Pullen 2007

Blackwell Publishing Ltd.
Oxford, UK and Malden, USAEHRThe Economic History Review0013-0117Economic History Society 20062007601190240Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS
Economic History Review, 60, 1 (2007), pp. 190–240
Book reviews*
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND
Mavis E. Mate, Trade and economic developments, 1450–1550: the experience of Kent,
Surrey and Sussex (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2006. Pp. vi + 261. 2 maps. 9 tabs.
ISBN 1843831899 Hbk £50/$85)
It was not only the concluding sentence which left me feeling that this book was
oddly unsatisfying. Instead of a peroration in C major, trumpets blazing, Mate
finishes with a comment on the way in which even small mid-sixteenth century
towns ‘usually housed a butcher or a pewterer who had been able to take advan-
tage of new customer demands to build up a modest prosperity’ (p. 238). Well,
yes, that is indicative of the way in which society had changed over the previous
100 years, but it does seem a rather distant key in which to end and strangely
typical of much of what has gone before.
The idea is original. Mate has offered us an economic history of the three south-
eastern counties of England between the mid-fifteenth-century slump and the mid-
sixteenth-century wars of Henry VIII. (In fact there is relatively little on the 1540s.)
This, by straddling the traditional divide, makes enormous sense. She looks at all
aspects of economic activity, moving from towns to the countryside. Her material
is frequently fascinating and every reader will have a favourite section: but she
remains close to the sources. Her style is anecdotal. In part, this is because much
of the material is drawn from manorial court rolls or the plea rolls of the court of
Common Pleas, and whilst valuable and illuminating, it remains a lot of instances.
In a book that is so plainly about the chronology of economic change, chronology
does not always come out very well. In part this is because of the number of towns
considered. These range from Southwark, the south bank suburb of London,
through Canterbury to smaller towns such as Rye and Hythe. Her account of rural
change is also informed by landscape regions, which leads again to the problem
that a surprisingly modest amount of data is split several ways. What the book lacks
are long data series on which to hang the more anecdotal materials, and the greatest
and most intractable of those is the lack of a population series. Mate can hardly be
blamed for this, but I was left wondering whether any attempt to write the history
of this period on a regional scale is going to remain an unsatisfying experience when
compared to accounts of single well-documented estates or towns.
The thesis is that mid-fifteenth-century depression produced an economy in
which rents were reduced. The cost of purchased products also fell, but the opp-
ortunities for work (and women’s work) were much increased. In turn, this gener-
ated a new spending power. The innovation of beer and the commercial brewery is
given a particularly prominent part to play in late fifteenth-century developments.
At the same time there was an improvement in the diet as more meat was consumed.
Men seem to have spent more time sitting in alehouses and gambling, to public
disapproval. The result was an expansion of barley production, stated as fact on
*Prices given are those supplied by publishers with review copies.

© Economic History Society 2007. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main
Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.
BOOK REVIEWS 191
p. 79 and probably quite right, but oddly unsupported by any evidence. The
development of the Kentish cloth trade provided a further stimulus to the producers
of foodstuffs. Increased spending power found an outlet in the spread of leisure.
By the 1520s there were signs that this economic revival was running into trouble.
Land had become not only a commodity worth having, but one worth improving.
There was a marked tendency for farmers to be converted into subtenants to
middlemen gentry or merchants. A sizeable proportion of the rural population had
no land at all. One gets the impression that this economic revival might well have
stalled. The taxation and trade disruptions prompted by Henry VIII’s wars might
also have brought it to an end.
Lurking over the horizon of this book are London on the one side and the Low
Countries on the other. Exports of textiles are only to be expected in the late
fifteenth and early sixteenth century. The transport of corn into the Low Countries
was a matter of some comment in the early sixteenth century, but as an illegal trade
its scale cannot be adduced readily. The trade to Calais was legal and so better
documented. However, Mate also describes export trades in beer and billets into
the Low Countries. There was, as she shows, a substantial movement of aliens into
these counties at the same time. The revival of the economy was, to a degree at
least, export-driven: certainly the stimuli seem to have lain largely outside the three
counties under consideration. Which begs two questions: is it not time to revive the
idea of the late medieval economic core, spanning the Low Countries and south-
eastern England?; and is beer to have the role in English economic history that
Parmesan has acquired in Italian economic history?
Overall though, a book that will be read for its detail rather than its thesis which,
if tantalizing and credible, remains unproven for this reader at least.
University of Reading . . 
Lien Bich Luu, Immigrants and the industries of London, 1500–1700 (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2005. Pp. xiv + 366. 9 figs. 45 tabs. ISBN 075460330X Hbk. £55/$99.95)
It is now 20 years since the publication of Andrew Pettegree’s Foreign Protestant

communities in sixteenth-century London (1986) and Ole Grell’s Dutch Calvinists in
early Stuart London (1989). These two works explored the foundation and impact
of the French and Dutch communities in London during the late-sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, focusing in particular upon their religious history as well as
their socio-economic impact. In the decades since their publication there have been
a series of theses and subsequent monographs on the other French/Walloon and
Flemish/Dutch communities that were established along the south coast and in East
Anglia. There have also been edited volumes on early modern immigration and
aspects of these communities: Randolph Vigne and Charles Littleton, eds, From
strangers to citizens: the integration of immigrant communities in Britain, Ireland and
Colonial America, 1550–1750 (2001) and Nigel Goose and Lien Luu, Immigrants in
Tudor and Stuart England (2005).
Immigrants and the industries of London, developed from Luu’s 1997 doctoral
thesis, is, therefore, the latest addition to the literature. Unlike some of these earlier
case studies, this monograph concentrates on the economic contribution of immi-
grants. The opening chapters provide an overview of the economic theories sur-
rounding immigration, innovation, and the diffusion of technology, as well as the
© Economic History Society 2007
Economic History Review, 60, 1 (2007)
192 BOOK REVIEWS
literature on exile communities; this is followed by a contextualizing chapter on

trade and consumption. After these introductory chapters, the book can be divided
into two sections, the first looking at the immigrant communities and the second
on specific industries.
Chapter 3 concentrates on the introduction and fostering of new skills from
abroad by the government, in particular the projects and patents developed during
Elizabeth’s reign, not only in London but also in other exile communities estab-
lished by royal authority outside the capital. The returns of aliens that recorded the
immigrant population of the capital provide the backbone for Luu’s investigation
into immigrants in Elizabethan London. There is a detailed breakdown by place of
origin of the immigrant population in the capital in 1571 and 1593, with useful
tables on pages 102–4, as well as an analysis of the occupational structure of this
alien population, their residential distribution and socio-economic structure. The
final chapter in this section concentrates on the reception and treatment of immi-
grants, with areas such as their legal status, relationship with the host population,
and also assimilation being discussed. Although at times Luu takes something of a
longue durée approach in introducing some areas of discussion, the focus of these
chapters is firmly on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The remaining chapters concentrate on the three specific industries and the
contribution made by immigrants from France and the Low Countries. The first,
on the silk industry, provides a detailed examination of its establishment during the
later sixteenth century and the immigrants involved; Luu demonstrates that some
migrants learnt these new skills in exile. What is surprising, given the chronological
coverage of the book, is the lack of similarly detailed analysis for the later seven-
teenth-century Huguenot diaspora. However, the Huguenot contribution to the
silver trade in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is treated more fully in
the following chapter, and provides a contrast to what Luu regards as the less-
successful artisan goldsmiths of the Elizabethan era. The final trade to be examined
is beer brewing, which illustrates that this trade, introduced by Dutch brewers
during the fifteenth century, had been largely taken over by the native population
by the mid-seventeenth century.
This monograph therefore provides a useful synthesis of the economic contribu-
tion of the French and Dutch populations, principally during the late sixteenth and
early seventeenth centuries. The main strength of the book is in the detailed exam-
ination of specific trades, looking at the contribution of individual craftsmen and the
establishment of these new industries, and in particular through Luu’s exploration
of the diffusion of this new technology to members of the native community.
Oxford Brookes University  
Deborah Valenze, The social life of money in the English past (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2006. Pp. xv + 308. 9 figs. ISBN 0521852420 Hbk. £40/$65.
ISBN 0521617804 Pbk. £14.99/$23.99)
In recent years the familiar landscape of economic history, of production, consump-

tion, and exchange, has been explored increasingly by those interested less in
material than social, cultural, and ideological matters. Deborah Valenze’s book falls
squarely within this developing genre. Her focus is upon the social implications of
money, with her approach being much informed by sociology, anthropology,
BOOK REVIEWS 193
cultural studies, and literary criticism/history. Through a range of specific case
studies she seeks to explore not so much how money worked, though that is not
ignored, but what it meant, both to users and observers. Her sources are mainly
printed and her approach is wholly qualitative.
Among the topics that Valenze considers are proverbs relating to money, the
reflections of two seventeenth-century diarists, rewards for the apprehension of
criminals, payments to move the poor to their place of legal settlement, wife sales,
and indentured servitude. To all of these, Valenze brings a keen eye and a determi-
nation not to miss the complexities of her chosen topics. Amongst many more
specific points, she argues more broadly that users as well as the state gave money
its meaning, and that in her chosen period people were unusually liable to be priced.
She makes telling points, offers up many suggestions, and often prompts further
questions. At one level this is undeniably a rich book.
Ultimately, however, The social life of money is a somewhat frustrating as well as
a challenging book, mainly because its ‘terms and references’ are under-defined, at
least to this reader. So the book is not an exploration across a broad sweep of
English history, but a number of forays into the topic within the period 1640 to
1770, and then in a rather loosely related way. Similarly, where ‘social life’ roughly
begins and ends is not very clear. The subject matter is pleasingly eclectic, but the
connexions between the topics, and the significance of the gaps, are left rather
vague. Why, for example, explore proverbs rather than sermons? Indeed, there is
arguably too little interest in the spiritual dimensions of the topic, though it is
certainly not ignored. Nor is there much attention to important relevant work done
at the border of social and political thought by Pocock, Hont, and Winch. Concep-
tually, more specificity would also have been helpful, in particular by separating
more clearly the discussion of money as a medium of exchange (and then coin from
paper instruments) from the ways goods, people, and labour were priced. Thus,
where Valenze sees people being traded, which is a central part of her concerns,
others would see labour or services. On more specific points, questionable positions
are adopted, as in identifying ‘political economy’ as an established science decades
earlier than is credible, or points about monetization are made that will strike
economic historians of the period as commonplace. Lastly, the argument is not
always easy to follow: causation is sometimes ascribed to periods, places, and things,
such that who actually did what takes some working out; and the prose is so
multilayered in places as to be difficult to follow, which is at one with the book
coming to an abrupt halt, without a conclusion.
This is, then, a multifaceted book on an interesting topic. Certainly, some
powerful beams of light are shone on the parts of the landscape of the past that are
Valenze’s concern. However, the beams are not well related one to another; nor is
it clear why they have been shone where they have.
University College London  
Adrian Green, Elizabeth Parkinson, and Margaret Spufford, eds., County Durham
hearth tax assessment Lady Day 1666 (London: British Record Society, 2006.
Pp. cxlii + 370. 7 figs. 17 maps. 12 plates. 8 tabs. ISBN 0901505463 Hbk. £50)
The hearth tax was imposed upon the English and Welsh for 27 years during the
reigns of Charles II and James II. The surviving records of most interest to historians
194 BOOK REVIEWS
today, however, come from just 1664–6 and 1670–4 because those that were drawn
up then correctly list the names of the exempt householders as well as the different
number of hearths for which the others were liable. In 1995 the Roehampton
Hearth Tax Project was founded by Margaret Spufford in order to publish, in
tandem with the British Record Society, transcripts of the best returns for those
English counties that had not yet done so and eventually to base a national survey
of the distribution of wealth and poverty upon them. This Durham volume is the
third in this series and coincides with Spufford’s move from project director to
general editor. She has assembled a most impressive support team for it, ranging
from the British Academy—which now sponsors the whole project—and four other
grant awarding bodies, to specialists in statistics, cartography, and palaeography,
and many knowledgeable academics, but without a contribution from Keith
Wrightson as Spufford promised in her Phillimore Lecture six years ago. Emerging
from such a stable, this volume has many impressive virtues, which are sadly spoiled
by a badly damaged Achilles’ heel.
Adrian Green has contributed a very perceptive 60-page introduction, with help
from Elizabeth Parkinson, supplemented by a dozen maps and a dozen photos of
relevant buildings, all in colour, and extensive tables. It places the peculiar political
situation of the Palatinate of Durham and its surviving records within the national
context of the administration of the hearth tax as well as the county’s economic
development during the seventeenth century. Green probes further into the social
topography of the city of Durham, and also reveals the wide range and uneven
distribution of the gentry’s dwellings, with clusters in some communities and similar
groups of female-headed households in others. His discussion of the few
seventeenth-century houses that have survived, and the many that have not, dem-
onstrates in fascinating detail how these bald lists of names and hearth numbers
conceal a diversity of architectural styles and a wide variety of accommodation even
for the same number of hearths, and warns that ‘neither the distinction between
payers and non-payers nor between one and two hearths represents a constant
dividing line’ (p. lxxxv).
Although Durham’s delayed assessment for Lady Day 1666 has 1,000 fewer
entries than the one from 1674, it has more legible names and so was chosen for
transcription. A 10 per cent random sample of pages confirms that all the num-
bers have been copied accurately, but a scattering of minor imperfections among
the names implies a somewhat casual final proof-read. Green is well aware that
the 1666 return suffers from extensive under-recording, which he exposes with
intriguing material from Tudhoe and Auckland as well as selected exemption
certificates from the 1670s that are all transcribed here. The main problem is to
estimate the proportions of missing exempt, which vary enormously between dif-
ferent townships and were supplemented by extensive evasion among the charge-
able, which affected the four northern counties most. Thus Green urges caution
in interpreting these data and often uses details from the 1674 return in his
discussion, but with a dubious preference for uncorroborated rebuilding rather
than better recording as his main explanation for the extra one house in ten that is
recorded in 1674 with three hearths or more.
The 1666 list with all its imperfections, however, is the sole source used for
detailed statistical analysis in this book and the resulting percentages are never
revealed, but just mapped in differing bands for some 260 separate townships. Forty
of these are flawed by the absence of their exemption data, and no data at all is
shown for a mystifying 70 more, with none of this being properly explained or
BOOK REVIEWS 195
handled in the text or tables. The maps, which are set out on separate pages in a
way that prevents one from being related to another, convey in a patchwork of
colour a vague impression at best of most differences. This approach to statistical
analysis is unacceptably superficial and Professor Spufford would be well advised
to rethink for the future this patently inadequate methodology in favour of one that
can absorb data from several sources, and provide clearer and more reliable analyses
capable of comparing areas that are much larger than individual communities and
smaller than whole counties. Ideally it should also use maps with boundaries that
match better the places enumerated in the hearth tax. Her team of willing helpers
deserves nothing less.
Wheal Ellen, St Just in Penwith  
Herbert H. Kaplan, Nathan Mayer Rothschild and the creation of a dynasty: the critical
years, 1806–1816 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006. Pp. xxiv + 194. 7 illus.
1 tab. ISBN 080475165X Hbk. £31.50/$45)
There is no shortage of books on the Rothschilds; indeed it must be true that more
has been written about them than any other business house. However, much of the
bibliography was speculation and mythology until the London Rothschild archive
was opened to researchers 30 years or so ago. Even then progress was slow; it took
several years to comprehend and list the vast archive, and for the family to define
their attitude to publication. A generation on, researchers can enjoy the extensive
resources of a model archives office and make exhaustive studies of the material.
Some readers may be surprised that anything of consequence could be written
following the publication of Niall Ferguson’s monumental tome, The world’s banker:
the history of the house of Rothschild (1998). In fact, Ferguson provides a broad canvas
for the story of a large and complex multinational financial enterprise, a very
attractive and readable story, but inevitably one that could not cover everything
that happened. It was left for later writers to fill in the details and focus on the non-
business activities of various members of the family.
Kaplan provides much more information for the decade that saw the establish-
ment of the family fortune and its unique status in international finance. Ferguson
provided the main elements: the lack of serious competition at a critical period of
the Napoleonic War, N. M. Rothschild (NM)’s close relationship with Charles
Herries (the British Commissary-in-Chief) and, most important, the creation of a
secret organization for shifting bullion to the Continent (where it was needed
urgently to pay armies and provide subsidies), covered by merchant bills of
exchange. So far as the records allow, Kaplan now contributes an exhaustive
account of these bullion movements, emphasizing the growth of an arbitrage busi-
ness to take advantage of the erratic trading conditions of the war years. The
Rothschild brothers established a network of bullion suppliers in Paris, Amsterdam,
Rotterdam, and other centres in 1806–7, which was the foundation for the later
supply system to the Duke of Wellington. In a word, the foundation of the
Rothschild dynasty’s unprecedented fortune was not primarily inheritance (from
NM’s father or his in-laws), or earlier intelligence of the Waterloo victory, but
arbitrage, based on the brothers’ networking.
The system was not without its strains. Successful arbitrage requires quick
decisions on large resources. NM was eminently capable of making the decisions,
196 BOOK REVIEWS
but there was a most frustrating problem of communication to M. A. Rothschild

and to his four brothers on the continent. Other writers have remarked on the
tensions between the five brothers at this period, but Kaplan is much more frank
about the difficult situation. He shows that from the beginning of his career in
England, NM was guilty of slipshod bookkeeping and inarticulate letter-writing,
which strained relations with his father, then with his in-laws (the Cohens), then
with his brothers. Kaplan is clear from the outset that the sturdy virtues of the
eighteenth-century merchant (being honest, punctual, responsible, and ethical)
were not altogether shared by the imperious Nathan (p. 4). It is all the more
astonishing that so great a fortune was created in so short a space of time.
Southwell, Notts.  
James P. Huzel, The popularization of Malthus in early nineteenth century England:

