the orthodox position articulated by HenryThornton (1802)’. Monetary disruptions after 1820 eventually led government to revisethe Bank of England’s charter in 1844, and in so doing it followed the Currency School’squantity approach as articulated by J. Horsley Palmer, Samuel Jones Loyd (Baron Over-stone), and RobertTorrens.The Bank was divided into an Issue Department, which issuedmore notes only as it acquired more gold to back those notes, and a Banking Departmentthat operated as a commercial bank, free of obligations to the Issue Department. Tookerejected the currency principle, arguing that the quantity of bank notes was endogenous.Tooke predicted correctly that, if the currency principle were enshrined in law, financialcrises would ensue. The Bank was forced to suspend convertibility three times within twodecades.

Tooke’s new framework rested on Adam Smith’s conception of a ‘dual circulation’.Money flowed through both the wholesale and retail markets, but the need for, and uses of,money and credit in the different circulations was quite different. The wholesale marketwas driven by credit transactions, while the retail circulation required much greater use ofcoin and bank notes. From this perspective,Tooke ‘conceived that in a system of convert-ible currency, a short-run downturn in prices was limited by the purchasing power ofconsumers’ (p. 169). Tooke’s Banking School position consisted of the belief that thequantity of borrowing, and hence the quantity of bank notes, was determined by demand.The Bank could affect the quantity of bank notes demanded by the commercial sector byadjusting the Bank’s discount rate. Given time and an adequate bullion reserve, theeconomy could be turned about. However, the Currency School’s rigid quantity-drivenapproach, and lack of concern for overall credit conditions in the Banking Department,virtually guaranteed that financial crises would arise.

Smith has written a fine book on nineteenth-century monetary theory and policy, onethat shines light on Tooke’s many contributions.The only criticism I would lodge pertainsnot to Smith but to his publisher. Presumably for reasons of economy, the book usesendnotes rather than footnotes. Even worse (for a book with so many citations), theendnotes are not placed at the end of chapters, but at the end of the text. I found myselfconstantly turning back and forth, making the book a slower read than it needs to be.

neil t. skaggsIllinois State University

Tom Crook and Glen O’Hara, eds., Statistics and the public sphere: numbers and the people inmodern Britain, c.1800–2000 (London and New York: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xiii + 229.7 figs. 2 tabs. ISBN 9780415878944 Hbk. £80/£125)

Crook and O’Hara are to be warmly congratulated on correctly identifying a highlysignificant subject of strategic importance for all forms of modern British history, whichhas suffered that curious form of neglect of being ‘hidden in plain sight’.This is the crucialand capacious field of the changing and multi-faceted relationship between politics andnumbers.The chapters assembled here provide a fascinating diversity of high-quality case

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studies which address in detail questions of how numerical forms of representation haveinteracted with public debate, questions of authority, trust and representation during theperiod from the 1790s through to the 1970s.Their sources range from the high politics ofhandwritten notes from the prime minister of the day calculating the arithmetic of electoralreform in 1832 (Steven Thompson) to the Edwardian pictogram posters depictingdifferent-sized loaves of bread to persuade voters of the relative virtues of free trade versustariff reform (James Thompson, Edmund Rogers), to the archival records of the twoleading interwar market research companies (Stefan Schwarzkopf).

As the editors propose rightly, in researching the history of the politics of numbers, thereis a ‘need to move beyond both Foucauldian and Habermasian perspectives’ (p. 6).The assembled chapters do, indeed, challenge effectively both the Habermasian thesisthat the nineteenth-century deluge of numbers distorted a ‘public sphere’ established in theeighteenth century, thereby robbing citizens of their active political participation; and thecompatible Foucauldian view that the modern rise of statistics primarily served to ‘objec-tify’ society in the service of bureaucratic state power and official knowledge.These chaptersshow that statistics and influential numerical schemes were in fact produced, used, inter-preted, and challenged by individual citizens and by many non-state groups and agencies:private, professional, commercial, academic, philanthropic, and party political (forexample, Laura Beers’s chapter on the Conservative Party’s early interwar steps at pollingpublic opinion).Thus, it was not the central state’s preferred method of socially classifyingthe populace used at every national census throughout 1911–91 (a hierarchy depicted byRoman numerals I–V) which prevailed in public consciousness and popular politicaldiscourse, but the ‘A, B, C1, and C2’ scheme of an interwar market research company.

Furthermore, the officials of the central state were far from confident of the adequacyof numbers alone to inform policy and politics; nor were contemporaries persuaded bynumbers alone, as the chapters by Higgs, Adams, Taylor, and Crook all show in differentways. Throughout the nineteenth century, to be convincing to their intended audiences,official and other supposedly authoritative statistics apparently often required the additionof assurances as to the gentlemanly status of their authors, or the confirmation of theirveracity through narrative cameos of the ‘types’ of persons they invoked. Statistical claimswere frequently subjected to effective challenge, as well as to repeated ridicule in the widelyread literature of Charles Dickens.Victorian civil servants at the General Register Office inSomerset House spent much labour manually coding the masses of data they received fromthe provinces (and thereby ‘truncating’ its range of meaning, as Higgs points out, invokingthe theory of Niklas Luhmann) to remove the worrying problems of local diversity in theinformation they collected. Not until well into the twentieth century, as Theodore Porter’schapter argues, with the development of mathematical statistics, were officials and expertssufficiently convinced of the validity of certain statistical measures—those that adhered tothe careful methodological procedures first spelled out in Karl Pearson’s The grammar ofscience (1892)—that they felt numbers really could speak for themselves at last. However,they could not then escape the reciprocal limitations of such ‘truncated’ statistics. In the1960s and 1970s O’Hara shows state officials confounded by the problem inverse to theirprevious worries: that the lack of local and regionally specific information, the ‘gap betweennational statistics and numbers at the microeconomic level’ (p. 90), could render nugatorythe state’s efforts at regional economic planning through reliance only on the high road ofthe procedurally secure national aggregate statistics.

This volume demonstrates the capacity for the contributors’ new approach to providesignificant revisionist historiographical contributions even to very familiar features of thelandscape, such as 1832 and 1834. It has long been argued that an increasing insistence onnational compilations of local poor law spending contributed to a political discourse forreform in 1834 on grounds of economy. Steve King’s chapter, however, suggests that afocus on the rise of numeracy after 1790 within local poor law discourse and practice

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shows that, rather than simply chiming its death knell, this may have preserved thelegitimacy of the system for several decades beyond its political sell-by date, as competentlocal officials and claimants found a new legitimizing discourse to deploy. Similarly,Stephen Thompson’s chapter intriguingly rewrites a crucial aspect of the parliamentarypolitical machinations involved in the 1832 Great Reform Act.

In summary, this rich volume demonstrates how politically protean, diverse, and full ofchallenge and conflict is the history of modern British society’s relationships with thelanguage of numerical representation.The overly schematic Foucauldian agenda has beeninsufficiently attuned to this because, ironically, it endorsed the same presumption as theVictorian statistical ideal that it claimed to subvert: holding that the most importantinsights are certain highly general characteristics which can be seen to inform the historyof statistical knowledge and its uses in all modern states. By bringing together the intel-lectual resources comprised by the distinct research projects of a dozen historians, thisvolume conclusively demonstrates how multi-faceted and diverse is the historical relation-ship between politics and statistics in the modern history of a single such state (mostly, infact, that well-known statistical (though not political) entity, ‘England and Wales’).

simon szreterSt John’s College, Cambridge

L. Perry Curtis, The depiction of eviction in Ireland, 1845–1910 (Dublin: University CollegeDublin Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 386. 45 figs. 41 plates. ISBN 9781906359577 Hbk.£50/$99.95; ISBN 9781906359584 Pbk. £25/$52.95)

The social and political dimensions of the Irish land question have come under increasingscrutiny from historians in recent years. In this lavishly illustrated book (for which UCDPress deserves great praise), Curtis has made a significant contribution to our understand-ing of eviction, an under-researched aspect of Irish history. Building on articles publishedduring the past decade, Curtis focuses on evictions that occurred during the successive landwars from 1879 onwards.While Curtis shows how evictions were represented in drawings,paintings, poetry, and novels during this period, this book is a rather tentative culturalhistory of the depiction of eviction. Rather than exploring the discursive meaning of evictionin Irish politics and society, most of the book is, instead, devoted to a conventional narrativeof how evictions took place.

The introduction places the book within the historiographical context of recent Irish‘revisionism’, countering the claims of Solow and others that evictions were a relativelyminor feature of post-Famine Ireland. Chapter 1 aims to establish evictions as ‘one of themajor leitmotivs in Irish history’ (p. 9) and continues Curtis’s critique of ‘revisionism’, butin so doing creates a misleading dichotomy between an ‘empirical’ approach and one thatexamines the ‘political, social, cultural and even personal ramifications of eviction’ (p. 12).The chapter concludes by arguing that Irish evictions were important sites of politicaltheatre, in which political issues such as Home Rule and tenants’ right could be played.The body of the book seeks to establish this by examining evictions from the Famineto the eve of the Great War, with a focus on the land wars of the 1880s in particular.The Famine evictions are dealt with in chapter 2, focusing on drawings that appearedin newspapers such as the Illustrated London News and the Pictorial Times. The ‘searingmemories’ of Famine evictions, Curtis argues, helped to ‘galvanise’ Fenians, Home Rule,and Land Leaguers after 1879 (p. 56), but the rest of the book is unclear about preciselyhow this happened. In chapter 3, for example, the author argues that, despite the declinein evictions between 1855 and 1878, there were a number of noteworthy instances thatcaught the eye of the press and set the scene for the land war evictions of the 1880s. Curtisrefers to William Henry Powell’s painting The eviction but provides no sense of the context

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in which the painting was produced, its reception, or how it relates to subsequent depic-tions of eviction. As Curtis moves into the 1880s, each chapter provides a compellingnarrative of the evictions that took place mostly in the west of Ireland, but only rarelyanalyses how these events were reported in the press and in visual culture. In chapter 4,Curtis discusses the beginning of the Land War in 1879 and how the Land League’scampaign against eviction produced some of the most arresting images of the period,drawn by Aloysius O’Kelly. Echoing his earlier work on the racialized representation of theIrish in the British press, Curtis argues that ‘These plebeian Land Leaguers betray nosigns of Paddy-like prognathism’ (p. 105) but in his anti-revisionist haste forgets tomention that neither did any of the drawings discussed earlier in the book. Chapter 5 ismuch more successful as an examination of how eviction was reported and representedvisually in the press, focusing on how these images could be used to criticize the Britishgovernment and raise money for the victims of eviction. Equally, chapter 7 makes excel-lent use of the National Library of Ireland’s Lawrence collection of photographs, illus-trating how land continued to shape nationalist policy at the end of the 1880s during theNational League’s Plan of Campaign against landlords. Chapter 8 provides a case studyof the use of battering rams during evictions in the late 1880s and examines how imagesof these weapons, drawn by J. F. O’Hea and others, provided ‘rich propaganda’ for theNational League (p. 252).

The book concludes with two chapters that deal, respectively, with evictions followingthe end of the Plan of Campaign and the third land war (1900–10), describing the magiclantern shows used to demonstrate the horrors of eviction to eager nationalist audiences.Following a brief epilogue on the persistence of eviction during the fourth land war(1917–23), Curtis discusses how images of eviction shaped the ‘social memory’ of thenationalist community in Ireland, yet his analysis appears relatively unsophisticatedwhen compared, for example, to Guy Beiner’s Remembering the year of the French (2007).While this is an important book about the relatively neglected topic of evictions in Ireland,future research will, no doubt, be more successful in establishing precisely how visualand literary representations of evictions influenced the politics and culture of nationalistIreland.

d. a. j. macphersonUniversity College Dublin

David R. Green, Alastair Owens, Josephine Maltby, and Janette Rutterford, eds., Men,women and money: perspectives on gender, wealth, and investment, 1850–1930 (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2011. Pp. xvi + 308. 22 figs. 35 tabs. ISBN 9780199593767 Hbk.£55/$99)

Men, women, and money is the product of an ESRC-funded project researching womenand their investments.Through the examination of macroeconomics, institutional arrange-ments, financial opportunities, national and international patterns of growth, and demo-graphic and cultural changes, the project aims to explore the ‘relationships betweenmen, women and money’ (p. 29). A key feature of this collection is its wide scope, one thattakes account not just of different social classes and geographical locations but also theexperience of the financial institutions themselves as well as those of the investor.

William Rubinstein’s exhaustive survey of British social elites suggests that the way inwhich wealth was perceived changed during the nineteenth century as owning land becameless important than the status symbols that could be bought with cash. However, decisionsover which investment to make was not the reserve of the rich. Mary Beth Combs exploresthe savings motives of shopkeepers in the nineteenth century and argues convincingly thatshopkeepers favoured ‘bequest saving’ rather than the increasingly popular ‘life cycle

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saving’ and transferred their wealth on death rather than during their lifetime. Green,Owens, Claire Swan, and Cary von Lieshout’s chapter links Rubinstein and Combs byexamining Residuary Accounts and Succession and Estate Duty Registers to determinewhat assets 1,446 individuals held on death, and to explore the implications of the growingimportance of investment in nineteenth-century society. Maltby, Rutterford, Green, StevenAinscough, and Carien van Mourik’s examination of the democratization of share own-ership in Britain in the twentieth century challenges the notion that share ownershipbecame open to all. Analysing share certificates according to which HISCO group theshareholder belonged to has allowed the authors to determine not only the level of shareownership occurring in each social group but also the types of shares owned. The resultsof this analysis show that there was no democratization of share ownership and that thegrowing numbers of small share sales were largely because the wealthy were diversifyingtheir portfolios. Interestingly, they also find that their evidence contradicts many contem-porary commentators such as the Economist which noted in 1926 that ‘industry wasfinanced by innumerable small shareholders’ (p. 185), thereby raising interesting questionsabout the perception and reality of share ownership.

Given that Green and Owens are geographers, it is perhaps not surprising that Men,women and money looks not just outside of London but also outside of Britain. MartinShanahan examines the experiences of women and their wealth in Australia between 1875and 1915 and finds that, as with the English shopkeepers examined by Combs, Australianwomen were much more likely to invest their money in the security of real estate.Furthermore, legislative changes which gave women the right to own property, receive aneducation, and vote had little impact either on the investment behaviour of women or onthe level of wealth that they enjoyed. Livio Di Matteo also examines the legislation ofwomen’s rights but in reference to women’s experiences in Ontario. By analysing theprobate data of over 4,000 decedents from two districts, Di Matteo questions the rela-tionship between women’s property legislation and the number of women who ownedproperty as well as the potential effects of regionalization. Di Matteo argues that thenumber of women buying property increased in line with the emerging legislation but thatthe influence of legal factors should be ‘filtered through broader economic fluctuations anddifferent geographies of development’ (p. 155).

Men, women and money offers more than a survey of the experience of the individualinvestor; it also examines the financial institutions themselves and considers their devel-opment during the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. GraemeAcheson and John Turner examine the emergence and popularity of female investors injoint-stock banks, arguing that women were willing to take the risk of investing but that thiscannot be explained by the legislative changes which limited individuals’ liability. Thedevelopment of stock market regulation is a topic touched upon by Leslie Hannah in hischapter about contested takeover bids and by Youssef Cassis in his chapter on globalfinancial centres.These chapters also provide a fascinating and concise overview of share-holders’ potential influence as well as the international organizations of which the smallshareholder formed a tiny part. Hannah’s examination of railway companies in Britain andthe US, and of the Berlin Stock Exchange, together with Cassis’s analysis of the fluctuatinginfluence of the London Stock Exchange, the rising power of Wall Street, and the growingnumber of international banking houses, offer an impressive macroeconomic contextwithin which to locate the themes found throughout the book.

Men, women and money is a clearly written and well-edited volume that maintainssuccessfully its interdisciplinary spirit throughout. It offers a new perspective on investorbehaviour, particularly the role that gender played in shaping that behaviour, and demon-strates confidently how closely financial behaviour is a part of everyday life.

jennifer astonUniversity of Birmingham

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David Sunderland, Economic development of Africa, 1880–1939, 1: Agriculture: non-food anddrink (Pp. lxxi + 390); 2: Agriculture: food and drink (Pp. 389); 3: Agriculture: other aspectsof agriculture (Pp. vi + 432); 4. Non-agricultural development (Pp. vi + 437); 5: Labour andother aspects of development (Pp. vi + 498) (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. ISBN9781848930636 Hbk. £450/$795)

The publishers have embarked upon an important and ambitious project to make availablekey documents on British involvement in Africa. Conceived of as an inter-disciplinaryseries that will cover all aspects of Britain’s African presence, it has two overall aims. Eachset of five volumes, in addition to a general introduction and bibliography, will containmaterial selected to encompass current and emerging areas of research, while also engagingwith what the publishers term the development process and the relationship betweencolonizers and colonized. A further concern is the inclusion of smaller territories normallyignored by such collections. Under the general editorship of Sunderland, author of twowell-regarded studies of the Crown Agents, and advisory editor Godfrey Uzoigwe, authorof the pioneering Britain and the conquest of Africa: the age of Salisbury (1974) and recentstudies of Nigeria before and after the CivilWar, the series is now well underway. Early nextyear will see the publication of Communications in Africa, 1880–1939, the first four volumesof which focus on British Africa’s railway system. Volume 5 examines the development ofits road and aviation networks, together with harbour construction and the evolution ofshipping, river navigation, and postal, telegraph, and telephone services. The third set inthe series, Government and administration of Africa, is due to appear in 2013. These twolatter sets, however, both rest on foundations laid by the first set of volumes reviewed here,Economic development of Africa, 1880–1939.

Three of the five volumes of Economic development are devoted to agricultural commo-dities and forms of production. The others concentrate respectively on ‘non-agricultural’development, that is, mining, trade and industry, and banking; labour supplies, workingconditions, and other aspects of development. Representative examples of the kinds ofcommissions of enquiry, other reports and memoranda contained in each volume includeH. H. Middleton, Report on the ground-nut trade in Kano Province (1924); Empire CottonGrowing Corporation, The cotton-growing industry in Uganda,Kenya,and the Mwanza Districtof Tanganyika (1925); Report of the Tobacco Advisory Committee (1936); J. H. Harris, Cocoaproduction inWest Africa (1911); R.A. S. Macdonald, Further memorandum on the economics ofthe cattle industry in Northern Rhodesia (1937); M. Van Den Hoek and W. J. Pretorius, Anenquiry into the factors of production in the citrus industry of South Africa (1929); M.T. Dawe,Report on the agricultural conditions and needs of the Gambia (1921); F. H. Hatch, The past,present and future of the gold-mining industry of theWitwatersrand,Transvaal (1911);A. Geddes,Memorandum prepared by Rhokana Corporation Limited on the copper mining industry ofNorthern Rhodesia (1932); G. H. Gethin Jones, Memorandum on the lime resources of KenyaColony with special reference to future requirements and the economy of transportation (1932);Labour problems in British East Africa:evidence and report from East African Protectorate,NativeLabour Commission (1914); Chinese labour (1903); and Nyasaland:a description of the countryand its resources (1924).

While each individual volume is prefaced by a short thematic introduction whichcross-references its particular primary sources to key issues and debates on, say, laboursupply, or the production of agricultural commodities, the wider context of Britain’seconomic and social presence in Africa is established in a lengthy essay in volume 1. Thestall that the editors set out is a heavily laden one. Among the many motivations behindBritain’s scramble for Africa, they write, the most important were economic. It wasbelieved that Africa ‘would supply the raw materials and foodstuffs required by Britain’sever-expanding industries and population, furnish guaranteed markets for some of thegoods produced by those industries, and provide investment opportunities and high

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returns for the large amount of capital unable to find employment at home.There was alsoa wish to protect this supposed economic Eldorado from exploitation by other Europeanpowers . . . which were increasingly threatening Britain’s dominance of the worldeconomy’ (p. vii). None of this is without controversy, and the editors explain that thepurpose of their introductory essay, together with the thematic introductions and thedocuments themselves, is to examine the extent to which these aims were realized.

Not surprisingly, given the editors’ own fields of expertise, the strongest sections of thevolumes are those dealing with imperial policies generally, and with West Africa in par-ticular. At the same time, regional coverage is nothing if not comprehensive. No part ofBritish Africa has escaped scrutiny. However, it may be that this particular strength is alsoa weakness. Breadth of coverage has been at the expense of in-depth investigation ofimportant sectors. Can the reproduction of a detailed report on Kenya’s lime resourcesreally stack up against the inclusion of additional materials on the Witwatersrand goldmining industry? Should an investigation into Uganda’s tobacco industry have beenincluded rather than accounts of Southern Rhodesian tobacco growing and marketing?Because everyone will have their own ideas about which documents should have beenselected to illuminate particular developments best, the editors will no doubt stand backwith some justification from the ensuing fray.What they or the publishers cannot so easilydo, though, is avoid responsibility for the unacceptably large number of errors andmisprints in the accompanying essays and bibliography.When turning to the references forvolume 5, this reviewer was amused to see that the main title of one of his own books hadbecome the author, with the sub-title elevated to the status of full title. Other examples aremore serious. Stanley Chapman’s important study of British-based investment groupsbefore 1914, originally published in this journal in 1985, is repeatedly dated to 2008.Thetwo paragraphs devoted to the origins and development of the Northern RhodesianCopperbelt require revision. Names, dates, and the sequence of events are garbled. Thatworks of reference should be accurate is a reasonable enough expectation. There is a gemhere, but it needs polishing.

ian phimisterUniversity of Sheffield

Jim Tomlinson and Christopher A. Whatley, eds., Jute no more: transforming Dundee(Dundee: Dundee University Press, 2011. Pp. xxvi + 326. 2 figs. 5 tables. 79 illus. ISBN9781845860905 Hbk. £20/$45.50)

I had my first lesson in the economic and social history of Dundee in 1968. The twogentlemen next to me in the bar had just retired from their positions as managers of a jutemill in Calcutta and had returned to their home town of Dundee to spend some of themoney they had earned. They have their place in this volume of essays on twentieth-century Dundee, the third of a series on the history of Dundee put together byWhatley andcolleagues. The essays cover a wide range of approaches to their subject: economic andindustrial history, gender and labour history, music, art, and planning are all coveredtogether with an innovative essay by sedimentologist Rob Duck on the interaction betweenthe physical form of the estuary and Dundee itself. These are quality essays and, as theycross and re-cross the territory, the reader is left with the task of drawing them together toget some sense of a unified view of what the century meant for Dundee and how tounderstand the major mechanisms of change. Substantial assistance in this task is providedby opening and closing contributions from Tomlinson.There are pointers here not just forunderstanding the distinctive nature of Dundee but for forming an urban history of manytwentieth-century places. He invites us to look at the slow process of deindustrializationand link this to processes of democratization and what he calls de-globalization.

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The slow decline of jute to its current museum status dominated deindustrialization. Bythe 1930s ambitious young men were already heading for Calcutta. Two world warsbrought brief revivals of demand with the need for sandbags.The 1950s and 1960s broughta brief industrial history of inward investment with American companies like Timex andNational Cash Registers. The end of the century saw the familiar and dramatic change ofeconomic structure with the public sector providing 35 to 40 per cent of employment, withthe NHS as the largest employer. Although the editors are anxious to show that Dundeewas more than jute and its decline, the footprints of jute are everywhere. The universitiesand college find themselves, somewhat to their surprise, a key dynamic part of theeconomy, not just in terms of employment and student spending but also as a stimulus tonew aspects of the economy in life sciences and in computer games and software devel-opment.The Technopol, Medi Park, and Technology Park are elements of spatial structurefor any urban historian. It was a lucky urban place that had a university to build from aspost-industrialization loomed. Dundee University owed its origins to money from the Coxfamily, earned through the massive CamperdownWorks: jute again. Concerns raised by thedecline of jute led to campaigns for theTay Road Bridge and the destructive modernizationof the town centre.

Several authors are anxious to challenge any simplistic visions of the female culture ofDundee centred on the demand for women’s labour in those jute mills. True, the avail-ability of paid work for women created a certain independence, especially in leisurepatterns, but it was ill-paid work in dirty conditions and with the harsh discipline of malemanagers and supervisors. The inward investors of the 1950s were attracted by thistradition and saw ‘nimble fingers’ as ideal for their assembly lines. Alan McKinlay and BillKnox provide a detailed account of the gendered relations of capital and labour in thesenew industries. The male engineers and tool-setters worked in a familiar unionizedcontext reluctantly accepted by the US companies. The women were offered better wagesthan in the mills, and welfare advantages such as canteen space and toilets, but faced thetarget-setting stopwatch discipline of their male supervisors. These women proved a shopsteward’s nightmare. They showed little interest in joining unions but were ready to walkout without consulting stewards or managers at the slightest sense of injustice. Theyfought their class and gender war with weapons of banter, derision, and high labourturnover that would have been familiar from the era of jute. As the economy moves to itspost-industrial phase, Tomlinson shows that key influences were not the global marketsbut political decisions taken in Edinburgh, London, and Brussels. The theme of democ-ratization is less secure by the end of the book. Universal suffrage did bring a variedselection of ‘labour’ politics, but even by Scottish standards women came late totwentieth-century politics apart from the formidable Tory protectionist Florence Hors-brugh. Bodies like the Dundee Women Citizens Association made few breakthroughs intothe public sphere.

Readers will want to draw together other themes in this collection. Dundee has amoderately successful post-industrial economy.This is where the accounts of art and musiccome into play. Post-industrial success requires a workforce that is not just skilled, buteducated. One life sciences company had 60 per cent of its labour force with PhDs. Musicand art are no longer serving wealthy industrial owners and their professional allies but areensuring that an educated labour force wants to come to Dundee. Charles McKean’sconcern for the historical built environment and its destruction is also part of this argu-ment. By the twenty-first century there is a problem for the historian of Dundee, hinted atbyTomlinson.What is Dundee? Is it a city, a region, a travel-to-work area? By 2001, 18,000people a day were commuting into the city. He might have added that nearly 10 per centof the working population, some 8,000 people, left the ‘city’ each morning to find work.The historian of late twentieth-century urban places has lost the comforting certainty ofgeographical boundaries.This is an urban history that needs to be read and thought about

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more widely than within the boundaries of Dundee itself; deindustrialization, certainly;de-globalization, partly; democratization, sadly dislocated.

r. j. morrisUniversity of Edinburgh

Franco Amatori, Robert Millward, and Pier Angelo Toninelli, eds., Reappraising state-ownedenterprise (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011. Pp xiii + 261. 29 tabs. ISBN 9780415878326 Hbk.£80/$125)

The relative merits of public and private ownership have long exercised common rooms,electoral campaigns, and airwaves in Britain, as elsewhere. For most of the twentiethcentury, from shop floor to ivory tower, economic modernization was often equated withinterventionist economic policies. Arguably, this outlook reached its zenith in the 1960s.For example, Alexander Gerschenkron highlighted the state’s historic role in promotinglatecomer development at the same time as economists advocated interventionist responsesto market failure. As noted in Reappraising state-owned enterprise, during the 1960s publicownership was an integral part of the policy framework pursued in both the UK and Italy.While the book is somewhat uneven in terms of its content, and there is perhaps a bit toomuch overlap between some of the chapters, there are enough thoughtful essays in thisbook for me to recommend it to historians of both countries as well as those interested incomparative approaches to economic performance.

However, since the collapse of Communism in the 1980s (and the related emergence ofcontemporary forms of globalization), academic debates have for the most part tended tofavour privatization. Voters, who were increasingly shareholders, tended (understandably)to lend electoral support to denationalization. The interventionist policy responses to therecent credit crunch, responses that have in the UK included the nationalization of banks,have added a new twist to these debates. Governments that previously had pursuedmarket-orientated policies, against the backdrop of increasingly globally mobile produc-tion, have found themselves needing to re-evaluate the balance between government andmarket failure. It remains to be seen what the academic response will be to this unexpectedturn of events.

Economic historians can shed some light in evaluating the unfolding political andeconomic aspects of these debates. Reappraising state-owned enterprise attempts to providesuch a contribution. The editors have brought together a dozen essays written by a rangeof eminent economic and business historians.The editor’s introduction recognizes that thepaths of Italian and British political and legal development have differed, and that ‘inter-related problems of finance, entrepreneurship, and governance’ (p. 8) illustrate these cleardifferences. For example, the absence in Italy of an equivalent to the City of Londoncreated the need for an alternative financial model.The Italian alternative was a pattern ofinvestment based on state-owned corporations. These essays provide a historical overviewof the British and Italian experience as it relates to the rise and fall of public enterprises.The book is organized into two distinct parts. Part 1, entitled ‘Policies, outcomes andfunding’, features an introductory essay by the editors followed by six other chapters, whilepart 2, ‘State-owned enterprises in different sectors’, covers the remaining six chapters.

A recurrent theme is the contrast between traditional private forms of entrepreneurshipand the statist alternatives. For the most part the essays are not directly comparative infocus. Most of the essays instead concentrate on the experience of public enterprises inonly one of the two countries, with two particularly interesting and genuinely comparativechapters on the comparative development of the iron and steel (Ruggero Ranieri) andshipbuilding (Giulio Mellinato) industries being exceptions. The strongest features ofthe book are that the best essays (such as those essays written by Ranieri, Glen O’Hara,Martin Chick, and Terry Gourvish) recognize the interconnections between political and

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economic development. The political-economic ramifications of the use of public enter-prises in policies towards Italian migration and North Sea oil are just two examples.

The quality of the chapters varies, as in many edited collections, and there is at times a littletoo much overlap in content.The book would have also benefited from a concluding chapterthat attempted to bring together some of the thematic issues raised in the book’s manythoughtful essays. Furthermore, the relationship between the changing intellectual climateand the fortunes of public ownership is one not developed to any extent in the book. Theabsence of an extended discussion of the intellectual context is unfortunate because acomparative study of British and Italian think tanks and industrial policy agencies mayprovide clues to understanding the observed divergence in the economic policies pursued.Nevertheless, there are many thoughtful essays in Reappraising state-owned enterprise, andthere is certainly enough to recommend this edited collection.

graham brownlowQueen’s University, Belfast

Vicky Long, The rise and fall of the healthy factory: the politics of industrial health in Britain,1914–60 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011. Pp. x + 290. 3 figs. ISBN 9780230283718 Hbk.£55/$85)

This book provides an interesting contribution to the growing literature on health in andaround the workplace, and on related debates about the development of a preventive healthservice in the mid-twentieth century. However, it is important to recognize what the book isnot about. It is not a history of occupational disease, an examination of health and safety atwork, nor really an exploration of employer-promoted industrial welfare schemes. Rather, itis largely concerned with policy debates, often within or between interest groups and thestate. It utilizes three keys sets of sources: those of theTUC and peak employer organizations;papers of the Ministry of Health and Labour; and the journals of the self-interestedorganizations formed to promote industrial health from a medical or social perspective.

Six thematic chapters deal broadly with the rise, operation, and decline of the healthyfactory idea. The opening chapter outlines the development of factory health provisionduring the two world wars, emphasizing the importance of militaristic mobilization togovernment promotion of workplace health facilities.This is followed by a consideration ofthe healthy factory environments promoted by companies and the industrial health pro-fession between the wars. Drawing especially on developments in the big, new consumerindustries of the interwar midlands such as Boots and Cadbury, strong links are drawnbetween the healthy loci of production and health-giving qualities of the products whichcompanies promoted in their advertising.

The core of the book explores the role of theTUC in the promotion of an industrial healthpolicy between the wars, and in the changing ideas about individualized health and the bestway to promote health in the workplace.These two chapters indicate the tensions inherentin the industrial health project, revealing the deep divisions within and between interestgroups as newly emergent professions and power brokers sought to promote their version ofindustrial health. For theTUC, work-related health issues were caused largely by employersand needed to be fixed by state intervention; yet this was at odds with both employee- andemployer-led voluntarist activities and the emergence of a dominant health care model ofindividual responsibility for personal health. The final third of the book shows how thesetensions led to the collapse of the ideal of a health policy focused on the workplace. TheNHS, providing home-based individual health care for all, made an alternative or parallelworkplace service look redundant, especially to government where the Ministries of Healthand Labour fought a lengthy and pointless dispute over the issue. The TUC continued tocall for a state system, viewing voluntary schemes with scepticism, while employers refusedto countenance a compulsory system which would place state doctors in their works.

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Moreover, most small employers simply could not afford permanent medical coveragethough some were willing to try pooled resources. Even the professionals failed to agree onthe best way forward, allowing the government to kill the idea by the end of the 1950s.

This is essentially a book about ideas and policy debates. It is disappointingly light ondiscussion of practical attempts to delivery healthy factories. There is some considerationof famous schemes but these are surprisingly scant.The picture is in general negative: toofew schemes; too little done; and that which was attempted undertaken in the name ofindustrial efficiency, not workers’ health. Moreover, the employers’ voice is largely silent inthis book. The only source utilized, the records of the anachronistically named BritishEmployers Confederation (BEC), provides little information on their attitudes and thatwhich does appear is largely defensive—unsurprisingly as the BEC, and its predecessors,largely represented SMEs in areas like engineering. Similarly, the chapter on the healthyfactory spends more time discussing William Morris the socialist than William Morris themotor manufacturer. Overall, the treatment of business is one-sided and rather naive, whilethe vague and contradictory views of unions and professionals are given sympatheticprominence. In particular, the political economy of industrial relations is only narrowlycomprehended. Age and gender were central to an understanding of the legitimate role ofthe state and social services in private lives and people’s bodies. Industrial health andwelfare had always focused on women and young workers as permissible cases for protec-tion and control, while adult males were deemed responsible for their own care.Thus, forboth employers and (male) employees, occupational health was an issue of regulation andcompensation, not nanny state industrial welfare. In these circumstances it is hardlysurprising that industrial health policy failed. This lack of sophisticated understanding ofindustrial relations weakens the book, as do a number of factual errors—incorrect names,dates—and an unacceptably high level of proofreading errors. Overall, it gives the impres-sion of a project shaped largely by (and from within) its sources. It is a useful contributionto the literature on mid twentieth-century health policy but one of only marginal interestto most economic and business historians.

barry m. doyleUniversity of Huddersfield

Matthew Hilton and James McKay, eds., The ages of voluntarism: how we got to the BigSociety (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 188. ISBN 9780197264829 Pbk.£14.99/$27.95)

This ‘loose and baggy’ collection of essays, to use one of the descriptors of their subjectmatter, arose from a British Academy workshop held in March 2009 and is now publishedwith the opportune addition of Big Society in the title. There is a concentration ofcontributors from Birmingham and London academia, two of whom have had substantialexperience in the voluntary sector. Although it would be incorrect to ascribe any oneideological slant to this uneven and varied collection, there is a persistent refrain that therewas no golden age of voluntarism; that the state has not supplanted the voluntary sector;and that Labour, contrary to the myth, has been a strong supporter of voluntarism. Thusthis is not a ‘declinist’ apologia for the voluntary sector. Their central metaphor is ofvoluntary action like a deep spring which, when apparently running dry in one area,resurfaces in another.