Martineau, Cobbett and the pauper press (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. xv + 266.
6 plates. ISBN 0754654273 Hbk. £55/$99.95)
This admirable study is concerned with the influence of Malthus’s ideas at the
popular or working-class level. It is contrasted with some previous studies, such as
those by Mitchell Dean, Boyd Hilton, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Peter Mandler,
J. R. Poynter, Anthony Waterman, and Donald Winch—all duly acknowledged by
Huzel—that have been more concerned with Malthus’s impact at the intellectual,
government, and theological levels. Huzel further demarcates his contribution by
arguing that the splendid works we already have on the pauper press of the time
do not deal specifically or adequately with how the press treated Malthus. By
showing how writers in the pauper press interpreted and responded to Malthus’s
ideas, and how they then proceeded to attack or acclaim him, Huzel has identified
and filled a significant gap in the literature.
Beginning with an excellent overview of Malthus’s life and thought (chapter 1),
the work contains three further chapters, on Martineau, Cobbett, and the radical
working-class press, respectively. It reproduces portraits of Martineau, Cobbett,
Bronterre O’Brien, Owen, Place, and Carlile. Each of the four chapters is pains-
takingly researched and documented; more than 1,000 endnotes in all provide
sources and/or supplementary material to satisfy the most demanding reader. A
short concluding chapter rounds off this outstanding effort of research and
scholarship.
As would be expected, Huzel’s main source of information on Malthus’s influ-
ence on working-class opinion is the working-class press, such as The Black Dwarf,
The Bulldog, The Gorgon, Penny Papers for the People, The Political Penny Magazine,
Political Register, Poor Man’s Guardian, The True Sun, The Working Man’s Friend; and
others with equally colourful titles and radical intent. Books and pamphlets
intended for general readership—such as those by Carlile, Cobbett, Marcet, and
Martineau—are also dissected for their pro-Malthus and anti-Malthus content.
Huzel’s familiarity with this immense literature is impressive. With sympathetic
commentators like Martineau promoting Malthus’s ideas, and hostile critics like
Cobbett inciting revulsion, Huzel provides compelling evidence of Malthus’s influ-
ence on the public consciousness of England in the early nineteenth century.
The term ‘popularize’ can have various meanings. In the title of this work it is
used in the sense of ‘to present (an abstract or technical subject) in a form popularly
BOOK REVIEWS 197
intelligible or attractive’ or in a form ‘adapted to the understanding of ordinary
people’, rather than in the sense of ‘to cause to be generally known and accepted,
liked or admired’ (Oxford English dictionary). The aim of William Cobbett—
described by Huzel as Malthus’s ‘single most determined adversary in the early
nineteenth century’ (p. 206)—was to make Malthus the most hated man in
England.
The comprehensive collection of anti-Malthus sentiments assembled by Huzel
shows that the comments of Malthus’s critics related more to the first or early
editions of the Essay than to the later editions, where ‘nature’s mighty feast’ and
other extreme statements were either omitted or modified. The distinction between
the earlier Malthus and the later Malthus is particularly relevant to his views on
the poor laws, where his position evolved from outright abolition to administrative
reform. The later position would have given Cobbett and the popular press fewer
grounds for abuse; but it is also arguable that Malthus’s position on the poor laws
might not have evolved, were it not for Cobbett’s attacks. Perhaps the extraordinary
onslaught unleashed by Cobbett and the popular press against him made Malthus
realize that abolition was not politically feasible, even though it might have still been
his preferred position.
A feature of the popular critiques of that period is the extent to which they
concentrated on Malthus’s Essay on the principle of population (1798) and ignored
his Principles of political economy (1820). His critics often accused him of pandering
to the landed aristocracy and of a heartless disregard for the interests and welfare
of the labouring poor. Strangely, they were unaware of, or deliberately chose to
forget, statements from the Principles such as ‘the excessive wealth of the few is in
no respect equivalent, with regard to effective demand, to the more moderate wealth
of the many’ (1820 edn., p. 431), that radically advocated a wider distribution of
property and wealth.
In this and in other respects, Cobbett’s version was a far from fair and accurate
account of Malthus’s mature position, but it is the version that was taken up by
Marx, and remains the current popularized version. If the ideas of the Principles on
distribution and effective demand had been recognized, and translated into policies,
they might have achieved more for the welfare of the working class than all of
Cobbett’s vehement protestations.
University of New England  
Lydia Murdoch, Imagined orphans: poor families, child welfare and contested citizen-
ship in London (New Brunswick, NJ and London: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Pp. xii + 252. 24 figs. 3 tabs. ISBN 0813537223 Hbk. £31.50/$44.95)
The fascination with Victorian and Edwardian welfare provision continues to exer-
cise its hold over the scholastic imagination. This book, a worthy addition to the
literature, is in the genre of rescue texts, and here those to be given respect and
recognition are not institutionalized children, as one might expect from a volume
in a series in childhood studies, but the parents (very often the mothers) of
‘imagined orphans’. These are child/adolescent inhabitants of Barnardo’s homes
and poor law residential schools normally portrayed by welfare reformers as either
orphans or as having been abandoned by feckless parents, but whose mothers and
fathers frequently maintained contact and strove, usually against all the odds, to
198 BOOK REVIEWS
reunite them with their families. Murdoch adopts a ‘welfare as a bargaining pro-
cess’ approach, and is intent on showing that, far from being passive victims of their
circumstances, poor parents used the welfare services pragmatically in such a way
as to negotiate not only the consequences of poverty (with its multiple causes) and
to maintain their family connections, but also to counter the intentions of reform-
ers who sought to corral them and their children in a model of citizenship that,
until the 1890s, was founded on an ideal of middle-class domesticity, and there-
after on the desire to rear an imperial race. To this end, the book seeks ‘to recover
the voices of these working mothers and fathers who contested the notion that they
lacked the basic rights of citizenship by claiming welfare entitlements, by demand-
ing equal protection under the law, and, most of all, by asserting their parental
rights’ (p. 11).
Chapter one focuses on debates concerning child welfare and the representation
of poor children as being in need of care and protection. The creation of domestic
space and civic identity for poor children is the subject of the second chapter, which
describes the debates surrounding changes in the design of children’s institutions.
Chapter three reconstructs the family background of institutionalized children,
while the fourth chapter argues that contrary to popular opinion, poor parents
neither used the institutions as permanent homes for their children, nor did they
abandon them during what were usually temporary residences. Many parents are
shown to have gone to great lengths to maintain contact, often calling upon
fundamental English liberties in support of their demands. The training given to
the children (and youths) in welfare institutions is examined in chapter five, where
the author shows how notions of citizenship were reinforced through independent
labour and subservience to a hierarchical class order. In the final chapter, Murdoch
considers the First World War and its effects on the welfare institution, and argues
that where the poor were concerned the war revised understandings of what con-
stituted desirable citizenship. In place of an emphasis on domesticity, the role of
poor parents as soldiers, munitions workers, and mothers of the Empire assumed
greater significance. Similarly, reformed young people were valued as soldiers in
the nation state, rather than for their contribution to either a domestic ideal or an
artisan culture.
There is no doubt that Murdoch succeeds admirably in unveiling the layers of
official rhetoric to reveal the day-to-day struggles of poor parents, the reasons why
they gave over their children to institutional care, and the lengths to which they
went to retrieve them once their economic condition improved. From the opening
chapter, which examines how Barnardo used staged photographs—in melodramatic
form—to create his famous ‘before’ and ‘after’ images of the children of the streets
in order (in common with other philanthropists) to undermine the domesticity of
the poor, Murdoch proceeds carefully and intelligently on her rescue mission. The
melodrama of representation allowed the state to intervene in those families who
were deemed to be beyond the constitution—without too much opposition from
conservative opinion, since the reform schemes neither challenged ‘the family’ as a
private institution, nor in any way undermined the hierarchy of class. The central
themes of domesticity and citizenship are examined cleverly in an account of the
transition from ‘barrack schools to family cottages’. Drawing on interdisciplinary
work on the political and ideological use of space as a ‘mirror and a constituent of
culture and society’ (p. 45), Murdoch argues that while mid-Victorian welfare
reformers, such as Mary Carpenter, acknowledged individual liberty and parental
rights as fundamental to citizenship, those of the late-Victorian period were more
BOOK REVIEWS 199
likely to disregard the rights of poor parents, seeing them as a threat to civil society,
who should be disenfranchised.
The account of the poverty-stricken family backgrounds of ‘nobody’s children’
and the examination of the ‘rights of parents’ are invaluable in providing readers
with detailed and insightful analyses as they uncover the degree to which
‘ “nobody’s children” came from families that had at least one parent and that were
often deeply integrated in their local communities’ (p. 67), and that the parents
themselves looked on parental rights as ‘that most delicate of all questions in an
Englishman’s mind’ (p. 119). In interpreting the linked cultures of poverty and
social class, Murdoch demonstrates convincingly the tenacious attachment among
the poor to long-held notions of English liberty. The chapter ‘Training “street
Arabs” into British citizens’ is also informative and subtle in charting the shift in
emphasis during the period from instruction in employment skills to teaching the
values of citizenship. However, the claim that the new emphasis illustrated impor-
tant changes in ‘ideals of childhood’ (p. 140) requires explication since this study
says nothing about concepts of childhood, or about how conceptual understandings
of childhood/adolescence impacted upon citizenship. The material presented in
‘Changing notions of child welfare and citizenship’, despite identifying important
issues, needs further thought, for it tends to exaggerate the impact of the First
World War both on child welfare and citizenship. Much of what Murdoch attributes
to the war was probably in process by the early 1900s. Furthermore, the theme of
imperial citizenship and young Britons is more complicated than she suggests. We
need some discussion of the connections between ideas of Empire and citizenship
training on the one hand and, on the other, the debates and reforms surrounding
‘children of the nation’.
Throughout the book, the author’s ‘voice’ is judicious and overall the text is
balanced and thoughtful. However, the PhD origins of this study are evident in so
far as Murdoch is often too close to her primary sources, and consequently the
reader is not given a proper sense of the wider context, particularly the broader
history of child welfare, the new class politics, imperial anxieties, the problematics
of ‘Englishness’, and, not least, the changing economic and political nature of the
state. This seems a shame. More referencing of well-known works by inter alia
George Behlmer, Hugh Cunningham, Anna Davin, Jeroen Dekker, Stephen
Heathorn, Stephen Humphries, and Ellen Ross, would have allowed Murdoch to
engage with an array of relevant perspectives and analyses, and so enrich her canvas
to create altogether a more inclusive environment for her arguments. Notwithstand-
ing this caveat, Murdoch has written a scholarly, informative, and perceptive
account that undoubtedly will join the ranks of required reading for those seeking
to understand late-Victorian and Edwardian England.
University of Southern Denmark, Odense  
Jill Liddington, Rebel girls: their fight for the vote (London: Virago Press, 2006.
Pp. xiv + 402. 50 illus. ISBN 1844081680 Pbk. £14.99)
Historians of the British women’s suffrage movement have known for some time
that there is more to the story than the Pankhurst family history, but convincing a
wider public remains difficult. One of the most significant developments in suffrage
scholarship in recent years has been the increased interest in the grassroots suffrage
200 BOOK REVIEWS
campaign in the regions. Liddington’s Rebel girls swims with the historiographical
tide by using new evidence to provide the most detailed study of the Yorkshire
campaign that is available. Using a collective biography approach, Liddington
focuses on the lives of eight young Yorkshire women, most of them poorly educated,
from working-class backgrounds, and without previous political experience, who
rebelled not only against a political system that denied women the vote, but against
a much broader gender system that disadvantaged women.
Although Liddington includes a few Yorkshire women who were active in the
National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), she is concerned prima-
rily with the Yorkshire suffragettes, demonstrating that the activists were often
relatively ordinary women until their lives were transformed by the suffrage cam-
paign. Liddington describes them as ‘community suffragettes’ to convey that they
were members of small communities who had to fit suffrage campaigning into
family and community obligations. While she identifies examples of middle-aged
Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) members, Liddington implies that
the WSPU differed from the NUWSS in being much more of a youth movement.
During 1907 the suffrage campaign became a mass movement as it spread from
a few large cities to many small communities. Yorkshire was an important source
of this growth; by autumn 1907 over a quarter of the WSPU’s branches were in
Yorkshire and Lancashire. The members in small towns like Halifax and Hudder-
sfield were often working-class women who also belonged to the Independent
Labour Party (ILP). Since the Pankhursts were recruiting wealthy London women
during this period to facilitate fundraising, Liddington suggests that two distinct
WSPUs were emerging: while members in the regions were working-class, socialist,
and ILP supporters, in London they were increasingly middle and upper-class, anti-
socialist, and Conservative. Liddington notes that the resulting tensions contributed
to the 1907 split within the WSPU that led to the formation of the Women’s
Freedom League, but does not develop this point as fully as she might have
(although she acknowledges that it contributed to Adela Pankhurst’s dismissal from
the WSPU after she refused to suppress her socialist views when in the presence of
wealthy women who were potential WSPU contributors).
Liddington indicates that Yorkshire’s distinctive social and economic environ-
ment shaped the way that the suffrage campaign unfolded in the region. In Lan-
cashire, where the women industrial workers tended to be unionized, most
supported the NUWSS, but in Yorkshire the female mill-workers were generally not
organized, and were much more likely to join the WSPU. Although the NUWSS
members in the Newcastle area were among the most enthusiastic advocates of the
1912 NUWSS’s electoral alliance with the Labour Party, NUWSS members else-
where in Yorkshire—usually Liberals—resisted implementing the alliance in their
constituencies.
Liddington is best known as the co-author of One hand tied behind us (1978), a
study of the Lancashire suffrage campaign that was rather critical of the WSPU’s
militant campaign. Has she changed her mind about militancy? Although Rebel girls
portrays the individual militants favourably, Liddington remains convinced that the
WSPU’s militant methods, especially after 1912, weakened the suffrage campaign
by allowing the Liberal Government to treat it as a law and order issue rather than
a struggle for democracy. Liddington’s study implies that the WSPU’s campaign
had ignited a revolt previously—in Yorkshire as well as elsewhere—against what
Christabel Pankhurst called the ‘slave spirit’ that Victorian culture attempted to
instil in women, but does not analyse why it was so much more effective (at least
BOOK REVIEWS 201
prior to 1912) in stimulating a gender consciousness among women than the
NUWSS’s efforts, nor why that development had mixed implications for the suf-
frage campaign. The history of the women’s suffrage campaign remains hotly
contested ground, but Rebel girls should appeal to supporters of both the militants
and the constitutionalists. While portraying sympathetically the sacrifices made by
individual suffragettes for the cause, Liddington briefly outlines the NUWSS’s
alternative strategy of an electoral alliance with the Labour Party, which by 1914
had made it the stronger and much more effective suffrage organization.
University of Houston-Victoria  . 
Derek Matthews, A history of auditing: the changing audit process in Britain from
the nineteenth century to the present day (London and New York: Routledge, 2006.
Pp. vii + 184. 1 fig. 12 tabs. ISBN 041538169X Hbk. £70/$150)
Despite a growing interest in the development of the accountancy profession in