The introduction provides the criteria for their selection of subject matter: ‘The chaptersin this collection have therefore been selected because the case studies they examine areemblematic, either of the most significant periods in the history of voluntary action since thenineteenth century or the most significant issues that have impacted on the sector’ (p. 4).Mutualism, trade unionism, religion (until chapter 7), sports, voluntary hospitals, andthe work of governors in schools get little attention. Chapters 2, 5, and 7 have a narrow

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focus, on First World War charities, tenant groups, and Christian involvement respectively.The other chapters tackle successively the broader areas of interwar associational volunta-rism, Labour’s support for charity and voluntary action in the 1940s, professionalism inthe 1960s, and, finally, New Labour and the third sector. These are fitted somewhatawkwardly into a chronology from 1914 to 2010. By page 12 in the introduction the editorsabandon any ‘squabbling over numbers’ and anyone seeking quantitative analysis will bedisappointed.

The early chapters make some rather large claims. Chapter 2 describes the First WorldWar as a crucial stage in the development of British voluntarism, details the growth of warcharities, and asserts that ‘strength in social capital . . . gave Britain a distinct edge overGermany’ and a ‘new view . . . [that] charity working hand-in-hand with state welfare haddecisively gained the upper hand’ (p. 46).The claim in chapter 3 that the developments inassociational voluntarism in the interwar period helped to ‘forge’ the emerging period ofdemocratization is a little better supported. These rather overblown claims continue inchapter 4 where Labour’s historic distaste for cold charity (as in the poor law) did not,despite some evidence to the contrary, undermine support for state and voluntary part-nership, which was supported when in government (1945–51), revived in the 1960s, andcontinued once more after 1997. Chapter 5, which concentrates on tenants’ associationsand action on rents in the 1960s, unfortunately begins with a historically dubious claim,that the Glasgow rent strike in 1915 was ‘led by the Women’s Housing Association’ (p.100), but does then become a subtle and nuanced analysis of changing urban governanceand the tension and intertwining of local party politics. Chapter 6 has the only applicationof the conventional ‘insider and outsider’ analysis, of various groups concerned with themisuse of drugs (including anti-smoking groups), and is succinct and informative. Chapter7 is the only sustained work on faith groups in a very well-balanced analysis of their workwith the Manpower Services Commission in the 1980s.The challenge to Thatcherism andthe New Right view of charity is made clear, where apart from the actual work of faithgroups, ‘their role in shaping the moral contours of debate about welfare’ (p. 157) wasimportant. All this leads to New Labour’s penchant for new terminology, as in the ‘thirdsector’ in chapter 8 where, influenced by the Deakin Commission (the same NicholasDeakin who co-authored chapter 4 of this book), greater funding brought forth greaterintegration of the political and voluntary.

The distinction between politicized and non-politicized voluntary groupings is taken asredundant. Jürgen Habermas now seems to be the continental theoretician of choice, in sofar as any deeper ideology is sought. A tantalizing question for economic and socialhistorians is not addressed here—why did growing disposable income not continue to beretained mainly by households rather than dispensed increasingly by central governmentfrom taxes? The editors clearly feel that the Big Society is a derivative of Labour’sapproach; indeed, ‘economic pressures may mean that, in time, history may judge the NewLabour era to have been a high water mark in partnership between the state and the sector’(p. 179). This interesting, fresh, and often original collection has, one suspects, alreadyprejudged this conclusion.

martin earleyUniversity of Bristol

GENERAL

Jean F. Crombois, Camille Gutt and postwar international finance (London: Pickering &Chatto, 2011. Pp. 192. 6 tabs. ISBN 9781848930582 Hbk. £60/$99)

Since the last quarter of the twentieth century financial history has become an importantsub-discipline of economic history. Research in this field has been focused mainly on

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banking history, generating some excellent case studies and interesting general publica-tions. By contrast, the history of international financial diplomacy, and more particularlythe involvement of private businessmen, has not as yet attracted much attention. Cromboisaims to fill the gap by studying the career of Camille Gutt, a Belgian businessman whobecame involved in international financial politics, first as an expert, later as a Minister ofFinance, and eventually as the first Managing Director of the IMF. The book is based onan in-depth study of the Gutt papers and of those of his close friend, Georges Theunis, aformer Governor of the Bank of Belgium and twice prime minister. Research in thearchives of the IMF and in other European and American archives also proved to be useful,but their scrutiny was not as exhaustive as for the Gutt and Theunis papers.

In the first chapter the analysis is focused on Gutt’s career between 1919 and 1935, firstas an expert and then as an active political player in international financial diplomacy.Several aspects of his actions are discussed, inter alia his role in the efforts during the early1920s to stabilize the European currencies and, in 1926, to introduce the gold exchangestandard in Belgium. Gutt’s unsuccessful attempts to save the gold bloc, this time asMinister of Finance (1934–5), close the chapter. The government fell on this issue. Thenext government, led by Paul Van Zeeland (1935–6), successfully devalued the Belgianfranc, bringing it into line with the currencies of the sterling area. Gutt would never forgiveVan Zeeland for preparing the operation behind his back.The rivalry between the two menwas enhanced by the contrast between the neo-classical, rather conservative, views of Guttand the more modern, Keynesian ideas of Van Zeeland.

The next four chapters discuss Gutt’s actions as Minister of Finance in the Belgiangovernment during the few months before the German invasion (1939–40) and in thegovernment-in-exile in London during the war (1940–4). Four aspects are investigatedcarefully: Gutt’s role in the negotiation of Belgian participation in the Allied war effort; hiscontribution to the shaping of a new international monetary regime; his crucial role in therealization of the Benelux Agreements, including his efforts to extend them to other westEuropean countries with the aim of achieving a broad regional cooperation; and, finally, hisrole in the preparation of the BrettonWoods conference of July 1944. In the sixth and finalchapter Crombois discusses Gutt’s actions as the first IMF Managing Director (1946–51),providing a nuanced account which challenges the traditional view of Gutt’s weak perfor-mance at the IMF.

The book is a most interesting and well-presented piece of scholarship, proving theimportant role of individuals, and of businessmen in particular, in shaping internationalfinancial politics during the first half of the twentieth century. That said, a few criticalremarks should be made: the emphasis given to the Gutt and Theunis papers sometimesgenerates a biased view in favour of Gutt in evaluations of his diplomacy. For example,Adolphe Baudewyns, a director of the National Bank of Belgium and head of its Londonbranch during the war, is not mentioned in Crombois’ analysis of the negotiations forlending Belgian gold to the Bank of England, although Baudewyns not only took part inthe discussion but was the main source of inspiration for the resulting terms and condi-tions. Furthermore, the analysis of the discussion between Gutt andVan Zeeland about thepostwar exchange rate, which was negotiated with the British and American authorities,does not reveal the entirely reasonable arguments put by Van Zeeland in opposing Gutt’splan to reduce the money supply by two-thirds immediately after the liberation of thecountry, nor to negotiate, on the basis of this plan, a minimal depreciation of the franc inrelation to the dollar and the pound.Van Zeeland argued that Gutt’s proposal would havea disastrous deflationary effect, paralyzing the economic recovery of the country. In this hewas proved right, although the unforeseen overwintering of the Allied army in Belgiumsaved Gutt’s plan. Finally, Crombois’ attempts to challenge the conventional wisdomabout Gutt’s weak performance at the IMF are insufficiently substantiated by the evidence.The IMF, for example, was excluded from the discussions leading to the important

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realignment of the American and European currencies in 1949. Furthermore, the IMF wasabsent during the discussions leading to the establishment of the European PaymentUnion (EPU), with the result that the Bank of International Settlements became theclearing agent of the EPU and not the IMF.

These few remarks do not diminish the originality and great scientific merits of the book.The author succeeded entirely in proving the need to include the role of individualbusinessmen in international financial diplomacy. Indeed, this is a pioneering study in thisrespect, opening up new perspectives for research in financial history. Let us hope thatother scholars will soon follow his innovative example.

herman van der weeLeuven University

Sheilagh Ogilvie, Institutions and European trade: merchant guilds, 1000–1800 (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. vi + 493. ISBN 9780521764179 Hbk. £60/$99;ISBN 9780521747929 Pbk. £22.99/$37.99)

Merchant guilds were privileged associations of professional trades, and their role ineconomic development in medieval and early modern European history has been intenselydebated over the last few decades. Some view these associations as being a fundamentalfactor in the creation of social networks, connecting far-removed markets and reducingtrade insecurity for merchants. Others have a more sceptical view, and see the guilds as animportant means for powerful merchants to monopolize trade, because the guilds’ legalprivileges gave them the right to exclude potential competitors from membership. Thepositive view of guild privileges found in the historical literature has recently been echoedby several economists, who argue that merchant guilds were beneficial for overcomingtransaction problems, while their membership generated a large stock of social capital.Thelongevity of the merchant guilds is, in this view, evidence of their efficiency; that is, thatthey solved economic problems better than any other institution at the time, such as thestate or the market.

In this book, Ogilvie takes issue with the positive view of the medieval and early modernEuropean merchant guilds. Ogilvie refutes a number of alleged qualities of the merchantguilds, such as that they were efficient institutions for providing security, enforcing con-tracts, solving agency problems, managing information and stabilizing prices. Perhaps themost controversial issue regarding merchant guilds is the proposition that they allowedrulers of trade centres to commit to the security of trade; by making credible threats ofboycotts, merchant guilds could effectively discourage rulers from confiscating theirmembers’ wealth. This idea underpins much of the optimists’ case as to why merchantguilds arose and existed in medieval Europe, but it is refuted by the historical examplesquoted by Ogilvie. She argues that increased security in medieval trade was not created bygranting exclusive trade rights to particular groups of merchants. Instead, political authori-ties in some locations found it beneficial to grant commercial security to all merchants,whether or not those merchants were members of a guild.

Using an impressive amount of secondary sources, Ogilvie succeeds in distilling anoverwhelming amount of evidence on numerous activities undertaken by the Europeanmerchant guilds.They were rent seekers and lobbyists.They excluded non-members fromtrade and restricted competition among members.Their monopolistic position was some-times even used to the disadvantage of their own members, as trade in some localitiesstagnated due to the high prices the merchant guilds were able to charge by disallowingcompetition. The merchant guilds restricted entry for Jews, women, and foreigners, andanyone else who was considered undesirable. They persisted so long, Ogilvie shows,

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because these powerful economic associations were able to provide economic benefits tovarious rulers throughout Europe.They provided financial support in the form of taxes andloans in return for economic privileges.

Ogilvie’s study is not only important for refuting the overly enthusiastic claims aboutmerchant guilds. It further argues that it is futile to study an institution in isolation byconsidering only some claimed beneficial aspects. Institutions need to be studied inconnection with other institutions existing simultaneously in that particular society. Effi-ciency claims need to be studied alongside claims of the institutions’ redistributive effects.Conflicts over institutional solutions must be taken into account when analysing why someinstitutions persist over long periods of time.True to her methodological stance, Ogilvie notonly succeeds in casting doubt on the beneficial effects on long-distance trade merchantguilds were supposed to have. On each and every account, she also offers an alternativeexplanation for the claims, presenting evidence that merchants benefited from otherinstitutional arrangements emanating from urban governments, rulers, legal systems, andmarkets. The expansion of public institutions benefited economic growth by providingsecurity to all, and thereby providing a legal framework and protection for transactions in themarket. A major challenge for future research is to understand this process more deeply.

This book not only effectively demolishes the efficiency thesis regarding merchantguilds, but, more importantly, also provides a framework for analysing institutional change,and it will define the terms of how social institutions should be researched and evaluatedfor years to come.

erik lindbergUppsala University

Vicente Pinilla, ed., Markets and agricultural change in Europe from the 13th to the 20thcentury (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010. Pp. 247. 16 figs. 40 tabs. ISBN 9782503529523 Pbk.£47.55/€62/$90)

The papers in this volume were originally presented at a conference held in Saragossa in2006, which aimed at analysing the effects of market demand on land use, the managementof land, and agricultural specialization. Including the introduction the volume comprisesnine chapters, ranging from literature reviews to new, empirically based studies.

Recent research has shown that spatially concentrated demand from urbanized andindustrialized regions was the main condition for agricultural development, and mostscholars concur that urban markets had positive effects on labour division and regionalspecialization.The first case study is by Isabelle Theiller and shows the emergence of localmarkets in eastern Normandy in the late middle ages. She draws connections between thehigh number of markets, the development of regional trade, and the emergence of a creditand rent market. José Vicente Serrao describes the changes in land management inPortugal between the seventeenth and nineteenth century in the context of consumerbehaviour and communication between consumers and decentralized producers. Since theseventeenth century the urbanization in Porto and Lisbon created market demand thatencouraged farmers to adopt new technologies and invest in farms.The output of productslike wine, olives, and orchards grew especially rapidly. Since it was agricultural changewithout institutional change and it occurred before the liberal reforms, Serrao describes itas a ‘silent revolution’ (p. 47).

The reasons for specializing in winegrowing in the province of Barcelona in the mid-nineteenth century are analysed by Ramon Garrabou, EnricTello, Xavier Cussó, and MarcBadia-Miró. The authors compare the influences of natural conditions (such as weather),the market (distance to a harbour), and population density. Following Ester Boserup’sargument, they attach special importance to the positive effect of prior population growth

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on the local emergence of specialized agriculture. Michael Kopsidis also follows Boserupin assuming a third way for agricultural growth besides pure increases of yield per acre orincreases in the amount of arable land: the intensity of farming systems. Due to rotationsystems, including many years of fallow ground, in the 1830s Westphalia had a very lowaverage farming intensity. In the following decades agricultural output increased tremen-dously, driven by the growing demand of the urbanizing Ruhr area and probably by the useof more intensive rotations.

Probably the most elaborate essay of the book is by Mats Olsson and Patrick Svenssonon agricultural production in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Scania, the ‘Swedishgranary’. In a persuasive econometric analysis, conducted at the micro level of individualfarms, they show that the amount of marketable surplus was not only determined by farmsize, soil quality, and other obvious variables, but also by prices that were both high andstable. In particular, and here the ‘radical’ Swedish enclosures of the early nineteenthcentury seem to have had a very important effect, they show that farmers of enclosedproperties had significantly higher marketable output than others.Thus both demand andagrarian reforms created incentives for increasing production. Pinilla and María IsabelAyuda discuss the role of markets in the growth of Spanish horticulture, especially orangesand other citrus fruit. Until the second half of the nineteenth century the main productsof Spanish agriculture were wheat, olives, and wine. Driven by English demand, farmersspecialized in citrus fruits, tomatoes, dried fruit, nuts, and peppers. Pinilla and Ayuda payspecial attention to the competition with the horticulture production and distribution ofCalifornia. The prices for Spanish products in England were much lower, due to com-paratively cheap family labour and lower transportation costs.

Mikkelsen Tretvik deals with agricultural development in Norway. From c.1600 Norwe-gian agriculture was characterized by the complementary existence of settling Norwegianfarmers and wandering Sami.The Sami reindeer economy developed from labour-intensivebreeding with dairy production on smaller fields towards labour-extensive reindeer ‘ranch-ing’ in large herds for the purpose of specialized meat production.This reaction to marketdemand for meat led to conflicts between groups of Sami following different strategies, toa decrease in dairy production, and to a considerable increase in grassland monocultureconnected with enclosures. Finally, Ann-Catrin Östman highlights more cultural and socialaspects of commercialization, dealing with gender aspects of the growth of dairy farming ina Finnish community between 1880 and 1930.Although the cooperative movement createda new public sphere exclusively for men, Östman concludes that there was no clearde-feminization of dairy work, because of their relevance to the production process andtheir social status within the family.

This volume is undoubtedly valuable for research on agricultural change. Its inspiringchapters raise new questions: why did Swedish enclosures foster agricultural growth,whereas English and north-western German ones did not; what size of market demand canbe considered responsible for farms changing production strategies; how strong is thenexus between markets and agricultural change; and did farmers inevitably change agri-culture when the market demanded it? Markets and agricultural change continue toconstitute a promising field of research.

johannes brachtUniversity of Münster

Eric G. E. Zuelow, Touring beyond the nation: a transnational approach to European tourismhistory (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011. Pp. xiii + 250. 4 figs. ISBN 9780754666561 Hbk.£65/$119.95)

How important is conflict of interest for a reviewer? Living in a country where the primeminister cannot find the time to legislate on his own multiple conflicts of interests, I want

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to confess my own immediately. Despite recent poor performance, according to the UnitedNations World Tourism Barometer, Italy remains in the top five tourism destinations in theworld, and third in Europe after France and Spain. It has been a shock to see that, despitethe abundance of scholars considering the economic, social, and cultural history of tourismin Italy, this country is not mentioned at all in this book (apart from a handful ofquotations). This reviewer is therefore biased by his own nationality, and yet he canunderstand that there are probably sound reasons for this omission. Nonetheless, it is a pity(I would never say a mistake: the conflict of interest would otherwise prevail).

The book offers many original points of view on the relatively young historiography oftourism. Zuelow has found the people and case studies that support his ideas, and he isadamantine in his introduction: ‘historians are always concerned with context, but fortourism scholars that context must be truly transnational in scope’ (p. 16). In the first partof the book, the reader is confronted with a survey of seaside resorts (by John K.Walton),mainly dealing with Spain and France, but also some other ‘capitals of seaside masstourism’ that have probably a lot to do with the (mostly British?) collective imagination ofthese places (here again is the conflict of interest. Vade retro, Satan!). A fresh and originalstudy of nudism and tourism in Cap d’Agde (Languedoc-Roussillon) is eye-opening,thanks to the balance of archival and oral sources, and considers elements from philosophyto the crudest of business practices. Laurent Tissot explores the ‘Alpinisation’ of tourism,reconsidering the classical image of British tourist culture in Switzerland, and showing theimportance of a ‘pure’ Swiss contribution to the foundation of the new myth. AngelaSchwarz investigates the international Great Exhibitions between the first at Crystal Palacein 1851 and the last one in Paris in 1937.These are considered an imaginative world tour,a sort of virtual visit to the reality (but also the stereotypes) of the different countries. Shementions that 200 million people visited these exhibitions.The latest, which took place inShanghai in 2010, received 83 million visitors in six months.This figure confirms the mainconclusions of the author, but it should also cause us to reconsider the over-optimisticexpectations of the importance of Chinese tourists in the near future, especially for Europeand the US.

The second part presents a selection of contributions dealing with modern ideas abouttourism promotion.Tourists are not just visiting a country or a town, but an idea or a placethat may have been invented, deconstructed, and restructured, to respond to the evolvingcollective imagination. Budapest, ‘the Paris of the East’ (the author could have investigatedhow often ‘the Paris of . . . ’ has been attributed to other cities before 1938), is describedby Alexander Vari as a perfect cocktail of business and tourism organization, with somespecific attractions (the spas circuit), and a balance between past and present, tradition andmodernity. Patrick Young then details the new strategies conceived by local and nationalauthorities together with the business community to find a rational path for both massand elite tourism in the Hexagon in the last century. Ireland is the third case study andEric G. E. Zuelow shows postwar changes, starting with specific projects arising from theMarshall Plan, that permitted Ireland to construct and market a new image of the EmeraldIsle, thereby making Ireland a place where nature and heritage combine under the flag ofa new (non-violent) patriotism.

The third section offers fresh ideas about mass tourism under authoritarian regimes.Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany, and the GDR shared the controversial project to create a‘new man’ and tourism contributed in several ways. Christian Noack’s chapter on theSoviet Union explores the different phases of the organization of mass tourism between1917 and 1941. In a country where the word ‘holiday’ almost did not exist before theOctober Revolution, tourism—inevitably mass or, even better, proletarian tourism—meantorganized excursions to see the country and its beauty, rather than privately arranged trips.Kristin Semmens offers a convincing analysis of the ways in which Hitler’s regime con-sidered tourism activities within the framework of nazification. Finally, Michelle Standley

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outlines how the GDR authorities conceived the centre of East Berlin as a sort of shopwindow that could contribute to the diffusion of East Germany as a ‘new’ country, whereculture and technology merged together, and where the TV tower in Alexanderplatzbecame a concrete symbol of a socialist modernity, and a challenge to the corruptiveconsumerism of West Berlin.

Different approaches co-exist in the book without compromising the coherence of thefinal result. In fact, the novelties of each contribution are conspicuous and relevant, andwill certainly contribute to further research along the same or parallel lines. The mix ofsocio-cultural and institutional approaches leaves the evaluation of the economic effects ofthe strategies conceived to foster tourism to one side.To some extent, considering that allplaces, resorts, and countries mentioned in the book are still very popular for today’s masstourism, that question has been implicitly answered by the history. However, there are stillquestions of the balance between direct and indirect costs to promote tourism, and directand indirect benefits of tourism activities that require urgent answers (and this time thelittle devil of the conflict of interest has nothing to do with my question).

luciano segretoUniversity of Florence

Theo Engelen, John R. Shepherd, and Yang Wen-shan, eds., Death at the opposite ends of theEurasian continent: mortality trends in Taiwan and the Netherlands, 1850–1945 (Amsterdam:Aksant Academic Publishers, 2011. Pp. 400. 65 figs. 2 illus. 5 maps. 132 tabs. ISBN9789052603797 Pbk. €29.90/$40)

This is the latest volume in the series ‘Life at the Extremes’, in which Taiwanese, Dutch,and US scholars use data from the Netherlands and Taiwan to compare European andChinese demographic regimes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Earliervolumes covered marriage and fertility, but this set of essays on mortality history can beread independently. Of the 13 essays, the first four survey mortality data from bothcountries, with quality of data issues for Taiwan in chapter 4. In chapters 5–8 the authorsprovide a context for the statistical data, specifically the history of public health policy aswell as individual access to medical care. Chapters 9–11 give special attention to therelationship between maternal mortality and infant mortality in the two countries, whilechapter 12 is an unusual demonstration of how ambiguous quantitative data can becombined with misleading qualitative data (provided by local informants whose memoriesare not always accurate) to resolve seemingly conflicting information about demographicchoices related to excess female mortality in one Taiwanese community.

Although the essays are part of project that compares two countries, it devotes morespace consistently to sub-national differences than to national level differences. In the firstessay, Frans van Poppel presents a wide range of mortality statistics in graphic form, buthe concludes by asking to what extent the national life expectancy data can be explainedmeaningfully so long as sub-national heterogeneity was so great that one value does notcapture ‘the experience of the majority of the population’ until fairly high levels of lifeexpectancy are reached (p. 42). Subsequently, Theo Engelen and Marloes Schoonheimreview the regional mortality history of the Netherlands, particularly with respect togeographic leads and lags. John R. Shepherd contributes two separate essays on Taiwan,one reviewing national level mortality data and another regional and ethnic variation inJapanese colonial period Taiwan. Regional differences in Taiwanese life expectancy at birthwere both more marked and more geographically persistent than in the Netherlands; inaddition, they persisted in Taiwan as late as 1940, despite a 20-year rise in life expectancyat birth.

The two essays by Willibrord Rutten and Liu Shi-yung deal with public health andmedical care in ways that fill out and complement the quantitative essays. Ku Ya-wen’s

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chapter on anti-malaria policy in colonial Taiwan is a particularly compelling explanationof why the possession of accurate scientific knowledge about a specific disease such asmalaria, as well as the political will to institutionalize that knowledge in a series ofappropriate medical and public health reforms, is not sufficient to bring a killer diseaseunder rapid control when local resistance is a barrier to implementation. Chapters 9(Shepherd, Schoonheim, Tian-yun, and Kok), 10 (Engelen and Arthur P. Wolf), and 11(Engelen and Ying-hui) discuss maternal mortality and infant mortality particularly fromthe standpoint of the possible importance of maternal depletion to both.The authors alsodebate the extent to whichTaiwanese couples actively limited family size.While these threeessays make some explicit comparisons between Dutch and Taiwanese data in the samechapter, readers desiring more national level comparisons must adopt a ‘do it yourself ’approach, and all without the aid of a subject index. For example, to compare lifeexpectancy at birth at the national level, data for the Netherlands can be found in chapter1 where they are presented in graphic form in terms of single year data (figure 1, p. 23). ForTaiwan, national level data come in tabular form, and are averaged for three-year periods.These data can be found in the essay on regional differences (table 1, p. 106) rather thanthe essay on national level trends.

Around 1900, Taiwanese life expectancy at birth (male and females combined) wasapproximately 28–9 years while Dutch life expectancy at birth had already reached50 years.Taiwan was just short of that level by 1940, while the Dutch were nearing 70 years.No general explanation is provided for such persistent differences, even in regional terms,because the comparison is never made explicit. This is not a small problem. In theintroduction, the editors describe their research as a ‘controlled’ comparison becauseduring the time period covered the Netherlands and Taiwan reached approximately thesame level of ‘modernization’, respectively 1850–1920 for the Netherlands and 1895–1945for Taiwan (p. 8). The catch-all term ‘modernization’ is not defined, but it raises readers’expectations that some comparative data on per capita income, urbanization, literacy, andso on, will be provided. No income data could be located (again, there is no subject index)and only a few scattered references to urbanization and literacy were found. Nevertheless,both before and after 1900 the Dutch were more urbanized, industrialized, and literatethan the Taiwanese, and thus more economically developed, rather than being similar toeach other in this respect as the introduction claims (p. 13). Although readers are assuredthat by 1900 there were no longer any subsistence crises in Taiwan or the Netherlands(p. 13), no clear picture ever emerges of overall living standards in the two countries.

It is as if the authors decided from the start that comparative income levels could beexcluded as an important contributor to differential mortality trends in the two countries.Even if such a case could be made, as certain data on infant mortality suggest it might(pp. 304–5), a wider range of relevant data needs to be presented. Stranger still, nomortality data on the resident Japanese population inTaiwan are presented (p. 125) despiteits availability. Since Japanese officials and their families comprised the closest group to aprivileged class that Japanese-ruled Taiwan had to offer, their exclusion is regrettable.

For mortality historians these essays are a veritable feast of data; for economic historiansthey may feel more like chronic malnutrition.

s. ryan johanssonPalo Alto, California

Emanuela Scarpellini, Material nation: a consumer’s history of modern Italy (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2011. Pp. xv + 343. 10 tabs. ISBN 9780199589579 Hbk. £35/$65)

Scarpellini’s Material nation has a simple, linear research question: is it possible to look atthe social, cultural, and economic evolution of a country through the lenses of material

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culture? Scarpellini’s answer consumes nearly 350 pages—the book is a translation fromthe Italian version—which cover almost 150 years of Italian history, from the politicalunification of 1861 to the present. The book’s structure and the narrative are plain andattractive. Four periods (more or less coincident with macroeconomic eras) are analysed,and constitute the four sections into which the book is divided: the liberal period before theFirstWorldWar; fascism; the economic miracle of the 1950s to the 1970s; and, finally, whatScarpellini names ‘the affluent society’ phase, covering the last three decades. This chro-nological structure is divided into chapters focused on various issues, all of them related toconsumption. To be precise, the protagonists are only partially the consumers: they(peasants, blue collars, nobles and the middle class, immigrants and emigrants, young andold, the state and private citizens) are there in order to buy things. Thus the items to beconsumed (goods and services) are the true focus of the story: from food, beverages, andclothes and apparel, to appliances and bicycles, furniture, houses, education, and healthcare; from tourism and leisure to electronic devices. In addition, the places of consumptionare explored: from nineteenth-century stores in which everything could be found, to thefirst department stores in fin de siècle Milan; from the five-and-ten chains modelled onWoolworths to the supermarkets of the postwar decades, up to the new cathedral ofshopping in Italy, the outlet. Scarpellini makes the goods (and the places) ‘talk’; she usesa captivating narrative, using a sort of ‘mobile camera’ with which she enters shops, houses,supermarkets, and other places following (or better, spying on) consumers’ tastes andthoughts. Obviously, there is more to this than items of variable presence, for the bookmakes explicit the connection between consumption and evolving cultural attitudes andcollective mentalities, often shaped by external, irresistible influences, such as for exampleAmericanization before, and more particularly after, the SecondWorldWar. Consumerism,the role and emancipation of women, the influence of the church and also of politicalparties, protests, and claims by the beat generation are all are part of the larger stage onwhich the rituals of consumption take place.

Undoubtedly, Scarpellini provides a rich, and sometimes provocative, portrait of theItalian world of consumption. Her style is normally neutral, even if sometimes she indulgesin psychological explanations. This book provides a genuinely original way to look atItaly’s tortuous path to modernization, from its humble beginnings in the middle of thenineteenth century—when Italy enjoyed the unenviable status of an underdeveloped,peripheral country—to the ‘glorious decades’ of the 1950s and 1960s, when the Peninsulawas showing an apparently unstoppable convergence towards the consumption levels, andstyles, of the most advanced nations. Nonetheless, economic and above all businesshistorians will be slightly disappointed by this book. Goods and services tell a lot aboutevolving culture, but also a great deal about technologies, and especially how a country canfollow and adapt to technological paradigms. Italy was able, quite successfully, to capturethe technologies of the first industrial revolution and of the second—large-scale productionof standardized goods in capital-intensive industries.The goods that Scarpellini celebrates,and the entrepreneurs she mentions, are Italians in the majority, producing in Italy for thegrowing needs of the internal markets, and increasingly exporting their products, knowl-edge, and style. This convergence between production and consumption has been fordecades the leading edge of Italian economic development into a modern nation; morerecently, it has been less apparent. The story of the affluent society is, in fact, a story ofincreasingly sophisticated consumption styles, but also of a tremendous collective blunder,the entrepreneurial failure in catching up on the new technologies of the electronic centuryof the third industrial revolution. Consumption no longer matches production, posing aserious threat to Italy’s ability to stay among the top industrialized economies. Consump-tion is barely understandable without production, and production cannot be addressedwithout entrepreneurship. In Scarpellini’s book you will find entrepreneurs, but they arepresented as appendices of their creations, something which is not always (or never) the

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case. In general, however, this is a book meriting attention by all interested in the processof social transformation in quickly modernizing societies. It tells many stories, someedifying, some unpleasant, but always interesting and provocative. A strong concludingchapter would also be beneficial.

andrea colliBocconi University

Ann M. Carlos and Frank D. Lewis, Commerce by a frozen sea: native Americans and theEuropean fur trade (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. viii + 260.25 illus. ISBN 9780812242317 Hbk. £32.50/$49.95)

For the first century of its existence, the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) surveyed fromthe shores of the ‘frozen sea’ the vast territory inhabited by its aboriginal trading partnersboth direct and indirect and visited by a growing number of Montréal-based traders.Scholars from various disciplines who have puzzled over the trade during this period haveconsidered an ever-widening range of evidence, including the rich HBC records andscattered French documents, archaeological artefacts, and Native oral tradition. Thepotential of HBC account books, which provide a running commentary on the evolutionof trade relations, was first demonstrated by historical geographer Arthur Ray in the1970s. In their provocative and wide-ranging book, Carlos and Lewis apply their econo-mists’ expertise to the company’s trade during the period of intensifying HBC/Montréalercompetition (c.1715–70). Focusing on the area south and west of Hudson and JamesBays, they both endorse and take issue with Ray’s depiction of idiosyncratically market-sensitive Natives.

Beginning with European demand, Carlos and Lewis analyse the expanding marketsfor beaver and hats containing felted beaver wool. A striking series of graphs (pp. 32,63–6) illustrates ‘exceptionally buoyant’ (p. 9) sales after about 1740—in London, Paris,and bayside. Europeans are also cast in a comparative role: as much greater consumersof alcohol than Natives and, in the case of English workers, as beneficiaries of a roughlyequivalent standard of living. More generally, the study posits a basic symmetry betweenNatives’ and non-Natives’ behaviour. Natives displayed a marked preference for moretrade goods rather than more leisure. Parting company with Ray and others, Carlos andLewis argue that improving terms of trade reflecting rising European demand encour-aged fur suppliers to trap more, reducing beaver populations significantly by the 1750s.In their view, these hunter-traders were not unlike ‘the industrious workers emergingin Europe’, increasing ‘their work effort in response to greater market opportunities’(p. 11).

By modelling the effect on beaver populations of commercial demand for tens ofthousands of skins per year, the authors highlight the early phases of depletion. Moreproblematic is their tendency to see the better terms of trade obtained by Natives fromthe late 1730s as a crucial factor. While short-term fur price increases may have incitedNatives to bring more pelts to HBC posts, this did not necessarily mean more trapping;many Natives could redirect furs they otherwise would have traded with the Montréal-ers. For example, the rise in Fort Albany’s returns in the late 1740s reflected not a majorassault on the beaver, but Natives’ reaction to the goods shortage at the Montréalers’establishments during the War of the Austrian Succession. The short-term connectionbetween price and trapping effort seems even more tenuous at the larger post ofYork Factory. Here the HBC’s principal suppliers were Cree and Assiniboine interme-diaries (these last of the Siouan linguistic group, not Algonquian, p. 4) who seem to haveprided themselves on obtaining most of their furs through trade with neighbouringpeoples.

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Over the longer term, the question of the relationship between price and effort rests onwhether Native consumption of imported goods rose faster than the price Europeantraders offered for furs. Arguing that both the trade’s total fur requirements and individualNatives’ fur ‘output’ rose, Carlos and Lewis extrapolate from York Factory’s experience,proposing that the rising proportion of luxury goods (such as broadcloth, tobacco, andbrandy) traded there corresponded to the expansion of the total volume of merchandisesupplied by the HBC and the Montréalers to the Natives of the York Factory hinterland.Lacking information on circumstances in the interior, they assume that the number ofNatives remained constant, and imply that the intermediaries transmitted York Factory’sprice increases to distant nations who were doing much of the trapping. By the late 1760s,they calculate, goods volume had increased by 63 per cent compared with the late 1730s,obliging Natives to deliver 14 per cent more furs.