Britain, research during the last 20 years has not paid much attention to the
practical activities of professional accountants, and how these have changed over
time. The corporate audit market today, dominated by four international firms, is
very different from that of a century ago. The role of the audit has changed from
a search for errors and frauds to an overall attestation of the ‘truth and fairness’ of
a company’s financial statements.
Matthews has responded to complaints from several audit researchers that little
is known about the development of audit in practice. His study, based on interviews
with 60 accountants, some of whose experience goes back to the 1920s, coupled
with responses to a postal questionnaire from over 1,000 accountants and a review
of company accounts from the 1880s, provides the first systematic review of the
changes in audit practice in Britain in the era of modern enterprise. Matthews traces
the gradual shift from the ‘bookkeeping audit’, where a company’s financial state-
ments were prepared actually by the auditor, who checked the validity of transac-
tions as part of the preparation process, to the modern ‘systems-based’ audit, where
the auditor identifies areas of material risk in the company’s activities, and checks
whether the company’s systems of internal control are adequate to prevent material
mis-statement in the company’s financial statements. He suggests that changes in
audit methods were driven by economic and technological factors. Competitive
pressures and a desire to keep the cost of the audit to a minimum have led to a
steady decline in the number of transactions that the auditor checks, as first
statistical sampling of the client’s activities and then ‘analytical review’ of the
numbers in the accounts supplanted the checking of large numbers of transactions.
At the same time, developments in information technology (from accounting and
tabulating machines to computers) led to the creation of more formal systems for
processing and recording transactions, so the client took greater responsibility for
preparing the accounts. Auditors could use computer-assisted audit techniques to
assess the overall reliability of the client’s systems of internal control, rather than
having to focus on detailed accounting entries.
The great strength of this book is its firm basis in the evidence provided by the
author’s postal questionnaire and interviews. The questionnaire responses, analysed
and presented in clear tables, show the various trends in practice that Matthews
highlights, such as the adoption for most audits of formal work programmes for
202 BOOK REVIEWS
carrying out each audit from as early as the 1930s, the focus on internal controls
rather than specific transactions in the 1960s, and the rise of statistical sampling in
the 1970s. Matthews was fortunate enough to obtain interviews not only with
eminent auditors such as senior partners of major accounting firms but also with
some practitioners who specialized in the audit of small and medium-sized entities,
and the book is worth reading just for the rich anecdotes and memories that
Matthews recounts. Although the trends that Matthews documents were known in
outline already, this book’s central contribution is in its richly nuanced account of
audit practices, showing how change was not a uniform process, but took place at
different rates in different parts of the audit market. For much of the period under
review, documents such as auditing standards did not exist, so auditors needed to
exercise individual professional judgement in planning and conducting their audits.
The book is less helpful when considering the influence of external institutional
changes such as the emergence of auditing standards on the organization of audits:
Matthews does not ignore the regulatory environment, but he is open in his hostility
to the ‘new accounting history’, whose practitioners would tend to view this as a
central factor in explaining changes in audit practice. Although the book focuses
on Britain, there are some discussions of the influence of the US, where several
audit approaches emerged before their adoption in Britain, and were transferred
through the large international accounting firms. A possible future study would be
an examination of changes in audit practice in countries such as France and
Germany, where the accounting profession has been organized along lines very
different from those of the UK and US. Such a study would provide a clearer test
of whether institutional or economic/technical factors are more important in
explaining changes in audit practice. Matthews has enriched our understanding of
audit practice greatly, and undoubtedly his book will become a primary point of
reference for future auditing researchers and historically inclined practitioners.
Royal Holloway, University of London  . 
Gary Burn, The re-emergence of global finance (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
Pp. xii + 231. 4 figs. ISBN 023000198X Hbk. £55/$80)
The fashion of the 1990s for agonizing over the globalization of the international
economy has paved the way more recently for historical approaches to the waxing
and waning of international finance in the longer-term. Recent contributions
include Raghuram Rajan and Luigi Zingales, Saving capitalism from the capitalists
(2003), and Maurice Obstfeld and Alan Taylor, Global capital markets (2005). Both
seek to explain the postwar evolution of international finance from the tightly
regulated markets of the first stage of the Bretton Woods system from 1945–59, to
the increasingly liberal and innovative era of the 1960s and 1970s, before global-
ization began to accelerate in the 1980s. Burn’s book fits into this growing literature.
Using political economy rather than economics, he offers some fresh perspectives
based on new conceptual approaches and archival research. He focuses on the rise
of the euromarkets, which he describes as ‘the most momentous financial innova-
tion since the bank note’ (p. 10).
The thrust of Burn’s argument is that existing explanations of the rise of the
eurodollar market over-emphasize the dichotomy between market and state.
Instead, Burn draws on the history of the Bank of England as a private institution
BOOK REVIEWS 203
to blur the distinction between regulators and regulated, a relationship he describes
as ‘incestuous’ (p. 95). He concludes that the euromarkets marked the rise of the
unregulated and independent power of finance capital (as opposed to industrial
capital), marking a return to the pre-1931 world. He argues that the institutions of
the City–Bank–Treasury nexus were unchanged by the collapse of the gold stan-
dard, depression, and war and so were poised to return to their pre-1931 structure.
Moreover, the subordination of industrial capital to finance capital hastened
Britain’s economic decline. Burn’s argument has resonance with the concept of
‘gentlemanly capitalism’ (not mentioned explicitly) in the overlap between the
financial elite and the state, and references to old Etonian financiers. This is
arguably less sustainable, however, in the case of the euromarkets, which were
dominated by brash Americans who did not play by the traditional rules of the
game in the City, and by the early 1970s required new formal supervision and
regulation by the Bank of England.
Burn’s emphasis on the institutional history of the Bank of England leads to
some organizational problems for the book, which abruptly leaves the 1960s after
chapter 2 to begin an assessment of the City–state relationship from the 1870s in
chapter 3. Since Burn views the eurodollar as supplanting sterling for the City,
chapter 4 then describes the development of sterling policy in the 1950s. The next
two chapters form the core of the analysis of the rise of the Euromarkets from
1957–63, focusing on British and American attitudes based on contemporary and
archive accounts. The analysis ends in 1965, before the explosion of the market in
the 1970s.
In stressing the novelty of his approach, Burn is in danger of over-emphasizing the
distinction between ‘market’ explanations and ‘state’ explanations. The view that
financial innovation occurred to evade regulation is not mutually exclusive with the-
ories that the innovation was promoted by the state (albeit passively). As Burn notes
(p. 180), the Stigler-Posner theory of capture of regulators by the market has already
blurred the conceptual distinction between the state and market, but he criticizes
this theory for lacking a concept of power to explain how the capture occurs.
Instead, Burn prefers to join the Bank of England and the City into an historically
self-regulating enclave that was able to seize control of its regulatory space in the late
1950s by developing an offshore market almost by accident out of funds they found
‘languishing in West European banks’ (p. 178). The concluding chapter, which is
highly critical of the Bank of England’s independence from government, could have
drawn on the economic literature on central bank independence.
Burn’s arguments will benefit from engaging with Rajan and Zingales’ use of
changes in incumbents’ interests to explain financial controls and liberalization, and
also with Obstfeld and Taylor’s use of the Mundell-Fleming trilemma to explain
this process. Oddly, the exchange rate system is almost completely absent from
Burn’s analysis. It could be argued that the faltering fixed exchange-rate system in
the early 1960s was the key demand factor explaining financial innovation as the
market sought ways to deal with the increased exchange rate and interest rate risk.
Another missing element is the threat of the eurodollar market to policy sovereignty.
Burn provides much discussion of the perceived impact on the balance of payments,
but little on the threat posed to the operation of national monetary policy, which
so occupied European and American central bankers in their discussion of the
market during the 1960s.
Economic historians will be frustrated by the lack of data presented consis-
tently, even of the growth of eurodollar deposits, although these are available (albeit
204 BOOK REVIEWS
imperfectly) in both archival and published sources. Burn also asserts repeatedly,
without presenting evidence, that the euromarkets were unstable, and seems to
equate liberal capital markets with speculation and volatility. It is also possible, how-
ever, to argue that the large flows of short-term capital in the 1960s and early 1970s
were the result of underlying global imbalances perpetuated by the fixed exchange
rate system rather than a cause of instability themselves. Other quibbles, such as
repeated typographical and grammatical errors, detract only slightly from this highly
provocative and long-awaited in-depth study of the origins of the euromarkets. It
should spark considerable debate and contribute to the growing literature on the
long-term historical process of financial market liberalization.
University of Glasgow  . 
John F. Wilson and Andrew Thomson, The making of modern management: British
management in historical perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvii
+ 297. 21 figs. 15 tabs. ISBN 019926158X £50/$95)
This is an important contribution to knowledge and to our understanding of

‘management history’ in its British context. As the authors note, notwithstanding
the post-1990 growth of published literature in business history, broadly defined,
there is only one study that ranks as a seminal contribution to management his-
tory, namely Sidney Pollard’s monograph, The genesis of modern management
(1965). Pollard’s temporal focus was on the classic period of the ‘industrial
revolution’ up to 1830, and he lamented subsequently the absence of complemen-
tary studies of management history that continued the analysis through to the
twentieth century. It is this gap in the literature that The making of modern manage-
ment seeks to fill.
A significant aspect of the book is the authors’ clear definitions of the key stages
in management development, reinforced by a strong theoretical framework. In these
respects, the authors set out four ‘underpinning themes’, which serve as essential
reference points in analysing the evolution of management structures in British
business. Stage one (to the 1870s) was the era of ‘personal capitalism’; stage two
(1870s to 1940s) witnessed the rise of ‘personal-proprietorial’ structures, whereby
personal capitalism was complemented by the beginnings of professional manage-
ment, cartelization, and the emergence of large-scale firms; stage three—the ‘man-
agerial’ phase (1940s to 1970s)—was characterized by the increasing divorce
between ownership and control, the intensification of merger activity, and interna-
tional investment, and the widespread adoption of the M-form by large scale firms;
the final stage (the 1980s onwards) is defined as the ‘managerial-financial’ era,
where the dominance of City interests has gone hand-in-hand with globalization,
the professionalization of the managerial function, and with SMEs serving as
‘stakeholders’ in the chain. Armed with this readily identifiable structure, the
authors then proceed to set out a ‘theoretical and thematic framework’ informed
by the work of Chandler (the ‘market-cum-technological model’), Popp, Toms, and
Wilson (the ‘industrial clusters model’), and Fligstein (the ‘environmental control
model’). A synthesis of these models is then offered, bringing together ‘the inter-
nalization-externalization transaction-cost’ approaches that are then linked to
Fligstein’s emphasis on the social context in which firms operate and the inherent
uncertainties of decision-making.
BOOK REVIEWS 205
The analytical core of the book is contained in three sections: ‘Management and
organisations’, ‘Managers in context’, and ‘Managerial functions’. In the first case,
the authors present a broad narrative history of British management, emphasizing
the persistence of personal and proprietorial capitalism. An insightful sub-section
on management systems in the United States, Germany, and Japan provides a
much-needed international context for assessing the British record. ‘Managers in
context’ ranges over social and cultural influences, the development of professional
structures and managerial thought, whilst ‘Managerial functions’ focuses on the
organization and control of labour, the development of modern marketing and the
emergence of a distinctive accounting and finance influence on management
practice.
The authors are to be congratulated for producing a lucid, ‘state of the art’
history of British management that can be read with substantial intellectual profit
by economic and business historians and students of management generally.
Moreover, the reviewer is helped by the preface to the book, which sets out a
series of caveats that highlight its limitations. In the first instance, the analysis of
the managerial function is limited to three roles, albeit the most important. More-
over, the sectoral coverage is confined to manufacturing industry, bearing in mind
that the service sector is now the main contributor by far to GDP. However, as
the authors point out, it is manufacturing, in the context of the large-scale firm,
which has dominated the literature in terms of academic debate, and this also
explains the focus on production-led issues in the development of modern man-
agement. Another self-confessed limitation is the lack of detail on ‘external’
issues, such as the role of the state, the relationship between market size and
structure, and the evolving relationship between industry and financial institu-
tions. Lastly, the authors confess that their work has been informed primarily by
‘tomes, articles, and monographs’ rather than by primary research. None of these
limitations detract from the quality of this study. Indeed, by delving into a vast
array of published sources, not all of which are readily available to scholars, the
authors can rest assured that they have produced a pioneering study, which reso-
nates with the current frontier of knowledge and identifies the parameters for
future research.
University of Lancaster . . 
Peter Borsay, A history of leisure (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. xix + 306.
2 tabs. ISBN 0333930819 Hbk. £47.50/$72. ISBN 0333930827 Pbk. £15.99/
$24.95)
This ambitious textbook focuses on the history of leisure between the years 1500
and 2000. Despite the complexity of his subject matter and the long chronology,
Borsay is not content simply to rehearse existing debates, but has instead produced
an informative and interesting contribution to the discourse on the history of
leisure. Borsay’s achievement is down largely to his thematic structuring, selecting
issues that have generated the most controversy over the period investigated.
Indeed, this format ensures that the book is accessible to student readers, particu-
larly if they are unfamiliar with either the early modern or modern eras. Signifi-
cantly, this approach also helps to convey his argument, which seeks to challenge
the orthodox view that asserts that the industrial revolution transformed leisure
206 BOOK REVIEWS
from an indistinguishable activity in the early modern period into a recognizable

concept in the modern. Indeed, Borsay argues that leisure should be analysed across
a long time span, as any other approach is liable to distort our understanding of it.
Thus, though acknowledging the importance of industrialization and urbanization,
Borsay argues that these two themes have been over-played by historians to establish
a ‘great divide’ (p. 9) between early and modern society. In respect of leisure,
however, Borsay suggests that change was more nuanced and there were, in
fact, six phases of change: 1350–1530, 1530–1660, 1660–1780, 1780–1870,
1870–1960, and 1960–2000. Though these phases often merged, Borsay is keen to
emphasize the chronological breaks as they help to counter the charge that the book
is ahistorical, as a result of an overly thematic approach.
Since leisure is a rather broad term, it is essential that any author attempting to
survey the subject sets out clear and identifiable parameters. Borsay not only
identifies the essential ingredients of leisure but also explores ways in which it can
be analysed over time periods. The book opens with Borsay challenging the notion
that leisure is ‘what is left when all the important and serious areas of life have been
accounted for’ (p. 5). In defining leisure and its importance in society, Borsay settles
on three ‘intrinsic characteristics’ that were more or less present in all forms of
leisure in the period under analysis; symbol, play, and ‘otherness’ (p. 6). Symbol
is where there is a notion of representation or metaphor for some other phenome-
non. Thus in horse racing, jockeys could be said to represent the owners or punters
who bet on them. Play is where the activity is self-contained and unreal, without
any serious consequences, such as in music halls or sporting venues. The ‘other’
also embraces the notion of a fantasy world that is not confined to a specific place,
but which can include any experience that is ‘other’ than the norm. While these
characteristics are present to some extent in all human experience, they are clearly
useful tools to analyse the continuity and change of leisure activities from the early
modern to modern periods. Indeed, Borsay argues that ‘leisure is particularly
saturated with the three traits, and that they are present in this specific combination’
(p. 7).
The book explores the development of leisure through seven themed chapters,
on the economy, state, class, identity, place, space, and time. These chapters are
crafted carefully to ensure that the reader is introduced to the key historiographical
issues while also contextualizing the material with contemporary events and trends.
Inevitably the debates selected and narrative included are highly selective, though
it is to Borsay’s credit that the book includes sufficient analysis for the reader to
grasp the key questions that leisure in a variety of contexts poses the historian. Few
major historical debates are missing, since a study on leisure will intersect inevitably
with important controversies. Thus debates about social control, the significance of
class, gender, generation, and ethnicity feature strongly.
The book, then, holds together well, and Borsay’s contention that the great divide
between the early modern and the modern is more a result of historical hindsight
than contemporary experience is argued coherently. Indeed, the three intrinsic
characteristics of leisure (symbol, play, and ‘otherness’) offer an attractive way of
exploring the subject as they can undoubtedly be found in leisure activity and
tracked from the early to the modern periods. Nevertheless, one could question
whether Borsay has down-played the economic, social, and cultural repercussions
of the industrial revolution to sustain his overarching thesis. Just as the industrial
revolution changed the experience of work fundamentally for many people, so their
perception of leisure underwent an unprecedented transformation.
BOOK REVIEWS 207
This, however, should not detract from what is an important contribution to the
history of leisure. Indeed, Borsay has not only produced a valuable text for students,
he has also offered a thought-provoking and fresh perspective on the history of
leisure between 1500 and 2000.
University of Portsmouth  
Robert L. Tignor, W. Arthur Lewis and the birth of development economics (Princeton
and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005. Pp. xi + 315. 9 illus. ISBN
0691121419 Hbk. £22.95/$35)
Arthur Lewis was a founding father of development economics, who received the
Nobel prize in 1979. This is primarily an intellectual biography, though it locates
Lewis’s work as part of an extraordinary story of personal achievement. Lewis, from
St Lucia in the West Indies, was a student then lecturer at the LSE in the 1930s,
and then became the first black professor in a British university at Manchester in
1947, after being turned down for a chair at Liverpool on racist grounds. He was
the first black person to win a Nobel prize other than for peace or literature.
Lewis is best known for his 1954 article on ‘Economic development with unlim-
ited supplies of labour’, which remains one of the most cited economics articles
ever, and this, along with his Theory of economic growth, first published the following
year, established his reputation. However, alongside his academic role, Lewis spent
much time in his early career in economic advisory posts, initially for the British
colonial office in the 1940s, and in the following decade, and most importantly, for
the newly-independent Gold Coast/Ghana led by Nkrumah.
Tignor is an historian of Africa, so is particularly well-qualified to analyse Lewis’s
role in Ghana, and this is done in considerable detail. This role has been criticized
by previous authors because of the later disasters that befell independent Ghana
under Nkrumah, in part the consequence of impossibly optimistic and grandiose
projects for economic development. Detailed analysis of Lewis’s advice shows that
he was in no way responsible for such projects, bringing a coolly rational spirit to
bear in the economic plans he wrote. The Ghanaian disaster owed something to
the classic confusion of a cycle with a trend—in this case the temporary upswing
in cocoa prices in the early 1950s, from which it was hoped revenues for rapid
industrialization would be delivered. It also owed a great deal to understandable
but utopian notions about how far independence in Africa would underpin a new
economic prosperity.
More broadly, the Ghanaian disaster, and similar episodes in the Third World in
the 1950s and 1960s, have been used to attack the whole notion of development
economics in that era, both as theory and as a guide to policy. Liberal critics have
chastized Lewis and others of similar mind with exaggerating the effective role of
the state, and underplaying the role of markets, in economic growth. This bias, it
is argued, was linked to an exaggerated belief in aggregate investment as the key to
development, a downplaying of the importance of human capital, and a misunder-
standing of the role of agriculture. The broad charge of excessive statism is surely
mistaken. Lewis was a mild Fabian in his approach; like so many advocates of
‘planning’ in the 1940s he used this term to describe an economic system in which
government laid down only broad guidelines, allowing market forces a very large
role. On the more specific issue of investment, Lewis was far from offering a
208 BOOK REVIEWS
monocausal account of economic growth; indeed his seminal book was strikingly
broad and interdisciplinary in its scope. And rather than ignoring human capital,
he not only argued for its importance in his writings, but by becoming Principal of
the University of the West Indies showed in a practical way how much he regarded
education as crucial to development.
The Nobel prize citation included two economic history books as well as the two
publications noted above. Lewis always believed that economic history was central
to understanding economic development. A perhaps surprising link examined here
is that between Lewis’ theory of labour supply and the Hammonds’ work on the
industrial revolution. Better known is Lewis’s own historical work, beginning with
his Economic Survey 1919–1939 (1949), which is still used today. Its key theme of
the importance of commodity prices in the evolution of the world economy was
developed at much greater length in his Aspects of tropical trade, 1883–1965 (1969),
and Growth and fluctuations, 1870–1913 (1978). Many contemporary economic
historians lack the self-confidence of historians of Lewis’s generation that their
discipline can contribute to current policy debates on development; Lewis’s histor-
ical work perhaps illustrates that more faith in that contribution would be justified.
Written elegantly and often argued powerfully, this book rightly places Lewis in
the Pantheon of economists. Occasionally the author’s touch deserts him when
commenting on economic issues. For example, Keynes is presented as an advocate
of ‘planned and regulated economies’ (p. 40), a view that only extreme neo-liberals
would adhere to today. In addition, the importance of aggregate investment to
development is sometimes treated as self-evident, rather than hotly contested. But
these are minor quibbles about a book that both does justice to a key figure in the
history of economics, and also powerfully re-creates key moments in the recent
history of economic development.
University of Dundee  
Terry Gourvish, The official history of Britain and the Channel Tunnel (London:
Routledge, 2006. Pp. xxi + 522. 13 figs. 12 illus. 36 tabs. ISBN 0415391830 Hbk.
£49.95/$93.95)
Literature on the Channel Tunnel project has tended to concern itself with relatively
narrow aspects of the scheme. Several accounts have focused on the project’s
technical dimensions. A number of people, including this reviewer, have written on
the political debates. The broadest previous account was Keith Wilson’s Channel
Tunnel visions, 1850–1945: dreams and nightmares (1994), which combined politics
with popular culture. However, previous studies fell short of considering the most
recent phase of the project, from the mid-1960s to the present. In his account of
that most recent 40-year phase, Terry Gourvish has successfully blended treatment
of the technical and political issues with close attention to the economic problems.
Meanwhile, an amusing selection of newspaper cartoons injects welcome attention
to the popular hopes and fears aroused by the tunnel. This combination makes for
such a thorough account of the British side of debates that it is hard to imagine
there is much else to be said about the project on this side of the channel.
Previous writing on the politics of the tunnel had stopped in the mid-1960s
simply because no major archival research had been carried out on the tunnel
project since the mid-1990s. At that time, papers more recent than the mid-1960s
BOOK REVIEWS 209
remained closed to the public. Ten years on, there was a clear need for analysis of
the 1964–75 period, covering the Wilson government’s interest, the commitment
made by the Heath government, and the later abandonment of plans in 1975.
However, Gourvish’s book has gone even further, to the completion of the tunnel
in 1994 and its subsequent ten years of operation. As an author in the government’s
official history series, Gourvish has been given full access to all relevant government
records, and so names such as Heseltine, Howe, and Lamont emerge from papers
in a way that would not have been expected for another decade or so. Such insights
into very recent internal discussions give one a sense of peeping through the keyhole
that is sometimes lacking after a 30-year wait.
Gourvish’s conclusion is that the project’s fate rested on a struggle between
‘political will and entrepreneurial optimism’ on the one hand, and ‘economic
scepticism’ on the other (p. 385). Thus, throughout the book, we see the tunnel
buffeted by the economic cycle. When times were tough, the will of politicians and
the optimism of entrepreneurs were not enough to overcome the scepticism bred
of an economic downturn. It should be no surprise that the optimism that greeted
the scheme in the late 1960s foundered on the rocks of economic collapse in the
mid-1970s. As the government began to rein in its spending, even before being
forced to make dramatic cuts by the International Monetary Fund, it was no
surprise that the tunnel was a casualty. The scheme approved by the Heath govern-
ment depended on public–private partnership. Yet leading Labour figures in gov-
ernment from 1974, such as Denis Healey, hankered after a publicly funded project.
That was simply impractical during a time of economic retrenchment when there
were so many pressures for spending on short-term concerns such as public-sector
pay. So it was not until the mid-1980s, when greater stability had been achieved,
that the idea could be placed firmly back on the agenda. In such times, the
entrepreneurial optimism that defined so much of 1980s Britain came to the fore
and seized the opportunities offered by a fixed rail link between Britain and France.
Such timing also meant that any thought of a solely publicly funded project was
over, with public–private partnership appealing to the spirit of the age.
The only criticism one can offer—and it is probably more of the publishers than
the author—relates to the absence of a bibliography. The references are vast,
covering 135 pages, and when one finds only a short form of reference in the notes,
trawling back through so many pages of fine print can be frustrating. A simple
alphabetical bibliography of no more than a few pages would have been more
user-friendly.
The book’s jacket says that Gourvish reveals ‘new insights into the role of the
British and French Governments’. The French approach is covered at key points,
but only as revealed through public pronouncements or the British papers. The
nature of the access to only the British papers means that Gourvish has focused
necessarily on the British government. It is therefore on the French government
that future research on the tunnel will have to focus. As regards the British govern-
ment, it is difficult to see that Gourvish will be supplanted as the definitive study.
Goldsmiths, University of London  . 