The timing and extent of the growth bears closer examination. Changing the yearscompared confirms that, occasionally at least, terms of trade improved sufficiently topermit Natives to bring in fewer furs while still obtaining more merchandise. A test usingthe authors’ formula and data (pp. 81–5) suggests that in 1750 and 1760, Natives tradingin the region collectively received 17 and 22 per cent more trade goods than in the late1730s while delivering 9 and 7 per cent fewer pelts. The exercise should be repeated forother years, but already one wonders what explains the considerably expanded trade theauthors discern in the late 1760s. Their version roughly corresponds to part of what webelieve about these years—increased goods deliveries into the region by the newly deregu-lated Montréal trade—but not to the relaxed terms of exchange in the interior as theMontréalers began to compete against one another. This put pressure on the HBC, whosetraders increasingly relied on gifts in the hope of enticing Natives to keep making the longjourney to the Bay. In 1770, for example,York Factory’s customers received a third of theirtrade goods as presents, and nearly two-fifths of the luxury items (including alcohol, halfof which was given away that year) that figure so prominently in the authors’ calculations.One wonders if beyond a certain level, Natives’ demand did not become epiphenomenal,a response to the goods being pressed upon them rather than a force in its own rightencouraging them to procure more furs.

Does all this an industrious revolution make? Carlos and Lewis demonstrate that growthin Native consumption continued beyond the trade’s early phases and attest to theimportance of factors duly noted by specialists offering different readings of their period:the growing influence of Native women, Native trading captains’ vying for prestige, andEuropean traders’ use and abuse of gift exchange.Their portrait of Natives entranced withimported goods is less persuasive.The authors ask them to go farther than Europeans, whoseem to have acquired their ‘industrious disposition’ in order to consume more underconditions of stable or declining real earnings, rather than of rapidly rising prices for theirprincipal marketable product.This hardly makes a sub-arctic industrious revolution morelikely, whatever the merits of bringing the denizens of the two continents into greateranalytic proximity.

thomas wienUniversité de Montréal

Jayeeta Sharma, Empire’s garden: Assam and the making of India (Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2011. Pp. xviii + 324. 12 illus. 3 maps. ISBN 9780822350323 Hbk.£74/$94.95; ISBN 9780822350491 Pbk. £17.99/$25.95)

Of all the major provinces of British India, Assam, its tea industry excepted, has been oneof the most neglected by historians. Annexed in 1826, Assam became a separate provincein 1874, by which time its importance as a plantation economy was well established. In this

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ambitious and wide-ranging history, Sharma seeks to break away from the writing ofAssam’s history in terms of its ‘planter raj’ to produce a more socially nuanced, locallygrounded story. Although the origins of the tea industry and the rise of the plantationeconomy in the Upper Assam valley form part of her discussion, her concern is less withtea-growing, management structures, and labour policies, than with how tea productionhelped create a context for the making of modern Assam. She does this in part byemphasizing the complex ethnic mix of a region that, even before colonial rule, includedIndo-Aryan settlers, Muslim converts and immigrants, Marwari traders from Rajasthan,and the hill tribes of Nagaland and Cachar, to which the British further added ‘coolie’labourers from Chota Nagpur, graziers from Nepal, and immigrant clerks and peasantsfrom Bengal. She follows Sudipta Kaviraj, however, in arguing that before colonialism thesewere often overlapping and ill-defined (or ‘fuzzy’) categories, characterized by a high degreeof assimilation into a common culture, whereas colonial policies created enumeratedcategories, highlighted difference, and encouraged separation.

Sharma’s main interpretive ploy is to identify the idea of ‘improvement’ as the centralmotif in the emergence of colonial modernity in Assam. From a colonial perspective the teaindustry was one way of transforming the wild Edenic garden of Assam into somethingmore productive, and of weaning the Assamese away from their presumed indolence. TheAmerican Baptist missionaries (whose role appears pivotal at several points in this story)saw Christianity, and their own social, educational, and linguistic aspirations (whichranged from the abolition of slavery to the promotion of vernacular printing and publica-tion), as the means to improve the moral and material well-being of the population of theBrahmaputra valley and later, having met with little proselytizing success there, among thedenizens of the adjacent hill tracts. In addition, for significant elements among the Assa-mese themselves ‘improvement’ became their own path to progress—through theirambiguous engagement with Bengali culture and the Bengali capital Calcutta, through thespread of print culture and creation of a new public sphere, and through attempts to reformand reconstitute the Asomiya (Assamese) language. At the same time as the Assamesedeveloped an enhanced sense of difference from those around them—Bengalis, Muslims,the ‘primitive’ hill tribes—they also became part of a new engagement with the idea ofIndia, with a common ‘Aryan’, Sanskrit identity, in which ideas of religion, race, language,and politics commingled.

In all of this, the tea estates played a necessary part—as models of ‘improvement’ anddrivers of the economic transformation of Assam, as sites of employment and exclusion(for few Assamese were able to enter the racialized world of the white planter elite), and asthe locale for the emergence of a sharpened sense of who was and who was not ‘Aryan’ orAssamese. However, the plantations do not dominate a story in which issues of emergingidentity rest far more on the literary activity and cultural agency of the Assamese them-selves, albeit within a situation in which state, missionaries, and planters have, in theirvarious ways, helped create the dynamics of change and the instruments of modernity. It ispart of the success of Sharma’s book that she is able to offer both a different history ofcolonial Assam (in which the planter raj, while not forgotten, assumes a less prominent role)and a plausible pre-history for the ethnic conflict and political unrest of post-IndependenceAssam. Arguably the book fails to sustain some of its early themes (the environmentalfactors which dominate the early chapters retain little apparent significance for the latterpart of the book) and there are aspects of the economic and political history of Assam (therise of the timber and oil industries, for example, or the impact of the Second World War)for which there appears to be no room. Nonetheless, and despite her (or her publisher’s)penchant for short sentences that tend to stifle more complex patterns of thought, inweaving together varied aspects of environment and ethnography with the emergingpolitical, cultural, and economic history of the region, Empire’s garden creates a rich,rewarding, and multi-stranded appreciation of Assam’s modern history. It greatly enriches

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understanding of the history and politics of Assam while at the same time giving freshinsights into the processes involved in the making of modern India and the incorporation ofits diverse regions.

david arnoldUniversity ofWarwick

Leon Fink, ed., Workers across the Americas: the transnational turn in labor history (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xv + 466. ISBN 9780199731633 Hbk. £45/$74; ISBN9780199778553 Pbk. £27.50/$39.95)

The prospect of a ‘transnational turn’ in labour history in the Americas was the topic of aconference held at the Newberry Library in Chicago in 2008. Sponsored by the journalLabor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas, a group of largely North America-based historians presented the papers that form the basis of this collection. Carefullycrafted and richly documented, these essays present an opportunity to assess the currentstatus of the study of transnational labour in the Americas today.

As this collection shows, transnational labour history has important advantages: it alonecan take the full measure of transnational labour organizations such as the InternationalLabour Organization (ILO) which Fink describes as ‘the pioneer effort to deal with theeffects of globalization on working people’ (p. 412). Eileen Boris’s essay on the Americanbattle over maternity leave shows the ILO in the 1940s serving as a forum for Americanlabour feminists who sought to preserve job equality by preventing discrimination againstpregnant workers, making maternity leave part of the social security system and includingnot simply workers, but their dependents. Fink’s essay shows New Deal policy-makerstrying fruitlessly to use the ILO to establish enforceable labour standards among maritimeworkers and finally turning towards protectionism. The finely nuanced study of the 1975International Women’sYear conference by Jocelyn Olcott covers a significant event whosefull understanding calls for the skills of a transnational labour historian. The ability toanalyse such events may become more important because international conferences onsocial policy, which were important vehicles for the spread of reformist ideas before 1914,may be on the way back.

Transnational labour history facilitates the study of metropole-based capitals’ efforts tofashion new proletarians outside their national boundaries, a common phenomenon in thecontemporary world. It is exemplified in Steven J. Bachelor’s essay on Mexican efforts inthe 1960s to spread a unified American model of industrial organization and command.This floundered in the face of employers’ determination to retain differing conditionsbetween Mexican and American workers, Mexican workers’ struggle to overcome thesedifferences, and declining profits in large factories.We know the results: a desolated Detroitwith vehicle production concentrated in low-wage industries along a Mexican-Americanborder where political repression dominates. Transnational labour history enables us tostudy aspects of proletarianization that occurred in empires, not only in consolidated statesand not just in the nineteenth century, the particular terrain of statist labour history.Focusing especially on the Seven Years War (1756–63), Peter Way underlines the key roleof force, especially military force, in underpinning the proletarianizing structure of free andunfree labour in the British Empire. Colonial labour in particular tended towards the lowend of a spectrum of free/unfree labour that included craftsmen, apprentices, indenturedservants, convict labourers, and slaves. Martial labour was also industrial labour. A long-lived eighteenth-century soldier spent much more time in industrial activities—diggingtrenches, building defensive works, laying roads, sewing, tailoring, blacksmithing, orshoemaking—than in combat. At times discontented soldiers and seaman expressed theirgrievances in a manner borrowed from other proletarians, by deserting for higher wages or

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striking against miserable conditions. Additionally, problematizing the state, transnationallabour history encourages the study of stateless peoples. Andrew Parnaby’s compellingessay shows non-state peoples confronting proletarianization in different mid-nineteenth-century Canadian contexts—with different results. The Mi’kmaq in the Canadian eastcoast had suffered depopulation and marginalization early on and, when wage workbecame available, were forced to compete with poor white settlers for survival in aneconomy of makeshifts. By contrast, the Squamish of the west coast were more numerousand economically independent; when waged work appeared, they were able to obtain muchstronger positions as longshoremen in the emerging labour hierarchy.

Finally, supplementing these research-based essays is an overview section and sevenshort sectional introductions that raise general issues. These vary in scope but several areexceptionally interesting in that they seek to identify large new transnational questionsand suprastate processes necessary to establish the framework for a distinct field ofstudy. As Julie Green points out, transnational labour history does not ignore or belittlestatist labour history but historicizes it, reminding us that state formation is also anhistorical process (p. 14). Nelson Lichtenstein’s contribution is of particular interest. Heraises the question of state capacity; how it has changed over time; and how changeimpacts on working-class mobilization. Lichtenstein also suggests some key processes,such as ‘commodity chains’, that may help explain varying state capacity. Commoditychains refer to the interrelated and fluctuating locations that link the production of acommodity from the extraction of raw materials to consumption. Such questions andprocesses illustrate the kind of framework required for a truly transnational history.More to the point, big questions concerning supranational processes are what our fieldneeds and this book makes a significant contribution towards answering them.

michael hanaganVassar College

Douglas A. Irwin, Peddling protectionism: Smoot-Hawley and the Great Depression (Princeton,NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp. 244. 10 figs. 22 illus. 1 map. 9 tabs.ISBN 9780691150321 Hbk. £16.95/$24.95)

In a hotly contested field for the prize for the crassest piece of tariff legislation in history,the Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930 would attract short odds. Irwin has written an excellentaccount of that most infamous of tariffs. The lengthy first chapter, nearly half the book,explores the domestic politics of the tariff, its origins, and its very lengthy passage throughCongress. Subsequent chapters assess the economic impact and foreign reactions to itbefore the concluding fourth chapter examines the aftermath of the tariff and its legacy.

When work began on the tariff in summer 1929 the Republicans had been in powerthroughout the decade, the business cycle was at its peak, unemployment low, stock pricesat record levels, and the balance of payments in substantial current account surplus. Themost glaring economic problems were those afflicting agriculture, large portions of whichwere suffering low prices, high real levels of indebtedness and a mounting toll of foreclo-sures (18 per cent of farmers had their mortgages foreclosed between 1926 and 1929).Input costs, inflated by the high industrial tariffs of the Fordney-McCumber tariff of 1922,compounded famers’ problems and highlighted the contrast between the booming cities ofthe north and east and the impoverished mid-west and south.With proposed direct actionto assist farmers using price support and export subsidies ruled out by presidentialvetoes, the farming lobby stumbled into a move to raise agricultural tariffs. Since little wasimported that competed with American agriculture and farmers depended heavily onworld markets, such a solution was singularly ill-conceived.With the prospect of increasedtariffs on the agenda, a large number of groups were happy to take the opportunity to pressfor higher duties. As Irwin suggests, ‘the process spun out of control and, as a result, the

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Smoot-Hawley tariff will forever be associated with logrolling, special interest politics andthe inability of members of congress to think beyond their own interests’ (p. 99). Far fromhelping agriculture the Smoot-Hawley tariff reduced the effective rate of protectionreceived by farmers by raising duties on other goods even higher. Apart from interestgroups the Smoot-Hawley bill had little support. There was widespread criticism fromnewspapers and, famously, trenchant opposition from the 1,028 economists who releaseda well-publicized statement.This met with the complete disdain of politicians for academicopinion, which was dismissed as coming from men ‘cloistered in colleges’ who had ‘neverearned a dollar by the sweat of their brow by honest labor—theorists, dreamers’ (p. 86).

In itself the new tariff was not extreme. Although the total nominal tariff on dutiableimports rose by nearly 50 per cent between 1929 and 1932, only about a third of this was dueto the new tariffs and the remaining two-thirds was the consequence of the impact of fallingprices on a tariff dominated by specific duties.The volume of imports fell by 40 per cent from1929 to 1932 but, again, the direct contribution of Smoot-Hawley was modest: two-thirdsof imports were duty free, and by far the greatest contribution to the import contraction wasthe collapse of American incomes, with price deflation a poor second and the new tariffs adistant third. Despite the public perception of Smoot-Hawley there is a broad consensusamong economists and economic historians that the new duties did not initiate thedepression or even play much of a role in deepening it.The foreign trade sector was simplytoo small and Irwin argues that the effect of the tariff was dwarfed by other powerfulcontractionary forces. One channel through which the new tariff probably exacerbated theslump was its role in reducing exports, which fell even more catastrophically than imports.

Irwin devotes a chapter to foreign retaliation. The tariff act was appallingly timed,coming as the world economy was tipping further into depression and at the moment thatEuropean nations were attempting to negotiate a tariff truce. Smoot-Hawley changed theinternational trade policy environment.The most obvious and immediate retaliation camefrom Canada, America’s greatest trading partner, where the tortuous passage of the newtariff was probably a decisive factor in the 1930 election victory of R. B. Bennett’sConservative government on an explicit protectionist platform. This quickly raised tariffsand Irwin calculates that these alone accounted for a 4 per cent fall in total US exports.New and even higher sugar tariffs (Smoot’s special interest) had a devastating effect on theCuban economy and contributed to the revolution of 1933 and a fundamental change inCuban politics and economic policy. Smoot-Hawley was followed by a worldwide slidetowards protection. Although this was not caused solely by American action—the depres-sion created powerful protectionist forces independently of Smoot-Hawley—the new tariffnonetheless reinforced them and encouraged the rise of discrimination, much of it directedagainst American products, most notably through imperial preference. Irwin is surely rightto argue, however, that the financial crisis of 1931 was far more important in dislocatingthe international economy and deepening the global depression.The final chapter reviewsthe legacy and aftermath of Smoot-Hawley, including its continued resonance in morerecent tariff debates. Irwin concludes that the stigma attached to Smoot-Hawley is welldeserved. This is a very good study, immensely well-informed of course, careful andconvincing in its judgements. It is clearly written, pleasingly produced, nicely illustrated,succinct, and sensibly priced.

tim roothUniversity of Portsmouth

Lloyd B. Thomas, The financial crisis and Federal Reserve policy (London: Palgrave Mac-millan, 2011. Pp. xx + 262. 30 figs. 10 tabs. ISBN 9780230108462 Hbk. £57.50/$95)

Lloyd presents a clearly written and useful summary of the financial crisis and the actionsof the Federal Reserve. He does several things quite well. First, he succinctly and effectively

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presents a number of important economic concepts and tools: from the building blocks ofGDP to the nuances of using Taylor rules to illustrate the trade-offs central banks facebetween responding to inflationary concerns versus shortfalls in economic activity. Sec-ondly, he links the economic concepts to the crisis narrative. By providing these linkagesbetween economic concepts and the crisis and the actions of the Federal Reserve, thereader is better able to understand some of the reasons why the financial crisis happenedand why the actions of the Federal Reserve were important in supporting the financialsystem and the economy. Thirdly, he compares the very active monetary policy andlender-of-last-resort actions taken by the Federal Reserve during the recent crisis to theconsiderably more passive policy of the Federal Reserve during the Great Depression.Thecontrast with the Great Depression provided useful context for the actions of the FederalReserve in the current crisis.