210 BOOK REVIEWS
Avner Offer, The challenge of affluence: self-control and well-being in the United States
and Britain since 1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xviii + 454.
45 figs. 29 tabs. ISBN 0198208537 Hbk. £30/$45)
Avner Offer has produced an intelligent, original, provocative, and moralistic book
which should make economic historians think seriously about extremely important
questions, even if they find themselves in disagreement with his approach. His basic
proposition is that ‘Affluence breeds impatience, and impatience undermines well-
being’ (p. 1). Individuals, and society as a whole, need to balance the gratification of
immediate desires with the interests of the future. Should a student forego a party to
secure a higher grade with the prospect of later prosperity; should a young adult forego
present consumption to save for a distant old age; should society control pollution with
harmful effects on present growth in order to save the planet for future generations?
Generally, better-educated and more prosperous individuals are more prudent:
they think ahead, deferring present gratification for future wellbeing. Less-educated
and less prosperous individuals are more myopic, opting for present pleasure at the
expense of the future. So far so good: Victorian social commentators accepted the
distinction readily, and sought to teach prudence to the poor, expecting that
increased prosperity and education would lead to an increase in foresight. But as
Offer points out, the outcome since 1950 has been very different. At any point in
time, better-off people are more prudent, but, over time, affluence, abundance, and
novelty have dissolved prudence with unwelcome consequences. The book explores
his insight in conceptual essays and a series of case studies of the market and social
relations in Britain and the United States.
The new electrical entertainment goods and flashy motor cars in America in the
1950s trapped consumers on a hedonic treadmill of anticipation and habituation,
leading to narcissism, an obsessive interest in the self, and a search for the next
stimulus and gratification, which in turn leads to satiation and disappointment.
Similarly, the explosion of obesity in the United States arises from the decline in
time spent on food preparation, the ready availability of cheap and novel fast food,
and a decline in self-control. Advertisers seek to capture these jaded and satiated
consumers, and they are more likely to succeed if their claims are credible. How-
ever, any individual advertiser has a temptation to free-ride on the general credi-
bility by deceiving. Consequently, credibility and honesty decline, and the
debasement of advertising spills over into politics and the media. Much the same
applies in personal relations. A search for status leads to ever-higher salaries for
some, and loss of status and satisfaction for others. Sexual gratification and a
desire for a ‘perfect’ marriage or relationship lead to a retreat from commitment,
with harmful consequences for children and women.
The prudential pursuit of long-term benefit over short-term gratification is not
easy, and is encouraged by ‘commitment mechanisms’, which lock-in decisions and
help to create a ‘sustainable balance between the present and the future’ (p. 3).
Commitment mechanisms took a long time to emerge, whether intrinsic or self-
imposed through control over desires; or social or external constraints, such as the
rules of financial institutions or regulation by the state. Prudence is easier for those
with education, assets, and access to banks and insurance companies. However,
commitment mechanisms are subverted by affluence and the development of
‘hedonic technologies’ delivering ever more gratification, which outpace the emer-
gence of new strategies to create commitment. Institutions and the state respond:
financial firms no longer merely lock customers into long-term saving plans, but
BOOK REVIEWS 211
also encourage debt; the state allows more freedom to opt out of the long-term
commitment of the welfare state. Offer is right to point to the difficulties of dealing
with time-consistency, but he has less to say about the processes that create and
dissolve these commitment mechanisms. Political, social, and cultural historians
should extend his analysis, asking precisely how sexual self-control was created and
gave way to permissiveness; or why commitment to collective public spending
emerged and then declined.
Offer uses the United States and Britain to test whether affluence was the driving
force, with a 20-year lag between the two countries; or whether other factors
constrained its impact. Offer suggests that Britain was more prudent in its habits
than the United States, so that it was not swept along in the frenzy of ever more
elaborate styles of automobiles in the 1950s, preferring to retain models for much
longer. Britain is more prudent and more self-controlled than the United States—
but will this change as British affluence catches up with the level in America? Offer
is guarded, accepting that British culture and institutions are different, with a
greater respect for cooperation and the state, and more concern about the pursuit
of growth and wealth to the exclusion of all else. He also sees signs of convergence,
driven by rising affluence and the crucial shift from social democracy to market
liberalism in the 1970s. Offer has not proved that affluence will be the main driver
and societies might opt for a different trade-off. Japan has retained a much higher
level of saving; the French have clung to a more generous state-funded welfare state
and job security. Offer admits that more work is needed before we can draw any
firm conclusions about the dominant influence of affluence.
The state offers one important commitment mechanism, but Offer’s approach
concentrates on individual rather than social choices. The state does appear on a
number of occasions, acting to limit the individual’s hedonistic drive for immediate
gratification through drugs or alcohol, or compelling citizens to save for their old age.
Offer suggests that individuals are aware of their own imprudence, and wish the state
to control their desires for their own good. At the same time, the state removed con-
straints on individual choices about saving for old age, and weakened collective
spending on welfare, which led to an increase in myopic behaviour. He suggests that
the nature of advertising leads to short-term political decisions, thus undermining the
prudential role of the state. Offer realizes that much more could be said about the role
of the state, but he opts sensibly to omit a detailed discussion of collective decision-
making from the present book.We can only urge Offer to turn his attention to the mat-
ter in his next book. How is the US government to become less myopic over global
warming? How are politicians to be encouraged to abandon the search for higher
GNP as the way to wellbeing and instead focus on eliminating ill-being such as crime,
repression, exclusion, mental health, urban congestion, and life expectancy?
Here is the moral component of the book. It can read in part as a plea for a
return to stable families and personal commitment. It also has similarities with John
Ruskin’s perception that the outcome of economic growth might be ‘illth’ rather
than wealth. Choice should be countered by moderation; pursuit of self-interest by
civility and a sense of noblesse oblige; self-seeking by a culture of service to others;
spin and puffery in advertising, the media and politics should be moderated by
honesty and independence. Avner Offer inserts a moral dimension into the study
of economic history that has been missing since R. H. Tawney, offering a warning
of the undesirable consequences of the pursuit of individual self-interest.
University of Cambridge . . 

212 BOOK REVIEWS
GENERAL
Hubert Bonin and Christophe Lastacouères, Les banques du grand Sud-Ouest,
Système bancaire et gestion des risques (des années 1900 à nos jours) (Paris: Editions
PLAGE, 2006. Pp. 523. 62 illus. 10 maps. 80 tabs. ISBN 2914369093 Pbk. €40)
This book presents a collection of 22 essays by a combination of academics, bank

managers, and experts. It represents a questionable addition to the 2,500 pages
already published by the main architect of, and contributor to, this volume, Bonin,
on the same subject. His ambition is to rehabilitate banking and bankers of the
south-west of France, but what is delivered here is the sort of self-promotion typical
of tourist authorities or public relations departments—perhaps a herald of things
to come.
Pride of place is given in the first section to three academic essays that provide
an economic portrait of the French Grand Sud-Ouest (an area referring sometimes
to the three ‘régions’ of Aquitaine, Languedoc, and Midi-Pyrénées, sometimes to
Aquitaine only, with incursions into Périgord and Limousin). This section opens
with some vapid considerations by a university vice-president—obviously one of the
paymasters for the publication—and an economics professor, on the reality of the
south-west as an economic unit. The exposition resembles more the tone and
content of a (regional) newspaper article or a speech by a (local) politician than a
scholarly essay. Much more solid and informative is that account by J-C. Asselain’s
of the standing of the south-west among other French regions. This tackles various
economic, demographic, and social indicators; it draws out of them a number of
interesting conclusions, and stresses the overall convergence of the area on the basis
of 25 out of 33 tests. Next, M. Lescure offers a very useful analysis of France’s
dual banking system between the nineteenth and mid-twentieth century.
The focus shifts to the history of banking in the south-west in the second section.
A. Plessis, the undisputed expert on the Banque de France, elegantly weaves together
information gathered from the bank’s headquarters records, which he knows well,
and new data from local sources used by Lastécouères in his thesis. From these he
demonstrates that, amidst the dearth of available credit for most of the nineteenth
century, the Banque de France served as the main provider to commercial and indus-
trial businesses in Aquitaine until local bankers took over at the turn of the twentieth
century. In the next, rather lengthy essay, Lastécouères sketches the activities and
personalities of eight local banks. In the absence of an analytical framework, it is hard
to gauge the actual contribution of these banks to local development. In the same
vein, Bonin tells the story of two ancient banking houses through to the Second
World War: Courtois from Toulouse and Tarneaud from Limoges, the former being
the oldest independent banking establishment still in operation. In a short but stim-
ulating essay, Carles Sudrià traces the extraordinary development of savings banks in
Catalonia (of which the now ubiquitous Caixa is the best example). He assigns their
success to the relative failure of mixed banking in the Generalitat (as opposed to
neighbouring regions). Bertrand Adam then considers briefly the record of
government-promoted industry-wide banking cartelization carried out by the Vichy
(in 1941) and later the Fifth Republic (in 1960) in order to ‘rationalize’ the sector.
This body was later dismantled, following the ‘Big bang’ in 1986, but it has survived
in another guise as the position of the author who works in its PR department.
Section III is dedicated to the study of local bankers’ idiosyncrasies and their
particular local knowledge. In the Banque Pouyanne in Orthez (in the Basque
BOOK REVIEWS 213
country), J. P. Allinne recognizes a model industrial bank. Established in 1903 by
the scion of an expatriate Protestant tanning family, it has remained self-standing
for more than a century; its small size sparing it nationalization in 1982. Bonin
then offers some thoughts on the reorganization of the Bordeaux exchange after
the Second World War, what he neatly labels ‘reconstruction without moderniza-
tion’. Next, he resumes the saga of Courtois and Tarneaud where he left off in the
1940s, bringing the story up to the 1980s. The focus is the steadily widening
industrial interests of these banks (from slippers and china to grain-milling and
quarrying), which he identifies as an effective risk-diversification strategy that
enabled these relatively small, family establishments to muddle through and with-
stand the competition from emerging national giants. From a battery of students’
Masters theses, Bonin then considers the development of trustee savings banks in
Aquitaine, with much material on the number of depositors, opening hours, and
more names of bank clerks.
The last section of the book focuses on the changes brought about in the 1990s.
It is made up of seven relatively short reports by selected bank managers on the
performance of their own establishments: the vocabulary is technical, the tone self-
congratulatory (sometimes boastful), and the style studded with the jargon common
to promotional leaflets.
In the conclusion, the editors ponder the achievements of this collection of
essays. The problem here is that it is not clear what the intended audience for this
volume is. Obviously, it aims to attract the readership of former bank employees
and their families, as well as local history aficionados. It appears to be a cross
between a coffee-table book and a book with pretensions to scholarship, but too
often it reads like a pamphlet from the Chamber of Commerce. Thus the subtitle
(‘banking systems and risk management from 1900 to the present’) promises more
than it actually delivers. One should not expect any actual assessment of risk
management by a sample of mostly small family banks for various periods of their
history. The ‘segmentation of markets’, to which it often alludes, is never docu-
mented. What the authors offer instead is a sometimes confusing narrative of the
vicissitudes of local banks. Having retreated from the grand questions of their
ancestors, French historians now seem to take it as their prime duty to work and
write for the promotion of their local heritage, and to exhibit its proud monuments
of the past for all to see (as instanced by the large number of old postcards
reproduced in this book). Furthermore, from a historical point of view, the book
is shorn of all controversial or embarrassing questions: no mention of wartime
profits, no insider dealing, no retention of Jewish property, and so on. True to the
Braudelian tradition, Bonin’s approach is to ‘let the facts speak for themselves’.
Reference is sometimes made to important work on the subject (e.g. Gerschenkron
or Casson), but it serves just as an exercise in name-dropping. Without a set strategy
of investigation, such an approach is limited to reproducing the information con-
tained in the extant records, celebrating the actors and claiming that, in this
business and this region, ‘personalities and connections are everything’. In place of
elaborate data processing or sophisticated ‘models’ the information is reproduced
in the most minute detail (the index of persons consists essentially of an endless
list of anonymous bank employees), making the ‘historian’s craft’ an exercise acces-
sible to anyone—including naturally bank managers. But again, perhaps this is the
way of the future.
Université Marc-Bloch (Strasbourg-II) - 