As with any book of moderate length, discussions of many issues are necessarily abbre-viated. In most cases, the choices made by the author regarding which issues to summarizeand which to cover in depth were quite reasonable. Nevertheless, there were a couple oftopics for which a more detailed treatment would have been beneficial, namely the role ofmoney markets and how they normally operate. Providing more information on theimportance of commercial paper markets for non-financial firms, and the importance ofrepurchase agreements (repo transactions) in supporting overall financial system liquidityand operation, would give the reader a better sense of why the disruptions to these marketswere so problematic, and why the Federal Reserve took some of the extraordinary actionsthat it did. Some information on these topics is included in the book, especially whendiscussing the Federal Reserve programmes, but more information earlier on would havebeen more helpful.

A second topic that deserved a more thorough discussion is the transmission of mon-etary policy to the real economy. An important part of the author’s comparison of theFederal Reserve’s response to the recent crisis versus the crisis in the 1930s is the easingof monetary policy.To help the reader better understand why these actions supported theeconomy recently, it would have been helpful to provide a fuller discussion of why changesto short-term interest rates can affect long-term rates and economic activity overall (oralternatively why an expanding or contracting money supply would affect economicactivity).

The book could have used linkages between chapters to greater effect. It starts with adescription of the ‘panic’ of 1907 and of the savings and loan (S&L) crisis of the early 1990s.Both episodes offer potentially interesting parallels to the recent crisis. The 1907 panic,much as the current crisis, strongly impacted upon New York money markets and invol-ved important interconnections between institutions and markets in the financial centre.These issues were less prominent in the Great Depression.The S&L crisis involved issuesassociated with property markets—both housing and commercial real estate—and some ofthe resulting developments set the stage for the recent crisis.The lessons offered by these twoepisodes are not discussed later in the book. I also had some quibbles. There were somedistracting factual errors, such as the indication that hedge funds were important issuers ofasset-backed commercial paper or the statement thatTimothy Geithner was president of theFederal Reserve Bank of New York in 2009 when he was the Secretary of the Treasury.Additionally, more extensive references to academic work and official documents wouldhave been beneficial. Overall, this book provided a useful summary of the financial crisis andthe actions of the Federal Reserve. (I note here that the opinions expressed in this review aremy own and not necessarily those of the Federal Reserve Board, or its staff.) While sometopics could have been discussed in more depth, this book would be helpful to generalreaders looking for a clear exposition and understanding of the events of 2007–10.

mark carlsonBoard of Governors of the Federal Reserve

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Markus A. Denzel, Jan de Vries, and Philipp Robinson Rössner, eds., Small is beautiful?Interlopers and smaller trading nations in the pre-industrial period: proceedings of the XVthWorldEconomic History Congress in Utrecht (Netherlands) 2009 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag,2011. Pp. 278. 25 figs. 22 tabs. 3 maps. ISBN 9783515098397 Pbk. £49/$84)

Throughout history, great powers have needed small nations to function as intermediaries.To survive, small nations have sought their niche in international relations and that nichehas been large enough for them to make profits in commerce.The co-existence of great andsmall powers has been an important aspect of history.

Small is beautiful? consists of 11 chapters dealing with interesting topics. Part I, com-prising six chapters, pays attention to chartered companies and small countries, begin-ning with Victor Enthoven who writes about the interloping activities of the Dutch in theAtlantic. He insists that Great Britain could not meet the demand from the Americancolonies and that the colonialists needed goods from outside the British Empire. TheDutch were active interlopers and invested in the British colonies in America. MartinKrieger writes on Danish trade in the Indian Ocean. Relative to the numerous studiesof the East India Company (EIC) and Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC),there are relatively few studies of the Danish India Company. Krieger studies the Dan-ish–Asian trade, especially in Tranquebar. Klas Rönnbäck calculates the profits of theDanish trade in the West Indies. He concludes, ‘all parties in Denmark seemed to havegained from Danish colonialism in the West Indies’ (p. 79). Danish neutrality played animportant role in their success. Leos Müller focuses his attention on the Swedish EastIndia Company (SEIC). He states that SEIC was an interloper between VOC and EIC.SEIC traded almost solely with Canton and was a smuggler of teas from Canton toBritain. Moreover, it was an institution that transferred British-made Asian fortune toLondon. Rössner writes two chapters: one on how Scotland became a tobacco entrepôt;and the other on the economic relations between the Dutch Republic and Scotland. Inthe former, he concludes that only 3 per cent of Scottish domestic exports were tradedabroad and thus it was natural for the Scots to re-export tobacco. While Scotland had avery small share of the European trade, its share in tobacco was large (approximatelyone-third of tobacco imports in Europe) in c.1760. This can be seen as part of a generaltrend towards interloping and/or an example of specialization of the commodities thatone small country traded. In the latter chapter, Rössner considers how Scotland reactedtowards the Dutch commercial and economic presence. Scotland collaborated withSweden as an interloper, but Scottish trade with the Netherlands declined, and its tradewith England increased.

Part II, entitled ‘Firms and individual businesses’, opens with Claudia Schnurmann’schapter on the Scotsman John Parish who played an important role in Hamburg, a portwhich was a vital trading link during the American War of Independence because of itsneutrality. Cristian Luca provides an example of Venetian–Ottoman trade through a studyof Zorzi Cuamo, the Greek Venetian consul to Duazzo in the Ottoman Empire. Cuamoused his position to make private profits and Venice appeared to overlook these activities.This may be a useful case study of principal–agency problems. Arnold Bonoldi turns hisattention to overland trade in a study of trans-Alpine routes used by Jewish merchants, withhis focus the Bolzano/Bozen fairs. Trans-Alpine routes were of particular significance forJewish merchants in the second half of the eighteenth century. Moreover, this chapterdiscusses the important role of minorities. Marie-Claude Schöpfer Pfaffen discussesAlpine entrepreneurship in small markets during the Napoleonic Wars. Surprisingly, therewere vast networks along the trade route, Milan–Simplon Pass–Lausanne–Lyon–Paris.The author describes the important role of the Fratteli Loscho, and here we learn about thegenealogy of merchants, family, and business networks, and the goods carried along thesenetworks.

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Part III has only one chapter, by Ian Blanchard on the ‘Great Silk Road’, c.1650–c.1855,which discusses merchant networks on a Eurasian scale. These were very complex andchanged over time. It is clear that merchants had to depend on external institutions andtheir livings were heavily influenced by external environments.

Small is beautiful? reveals the importance of small nations and interlopers, such thatthrough interlopers many larger states have been able to import goods more cheaply andexport with profit. Without a doubt, the great powers have played significant roles inhistory, but if we ignore the role of small nations we will have an incomplete picture ofglobal trade.This is a global history of small countries, cities, and merchants of minorities.Without a doubt, the small and the big have worked together.

toshiaki tamakiKyoto Sangyo University

Jeffrey G. Williamson, Trade and poverty: when the ThirdWorld fell behind (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 2011. Pp. xii + 301. 29 figs. 32 tabs. ISBN 9780262015158 Hbk. £24.95/$35)

In this new volume Williamson expands his ambitious project on long-run globalizationinitiated in the 1990s to address the connections between globalization and the emergenceand development of a gap between the rich world, the ‘core’, and the Third World, or, ashe likes to call it, the ‘poor periphery’. The volume consists of 14 chapters grounded onprevious research papers to which 12 collaborators contribute. Such an impressive groupof academics gives an idea of the intellectual drive of one of the world’s most distinguishedeconomic historians. After an introduction, in which the main issues are presented and anoverview of the periphery’s relative performance is provided, the terms of trade, deindus-trialization, inequality, and price volatility are analysed successively with the help of theoryand empirical evidence. A shortcoming, though, of the book’s close dependency on as yetunpublished research papers is its unbalanced nature. Deindustrialization, for example,occupies four full chapters. Furthermore, the evidence presented there does not lend fullsupport to the negative impact of core–periphery trade on peripheral industrialization thatis claimed in the general interpretation.

Williamson’s main points are that a gap between core and periphery widened betweenthe early nineteenth and mid-twentieth century and that it was caused by globalization.Trading with the core caused the periphery to fall behind. Deindustrialization, inequality,and price volatility of primary produce were the main forces underlying this process, inwhich the net barter terms of trade (TOT), that is, the purchasing power per unit ofexports in terms of imports, appears as its trigger. Williamson merges the views of HansSinger and Raúl Prebisch. TOT in the poor periphery suffered from high volatility (Pre-bisch) and, when they improved, deindustrialization occurred (Singer) and inequality rose;but when TOT deteriorated (as Prebisch predicted), instead of immiserizing growth(Jagdish Bhagwati), industrialization, according to Williamson, had its opportunity. Tradewith the core was, hence, decisive for the Third World’s falling behind.Williamson stressescautiously that this does not imply that growth failed to occur. On the contrary, trade andgrowth were hand in hand in the periphery, but growth was not strong enough to preventits falling behind.

As an international and development economist,Williamson tends to look at the policyimplications of historical evidence. On this occasion, he does not discuss them in depth,but an obvious lesson appears to be that trade was ‘bad’ for the poor periphery.What, then,could be the feasible counterfactual scenario alternative to opening up to international tradefor policy-makers at the time? Might it be strong protectionism or Import-SubstitutionIndustrialization (ISI)? The latter is implicit in his analysis. However, since the time spancovered by the volume ends with the Second World War, Williamson does not assess the

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ISI consequences in the periphery during the postwar golden age and beyond. WouldWilliamson support an early ISI strategy for the poor periphery in the light of its observednegative effects on long-run growth? In fact, the author does not address the issue of theopportunity cost of the resources embodied in primary exportables. His implicit counter-factual is that the feasible alternative scenario would be one in which labour and capitalwere allocated to the production of industrial goods to cater for the domestic demand,rather than being allocated to primary production for foreign markets. However, would thisbe a realistic scenario?

The volume as a whole suffers from a lack of conceptual precision. To begin with,both the book’s title and its sub-title address different issues, with the latter more accu-rately reflecting the book’s content. Thus poverty is hardly mentioned. Such a looseapproach is also evident in the definition of the poor periphery which encompassescountries as diverse as India and Argentina. The latter was one of the six richest coun-tries in the world by 1913 and still in the top 10 by 1950. To make it part of the poorperiphery is far-fetched, as is the inclusion of Cuba and Uruguay. This ambiguity ismore serious in the case of the term deindustrialization, which would require a previ-ous definition of industrialization. Williamson never provides one but his country casestudies reveal that, before globalization, industrialization in the periphery was a synonymfor textile handicrafts. It was often, but not always, the case that local handicrafts wereswept away by the arrival of modern textiles from the core, but also new industries oftenemerged. Williamson’s negative perception of the impact of globalization could be asso-ciated with the fact that he takes comparative advantage as static. If a peripheral countryhad comparative advantage in primary products and its TOT improved with globaliza-tion, it implied deindustrialization and, hence, the choice of a sub-optimal growth path.However, what about changes in comparative advantage as a result of a richer popula-tion (thanks to trade) which demands more diversified and higher-income elastic goods?In such a scenario the emergence of new industries (for example, first transforma-tion industries for cash crops or mining ore exporting countries) would be a plausiblealternative.

The book reads well and provides lots of evidence, and the issues discussed are ofgreat interest to historians and social scientists. Even for those who would disagree withWilliamson’s arguments, this is highly recommended reading.

leandro prados de la escosuraUniversidad Carlos III

Roderick Floud, Robert Fogel, Bernard Harris, and Sok Chul Hong, The changing body:health, nutrition and human development in the western world since 1700 (Cambridge Univer-sity Press, 2011. Pp. xxvi +431. 60 figs. 76 tabs. ISBN 9780521879750 Hbk. £55/$90;ISBN 9780521705615 Pbk. £19.99/$30)

The changing body, the latest volume in the Economic History Society’s ‘New Approachesto Economic and Social History’ series, provides a fascinating synthesis of a great body ofwork, much undertaken by the authors, but also incorporating the research of, at least,demographers, economists, nutritionists, and historians. It will change the way we viewhistorical populations. It is not, however, a book that will be absorbed easily; severalre-readings will be necessary to grasp all the nuances of interpretation encapsulated bothin the text and in the many tables, graphs, statistics, and appendices.

The first chapter outlines the book’s principal aim: to link growth in childhood, mor-tality (and morbidity), adult living standards, labour productivity, food, and manufacturingoutput. It is a model of how to introduce concepts to be used and explored, highlightingcaveats and making sure definitions are clear, and also warning that the bringing together

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of perspectives from different disciplines will ‘link phenomena and findings of previousstudies which are simultaneously obvious or taken for granted by some, and a revelationto others’ (p. 2). One of the concepts introduced is that of ‘technophysio evolution’, a(hopefully) virtuous circle whereby the nutritional status of one generation, along with thetechnology at their disposal, influences their capacity for work and thus their output whichdictates their standard of living, and, in turn, along with fertility and the distribution ofwealth, affects the nutritional status of the next generation.The authors’ contention is thattechnophysio evolution over the last 300 years has led to humans gaining ‘an unprec-edented degree of control over their environment’—a very different scenario from that ofprevious generations.

The second and third chapters form the ‘technical core’ of the book, discussing how tomeasure or estimate such phenomena as height, food consumption, calorie intake, andenergy expenditure from fragmentary historic evidence, and then analysing, in consider-able detail, long-term trends in these factors across the societies and centuries understudy. Chapters 4 to 6 consider technophysio evolution and human health in, respec-tively, England and Wales, continental Europe, and the US. They contain a plethora ofstatistics, drawn from various ranges of time between 1700 and the present, which will beeagerly pored over by many scholars from diverse disciplines and will surely be the basisof much future research in a wide range of fields. The arguments are presented on avariety of levels of detail; however, in short, demographic and anthropomorphic evidenceis produced which suggests that the population of England and Wales was, on average,better fed, both in terms of the number of calories consumed and also with regards to thetype of food eaten, some foods being easier to absorb and producing fewer ‘unused’calories in the form of waste. This resulted in the English and Welsh being taller thanmost populations in the rest of Europe, with a greater proportion of their number beingsufficiently fit to undertake ‘a day’s work’, which may have allowed the industrial revo-lution to flourish earlier in Britain. A great many urban workers in continental Europe,in contrast, had to wait until the later nineteenth century before they could consistentlyexpect to be fed adequately in terms of nutrition. It is instructive to consider the pro-portion of the various populations which would have been so malnourished that theywould have been unable to manage more than a few hours ‘strolling’ each day (thoughtto represent the ‘begging population’), and to consider the implications for pre-1700communities. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth century, US technology was wellbehind that found in either England and Wales or Europe, but there appears to have beenmore food available per capita and, until large cities developed, the population was ratherless prone to infectious diseases because of the sparsely distributed population. Ameri-cans appear to have been taller and longer-lived than Europeans at this time. Chapter 7moves on to the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and carries the argumentsforward to consider ‘recent trends and future prospects’ and to unpack the reasons for theepidemics of ‘obesity’ or ‘over nutrition’ currently holding sway in many parts of Europeand, in particular, the US.

Space precludes a detailed examination of the many nuanced points and argumentspresented to make the authors’ case for the complex, and tangled, pathways betweennutrition, health, and economic development that are ‘technophysio evolution’.The readeris left with many questions, the answers to some of which are to be found through a patientdelving deeper into the text. However, as a culmination of many years’ work, this publi-cation presents scholars from a wide range of disciplines with a ‘state of the art’ overviewof current understanding of the interaction between a population’s nutritional status,physical stature, health, and economic well-being which will undoubtedly be a cornerstonetext for many years to come.

eilidh garrettUniversity of Cambridge

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Geoffrey Wood, Terence C. Mills, and Nicholas Crafts, eds., Monetary and banking history:essays in honour of Forrest Capie (London: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xxii + 316. 37 figs. 25 tabs.ISBN 9780415451468 Hbk. £85/$140)

A combination of the effects of successive research assessment exercises and the changingeconomics of book publishing make the Festschrift something of a rarity nowadays. Thatthis is a volume for a past editor of this journal (1993–7), edited by a team includinganother past editor (Crafts, 1999–2004), and with a cast of contributors which includes thecurrent managing editor of this journal (Stephen Broadberry) makes this a rare treatindeed. Thus Routledge is to be congratulated for backing this project, as are the editorsin assembling such a distinguished group of contributors (19 including the editors, all ofwhom provide chapters), British, continental European, and North American, to whatbegan life as a conference amidst the developing global financial crisis in 2009 to mark notthe retirement of Forrest Capie but the completion of his most recent and largest project,itself the latest instalment of commissioned histories of the Bank: The Bank of England,1950s to 1979, published by CUP in 2010 and reviewed in this journal in May 2012 byMichael Oliver.

The volume has a preface by the Governor of the Bank of England, who makes clearthe benefit that Capie brought to the Bank at a time when the Bank was in need ofjudicious assessment of the lessons of history so that central bankers might avoid makingthe same mistakes in the future (though, as those who know Forrest will attest, he oftremarks (and quotes A. J. P. Taylor as the source) that the only lessons of history are thathistory has no lessons). After a brief introduction by the editors the volume then dividesinto four parts of unequal length: I, ‘Writing history’ (two chapters); II, ‘Crisis manage-ment’ (three); III, ‘Money and interest rates’ (three); and IV, ‘Implications of economicintegration’ (four). An appendix details Capie’s publishing output over 40 years, amount-ing to 10 books, 17 edited volumes, and 133 articles and chapters. Some of this isco-authored, and especially with Wood and Mills, but even so this is a prodigious achieve-ment, amply justifying the production of a Festschrift. The introduction situates thesechapters in terms of the differing aspects of Capie’s work which began, appropriatelyenough, with an article in this journal in 1972 on mid-nineteenth-century British–NewZealand trade. All of the chapters are prompted by differing aspects of this immense bodyof work which includes contributions on international trade, unemployment, interna-tional finance, business cycles, growth, inflation (including hyperinflation), deflation, andthe history of economic thought, with some drawing upon Capie’s other big project,published jointly with Alan Webber, A monetary history of the United Kingdom, 1870–1982:data sources and methods (1985). The following necessarily can only touch upon part ofthe whole of this rich volume whose contents are worthy of the economic historian whosework is here celebrated.

Part I begins appropriately with a chapter by Charles Goodhart on the commissionedhistories of the Bank: in sequence from J. H. Clapham, Richard Sayers, John Fforde, andnow Capie. Next Barry Eichengreen examines the new monetary and financial history, newmeaning since the canonical Milton Friedman and Anna Schwartz’s A monetary history ofthe United States, 1867–1960 (1963) and Charles Kindleberger’s The world in depression,1929–1939 (1973). In a wide-ranging survey he demonstrates that current scholarship,while not neglecting central bank policy, places more emphasis on financial markets andinstitutions and how they transmit monetary impulses to the economy. Part II covers crisesin England in the 1830s (Mae Baker and Michael Collins), in nineteenth-century France(Eugene White), and in the US over the long-term (Charles Calomiris). Much of this hasa very topical feel, with explorations of the consequences of individual bank failures andconsequent contagion and, for the US, the circumstances in which financial crises areparticularly likely to occur.

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Part III on money and interest rates is equally varied: the US of the Great Depression,now given added appeal by the Great Recession (Peter Basile, John Landon-Lake, andHugh Rockoff); British interest rates, monetary regimes, and inflation (Mills and Wood);and an econometric re-examination of Capie and Webber’s monetary aggregates dataset(Alec Chrystal and Paul Mizen). Part IV begins with a chapter explicitly on whether historydoes offer useable lessons: ‘Does the euro need a fiscal union?’, to which the authors(Michael Bordo, Lars Jonung, and Agnieszka Markiewcz) give an emphatic affirmativeanswer and point to the Stability and Growth Pact as exhibiting the technical institutionalconditions for that purpose. However, as they point out, in crises such as the GreatDepression, the historical record demonstrates the need for fiscal federations to becomemore centralized if the monetary union is to endure.They conclude: ‘The future will showto what extent the euro area will follow this crisis pattern of the past’ (p. 229). At the timeof writing this review (late July 2011 amidst the Greek and US sovereign debt crises), onemight be less sanguine about those prospects than in 2009. The next essay is also on aEuropean theme, ‘Making a central bank without a state’ (Harold James), and uses avariety of national archives to explore the emergence of the euro, highlighting the key roleof central banks in the absence of a state.The final two chapters concern protectionism, thetheme of Capie’s early work. The first revisits Britain’s economic underperformance inrelation to openness and tariff policy, upon which Broadberry and Crafts reaffirm theimportance of openness and relatively free trade for productivity growth.The promotion ofgood productivity performance is also the theme of the final chapter, a long-run econo-metric study by Crafts and Mills of the price-cost mark-up.

roger middletonUniversity of Bristol

Catherine R. Schenk, International economic relations since 1945 (London and New York:Routledge, 2011. Pp. xiii + 172. 30 figs. 17 tabs. ISBN 9780415570763 Hbk. £65/$105;ISBN 9780415570787 Pbk. £16.99/$27.95)

Schenk’s book is part of the ‘Making of the Contemporary World’ series, edited by EricEvans and Ruth Henig, the first volume of which was Sidney Pollard’s The internationaleconomy since 1945 (1997). So what is in a word and how much does 15 years matter?Pollard’s book reflected recent progress in economic history, being more global, lessconcentrated on Europe and America. Schenk’s book is about institutions. The word‘relations’ in the title should flag up that we are talking about BrettonWoods.There is moreto it than that, but not much more than an analysis of the evolution of, and a critique of,the institutional framework of international trade, strengths and weaknesses. That is stillquite a lot for a short book that takes the long view. Schenk deals with complex subjects,periods, and organizations clearly and concisely, giving a broad introduction to the makingof the contemporary global financial infrastructure. More than that, Schenk, like Pollardbefore her, has been bold and hypothesized from the prism of contemporary obsessionsabout the evolution of current failings. It will be interesting to see whether the worldeclipses her suggestions as quickly and completely as it did Pollard’s, who ends his bookwondering whether communism may take hold again in the east. If there is one criticism,it might be that historians should stick to history: Schenk might have done better to endthings sooner, rather than going right up to the present (to fulfil the object of the series,addressing contemporary issues seems inevitable; whether it is advisable is something else).

The book is bold and bouncy, and simplifies a series of seemingly stodgy soundingschemes and summits: the Schuman Plan, the Smithsonian Agreement, the ShanghaiDeclaration . . . as with Ferguson’s work, we may all be vaguely aware of the events butthey had seemed more random, more shrouded in mystery and mythology.This is the big

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picture, with broad brushstrokes of where we are and how we got there, and like Ferguson,it also offers something of a roadmap. Schenk makes it clear and makes the connectionsseem enticing, seductively obvious. There are clear and immediate plausible solutions,contributing to that other Fergusonian mission of giving history more of a point, filling inthe gaps, joining the dots, compressing it, and making it linear. Like Ferguson (in Empireand colossus, 2004), Schenk seems to suggest that the world would have been better if theAmericans had done it more the British way (that is, if international economic institutionshad followed Keynes more closely, rather than Harry DexterWhite, American pragmatism,and postwar realpolitik). Schenk and Ferguson may share Glasgow connections rather thanpolitics, but like Ferguson, she has produced eminently digestible history. Schenk’s bookdoes what it says on the cover and then some, which also reminds me of a comment madeby Ferguson to a newspaper about his most recent publication: ‘it’s designed to be slightlyannoying, so that you talk about it.’

Would I recommend it to students? Yes. Will I dip into it again during the course ofteaching?Yes, probably, because of its clarity and conciseness; because it is well written; butmostly because it is well signposted and has clear, simple, and up-to-date graphs andtables; and because it is well referenced but not cluttered. There is also an argument herethat, perhaps like Pollard, Schenk reflects the state of the union, in terms of whereeconomic history is. I cannot help thinking, a bit like Pollard (and neo-liberal economics),that this train (institutions) cannot go on forever.The same answers are rehashed again andthen forgotten or finally implemented just as we go into another crisis which makes themredundant. Whether it can all be tidied up by looking again with more sincerity at thewishful thinking of a world still hobbled by total war, as Schenk suggests, is not easilyanswered. Did Pollard believe that capitalism looked like it was done for in the east in themid-1990s, or are Keynesian moderations to global capitalism likely to be practicable orsuccessful? Where Schenk does come good is in highlighting these near misses, in makingexplicit a series of otherwise random events and manoeuvrings, drawing the reader into thereality of politics and power. With the best will in the world it is the victors and theeconomic powerhouses that determine the rules of the game and how evenly, rationally,rigorously, and openly they are applied.

paul strongLondon School of Economics

Robert J. Balfour, ed., Culture, capital and representation (New York and Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Pp. xiv + 223. 7 figs. ISBN 9780230246454 Hbk. £50/$80)

This book makes three sets of interdependent contributions to cultural studies, intellectualhistory, and economic thought. Indeed, one of the striking things about it is the way inwhich a discussion of one aspect of its project leads into another. The first two sets arehistorical and disciplinary. Balfour describes the book as an attempt to construct ‘a culturalhistory of capital, or the enculturation of capital to demonstrate its impact on behavior,values and value over time’ (p. 185). To this end, the essays span from William Petty’sseventeenth-century political arithmetic to the films Wall Street and Boiler Room, givingbreadth in both historical and discursive range. The historical range demonstrates thepersistence of certain key tendencies in the way capitalism is represented in modernwestern culture, while the discursive range shows the complex and varied forms of culturalengagements with capitalist developments and problematics, even as it also contributes tothe overall argument about historical persistence.The focus on the cultural forms of capitalis also crucial to one of Balfour’s most significant claims, that ‘the book considers how thecomprehension of value comes to be enculturated; how it can be manifest, designated,exchanged and possessed’ (p. 2). This is key to an understanding and appreciation of thebook’s project because it links so solidly and resolutely the domain of ‘culture’ with that

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more generally thought of as the ‘economic’. It does so precisely by refusing to identify‘value’ in such narrow terms and, in so doing, points inexorably to the text’s commitmentto interdisciplinary analysis as the key to denaturalizing the very category of the ‘economic’as a distinct and autonomous domain of human activity and value.

While the collection’s interdisciplinarity makes visible aspects of value and its represen-tation that are elided, collapsed, or naturalized by the ideologies of both the capitalistmarketplace and the traditional boundaries of economics, its historical range brings to lightthe persistence of capitalism’s complicity in ‘the ideologies of racism and cultural superi-ority that . . . remain powerful predicators of value and worth which find their realizationin [“impersonal”] markets’ (p. 201).This is the third set of contributions made by this bookand constitutes one of the persistent threads that draw the essays together, hence demon-strating, for Balfour, one of the problematic aspects of the way value is constructed andrepresented in the capitalist west. Furthermore, it is in part by pushing beyond traditionalmeasures and representations of economic value that these essays expose this persistentcomplicity. As Balfour suggests, another element shared by the essays is a strong theoreticalengagement with marxist analysis, particularly of a type associated with Immanuel Waller-stein. This enables the contributors to question the definitional and geographical bound-aries of orthodox economic theory and sets the tone of political critique that runs throughthe collection. In their rejection of the fundamental parameters of economics, the con-tributors also reject the consensus that economics is a science and hence descriptive andpositive rather prescriptive and normative. Theirs is a project of critique: both of capitalismand of the academic discipline that they see as naturalizing the violence and inequitygenerated by a capitalist economic system.

The first essay embodies many of the strengths of this approach. Hugh Goodacreexamines 30 years ofWilliam Petty’s writings on Ireland, analysing particularly the way hiseconomic logic leads to his advocacy of an openly genocidal ‘solution’ to the problem ofgenerating Irish labour. For Goodacre, Petty’s writings are important because they ‘exem-plify a viewpoint that was subsequently to be lost in the literature of political economy, letalong in the economics of today—a viewpoint from which the colonized peoples had notyet been rendered invisible, and where their suppression and even extirpation was neitherelided from, nor merely implicit in, political and economic discourse’ (p. 19). For Goo-dacre, then, Petty’s Irish writings function as a pre-history for the consolidation of politicaleconomy through the work of Adam Smith and later economists, making visible preciselythe structural limits to is disciplinary authority of economic science and the human costsof an economic system that cannot take into account crucial elements of the very colonialproject on which it depends. Marian Aguiar also outlines clearly the links between globalcapitalism and the racist logic of western imperialism, turning to the image of fever in a setof first- and second-hand accounts of the speculation that attended the construction of thePanamanian railway in the nineteenth century. She follows the trope of fever from concernsabout the economic development that linked the US to this distant locale, to the way thatlocale itself was figured in terms of excessiveness, contagion, racial depravity, and, throughthese, boundary transgression that threatened Americans and Europeans with physical andmoral degeneration.

Perhaps the most ambitious essay in terms of interdisciplinarity is Gyorgy Fogarasi’sargument that the epitaphic tradition of poets such as Gray and Wordsworth provides therhetorical structure and vocabulary for the language of economics. Fogarasi develops acomplex argument about the structure of attention, sympathetic identification, and moralexpectation in the position of the epitaphic address, and then shows how this structure isrecapitulated in advertisements. Underlying both strands of this argument, Fogarasi subtlybut insistently exposes the inescapable borrowings of the vocabulary we now associate witheconomics, from those that Gray, Wordsworth, and their contemporaries would haveconceptualized as moral and literary.

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Balfour’s overviews offer extremely useful contextualization of the collection, as well asproviding chapter summaries for those scanning for essays that match their own interests.His disciplinary and theoretical situation of, and claims for, the book are particularlyimportant and, in large part, persuasive.The largest question left by his collection is whereit will find its most attentive audience, or whether it is perhaps part of a new kind ofinterdisciplinary scholarly work that is creating, as well as appealing to, its own newaudience.

claudia klaverSyracuse University

Orianna Baddeley, Jane Collins, Stephen Farthing, Becky Green, and Eileen Hogan, eds.,The currency of art: a collaboration between the Baring archive and the Graduate School of CCW(London: CCW Graduate School, 2011. Pp. 78. 41 illus. ISBN 9780955862854 Pbk.£9.95)

At first sight historians may approach this collaboration between contemporary artists andthe Baring archive with a certain amount of wry scepticism. Titles such as re:MAKING,re:INVENTING, and re:SEARCHING may well prompt a groan, and the organizersthemselves are the first to admit their approach is ‘distinct from those of financial historiansor more traditional academics’ (p. 7), employing ‘quite different methodologies to thoseemployed by most financial and social historians’ (p. 8).

When the artists confess that they are really ‘playing’ with the archive, historians areprone to assume that that such an approach is not for them. Nevertheless, perhaps ashistorians we should get out more, and be ready to have a little fun. As luck would have it,I happened to read The currency of art on the same day as Grayson Perry’s account of thepreparations for his own exhibition, juxtaposing examples of his art with items he haschosen from the collections of the British Museum (The tomb of the unknown craftsman atthe British Museum, London, 6 October 2011—19 February 2012). In both cases, the ideaof contemporary artists responding to historic objects and archives is the same, and theplayfulness and fun of such enterprises is common to both.The artists are very well awareof the pitfalls in such an approach: as Perry put it, the danger of ‘falling into easy butspurious cross-cultural comparisons, misinterpreting objects’ (Observer, 18 September2011, p. NR9). Yet taking the risk seems worthwhile if it generates new insights. SettingEileen Hogan’s contemporary portraits of Paul Ruddock, the City grandee and Trustee ofboth the V&A and the Met in New York, alongside Thomas Lawrence’s 1806 study ofFrancis Baring is thought-provoking. Stephen Farthing’s focus on the elegant flourisheswhich filled space in the 1766 Bank ledger draw attention to the style and beauty of therecords, which we historians are prone to miss as we sift bank accounts for historicalinformation.

Stern economists and historians may want none of this, but even they may find in thisslim volume something to capture their interest, for, if nothing else, this artistic exercisedoes provide an attractive introduction to the treasures of the Baring archive.The print ofthe bank’s first home in Devonshire Square, the prospectus for the Louisiana Purchase, thepages from Joshua Bates’s 1859 diary, and the Moscow Bonds of 1908 with their uncashedcoupons for 1918, are all worth the attention of the driest and most focused historian.Thevery survival of the archive itself, despite the collapse of the bank in 1995 as a result of‘unauthorized trading’, is ground for hope, even as we read of yet more unauthorizedtrading at UBS in September 2011. The lessons of history are but slowly learned.

n. mayhewWinton Institute for Monetary History,Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

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Franco Amatori and Andrea Colli, Business history: complexities and comparisons. (Londonand NewYork: Routledge, 2011. Pp. ix + 262. 3 figs. 49 tabs. ISBN 9780415423960 Hbk.£95/$160; ISBN 9780415423977 Pbk. £31.99/$51.95)

This slender and ambitious volume, with 24 chapters over 250 pages, packs a strongpunch. Amatori and Colli bring together their combined expertise and use the evolution ofthe firm as a lens through which to observe modern economic development. Theirapproach is both thematic and diachronic and the book’s narrative unfolds from pre-industrial manufacturing in England to the present-day economies of China and India.This ambitious scope forces the authors to engage with both the micro and the macroaspect, an exercise performed also by paying constant attention to theoretical issues andconceptual frameworks. Given these characteristics, the book can be used to complementmore thematic ones (such as Simon Ville and Gordon Boyce’s The development of modernbusiness, 2002), or volumes focusing on individual national experiences (John Wilson’sBritish business history, 1720–1994, 1995).

The volume starts with three chapters introducing some basic issues such as therelationship between business history and the theory of the firm, and the problem ofentrepreneurship. Although no precise theoretical view is provided to inform the contentof the analyses, nonetheless the reader is provided with some useful basic concepts anddirections to navigate the following historical chapters. The rest of the book is organizedalong five chronological sections, starting with the period up to the Victorian age (part II),followed by the study of the belle époque (III), the interwar years (IV), the golden age, the1970s, and 1980s (V), and the historical phase that followed the fall of the BerlinWall (VI).This division reflects broadly the emergence and evolution of the most significant modelsof business, and the changes in the technological regimes and in the forms of firms’governance: the pre-industrial mode of production and the birth of the factory system inpart II, the emergence of big business in part III, the spreading of corporate capitalism inpart IV, the third industrial revolution in part V, and new models of businesses in part VI.The book’s structure serves two purposes: it provides enough information to studentswithout any background in history without being too encumbered by details and, at thesame time, offers (mercifully jargon-free) general trajectories to students without a busi-ness or management background. The volume also looks at national models by focusinginitially on Britain, then widening the horizon by progressively including European andoverseas competitors, then Japan, the Soviet Union, Korea, and Argentina, and eventuallyChina and India. The exercise, again, is successful in introducing the students to thechronology of the rise and decline of different varieties of capitalism.