214 BOOK REVIEWS
Susan Mosher Stuard, Gilding the market: luxury and fashion in fourteenth-century
Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 323. 9 figs.
14 plates. ISBN 0812239008 Hbk. £39/$59.95)
For historians of costume, the fourteenth century marks a new age of change, which
has come to be associated with the dawn of fashion. As Stuard points out, some
historians, such as Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli and Stella Mary Newton, have
associated the beginning of this new age with innovations in the cut of clothing,
such as the inset sleeve or the use of buttons, which enabled the creation of tighter,
more form-fitting apparel. Newton, following theorists such as Werner Sombart,
looks to courtly circles, particularly that of Paris, as the driving centre from which
changes in personal appearance emanated.
Stuard shifts our attention from the courts of northern Europe to the towns of
northern Italy, and she attempts to drive a wedge between courtly ‘style’ (which
was too lavish to imitate) and urban ‘fashion’, which she associates with the creation
of a broader consumer market for cheaper, and often ready-made, luxury goods.
She focuses not on textiles and clothing, but on dress accessories, such as buttons,
belts, jewellery, and beads: literally, the glittering items with which consumers
gilded their bodies.
According to Stuard, a number of factors contributed to the accelerated and
broader consumption of these goods in the fourteenth century. These included the
wealth of the Italian merchant elite, their need for acceptance by the courtly circles
where they did business, the concentration of wealth in fewer hands after the onset
of the Black Death, the creation of ready-made products, and the use of techniques
with metal and glass that created glittering products at cheaper prices. The Vene-
tians, who for some time had been meeting the consumer needs of pilgrims travel-
ling east, apparently led the way in the creation of ready-made products, but
goldsmiths throughout the peninsula soon caught on. Metalworking techniques that
were important to the creation of cheaper goods included gilding, and the making
of silver and gold foil and wire; glassmakers contributed with glass pearls, beads,
and imitations of coloured gemstones. All of these techniques and products had
been around for some time, but they were now employed for a much broader, and
more secular, consuming market.
The chief consumers of ‘fashion’ were adult men. Unlike royal and ducal sump-
tuary codes, which restricted dress according to rank and office, Italian urban
sumptuary codes emphasized gender and age. Apparently, adult men could adorn
themselves with very little restriction, but, Stuard argues, those same men expressed
their anxiety about losing control of familial wealth by passing laws that restricted
the dress of women and children. Still, women (and some of their men) found ways
around the restrictions. Wealthy men were willing to pay fines and taxes that allowed
their women to break the rules; and women adorned, and re-fashioned, their
garments from year to year by re-working the cut and applying embroidered detail
and sewn-on beads.
Stuard discusses several possible economic consequences of the fourteenth-
century fashion for gilded bodies (as well as well-appointed homes). The creation
of a broader retail market for luxury goods may have helped the Italian merchant
elite weather the economic consequences of population decline in the latter half of
the century. Conversely, the private consumption of precious metals may have
contributed to a bullion shortage that beset governments in the late fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. Certainly, municipal officers were aware of a connection
BOOK REVIEWS 215
between private consumption and the bullion shortage—in 1379 the masters of the
Venetian mint called upon citizens to turn in their plate voluntarily. Still, Italian
municipal governments avoided direct confrontations with their citizens—possibly
because they viewed this private wealth as a healthy reserve that was much less
likely to leave the state than coins and ingots. Other possible reasons explored by
Stuard include the perception that wealth was to be worn by successful men; and
the problems involved in estimating the value of private plate, which included such
a broad range of metal content.
The book is full of rich detail, drawn from account books, inventories, sumptuary
laws, literary sources, surviving artefacts, and artistic representations. However, the
recounting of the detail, along with a meandering presentation of the main argu-
ments, makes for a somewhat difficult read. In the end, moreover, I am not fully
convinced by Stuard’s attempts to distinguish courtly ‘style’ from urban ‘fashion’.
Her own discussion paints a picture of an Italian merchant elite that was fully
enmeshed with the courts of northern Europe, and as she herself asserts, ‘a banker
with a king as his debtor might find it appropriate to dress as well as he’ (p. 82).
University of California, Santa Barbara  
Hanno Brand, ed., Trade, diplomacy and cultural exchange: continuity and change in
the North Sea area and the Baltic, c.1350–1750 (Hilversum: Uitgeverij Verloren,
2005. Pp. 248. 2 figs. 7 illus. 3 maps. 10 tabs. ISBN 9065508813 Pbk. €29)
Late medieval and early modern trade and shipping in the North Sea and in
the Baltic region by merchants belonging to member-towns of the German
Hanseatic League or by merchants from outside have been studied in depth in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-
tury, interest in the topic has not declined: today, research on the Hanseatic past
is still flourishing in Germany as well as in the rest of Northern Europe. Recently,
for example, a Dutch Hanze Studie Centrum was founded at the University of
Groningen. It publishes the results of its symposia and workshops in a new series
(Groningen Hanze Studies), of which the book under review is its first volume.
The book is subdivided into three parts: the organization of trade; economic
policies; and political relations and cultural exchange. The first part is the most
homogeneous of the volume. Its introductory chapter by Clé Lesger and Eric
Wijnroks, on the spatial organization of trade, is an outstanding application of
Lesger’s innovative concept of the ‘gateway-system’ to the ports of the Low Coun-
tries and to the Baltic ports during the sixteenth century. The next two chapters,
respectively by Michiel De Jong and Leos Müller, deal with the Walloon and Dutch
merchants active in Sweden as creative entrepreneurs: they are an interesting follow-
up on Peter Klein’s classic 1965 study De Trippen in de zeventiende eeuw (‘The Trip
family in the seventeenth century’). The last chapter of part one, by Andrew Little,
on the large presence of English and Scottish seamen in the Dutch navy during the
Anglo-Dutch wars in the seventeenth century, reveals inter alia in an original way
the large wage-differential between the two countries at this time, and its effect on
maritime recruitment.
The second part of the book on economic policies in the Hanseatic region
again contains four chapters but is, thematically, not as homogeneous as the first
part. As a matter of fact, Hanno Brand’s chapter on the role of diplomacy in the
216 BOOK REVIEWS
Holland-Wend trade conflict—an excellent, but somewhat limited piece of

research—is the only one that fits well into the theme. In contrast, the chapter by
Job Weststrate on the organization of Dutch river trade on the Rhine and the Waal,
the chapter by Mike Burkhardt on the organization of the Hanseatic Kontor in
Bergen, and lastly the chapter by Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz on the penetration of
hopped beer into the Norwegian, and Bergen market in particular, are all three
original and good contributions to the study of Hanseatic trade, but they belong
rather to the first part of the book than to the second.
The third part is the most heterogeneous of the three. Some of the chapters have
only very narrow links, or no links at all, with ‘cultural exchange’ in the area. For
example, Vincent Robijn’s chapter on a religious brotherhood of the plutocratic
leaders in the Dutch Hanseatic town of Kampen during the late middle ages is
describing a unique phenomenon, which did not have any influence on other towns
of the Hanseatic League. Similarly, Hans van Koningsbrugge’s chapter on the per-
ception, by a Dutch newspaper and by a Dutch observer in Groningen, of Gustav
III’s political action in Sweden during the eighteenth century, does not indicate that
the perception had any impact on Swedish public opinion. The chapter by Cornelius
Hasselblatt on the influences of Dutch culture on early modern Estonian literature
is verified by a tiny number of marginally representative data, while Joop Koopmans’
chapter on Dutch censorship in relation to foreign contacts deals not only with Prus-
sia, but also and substantially with the Habsburg Empire, with France and Spain.
Moreover, it has more to do with the fear of commercial retaliation than with cul-
tural exchange. Lastly, the chapter by Lars Hendrikman on the use by King Chris-
tian II of Flemish inspired painted portraits and etchings of him as a tool of
propaganda in his favour in his home country during the sixteenth century is not ver-
ified at all. The lack of coherence in the second and third parts of the volume does
not imply, however, that the chapters as such, even in these parts, are not interesting.
On the contrary, some of them are pieces of fine scholarship, based upon solid
research, and are opening new vistas upon the history of the Hanseatic League.
To sum up: the first part of the book on trade organization in the Baltic and
North Sea area, and the chapters, in the two other parts of the volume, on the same
topic, are with a few exceptions of very high quality. A special mention should be
made of the chapters in which the commercial combination of shipping by sea and
transport over land and by river are analysed. Other excellent chapters are those
that examine the creative role of individual merchants and entrepreneurs from the
northern and southern Netherlands and from the Liège Bishopric, in shaping the
commercial and industrial development of the Baltic and North Sea area during
the early modern period.
Leuven University    
Andrea Finkelstein, The grammar of profit: the price revolution in intellectual context
(Leiden and Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2006. Pp. x + 374. ISBN
9004149589 Hbk. €99/$134)
This book affords one of those rare examples where the title and sub-title describe
its contents accurately. Their ordering, moreover, reflects the importance attached
by the author to each of its component elements. The pivot upon which the greater
part of the work turns involves a rather precious and contrived semantic dialogue
BOOK REVIEWS 217
concerning the contemporary grammatical usage of the term ‘profit’. The pejorative
use of the word, illustrated unfortunately with only one textual example where the
word is actually so used (p. 4), is contrasted with what the author calls its employ-
ment as ‘the highest praise the age could offer’. In this latter context the word is
used in the sense that a part was ‘profitable’ or of benefit to some greater whole.
An example used is that ‘the true church was always profitable to the community’
(p. 5). Thus the book evolves. It examines the application of the term in the context
of a so-called journey along a ‘natural pathway through a series of nested concentric
circles—soul, family, society’. An examination of each of these ‘circles’ forms the
basis of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 2 examines ‘Body, mind and soul’;
chapters 3 and 4, ‘Family values’ and the relationship between ‘Master and servant’;
and chapters 5 to 8, ‘Society’, both as an entity and as a distributive and commu-
tative system. In each case the relationship of the part to the whole is examined in
terms of its ‘profitability’ or utility.
It is not until page 178, a quarter of the way through the society chapters and
half way through the book, that the ‘price revolution’ is discussed in terms of this
semantic dialogue. Here, an earlier categorization of causes of inflation, outlined
in a generalized survey of the secondary literature concerning the price revolution
(pp. 14–34) is used as a basis for a discussion of contemporary perceptions of the
causation of that phenomenon. Once again, however, before passing along this path
the author again subordinates (pp. 181–217) the investigation of attitudes regarding
the causation of the price revolution to a general analysis of the intellectual context.
Finally, however, the goal is reached and the causation of the price revolution is
considered from the perspective of debasement of the coinage (pp. 217–19); the
influx of American gold and silver (pp. 219–24) and induced supply restrictions
(pp. 224–32).
This reviewer cannot help but remember an aphorism of the late Jack Fisher that
most books are articles trying to get out. Inevitably in this context, economic
historians hoping, like this reviewer, for an analysis of contemporary perceptions
of the causes of the price revolution will be disappointed. They must certainly ask
themselves whether it is worthwhile spending about £70 for what is a slightly
extended, rather interesting if somewhat verbose, 14,000-word article. Whether
intellectual historians will find the so-called grammar of profit an insightful tool for
the analysis of the enormous and varied body of contemporary texts not concerned
with the price revolution, which occupy nine-tenths of this book, unfortunately
the present reviewer does not feel himself to be competent to judge.
Edinburgh University-CEU, Budapest  
James E. Shaw, The justice of Venice: authorities and liberties in the urban economy,
1550–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2006.
Pp. x + 246. 4 tabs. ISBN 0197263771 Hbk. £35/$65)
In 1689, an immigrant named Piero stood on a bridge in Venice selling his own
homemade knives, forks, and scissors to passers-by. Discovered by the officials of
the Venetian guild of cutlers who prohibited such black-market sales, Piero’s stock
was confiscated and he was fined 100 lire for his crime. Piero’s tale is one of
countless others that inform James Shaw’s study of crime and justice in early
modern Venice. Using the archival records from a variety of Venetian magistracies
218 BOOK REVIEWS
and guilds, as well as an array of published legal texts, Shaw forces his readers to
focus on something that, to date, strangely, has not been studied by any other
historian of Venice: everyday, petty crime. According to the author, the records of
petty crime have much to teach historians; namely, that we should be paying as
much attention to the crimes of everyday life as we have to the more glamorous
crimes of murder and treason that have tended to attract much more attention.
The archival documents of the Giustizia Vecchia form the basis of this study. This
magistracy was responsible for regulating essentially the entire urban marketplace of
early modern Venice, including its craft guilds, from the sixteenth through to the
eighteenth century. Before turning to cases of petty crimes such as Piero’s, Shaw
considers how Venetian judges operated in this magistracy in order to demonstrate
clearly how economic and social life were linked. His first few chapters illuminate
how tensions over the administration of justice in the Giustizia Vecchia reflected
broader tensions between rich and poor nobles in Venice at large. For instance, elite
patricians often manipulated courtroom clerks and public lawyers—working men
outside the noble class—to limit the autonomy of lesser nobles who worked as
judges. Naturally, these lesser nobles resented the power that these courtroom
bureaucrats outside their class ended up having over them. Through these cases and
others, Shaw illuminates how ‘the bonds of credit overlapped with those of family,
household and neighbourhood to create a complex web of social ties that cut across
social ranks’ (pp. 205–6). This book aims to integrate more fully economic history
and social history: a praiseworthy project that more historians should invest in.
Shaw then turns to examine a panoply of petty crimes, such as scant measure
(not producing the amount of a good paid for), price manipulation, hoarding, and
the failure to pay for goods or services rendered. From the records of these cases,
Shaw posits a series of noteworthy arguments. ‘The urban economy of Venice
was . . . characterized by a patchwork of rival authorities jostling for control of the
market’, namely, public magistracies and over a hundred guilds (pp. 109–10). This
fragmentation, however, was not economically ‘irrational’. Contrary to traditional
understanding, guilds did not indulge in excessive or reckless spending for litiga-
tion, but were instead savvy and flexible forums of economic organization. The
records of the urban marketplace, when examined closely, belie the commanding
narrative of economic progress that typically describes both guilds and early modern
markets as backwards and irrational.
Several of this study’s conclusions, while accurate, seem somewhat less signifi-
cant. For instance, Shaw wants his readers to understand that justice was clearly
available to people across the social spectrum. For instance, everyday people sought
recompense for crimes resulting in small claims, sometimes amounting to as little
as one ducat of damage: a sum that, while small, would still be of interest to a
lower-class worker. While his specific case studies are unique and have not been
examined before, many scholars, such as Caroline Castiglione, have demonstrated
how socially subordinated individuals understood how the legal world worked and
used various courts as resources to manipulate the law in their favour. Such studies
represent a sizable body of scholarship that Shaw does not engage with. Similarly,
Shaw emphasizes the seemingly perplexing fact that courtroom actors in Venice
barely referred to statutes or legal precedent when arguing their cases, relying
instead on acting out dramatic narratives or denouncing the moral fabric of their
opponents in order to win their cases. Here too, many historians, such as Joanne
Ferraro and Anne Jacobson Schutte, have long examined the theatrical nature of
self-fashioning in the courtroom: studies that would inform this one neatly.
BOOK REVIEWS 219
This said, Shaw’s understanding of early modern legal and economic documents
is unsurpassed. While the trends of the moment dictate an almost exclusive focus
on the history of sexuality or religious or cultural others, Shaw reminds us of the
importance and fascination of the tiny, almost invisible, errant act. His stories of
devious merchants placing one too many weights on the market scale, of wily
individuals buying up all of a day’s onions and slowly releasing them back to the
market to raise the price, or of hucksters selling pears too close to a church, were
the stuff of everyday life—of power, agency, subordination, and resistance—for
people across the early modern world.
New Mexico State University  
Robert Beachy, The soul of commerce: credit, property and politics in Leipzig,
1750–1840 (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill, 2005. Pp. viii + 248. 5 figs. 3 illus. 16 tabs.
ISBN 039104128 Hbk. €99/$129)
This valuable new book argues effectively that the development of modern fiscal
mechanisms in the city of Leipzig and the state of Saxony provide the ‘critical
insight’ (p. 223) in explaining the region’s modernization. Through an examina-
tion of the relationship between commerce and politics, the book demonstrates
that the ramifications of property ownership, taxation, and public debt were criti-
cal in the development of citizen activism and political reform. In short, the
economic prerogatives of the burgeoning mercantile and academic classes eluci-
date the rationale behind political transformations. Through his focus on the trade
centre of Leipzig, Beachy rescues the city from unfair obscurity, reasserting its
place as ‘central Europe entrepot’ (p. 141), the ‘knot’ (p. 150) in a vital trade
network, linking the Baltic, North and Adriatic Seas, and manufacturing hubs in
Europe and Russia.
Beachy diverges from most Saxon historians, who argue either that the French
occupation of central Europe or the emergence of a radical proletarian community
served as the essential precondition of Saxony’s political transformation. He con-
tends that neither takes into account the traditional burgher culture of rights and
responsibilities, the pressure for administrative transparency that accompanied grow-
ing public debt, or the effect of public and printed political culture on Leipzig’s
reform movement. Through this, Beachy moves beyond historiographies that focus
on either continuities from the pre-modern era or radical ruptures. Using imaginative
and compelling local primary sources, Beachy presents a more nuanced picture,
demonstrating that while liberal governments were a modern phenomenon, they
were rooted in pre-modern urban traditions. Such a study demonstrates the indis-
pensability of local history: liberalism is constructed as inherently local, the result of
persistent citizen activism rather than large-scale revolutions or bureaucratic changes.
While the book is structured chronologically, each chapter operates thematically,
often beginning with a detailed personal anecdote that serves as a vehicle for
explaining the more fundamental economic and political issues. The first two
chapters provide useful contextualization, with the first introducing Saxony and the
second analysing Leipzig in 1750. However, most of the latter chapter focuses on
the preceding years, raising the question of why the dates of the book’s title do
not reflect this. The third, fifth, and sixth chapters cover the Seven Years War,
Napoleon’s occupation of Saxony, and the restructuring of Leipzig’s council during
the post-Napoleonic period. A fourth chapter examines the development of civil
220 BOOK REVIEWS
society, focusing on Leipzig’s citizen clubs and the emergence of a print culture of
critique, satire, and libel. Although one of the most fascinating sections, it interrupts
the otherwise chronological thrust, and, because of its placement, at times seems
almost tangential. A final, climactic chapter examines the significant political reform
of Leipzig in 1830 and its ramifications for Saxon political realities.
However, using Leipzig to explain Saxon developments is problematic. In con-
cluding chapter seven, for example, Beachy writes that Leipzig served as a ‘practical
laboratory and theoretical model for Saxon constitutionalism’ (p. 221), yet the
chapter itself focuses almost exclusively on Leipzig; the validity of transposing local
material onto an entire state is debatable. Furthermore, much of Beachy’s argument
describes Leipzig’s autonomy and uniqueness, which undermines subsequent
attempts to employ it as an epitome of Saxony. Thus, the problem is one of scope,
whether the book is a history of Leipzig or Saxony. Although it attempts the latter,
it does the former more successfully, not least because Beachy has made a partic-
ularly strong case for the importance of Leipzig.
Although the book is termed a social history (back cover), it is a stronger text
when viewed as essentially a political and economic one. Those at the bottom of
the social scale are ignored, those individuals who truly were ‘the soul of commerce’,
or at least the backbone of the daily realities of mercantile trade. Chapter four,
which focuses on the popular development of liberalism, shies away from discus-
sions of the proto-proletarian community. In criticizing Habermas’ theory that elite
salons and reading societies were the centres of public dissent during this period
(p. 136), Beachy examines only the recalcitrant activities of educated students and
merchant apprentices. Perhaps this omission of the political and economic devel-
opment of the lower classes explains the ambiguity about when this book ends.
Although the title suggests it finishes in 1840, the last significant events discussed
are in early 1831, with the reform of the Leipzig council and writing of new local
laws. A more logical conclusion may be the large-scale political revolutions of 1848
or the economic transformations of the industrial revolution.
Despite this, The Soul of commerce is an impressively researched, detailed, and
compelling examination of political and fiscal continuity and change, as well as an
illuminating insight into a crucial urban centre often ignored in favour of more
famous cities such as Hamburg. Despite its accessibility, it is not an introductory
book, assuming a prior knowledge not only of the basic European history of this
period, but also developments in the Germanic kingdoms, if not specific Saxon
history as well. A map of both Saxony and Leipzig would have been helpful. In
many ways the book’s most compelling point is one not explicitly offered—the
emergence of a distinct middle class comprised of merchants, academics and jurists
on the eve of the industrial revolution.
University of Cambridge  
Günther Schulz, Christoph Buchheim, Gerhard Fouquet, Rainer Gömmel,

Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning, Karl Heinrich Kaufhold and Hans Pohl, eds.,
Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Arbeitsgebiete–Probleme–Perspektiven (Stuttgart:
Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005, Pp. 661. ISBN 3515084355 Hbk. €104; ISBN
3515087710 Pbk. €26)
Social and economic history: fields, problems, perspectives is a volume published to

celebrate the centenary of the Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte
BOOK REVIEWS 221
(VSWG), the leading German-language academic journal for economic and social
history. Compiled by Schulz and his co-editors of the VSWG, this volume includes
an introduction and 26 essays covering many aspects of economic and social history
and its connections and relevance for related fields.
As in most collections of this type, the quality of the essays varies. Some are
merely annotated bibliographies, such as Gömmel’s work on trade and transport.
Others are well-written articles, giving a very good overview of older and recent
works and with an emphasis on possible further research. Hans Pohl’s essay about
banking and insurance belongs in this category. Most essays accomplish the inten-
tion of the editors as outlined by Schulz in his introduction: they should review
what was written about a certain topic during the last century, with a focus on
publications in the VSWG. Some authors depart from this general line, but most
of them give a—more or less felicitous—review of the literature.
The essays are grouped into three categories, with the first focusing on economic
history. The first two essays, by Werner Rösener and Friedrich-Wilhelm Henning,
investigate the agricultural sector in medieval and modern times. The next two
chapters evaluate the literature devoted to the secondary sector, and are written by
Gerhard Fouquet (medieval) and Karl Heinrich Kaufhold (modern). They are
followed by two essays focused on trade and commerce (by Rainer Gömmel), and
banking and insurance (by Hans Pohl). State activity, and especially the activity of
public enterprises, is reviewed by Gerold Ambrosius. The final two papers of this
first group investigate business cycles during the early modern (Markus Denzel)
and modern periods (Rainer Metz).
The second group of essays focuses on social history, though it is less clearly orga-
nized than the first group. It starts with an essay by Jörn Sieglerschmidt on popu-
lation history, upon which there has been little research in Germany, a characteristic
he does not expect to change in the future. Next, Günther Schulz provides a general
historiographic overview of the social history literature, demonstrating its diversity
and broadening scope during the past decades. However, the economic base of
social history is still important. Income and work still define social history. These
two essays are followed by articles dealing with more narrowly defined research
areas: gender and women (Heide Wunder), everyday life (Wolfang Zorn), cultural
history (Ute Daniel), historical gerontology (Peter Borscheid), environmental and
technology history (Helmut Braun), and lastly business history (Werner Plumpe).
The third group concerns methodological issues and the relationship of
economic and social history to other disciplines: to medieval history (Eberhard
Isermann), modern history (Joachim Scholtyseck), the social sciences (Florian
Tennstedt), economics (Toni Pierenkemper), and public economics (Rolf Caesar).
In addition, Volker Berghan discusses foreign influence on German economic and
social history, and Rolf Walter the connection between economic and social history.
Two methodological essays conclude the volume, one on institutional economics
(Oliver Volckert), and one on cliometrics (Jörg Baten).
Some authors criticize older writings quite strongly, for example, Plumpe accuses
traditional business history of being persistently pre-scientific (p. 407), and in
particular identifies the work of Wilhelm Treue, founder of the Gesellschaft für
Unternehmensgeschichte (Germany’s Business History Society), as constraining the
development of this sub-field. He notes that during the 1970s and 1980s the
structural approaches of the ‘Bielefeld-school’, a school not interested in business
history per se but in subordinating business history to political history (p. 409), was
a considerable constraining influence. The new institutional economics of the 1980s
222 BOOK REVIEWS
and 1990s was an improvement, but it cannot deliver sufficient answers to business
history. Plumpe postulates evolutionary economics as the answer to the problems
of business history (p. 417), a view shared by Walter in his essay.
However, not all authors agree that evolutionary economics is the foundation for
the future of economic and business history. Some prefer a stronger orientation
towards the new institutional economics (Volckert) or cliometrics. In particular,
Baten and Pierenkemper think that a strong link between economics and economic
history is made possible using cliometrics. Baten reviews recent cliometric writings
in Germany, especially important work by Dumke (on the Zollverein), Baten (living
standards), and Ritschl (the great depression). However, Baten also concludes that
a strong focus on cliometrics is likely to deepen the divide between the economic
history undertaken in economics departments and that accomplished in history
departments.
This divide is already visible, for example, if one compares the two essays dealing
with business cycles. According to Denzel, business cycles are not a clearly defined
concept applicable to the medieval and early modern period. Business cycles are in-
dicated by a set of variables (e.g. prices, wages) and are mostly a sectoral and regional
phenomenon. According to him, Abel’s (1934) concept of secular trends is still fun-
damental for pre-modern business cycle research (p. 204). However, more regional
data about prices, wages, and output are necessary and should be available on a com-
parative basis (e.g. transformed into grams of silver) to calculate business cycles.
Denzel’s discussion has a clear focus on sources and data quality, whereas Metz’s
essay on modern business cycles focuses on methods and theory. In particular, Metz
discusses the evolution of business cycle theory and the econometric methods to test
these theories. On the other hand, he does not discuss data quality at all. A com-
bination of the two approaches would be fruitful, but given the institutional structure
of economic and social history in Germany, cooperation does not seem very likely.
In particular, many departments of economics have closed institutes of economic
history, driving the discipline more in the direction of an historical approach.
University of Münster  
Jörg Roesler, Momente deutsch-deutscher Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte 1945 bis

1990: Eine Analyse auf gleicher Augenhöhe (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag,
2006. Pp. 240. ISBN 386583096X Pbk. €19)
This is an economic and social history of postwar Germany, but with a difference.
It treats not the West (FRG) alone nor the East (GDR), but both states, in parallel,
in comparison, and above all, in their interactions. Roesler invites the reader to view
the two Germanies as an ensemble; he notes their obvious structural and ideolog-
ical differences, and the Cold War confrontation, but contends that these familiar
contrasts have obscured manifold similarities and mutual relationships. The aim is
to bring these into the light; the outcome is an original reinterpretation of postwar
German history.
Consider, first, some resemblances. In 1945, each Germany not only shared an
economic inheritance, but also experienced occupation by outside powers. Before
long, they were entangled in Cold War rivalry; although their governments were
hostile, they held back from outright confrontation; and in the 1980s a FRG-GDR
‘mini-détente’ developed. In economic terms, each Germany experienced similar
BOOK REVIEWS 223
phases. In the initial postwar years, production recommenced and new institutional
foundations were laid. Workers revolted against prevailing economic and social
policies. In 1948, West Germans participated en masse in strikes and demonstra-
tions, provoking intervention by the occupying US forces, the deployment of tanks,
and military police. There followed a prohibition of street protests, and social
concessions in the form of price controls on a wide range of goods. In 1953, East
Germany witnessed similar events, if bloodier and on a larger scale. Here too, the
authorities responded with political repression and social concessions. Roesler
contends, rather speculatively, that both revolts pushed governing elites to adopt
policies that encouraged rapid economic growth. More convincingly, he shows that
both Germanies became ‘more social’ in response to protest.
From 1950 to 1973, both Germanies enjoyed unprecedented GDP growth. In
their legitimacy claims, each political elite emphasized economic expansion and
social welfare, as well as the goal of out-competing the other: ‘magnet theory’ in the
West, ‘catch-up’ (or ‘overtake’) in the East. The 1960s saw both governments
develop economic reform packages in response to faltering growth. In the 1970s,
both—being tightly integrated into the world economy—faced the challenges of eco-
nomic crises and oil price rises. From the 1970s onwards, ‘interpenetration’ between
the two Germanies intensified: Easterners watched Western television, while FRG
companies produced under licence in, and Western tourists visited, the GDR.
Roesler knits together these parallel and interconnecting threads with consum-
mate skill, and illustrates his approach with apt examples. Of equal insight and force
is his discussion of five crucial points of German–German divergence. These began
with differential treatment by the occupying powers. Reparations from the GDR,
as against Marshall Aid for the FRG, ensured that already by 1950 the approximate
equality in postwar conditions had given way to a productivity gap of 33 or even
50 per cent. At that juncture the Korean War boosted US demand, igniting West
Germany’s boom. In contrast, Moscow imposed an increased defence burden upon
the GDR. Lacking significant heavy industry, the GDR economy and populace
were stretched to meet this imposition—hence the 1953 revolt. A third divergence
concerned the impact of East–West migration: the lifeblood of the West German
Wirtschaftswunder and a drain upon the GDR. Fourth, the FRG benefited from
European integration, while comparable plans for Comecon stalled. Lastly, the
1980s oil-price fall benefited the oil-importing FRG, while the East German econ-
omy, increasingly reliant on re-exporting Soviet oil products, suffered.
In his method, Roesler accords importance to policy decisions but without ignor-
ing their antecedents and context. He eschews both the ‘voluntarist’ method that
accords explanatory primacy to leadership decisions and its structural-determinist
antipode which, viewing history from its ‘ending’ in 1989, retrodicts the GDR’s col-
lapse from its early adoption of Soviet-type institutions. Against the view that 1989
was predetermined in 1945, Roesler joins Charles Maier and others in suggesting
that other periods—notably the 1970s ‘watershed’—were of crucial importance.
A number of arguments in this book left me unconvinced. Roesler’s insistence
that West Germany’s developed welfare system resulted from competition with the
GDR sits uneasily with the explanatory importance he accords to the 1948 social
movements. Proper discussion of this issue would require a comparative approach.
(From a British perspective, one recalls that the Beveridge report appeared in
1942—hardly a time of intense West–East rivalry.) In addition, I feel that the
changing world economy deserves greater centrality in explaining the nature and
timing of GDR decline. Yet, these quibbles aside, this is an accomplished piece of
224 BOOK REVIEWS
work. In the form of sustained and in-depth analysis of public policy and political
economy, Roesler expounds a novel interpretation of modern German—in a
crowded field, that is no mean feat.
Brunel University  
Jonathon W. Moses, Norwegian catch-up: development and globalization before Word

War II (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Pp. x + 149. 11 figs. 8 tabs. ISBN 0754643549
Hbk. £35/$69.95)
This book purports to tell a ‘Cinderella’ story about ‘how Norway rose from rags
to riches’ (p. 1), of how the Norwegian economy, from the middle of the nineteenth
century to the eve of the First World War, ‘outperformed the rest of what would
become the OECD club’ (p. 2). This is an awkward starting point because this
basic proposition is simply wrong. The notion that Norway was among the poorest
countries of Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century and then grew to
become one of the richest by means of industrialization and wise government
policy—long before the discovery of oil in the 1970s—is basically a long-lived myth
that confuses relative economic performance with growth in an absolute sense. It
was once created by some economists and historians, and ever since eagerly
espoused by politicians. Well-known international comparisons of GDP per capita
published by Bairoch, Crafts, and others, but conspicuously absent from any
references in the book, show that Norway’s GDP per capita was in the middle range
of European countries both in the 1860s and in 1910. Norway’s growth rate over
this period was not spectacular, neither compared to other countries nor to later
periods. Instead of focusing on standard GDP data, Moses relies uncritically on a
strange-looking international dataset that shows growth rates of real wages for
Scandinavian countries that were three times higher than corresponding growth
rates of GDP per worker from 1870 to 1910. (For most other countries real wages
grew in line with real GDP.) The sound of warning bells arising from this gross
inconsistency between growth rates of real wages and real GDP per worker is totally
ignored by the author.
Moses reviews the basic features of the political system, the country’s natural
resources, migration, trade, and capital flows. The chapter on migration is perhaps
the more interesting one. Three waves of emigration can be identified, peaking in the
late 1860s, the middle of the 1880s, and in the early 1900s. In each episode about
60 per cent of the birth surplus emigrated, most of them to America. Moses cites the
results from the estimation of a general equilibrium model presented by O’Rourke
and Williamson, which shows the net effects of large-scale migration on real wages
and GDP per capita to be positive in the case of Norway. But the magnitude of these
estimates is nowhere near the level that would be required to be a significant con-
tribution to the imaginary catch-up figures that the author sets out to explain.
Although Norway’s growth experience in the half century before the First World
War was not outstanding, there were several features in this period that may have
been conducive to a strong economic performance in the longer-term, with the full
effects perhaps coming only in the interwar period. Rightly, Moses emphasizes the
beneficial effects of investment in schooling and public infrastructure, a relatively
liberal commercial policy, and strict adherence to the gold standard. School enrol-
ment and literacy rates were fairly high in the Scandinavian periods, which led Lars
BOOK REVIEWS 225
Sandberg (Journal of Economic History, 1979) to frame the hypothesis that Sweden
was an ‘impoverished sophisticate’. It is a bit strange that Moses does not refer to
this influential study, because Sandberg was trying to explain exactly the same
phenomenon: how a country can be transformed from being ‘one of the very
poorest countries in Europe in the middle of the nineteenth century’ into one of
the richest. The proposition is, however, more appropriate in the case of Sweden
because it is a fact that Sweden was at one stage relatively poor by European
standards, having a significantly lower GDP per capita than Norway in 1860, but
growing faster in the following decades, surpassing Norway, and becoming relatively
wealthy after the turn of the century. Using the material collected in this book to
investigate why Sweden managed to grow so much faster than Norway over this
period might have been a more interesting proposition to investigate than the
statistical illusion that the author chases vainly here.
Although the convergence hypothesis may be seriously flawed, nevertheless the
book summarizes much quantitative and descriptive evidence on the economic
history of Norway between 1850 and 1914, which is not easily accessible to many
foreign scholars since many of the original sources are in Norwegian. However, it
is unfortunate that the empirical evidence is presented so uncritically. In several
cases it is rather incomplete, because it neglects more recent research that may have
revised previously established views radically. A striking example is the grossly
misleading unemployment figures for the interwar years. Thus, in spite of a plethora
of facts, this book is to be shelved between Cinderella and other fiction books.
Norwegian School of Economics &Business Administration   
John Brewer and Frank Trentmann, eds., Consuming cultures: global perspectives,
historical trajectories, transnational exchanges (Oxford: Berg, 2006. Pp. x + 317.
17 illus. ISBN 1845202465 Hbk. £55/$99.95. ISBN 1845202473 Pbk.
£17.99/$29.95)
The take-off and sustained flight of interest in all aspects of consumption since the
1980s marks one of the most important trends in social sciences and arts scholarship
of recent times. From grand narrative economic histories of the relationship over
centuries between continents, raw materials, producers, products, and consumers
through to postmodernist micro-histories and celebrations of identity and lifestyle,
consumption appears to be everywhere. The present volume showcases new work fo-
cused largely on regions outside Europe and North America. Based on a conference
organized by the ongoing ‘Cultures of Consumption’ programme (funded to the
tune of £5 million by the British ESRC and AHRC) this book is the second instal-
ment of a series, with five more titles on their way from the publisher Berg. Gen-
uinely international and cross-disciplinary perspectives are promised and delivered.
Diversity of object and approach is the keynote of this collection. The introduc-
tion by Brewer and Trentmann emphasizes that there is no likelihood that one
model or narrative of consumption, certainly not an American model of high mass
consumption and the rational consumer, is ever likely to encompass such a broad
and complex field. The idea of a formative north Atlantic crucible of consumption
has been decentred by empirical work on the earlier growth of consumption in
Southeast Asia and China. Consumption, understood in a broad sense, can connote
all human interactions with the worlds of matter and culture. Undaunted, the
226 BOOK REVIEWS
editors and contributors aspire to bring reflexive social science perspectives to bear
on the topography of consuming cultures. The collective aim is to develop
approaches that will avoid ‘the temptation of talking about consumption either in
terms of globally advancing homogeneity or in richly detailed terms of local spec-
ificity’ (p. 2). Trentmann begins with a study of ‘the modern genealogy of the
consumer’ and covers a great deal of ground, partly in a destructive vein, by
uncoupling some assumptions that follow an uncritical use of the conceptual
language of consumers, consumption, and consumer societies. The upshot is a
welcome attempt to bring politics back into the equation. Batchelor studies the
movement of porcelains c. 1600–1750 in an attempt to reconsider ‘the birth of
consumer society’. Wilk pens a tantalizing sketch of ‘binge consumption’ in the
Caribbean since the eighteenth century. Anderson and Carrier usefully bring eth-
nographic perspectives on vernacular modes of consumption into play in a study
of the consumption of Khat (a mildly narcotic chewing leaf) in east Africa. By
contrast, Redclift studies the export of a globalized American mass consumption
good, chewing gum. Garon studies the ambivalent relationship of Japanese citizens
to the consumer society even four decades after its spectacular onset there, and
shows what a difference culture, history, and politics make. Kroen’s study ‘Nego-
tiations with the American way’ is a very useful study of the politics and economics
of consumption in the age of the Marshall Plan.
Long gone is the tendency to privilege a masculine sphere of production over
consumption as a trivial or wasteful pursuit, a point emphasized here by Arvidsson,
who goes on to stress the ‘value-added’ economic impact of brand creation. Sas-
satelli frames what she terms ‘critical consumerism’, regarding the consumer as ‘an
active subject . . . and above all, as a moral and political subject’ (p. 219), whilst
Morgan protests at the commodification of everything in a study of water. Other
forms of civic and moral identity (as opposed to consumerism) come out in her
study of water provision, which concludes by finding a ‘lack of resonance at the
broader political level’ (p. 302) in the figure of the consumer. Recoding all
relationships as consumer exchanges (the ongoing struggle in British universities
over the identity of student-consumers being a case in point) is unhelpful.
Some social scientists have argued long against the ethnocentric and elitist bias
contained in older leftist and aristocratic critiques of popular taste and mass con-
sumption. But are there signs that this reaction has now gone too far? Surely it is
wrong to regard consumption primarily as a form of political activism or as resis-
tance in everyday life. Human identities are also made and reshaped away from the
world of goods. Seeing the whole world as a shopping mall will be as fruitless
ultimately as the older view in Marxian political economy that the whole world
could be seen as a factory.
Where is all this work going? If incommensurable approaches and stark contra-
dictions between the covers of the present book can be taken as a sign of interdis-
ciplinary vitality and generative controversy rather than confusion (as of course they
should) at this stage, then the field is alive. Calls here by Trentmann for the
development of a pluralist, ‘multicentred’ approach in place of reliance on an under-
theorized Americanization model is matched by a current call for new theoretical
work in a second round of funding from the programme.
University of Bristol  