Given its wide focus, the book covers an amazing amount of material but still managesto keep a precise direction and a consistent structure. Broadly, the book tells a story of howfirms that were initially small, low-tech, mono-product, and national evolved into bigbusinesses and then adapted more or less successfully to changing scenarios. Symmetri-cally, the rise and decline (or evolution) of national models can, to a large extent, be tracedback to this dynamic. Although the authors’ efforts assemble a picture that is moresophisticated than this short summary might suggest, possibly some relevant aspects endup sacrificed to what is still a rather orthodox Chandlerian approach. For example, verylittle attention is paid to the ‘historical alternatives to mass production’ and industrialdistricts are mentioned only briefly; in this regard one may wonder whether post-1945 Italyand Germany might have deserved more attention. Similarly, the book does not engagemuch with the idea that different national systems, or the same system over time, arecharacterized not only by the relative weight of big business and by the way they worked,but also by different mixes of different models of businesses. Ultimately, sole ownershipsand small and medium-sized businesses comprised the vast majority of firms in theeighteenth century, as they do today, and students need to know why this is the case and

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what it means. All this said, with this book Amatori and Colli have provided us with anexceptionally useful and welcome tool to teach business history.

francesca carnevaliUniversity of Birmingham

Francesco Boldizzoni, The poverty of Clio: resurrecting economic history (Princeton, NJ andOxford: Princeton University Press, 2011. Pp xi + 228. ISBN 9780691144009 Hbk.£27.95/$39.50)

The ‘new economic history’ that was born in the US during the 1960s is no longer new.The onceYoung Turks who attended the Purdue seminars, and attacked the older genera-tion of economic historians for their alleged lack of fidelity to science, find themselves nowan older generation, but until recently they have largely evaded methodological criticismand there have been no widespread calls for a cliometrics 2.0. Boldizzoni in The poverty ofClio contends that cliometricians have taken economic history in the wrong direction.According to Boldizzoni, the economistic rhetoric provided by cliometricians has extendedthe domain of (neo-liberal) economics; yet it has also created an ‘identity crisis’ withineconomic history (p. 4). The book’s sub-title suggests that economic history requiresnothing less than a resurrection. Whatever reservations this reviewer may have with someof Boldizzoni’s arguments, of which more later, it is the case that the return of method-ological debate, as signalled by this book’s publication, should be welcomed by everyoneinterested in creating a useful future for economic history.

After an introduction, chapter 2 surveys the new institutionalism and suggests that thistype of research cannot put an end to the identity crisis. Chapter 3 surveys the most recentdevelopments within economic history. While downplaying the value of cliometric inter-pretations, Boldizzoni acknowledges that the high prestige economics enjoys within Ameri-can academe may explain the spread of such ideas into research areas (such as ancienthistory) that had traditionally evaded the lure of cliometrics. In chapter 4 microeconomichistory is surveyed. Boldizzoni is particularly vexed by what he regards as the unrealisticapproach to rationality taken by cliometricians. Chapter 5 provides a survey of macroeco-nomic history which is mainly concerned with showing the superiority of Annales overdeductivist approaches to the study of long-run development. Chapter 6 presents amanifesto for an inductivist alternative to cliometrics.

Boldizzoni has more than a few axes to grind. Certain eminent economic historiansassociated with cliometrics (including Greg Clark, Robert Fogel, Avner Greif, and Dou-glass North) are singled out for particularly strong criticism; some others who cannot beplaced in the same category (David Landes and Avner Offer) are also criticized. Moregenerally, there is a strong antipathy throughout to any intellectual trend that is supportiveof either market competition or what Boldizzoni terms ‘ethnocentric naturalism’ (p. 63).Beckerian economic imperialists, evolutionary psychologists, socio-biologists, and neo-conservatives all come in for harsh criticism. By contrast, and despite Boldizzoni’s protes-tations to the contrary (pp. 6–7), a range of scholars sympathetic to marxism—includingBen Fine, Moses Finley, Eric Hobsbawm, Witold Kula, Joan Robinson, and E. P.Thompson—are identified as offering better examples for aspiring economic historians tofollow. Institutionalist critics of the market, such as Thorstein Veblen and Gunnar Myrdal,are likewise presented in a positive light.

Boldizzoni advocates what he presents as a third way between narrative forms of historyand one in which economic history is reduced to empirical exercises in applied economics(p. 138). While Gustav Schmoller and the German historical school get only two passingreferences (pp. 3, 120) and Cliffe Leslie gets none at all, Boldizzoni’s inductivist messageis one that these earlier historicists would have recognized. By way of illustration, an

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historian studying the feudal economy is advised to ‘free himself of the useless toolbox ofreceived theory and to build up his own microeconomics that is compatible with theempirical evidence he is interpreting’ (p. 90). His comparison of deductive and inductiveapproaches to economic history is easy to follow and diagrammatic. In short, Boldizzoniargues in favour of resurrected historicism within economics: to borrow the modernterminology, he is advocating the creation of a historical school 2.0.

The strongest feature of the book is the wide range of reading on display. However, thisreviewer finds himself in the position of a sympathetic critic. I am sympathetic to theobservation that cliometricians have often been sloppy in their use of textual primarysources (and indeed some have unfortunately avoided using such sources entirely). Like-wise, some of the lesser lights among cliometricians have made exaggerated claims for thehistorical generality of their graduate school economics training. Undoubtedly, Boldizzonihas read widely, but this reading is somewhat selective.This selectivity is the basis of manyof my problems with Boldizzoni’s inductivist message. Thus recent developments withineconomic methodology are ignored. Moreover, the absence of any discussion by Boldizzoniof how an inductivist research programme could be implemented in classroom teachingcontrasts with the relative and demonstrated ease of teaching cliometrics. Interestingly,Boldizzoni uses the Popperian cudgel of falsification with which to beat Becker and North(p. 51), but this is a particularly inappropriate and unfashionable choice of weapon.Popper’s own philosophical writings lend no support to inductivist lines of argument.

Moreover, Boldizzoni’s rule-setting approach to economic methodology has fallen out offavour in recent decades. As my own research demonstrates, North’s thinking has evolvedover the decades in ways that Boldizzoni ignores. Schumpeter’s influence is also clearly tobe found in this evolution (see my paper ‘Structure and change: Douglass North’s eco-nomics’, Journal of Economic Methodology, 2010). Furthermore, as Cristel De Rouvray hasshown in her excellent work on the ‘old’ economic history, writers in the 1940s saw historyas a laboratory for experiment where economic historians could test hypotheses. She alsonoted that such a hypothesis-testing justification for economic history was in large part aresponse to the activities of Cowles econometricians. One could extend De Rouvray’s lineof argument and speculate that it was no coincidence that in the 1960s modern experi-mental economics and ‘new’ economic history were to flourish in the same department inthe same university: economics at Purdue became an experimental science with cliometricsproviding a supportive role.The view associated with economic historians such as CharlesKindleberger or Joel Mokyr that specific economic models are like other tools—namely,they are to be used only when the appropriate situation arises—strikes this reviewer as amore sensible response to the worst excesses of cliometrics.This reviewer was unpersuadedoverall that the creation of a historical school 2.0 could solve any real or imagined identitycrisis.

graham brownlowQueen’s University, Belfast

Gérard Duménil and Dominique Levy, The crisis of neoliberalism (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 2011. Pp. viii + 391. 76 figs. 21 tabs. ISBN 9780674049888Hbk. £36.95/$49.95)

Jamie Peck, Constructions of neoliberal reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.Pp. xxi + 301. 4 figs. 2 tabs. ISBN 9780199580576 Hbk. £25/$45)

Neoliberalism is an over-used word—indeed it has practically become a term of politicalabuse—but, in spite of the looseness with which it is deployed in everyday speech, it doescapture an ideological and economic phenomenon of considerable historical significance.

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These two books are the latest of many attempts to examine more precisely what ‘neolib-eralism’ means, and to debate the likely fate of neoliberalism in the wake of our tumultuouseconomic times. Although both books are written by authors who are clearly opposed tocentral tenets of neoliberal thinking, their conclusions are not particularly encouraging forthose who hope that the current crisis might revive a social democratic form of politicaleconomy. The books were written before fiscal retrenchment became the recurrent themeof economic policy-making in the UK and elsewhere, but their authors will not have beensurprised to see a crisis of the banking system, and ultimately of the market, mutating overthe past year or so into a crisis of the state.

Duménil and Levy provide a penetrating analysis of the recent financial crisis that locatesits origins in the contradictions they see as inherent in the neoliberal order.They are quitedirect about what they mean by ‘neoliberalism’. Rejecting more familiar circumlocutorydefinitions, they write that ‘neoliberalism is a social order aimed at the generation ofincome for the upper income brackets, not investment in production nor, even less, socialprogress’ (p. 22). This materialist account of neoliberalism attributes its rise to the powerof financial interests to subvert the Keynesian compromise of the postwar years. As theyput it: ‘Ideology was not the engine of the neoliberal revolution. The relationship to classhierarchies is all too obvious . . . The hegemony of the upper classes was deliberatelyrestored’.While an important political weapon in this struggle was neoliberal ideology, thisideology was ultimately ‘the expression of the class objectives of neoliberalism’ (p. 18).Tosubstantiate this claim they employ an unusual form of class analysis. Eschewing theMarx-inspired distinction between capitalists and workers, and the conventional catego-rization into upper, middle, and working classes, they use a different trichotomous schemathat distinguishes between classes: capitalist (owners), managerial (upper wage earners),and popular (lower wage earners).They see the displacement of the Keynesian settlementby neoliberalism as the result of a new dominant social alliance between the capitalist andmanagerial classes, overthrowing the alliance between the managerial and popular classesformed in the wake of the depression of the 1930s.

The main burden of The crisis of neoliberalism is that this new social alliance containedwithin it the seeds of its own destruction, or at least its own instability. Duménil and Levypresent an invaluable wealth of empirical information to document the key economictrends that led to the ‘great contraction’ of 2007–10. In their view, the crisis emerged fromthe intersection of two trends. First, the quest for high incomes on the part of the upperclasses created a massive expansion of the financial sector and an accompanying global-ization of capital. The upper income brackets vastly increased their share of income andwealth through the creation of financial structures that were ‘fragile and unwieldy’ (p. 36).Second, the US economy under neoliberalism was characterized above all by the growingindebtedness of both government and households. The two trends were related: theincreasing indebtedness of the US economy allowed those on high incomes to push theirincomes ever higher, while the growing financialization of the economy enabled UShouseholds to rack up rising debt. It was the rise in household debt that served as thetrigger for the crisis: when housing boom turned to housing bust the whole economicsystem was destabilized. The crucial point that Duménil and Levy want to convey is thatneoliberalism is premised on increased consumption, particularly for high earners, at theexpense of investment. Regardless of any moral or political shortcomings that neoliberal-ism may have, their case is that neoliberalism is unsustainable economically, since it entailsover-consumption and under-accumulation.

For this reason Duménil and Levy see the crisis as marking the beginning of the end forneoliberalism. However, they are not offering what might now seem to be prematureKeynesian triumphalism. They explore the historical analogy between the present crisisand the emergence of the New Deal order in the 1930s. The ‘tempered capitalism’ thatemerged after 1945 was the product of a decade and a half of sustained political struggle,

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with total war, dynamic political leadership, and a powerful labour movement all playing arole in shaping the resulting social settlement, an alliance between the popular andmanagerial classes against the capitalist class (p. 293). Duménil and Levy think it is notimpossible that something similar might emerge over the next decade, but they suspect onbalance it probably will not, not least because the opposition to neoliberalism appears soweak; rather, a more likely scenario is a renewed alliance between the managerial classesand capitalist classes, this time with the managerial class in the driving seat. This ‘neo-managerial capitalism’ would be a new, right-leaning social compromise that places greaterconstraints on financialization and capital incomes than in recent decades, and seeks toinvest a higher share of profits within non-financial corporations, but is still essentiallygrounded on paying high incomes to those at the top of management at the expense of thepopular classes (p. 330).

Duménil and Levy advance significantly our understanding of recent events, and thegamut of fascinating charts and tables that they have marshalled in defence of their case isitself worth the price of the book. Nonetheless, there is inevitably more to say aboutneoliberalism than they are able to include in this volume. The Olympian perspective ofThe crisis of neoliberalism provides a broad outline of the socio-economic roots of neolib-eralism, but further levels of analysis are needed for a comprehensive understanding of howwe reached the present economic conjuncture. While the definition of neoliberalism asessentially a class strategy to secure high incomes for the privileged captures one aspect ofthe neoliberal project, it leaves to one side the important question of how such a sectionalstrategy was legitimated as being in the wider public interest. In other words, questionsrelating to ideology and institution-building are more fundamental than Duménil and Levysuggest. Peck’s Constructions of neoliberal reason helps to fill this gap, deploying the skills ofa historical geographer to trace the diverse lineages of neoliberal ideology and policy from‘much closer to the ground—close enough to see the whites of the protagonists’ eyes’(p. xii). Peck’s aim is to uncover the complicated ways in which ‘market rule’ was politicallysponsored and advanced by particular social actors, thus illuminating ‘some of the spacesin which neoliberalism has been made and remade’ (p. xii). In contrast to Naomi Klein’sfamous portrait of neoliberalism as a creed developed in Chicago and then exported to therest of the world, Peck shows how neoliberalism emerged in diverse locations across theglobe—notably Chicago, Vienna, and Freiburg—and is in effect an umbrella term for acomplex, shifting constellation of doctrines and institutions. There is no pure essence ofneoliberalism in Peck’s view, only a continuous story of its construction and reconstructionin particular times and places. He prefers to talk about ‘neoliberalization’ rather thanneoliberalism, indicating the open-ended process by which a market order is createdpolitically. Thus Peck stresses a definitional point also made by Duménil and Levy: it is amistake to think that neoliberalism is centrally concerned with prioritizing the market overthe state. Rather, the aim is to substitute a neoliberal state for a social democratic one.Neoliberals are inevitably implicated in state-sponsored intervention designed to restruc-ture market regulation, and focus their energies on the seizure of state power to advancetheir objectives.

Constructions of neoliberal reason is a set of essays linked by a common theme rather thana monograph. It is based on wide reading of both the secondary literature and neoliberalpublications, but not on archival research. Peck does not claim to provide a comprehensivediscussion of the trajectory of neoliberalism, but he picks out some telling examples thatillustrate his broader case. An early chapter provides a powerful and acute analysis ofneoliberalism’s origins: how diverse intellectual currents in the English-speaking andGerman-speaking worlds drew together in the 1930s, ultimately forming a fractiousoppositional intellectual movement under the aegis of the Mont Pelerin Society. Peck makesthe important point that this nascent neoliberalism was internally quite diverse, noting inparticular the differences in emphasis between the German Ordo-liberals and the Chicago

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economists over how strong the state should be. Later chapters explore how the city anduniversity of Chicago shaped the character of Chicago neoliberalism; the influence ofneoliberal discourse on recent trends in urban planning; and the persistence of neoliberaleconomic policy under the Obama administration.

Perhaps the most original chapter, however, investigates the way in which neoliberal USthink tanks played a decisive role in framing the debate about urban regeneration in NewYork in the 1980s and 1990s, and in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. Peck recountsthe dispatch with which such think tanks sprang into action after Hurricane Katrina toscotch any suggestion that the federal government should sponsor a New Deal for theregion. Instead, they refocused the debate over New Orleans on the need for fiscalresponsibility (any extra spending to be matched by cuts elsewhere), and on the failures ofstate and local government. The social chaos exposed by Hurricane Katrina was laidsquarely at the door of a purportedly dysfunctional welfare system. So what at first seemedlike an event that might disturb the dominance of neoliberalism in fact caused it only somemomentary discomfort before being re-narrated by a revivified neoliberal discourse. Thisis an instructive finding, which helps us to understand the likely trajectory of neoliberalpolicy-making in the wake of the financial crisis. As Peck suggests, while there may now besome inflection towards an Ordo-liberal variant of neoliberalism—perhaps towards some-thing that resembles Duménil and Levy’s neo-managerial capitalism—the lack of any fullyworked out alternative, or powerful counter-movement, means that we are likely to seeanother example of ‘neoliberalism’s demonstrated capacity to rise phoenix-like even fromcrises of its own making’ (p. 275).

The old adage has it that history is written by the victors. A curiosity of recent scholarlywork on neoliberalism is that its history is being written by the losers, in the sense that it isscholars who are professedly opposed to the ascendancy of neoliberalism who are currentlyproducing the authoritative academic research on the subject. One cost of this (evident inboth the books under review here) is that imaginative sympathy can be in short supply.Neoliberalism is almost prima facie presented as intellectually defective.Yet this makes iteasy to underestimate neoliberalism’s intellectual strengths. The shocking truth is thatneoliberalism did not succeed simply because it was a strategy to advance the interests of theupper classes or because it was promoted by well-organized institutions—although theseare surely part of the story—but also because many people were persuaded that its politicaland economic vision was attractive and suited the times, especially when contrasted withthe rival vision proffered by the left. Understanding the historical construction of thatvision—and its attractions—remains a neglected topic in the literature on neoliberalism.

ben jacksonOxford University

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Documents

The financial crisis and Federal Reserve policy – By Lloyd B. Thomas