BOOK REVIEWS 227
Ivan T. Berend, An economic history of twentieth-century Europe: economic regimes
from laissez-faire to globalization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Pp. xi-xv + 356. 46 figs. 41 tabs. ISBN 0521856663 Hbk. £45/$80; ISBN
0521672686 Pbk. £19.99/$34.99)
This is a grand narrative of the economic history of Europe in the twentieth century.
It will be useful for all students of the period as it is written largely in a highly
accessible form. It is also a critique of comparative economic systems. The book is
structured around six chapters, which examine the rise and fall of different eco-
nomic ideas and regimes. Berend is a distinguished historian of Eastern Europe so
there is a highly authoritative discussion of the experience of the European periph-
eries. Indeed it is a useful way of approaching the period to contrast the fortunes
of the developed ‘core’ economies of western Europe—Britain, Germany, France,
Italy, Belgium, and Holland—with the economies of the less-developed ‘periphery’:
Spain, Portugal, Greece, Ireland, Russia, and eastern Europe.
Chapter 1 describes the European economy of the early part of the century, a
Europe dominated by ideas of open markets, laissez-faire, and small government.
Berend demonstrates the way in which the core forged ahead in the nineteenth
century while much of the periphery lagged behind. Meanwhile, in the closing
decades of the nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century, Scandinavia was
catching up. This was also, of course, a period of rampant nationalism, high
imperialism, and confidence in European civilisation. This ordered society was,
Berend argues, shattered by the First World War, and the European Economy
started the process of disintegration that was to culminate in the pit of the great
depression. Chapter 2 charts this process and discusses the response to the depres-
sion in the rise of what he calls the ‘regulated market system’: protectionism,
structural intervention in industry, and later the macroeconomics of Keynesianism.
This is well told for the most part, but there are a number of slight deficiencies.
For example, on page 62 he refers to the Wall Street Crash: ‘Black Thursday on the
American Stock Exchange’ and its impact on international finance in generating
the great depression. The vast majority of the economics profession now regards
the crash as secondary to the monetary policy mistakes of the Federal Reserve. As
for the internationalization of the depression, this stemmed as much from the
collapse of trade as the reversal of financial flows. One more detail here: actually,
Berend means the New York Stock Exchange, not the American Stock Exchange
(Amex)—which is a different and much smaller organization. Also, on page 71 he
charts how the recovery process had started in 1932 in virtually all European
economies except France. But there is no explanation for this atypical perfor-
mance. Granted there is some discussion of Popular Front policies in 1936, but
the determination not to devalue the franc (‘une éventualité absolument exclue’) is
not mentioned. Not all of Europe took this road to the regulated market economy
and chapters 3 and 4 examine the deviations to the right and left. Thus the
economic policies of the authoritarian fascist states are dealt with in chapter 3,
while the Soviet experiment is analysed in detail in chapter 4. To a generation of
students brought up on a diet of the politics and military activity of Hitler and/or
Stalin there is quite a deal of useful complementary material here. There is also a
considerable quantity of novel information with a detailed discussion of the eco-
nomic dirigisme practised by Mussolini, Salazar, Franco, and even the Metaxas
regime in Greece. As a sort of ‘compare and contrast’ essay, this is a model of
clarity and insight.
228 BOOK REVIEWS
Chapter 4 discusses the ideological origins of the Soviet model and its results,
both good and bad. Berend deals with the well-worn story of Stalin’s ability to
outmanoeuvre his political opponents by switching sides on the direction of
economic policy. One minor criticism here: he should have mentioned Stalin’s key
role as General Secretary of the Communist Party. This bureaucratic function gave
Stalin crucial leverage. Chapter 5 focuses on the postwar development of the
mixed economy and the welfare state in an integrating western Europe. Much of
this is familiar territory for many economic historians, but it is enlivened by
references to what was happening in non-core countries such as the Czech Repub-
lic, Hungary, Finland, and Ireland. The final chapter deals with the process of
globalization and the return to laissez-faire, that is, the apparent victory of the
neoliberal right. There are some contentious issues dealt with here: for example,
how can environmental issues be coped with in the context of a laissez-faire
economy? Does globalization produce greater global inequality? Does it favour the
haves over the have-nots? These latter issues are complicated by the recent growth
performance of China and India, and the evidence is mixed. Berend deals with
these issues in an interesting and balanced manner. Overall, then, a book that will
be welcomed by many.
University of Liverpool  . 
Edward L. Glaeser and Claudia Goldin, eds., Corruption and reform: lessons from
America’s economic history (Chicago: University of Chicago Press for the National
Bureau of Economic Research, 2006. Pp. x + 386. 20 figs. 1 illus. 33 tabs. ISBN
0226299570 Hbk. £47.50/$75)
Corruption is difficult to study empirically. Cross-country work confirms that high

levels of corruption are associated with low growth, low levels of income, inequality,
and a lack of government legitimacy. Yet these statistical regularities have not
resolved problems of causation and provide no concrete guides to policy. Recently,
scholars have used more micro-analytic, institutionally grounded approaches. Some
carry out micro-level experiments in developing countries. Others turn to history.
The present volume represents the latter approach, but the results are mixed. The
book is a fascinating collection of empirically grounded essays by leading scholars
on the United States experience, but there are few sharply focused lessons for
countries struggling currently with the costs of corruption and a weak rule of law.
Nevertheless, one can draw some broad conclusions.
In the United States, political corruption was endemic during much of the
nineteenth and into the twentieth century. Today, it survives in stubborn pockets,
but is less widespread and harmful. The interrelationship between money and
politics remains a vexed and troublesome theme, and individual politicians at all
levels continue to accept payoffs. However, in many areas of public life corrup-
tion is the exception, not the rule. This volume asks how that transformation
occurred and analyses the costs of corruption and benefits of reform in specific
cases.
The first section tries to measure corruption over time and space. Evidence is
adduced from press reports (Glaeser and Goldin), the number of corrupt mayors
and administrations (Rebecca Menes), and from cost overruns on government
projects (Stanley L. Engerman and Kenneth L. Sokoloff). Next, the volume
BOOK REVIEWS 229
considers the consequences of corruption. The chapters concentrate on two
specialized areas: corporate governance and the municipal water supplies. Naomi
R. Lamoreaux and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal write about fraud rather than political
corruption. They show how the economic benefits of the corporate form permitted
the number of firms to grow in spite of a legal regime that disadvantaged minority
shareholders. Even the widespread fraud permitted by an inadequate legal regime
was not sufficient to undermine the profit motive. David Cutler and Grant Miller
show that the availability of credit made municipal water systems possible in spite
of widespread corruption. Inefficient, corrupt, and overly costly systems were the
rule in the absence of adequate controls on borrowing. Both chapters are cautionary
tales about the costs imposed by weak legal controls on fraud and corruption, even
when investments occur nevertheless. As Glaeser and Goldin note, although the
US grew in spite of these inadequacies, today’s developing economies seem unable
to do so (p. 5).
What policy tools can limit corruption successfully? In keeping with its historical
focus, this volume provides no comprehensive answers, but two chapters provide
some suggestive options. The first is an independent media. Matthew Gentzkow,
Glaeser, and Goldin argue that the rise of a non-partisan press with broad circula-
tion played a key role in limiting corruption. Second, Werner Troesken shows both
how the public ownership of utilities, such as water, limited corruption in the early
twentieth century and how their recent privatization also appears to have limited
corruption. This chapter is a counterweight to those who see privatization as a cure
for corruption, but also suggests that entrenched public firms can grow inefficient
and patronage-ridden over time.
The chapters on the political economy of reform show how progressives allied
with portions of the business and labour communities. Sometimes reforms served
the interests of ordinary people imperfectly. However, in other cases, the result
benefited consumers and workers even if it represented a compromise between
competing interest groups. Conflicts between different parts of the business and
labour communities influenced the nature of banking entry regulation in New York
State (Howard Bodenhorn), workplace safety reform (Peter V. Fishback), and the
Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906 (Marc T. Law and Gary D. Libecap). The role
of politicians was also central. Similarly, efforts to control corruption in federal
relief programmes owed much to Franklin Roosevelt’s strong political interest in
the integrity of the national programme (John Joseph Wallis, Fishback, and Shawn
Kantor).
This volume is a valuable contribution to empirical research on corruption and
is full of clever and interesting efforts to collect and analyse data linked to the level
and impact of corruption and other forms of self-dealing or political pressure. What
general lessons can be learned? I would highlight three. First, data can be found
that indirectly illuminates the level of malfeasance. I would point particularly to the
Engerman and Sokoloff measures of corruption in public works and Gentzkow,
Glaeser, and Goldin’s use of media reports. Second, although growth can occur
even when corruption and fraud are widespread, the costs are high and can be
documented. Lastly, reform is unlikely to arise simply from the efforts of principled
reformers. They need allies in—and outside—of government, and they need to be
willing to compromise to achieve reforms that, while imperfect, improve on the
status quo.
Yale University  -

230 BOOK REVIEWS
Paul A. Van Dyke, The Canton trade: life and enterprise on the China coast, 1700-1845
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005. Pp. xviii + 280. 10 tabs. 41 plates.
HK$325/$45)
During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries China conducted most of its
maritime trade with the wider world through Canton, but no historian has yet been
able to write a general study of that great port city and its rapidly expanding
commerce. This is because any scholar contemplating taking up the challenge has
always been presented with formidable obstacles of a practical and linguistic nature,
and hence most studies of Canton have been based upon the accessible records of
the great European trading companies, most notably those of the English East India
Company. But, as Van Dyke points out, such an approach opens only a very narrow
window on the Canton trade and there is much that has escaped the attention of
historians. Moreover, because European records are littered with official complaints
about corruption and petty restrictions imposed upon foreigners by the Chinese
authorities, we have been left with a view of the trade that suggests that it was
characterized by high levels of risk, inefficiency, and uncertainty.
It is much to Van Dyke’s credit that his revisionist study dispels many of the
myths and misunderstandings that have long surrounded the organization and
conduct of the Canton trade. He has been able to achieve this because he has drawn
on an enormous range of Chinese and Western sources and methodically worked
his way through a great number of archives in Europe and North America, which
has taken him well beyond the records of the trading companies. This has enabled
him to reconstruct the inner workings of Canton’s overseas trading system, as well
as to incorporate analysis of the local junk trade and the extensive commercial
activities that were conducted at nearby Macao. Most earlier studies have also
concentrated on the small number of Hong merchants who were licensed to trade
with foreigners, but Van Dyke throws important new light on other important
actors, such as river pilots, linguists, compradors, and customs officials; and due
attention is also paid to the countless thousands of others who were drawn directly
and indirectly into various forms of contact with foreign traders. As a result, a much
fuller range of commercial interactions are explored, and we are much better placed
to understand how the Canton trade actually worked and was regulated on a day-
to-day basis. We now have a picture of a trade that, generally speaking, operated
smoothly according to standardized and well-understood procedures, thereby
engendering a mutual trust among the participants, which created the conditions
that were necessary for long-term growth.
Van Dyke is at pains to stress that the unique set of circumstances that gave rise
to the ‘Canton system’ came into being well before China’s trade with foreigners
was officially restricted to the port in 1757, and he sees each and every aspect of
the ever-evolving system as being intended to facilitate local supervision and control
over the small foreign trading communities. However, while identifying the
strengths of the system, he also devotes due attention to serious weaknesses that
led to accelerating disintegration well before it was finally destroyed by the Opium
Wars of the 1840s. The system worked best when the large European trading
companies dominated the trade, but during the late-eighteenth century it failed to
cope with a steady influx of private traders, whose extensive smuggling activity,
especially of increasingly large quantities of opium from the 1750s onwards, was
based upon the payment of connivance fees to local officials. Yet the authorities had
to turn a blind eye to such trafficking because opium alone attracted the silver that
BOOK REVIEWS 231
was necessary for the ever-greater purchase of tea for export, and this saw the licit
and illicit branches of Canton’s trade become increasingly intertwined, a circum-
stance that eventually made it impossible for government countermeasures to be
effective when they were put in place belatedly during the 1830s. More generally,
a failure to keep and preserve commercial information for any length of time also
represented a great weakness because it meant that, unlike their foreign counter-
parts, Chinese participants in the system were unable to assess trends, anticipate
change, or understand international economic movements.
Throughout this richly illustrated book the focus is on the organization, conduct,
and expansion of maritime trade, which is understandable in view of the need more
fully to integrate the Canton system into wider narratives of global economic history.
It does mean, however, that very little is said about relationships between the Pearl
River Delta and its various economic hinterlands within China itself. This is perhaps
to be regretted, although it represents only a minor criticism in the context of an
important study that increases our understanding very substantially of how the
Canton system evolved, operated, and then collapsed under foreign pressure.
University of Leicester . . 
David Faure, China and capitalism: a history of business enterprise in modern China
(Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006. Pp. viii + 127. ISBN 9622097839
Hbk. £27.50$39.50. ISBN 9622097847 Pbk. £11.50/$15.95)
In the past ten years there has been a tremendous growth in research on Chinese
business history, which has built on the pioneering work that was accomplished in
the preceding decades. This phenomenon reflects, on the supply side, the accumu-
lation of available source material on Chinese companies and a growing cohort of
Chinese-speaking scholars writing in English, and on the demand side the intensi-
fying interest in the historical context of the ongoing transformation of China’s
industrial structure from command economy to ‘capitalism with Chinese charac-
teristics’. The great challenge for China’s economic planners has been to combine
the domestic politics of socialism with the economic institutions of capitalism.
Whether this is achievable or sustainable in the longer term has still to be shown.
Faure’s book offers an overview of how the state has interacted with the develop-
ment of capitalist institutions in China over the past five centuries to give a long-
term context to this process. It addresses directly, therefore, another great theme
of Chinese history: the ‘great divergence’ between east and west, that is, why China
fell behind Europe in terms of economic development.
Faure finds a compromise between cultural explanations of China’s performance
and economic explanations by emphasizing the contrast between capitalism based
on legal rights and financial markets with China’s business relations organized
around lineage ritual and patronage from the state. He dismisses concepts of a
distinct Chinese capitalism emphasizing guanxi and ‘face’ as ‘crude generalisations’
and argues that the method of incorporation and control of property has influenced
interpersonal relations in business rather than the other way around. His explana-
tion for why China did not adopt western capitalist patterns of business organization
is that the financial system and capital markets required were stymied by the
persistence of patronage as the basis for business relations. By the fifteenth century,
ritual rather than law formed the basis for economic relations. For Faure, the
opportunity to make the transition from patronage and ritual to capitalism was lost
232 BOOK REVIEWS
in 1617 with the abolition of an emergent financial market related to the salt trade.
This edict marked a return to patronage, the capital market was unable to develop
and so capitalism was unable to take hold. This is not to say that there was no
experience of wage labour, contracts, or corporations in China, but that the large-
scale capital accumulation and financial intermediation that characterized the
industrial revolution elsewhere did not occur in China. Contracts were not among
individuals, but operated through ritual lineages not regulated by law. From the
second half of the nineteenth century, with the growth of commerce and relations
with the west, corporations emerged under new structures of western-inspired
company law, but still the financial and banking sector lagged behind and patronage
remained predominant. In the twentieth century, political upheaval disrupted the
development of capitalism further. Faure then interprets the reforms of the 1980s
as a return to the institutional pre-conditions for capitalism that had begun to
develop by the end of the Qing period almost 100 years earlier.
As always, there are quibbles to be made over such a broad analysis. The book
is both admirably and frustratingly short given the time-span and complexity of the
subject matter. This makes it a good introduction, but also sometimes leaves the
reader rather frustrated. Faure has drawn on lectures he gave in the 1980s and early
1990s, and this shows in the final parts of the book, which reflect on current and
future developments. The culmination of the discussion of the emergence of the
stock market in the 1980s, for example, might usefully have addressed the
implications of the large hangover of state-owned, non-tradable shares that have
depressed the market over the past five years and lend uncertainty to the value of
traded shares. This would fit well with his theme of the limits imposed by the state
on the development of capitalist financial institutions.
The overarching and sometimes provocative argument of this book is presented
in a very cogent and elegant way, drawing on various examples from Chinese
business history as evidence. It therefore serves both as an excellent introduction
to the evolution of Chinese business formation and also as a summary of Faure’s
sometimes controversial scholarship. It will therefore meet the needs of both stu-
dents and scholars of economic and business history.
University of Glasgow  . 
Penelope Francks, Rural economic development in Japan: from the nineteenth century
to the Pacific war (London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xvi + 312. 3 figs.
20 tabs. ISBN 0415368073 Hbk. £65/$115)
Penelope Francks has written a fine overview of the history of Japanese agriculture
from the late Edo period until 1945. Drawing on a wide variety of English and
Japanese-language secondary sources, she has made important contributions to our
understanding of modern Japan, and of its economic and rural development. Her
primary contribution is her extended and well-documented argument that rural
people were not merely victims of cruel treatment by their political, social, and
economic leaders or of an often harsh natural environment, but that they strove to
ameliorate these conditions and to control their own lives and livelihoods. She
makes this point with careful documentation and with references to all of the various
scholars who have entered into the long-standing debate.
One of the strengths of Francks’ book is the revisionist time-frame in which she
presents her ‘rethinking’ of rural Japan. After an introduction in which she presents
BOOK REVIEWS 233
a number of analytical approaches to understanding rural society, Francks divides
her book into three periods: an analysis of the pre-industrial agricultural economy,
1790–1890; Japan’s transition from an agricultural to an industrial economy, 1890–
1920; and the period between the two world wars. In other words, she eschews the
usual approach of dividing pre-industrial and industrial Japan with the fall of the
last shogunal regime in 1868, but makes 1890, when modern technology begins to
take root in Japan, her dividing line. In the first period, the rural economy grew
even without the help of industrialization. In the second, the agricultural sector
underwent a relatively smooth adjustment as Japan transformed itself from a nation
of farmers to one of industrial workers. In fact, it was at the end of this period that
non-agricultural workers outnumbered agricultural workers for the first time in
Japan’s history. In the third period, the rural economy faced not only these transi-
tional problems, but also the impact of the great depression and the road to the
Second World War. Because of the nature of the government’s response to these
crises—through the central support of a number of village organizations such as
productive, reservist, youth, and women’s groups that inculcated national values
on the foundations of traditional (or at least reinvented, quasi-traditional) values—
Japan avoided the development of the kinds of large capitalist or socialist communal
farms one finds elsewhere in the modern world.
In the 250 pages of these three sections, Francks treats many of the issues that
have arisen in the copious and often divisive debates on Japanese agricultural
development: the influence before industrialization of the growth of a market
economy on peasant lives and livelihoods, and on the nature of their resistance and
protest; industrial growth, labour markets, and the countryside; deflation in the
1880s and inflation in the pre-First World War era, and their impact on rural
livelihoods; the impact of new technology on the countryside; rice imports and rural
standards of living after the Rice Riots in 1918; the causes, nature, and outcomes
of tenancy disputes in the 1920s and 1930s; rural standards of living; and many
others too numerous to introduce here. A reader who wants to read a synthesis of
Japanese agricultural development from 1800 to the Second World War, that is, just
before and during Japan’s prewar industrialization, can do no better than turn to
this book.
Having said that, Francks has missed an opportunity to make an even greater
contribution to our analysis of modern rural Japan. She has touched on, but not
entered directly into the debate over rural standards of living under capitalist
industrialization, even though quantitative economic historians are fortunate to
have sources available to get at this hotly debated issue. From the 1880s until 1937,
the army issued annual yearbooks that contained nationwide and regional data on
the heights of all those who took the conscription physical examination. Since young
men at age 20 were required to take this examination, cliometricians, using the
techniques introduced by Robert Fogel, Stanley Engerman, John Komlos, and
others, have at their disposal a comparable sample of all men in the age group for
over half a century. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing to the present, every
prefecture in Japan has published annually a set of statistical data on crop prices
and yields, arable land by crop type, mortality, fertility, morbidity, health care, and
the use of modern facilities such as railroads, cinema, the postal and telegraph
systems, bicycles, and electric lights, among many other things. The task of using
these data to get at the question of rural standards of living still remains.
University of Pittsburgh  . 

234 BOOK REVIEWS
Richard Perren, Taste, trade and technology: the development of the international meat
industry since 1840 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. Pp. viii + 285. 39 tabs. ISBN
0754636488 Hbk. £55/$99.50)
It is now nearly 30 years since Richard Perren published The meat trade in Britain,
1840–1914 (1978), a book well-known to readers of this journal who are interested
in the history of commodities. The present volume expands ambitiously the spatial
and temporal scope to the international sphere and focuses on interactions between
producers, traders in their various guises, and consumers. In essence, it draws
together threads from secondary works on meat production and trade in different
countries over various time-scales, and uses official government reports and the
trade press to provide international perspectives and technical detail. Britain was
the main destination for meat traded internationally for much of the period, and
there is, therefore, an underlying assumption throughout the book of a focus on
this market. The voice is that of an economic historian, and readers should not
expect much in the way of social or cultural leavening. Here is a specialist at work,
with satisfying results, although the book cannot have been easy to write because
of its vast compass. There were tough decisions to make about how much detail to
include for each species traded, each source area, and each importing country.
The author begins by reminding us that there was a mid-nineteenth century
productivity stagnation in the beef sector against a rising demand, and it was this
shortfall and associated high prices that encouraged sourcing from North America,
Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand. Of course, supplies in both quantity and
quality had to be built up gradually, and this involved investment in the improve-
ment of breeds, often with blood from British pedigree stock, and also in transport
and processing infrastructure. The picture is by no means complete, but we are
presented with some useful examples of the industry’s expansion in a chapter
entitled ‘capital and markets’. Here a wide range of ownership and investment
experiments is described, much with British or American capital but with success
by no means guaranteed.
A useful aspect of this book is its emphasis upon technicity, not just the familiar
chilling and refrigeration, but also the relative merits of home-produced meat,
jerked beef (dry cured), canned products, meat extract, live animals transported by
steamship, and frozen meat. By 1900 there was an increasing domination by the
large meat packers, often employing oligopolistic practices. In 1913 United States
meat companies controlled half of the beef imported into Britain, for instance, and
57 per cent of the meat sold at Smithfield. Uruguay and Argentina were also
dominated by foreign-owned meat companies and their governments sought to
wrest the initiative from frigorificos such Vestey, Armour, La Blanca, and Wilson. A
chapter on ‘government and business’ has more on the mixed fortunes of state
involvement in the meat trade. The twentieth century saw the rise of international
agreements, such as the quotas arranged at the Ottawa Imperial Conference in 1932
and the Roca-Runciman Treaty in 1933, and the more recent introduction of farm
subsidies and other types of assistance for livestock producers.
Modern changes in the industry’s structure are discussed in terms of companies
that have sought to control more of the chain, from the farmyard to the supermarket,
in order to streamline production, monitor quality, and ratchet up profit margins.
One example is Tyson Foods, which began on a single poultry farm in Arkansas
and became the largest producer in America, being involved along the way with the
‘invention’ of that ultimate convenience food, the chicken nugget. A quibble I have
BOOK REVIEWS 235
here is that author does not take the argument further by drawing upon the recent
theoretical literature on commodity value chains and systems of provision.
Another minor criticism, a structural one, is that the author follows the current
fashion for short conclusions and he chooses not to write strong summaries of the
individual chapters, leaving the reader to assess the progress of the argument and
to infer links between chapters. The publisher is well-known for small print runs
targeted at the library market, with the price for the volume well beyond the budgets
of all students and most academics, but maybe we should be grateful that they are
at least committed to monographs in a series on ‘Modern economic and social
history’.
This book will become an indispensable reference on the international meat trade
because it is the only single volume to paint on such a wide canvass. While the
brush strokes are at times impressionistic, it meets a felt need for more global
commodity studies from the perspective of economic history.
Durham University . . 
Jeffrey Frieden, Global capitalism: its fall and rise in the twentieth century (New York:
Norton, 2006. Pp. xvii + 556. ISBN 0393058085 Hbk. £19.99/$29.95)
This is an ambitious book. It provides a history of the world economy from the
late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, concentrating on the advancing
(1870–1914), then receding (1914–39), then advancing (1939–2000) tides of glo-
balization. Freiden argues that there has never been an automatic progress towards
globalization. Instead, governments have taken measures to open up national econ-
omies to freer trade and capital flows because they have believed that liberalization
brings welfare gains, in the form of economic growth, rising living standards, and
employment opportunities to broad coalitions of workers, employers, and finan-
ciers. He points out that there have always been losers from this process and that
it has never been uncontested, from the Populists in the United States to the
anti-globalization protesters of the contemporary era. He argues that the pro-
ponents of economic nationalism and protectionism have been in the ascendant
only when depression has led to the impoverishment of the coalitions supportive
of globalization, or when total war has rendered liberal political economy redundant.
There is a lot of good material. Generally, the book is written in a lucid and
accessible style. Students on this side of the Atlantic will derive particular value
from the discussion of the Populists and the analysis of politics and economic policy
in Latin American states during the twentieth century (a subject in which Frieden
is a specialist). There is an interesting discussion of the great depression, arguing
that autarky or social democracy, with Hjalmar Schacht and Maynard Keynes
respectively as the key figures, were the only workable alternative responses to the
crisis. Freiden’s treatment of post-1945 reconstruction in eastern Europe is refresh-
ingly clear and helpful, as is his analysis of the economic record of the socialist bloc
of countries between the 1950s and the late 1970s. There is a thoughtful section at
the end discussing the reaction against globalization at the end of the twentieth
century. When at his best, as he is in these and other case studies, the author offers
a stimulating fusion of political with economic history.
Unfortunately, there is a large ‘but’ with this book. There are mistakes, oversim-
plifications, and exaggerations. To give a few examples: it is simply not true to say
236 BOOK REVIEWS
that textile workers and employers in pre-1914 Britain supported imperial prefer-
ence (p. 118). The facile equation of planned trade and protectionism with fascist
and authoritarian regimes does not deal with the historical reality that after 1945
many west European democracies followed interventionist and discriminatory for-
eign trade policies which included bilateralism, controls and multiple exchange rates
to safeguard domestic production (Alan Milward’s work on this is ignored despite
appearing in the bibliography). The chapter covering the 1970s and 1980s is spoiled
by crude and rather propagandist generalizations. The 1970s in particular are
discussed as if they were the first stage of the apocalypse. Everything is thrown into
a breathless argument that mentions oil price shocks, inflation, the growth of
international indebtedness, radicalization in the less-developed countries, global
financial instability, and the establishment of the European Monetary System within
three short pages (pp. 366–9), as if they were all signs of breakdown. The ability of
west European governments (including the UK up to 1978–9) to ride out the oil
crisis and come to grips with inflation on the basis of policies that maximized
consensus and continued to deliver growth, is completely ignored. By the same
token it is alleged that that western governments ‘threw money’ at social and
industrial problems between 1973 and 1980 (p. 371). This is a ludicrous remark
that will surprise few people more than Jimmy Carter, Denis Healey, and Helmut
Schmidt. Frieden fails to acknowledge the strong element of protectionism in the
industrialization strategies of the Tiger economies (p. 422) and it is something of
an overstatement to say that by 2000 the central European nations were integrated
into the economy of the European Union (p. 432).
These problems appear to stem from Frieden’s falling into the category of what
J. H. Hexter, writing rather unfairly about Christopher Hill, called a ‘lumper’. This
is the type of historian whose fondness for general conclusions leads to a blind eye
being turned to awkward facts and obvious differences between categories of events
or ideas that are being treated as the same. In Frieden’s case the trouble appears
to derive from the excessive neatness of an argument that revolves around a dialectic
of open economies = democratic politics = prosperity versus protectionist/planned
economies = authoritarian regimes = losses to welfare. But the record of what really
happened in any period does not support history written on the basis of trite polar
opposites, and the story of the global economy in the twentieth century is no
exception.
Cardiff University  
Dennis M. P. McCarthy, International economic integration in historical perspective

(London and New York: Routledge, 2006. Pp. xii + 254. ISBN 0415770270 Hbk.
£70/$125)
International economic integration is claimed here as ‘one of the most important

global forces of our time’ (p. x), but also as one of the oldest, with roots that can
be traced to the Roman Empire. Recent historical research links integration to
globalization, and conceives of economic integration as a process measured through
convergence of prices of goods/services and factors of production, as for example
in the widely used approach of Michael Bordo et al., eds, Globalization in historical
perspective (2003), in which ‘integration seems in many ways a natural economic
process, which can only be reversed, if at all, when policies are deliberately framed
BOOK REVIEWS 237
to that end’ (Clive Crook in Bordo et al., p. 549). McCarthy adopts a different
approach, one in which policies have a key role for understanding integration; thus
‘international economic integration is much more than an economic process. It is
an economic and political process that also involves political economy’ (p. 2). In
this he is returning to the classic integration framework of Béla Balassa’s The Theory
of economic integration (1962), which linked economic integration to political co-
operation in an account of the creation of the European Economic Community
(now the EU). Balassa defined five stages in the European economic integration
process: free trade area, customs union, common market, economic union, and
total economic integration. McCarthy here employs the first three stages to explain
long-run world economic integration.
The introduction defines the book’s main concepts, and these are then employed
systematically throughout seven successive chapters to analyse seven different kinds
of organizations within three different general categories: public, ‘between public
and private’ (an intermediate level), and private. Public organizations comprise
colonial empires, free trade areas, customs unions, and common markets, while the
intermediate category is taken as merchant associations, religious empires, and
criminal empires. Private organizations are omitted here because they were the
subjects of his earlier study, International business history: a contextual and case
approach (1994). Lastly, there is a short conclusion that summarizes the main
insights that emerge from these different organizations.
Public organizations are analysed in chapters 1 and 5–7. Chapter 1 focuses on
the characteristics that defined the degree of integration in different historical
examples of colonial empires from Roman times to the twentieth century, this with
a focus on how administrative structures shape integration. Chapters 5, 6, and 7
are devoted, respectively, to the analysis of several twentieth-century free trade
areas, four customs unions (with especial attention devoted to the Zollverein, a
‘stellar example of realistic integration, p. 204) and the two largest common markets
to date, those of the US and the EU.
The focus of chapters 2–4 is on the intermediate level institutions. Chapter 2
collects the main examples of two types of merchant organizations: chartered
companies and merchant associations. In respect of the former, McCarthy provides
an historical overview of the main companies associated with the overseas expansion
of Europe: the Mississippi Company, the Dutch and French West Indian Compa-
nies, the Royal African Company, the Royal Niger Company, the Imperial British
East African Company, the British South African Company, and the Dutch and
English East India Companies. The analysis of the latter type, merchant associa-
tions, is based on the example of the Hanseatic League, which McCarthy considers
‘one of the most important historical antecedents to the continental economic
integration that now occupies Europe’ (p. 65). Chapters 3 and 4 focus on two polar
opposites: the Roman Catholic Church, here taken as an example of a religious
empire; and the Mafia, here an exemplar of a criminal empire. The author describes
the structures and procedures of both organizations and of how they both resemble
modern multinational corporations in their operation.
Such are the chronological and geographical ambitions of this volume that, in-
evitably, much of it is rather superficial. However, it does provide a very good summary
of the topic, and will be useful for students, which is partly the author’s intention.
Chaire Finances Internationales, Institut d’Études

Politiques de Paris   
238 BOOK REVIEWS
Stephen Broadberry and Mark Harrison, eds., The economics of World War I
(Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 345. 12 figs. 143 tabs.
ISBN 0521852129 £48/$80)
This much-needed volume complements The economics of World War II, edited by
Harrison and from the same publisher in 1998. Together they provide a quantitative
economic record, in macro-economically and internationally consistent aggregates,
that enables comparative conclusions between countries and between wars. The
authors of the present volume seek to map the changes in real GDP, proportionate
shifts in the structure of production, changes in the balance of payments, changes
in real incomes, and consumption levels. They give quantitative accounts of patterns
of war finance and change of monetary aggregates; and qualitative accounts of war
organization. The quantitative project exposes the tenuousness of many (in fact,
most) of the national accounting aggregates. Nevertheless the results seem robust
enough to support the editors’ conclusion: (i) that proportionate mobilization of
factors of production for the war effort fell with declining per capita income, once
distance from the theatres of war and length of involvement in the war have been
controlled for. From this they deduce (ii) that aggregated potential output was
inevitably what determined victory and defeat once the German offensive had run
into sand in 1914. Thus ‘hardly any room is left for traditional historical accounts
based on the peculiarities of national public and private institutions and government
policies’ (p. 37).
One reason given for (i) is that a larger proportion of both the consumption and
the productive effort of the poorer belligerents was in foodstuffs. This meant that
reallocation of resources bit more deeply into the nutrition of the population and
the production of food, as farm labour, horses, and the supply of nitrates were
redirected to war purposes. Various chapters describe how this handicap was com-
pounded by economic disincentives, a result both of price controls on behalf of
urban populations (Albrecht Ritschl on Germany, Max-Stephan Schulze on Aus-
tria-Hungary), and of disconnection from world-market grain prices (Peter Gatrell
on Russia); and by inefficient war-organization, especially in the dual monarchy.
However, the volume implies that a further critical variable was access to seas
controlled by friendly navies, since Pierre-Cyrille Hautcoeur’s chapter on France
(p. 197) and Franceso Galassi and Mark Harrison’s on Italy (pp. 290–1) deny any
general food-supply problems, unlike those on Germany, Austria-Hungary, the
Ottoman empire (Sevket Pamuk), and Russia. The work suggests intriguing coun-
terfactuals. On the one hand, what if Churchill’s Dardanelles project had worked
and Russian grain exports had been possible? Would the Russian peasantry have
‘seceded from the nation’? On the other, what if Germania had ruled the waves
and cut North America off from Europe?
Discussion of war-economic organization centres on its implications for market
efficiency. Thus Stephen Broadberry and Peter Howlett (United Kingdom), Haut-
coeur (France), and Hugh Rockoff (US) argue on the basis of a ‘real business cycle’
model that war planning had a ‘following wind’ in market forces that were tending
to produce the needed reallocations anyway. Ritschl is not so sure: the tendency of
his reading of the same model is that a ‘real bad business cycle’ tended to reduce
supply. The implication of the ‘following wind’ reasoning is that private and public
interests converged; and so to efface the ‘principal-agent’ problem of war. Other
research has centred on the idea of a conflict between the government’s economic
goal of short-term maximization of production, and the business goal of positioning
BOOK REVIEWS 239
itself for profit maximization in the post-war environment. The ‘following wind’
argument also begs the question why governments resorted to planning at all: this
volume lacks the illuminating discussion of this issue that Howlett has provided
elsewhere.
The analyses of war finance emphasize the similarities between the practices of
all belligerents, and tend to justify reliance on war borrowing. The influence of the
gold standard on war finance is discussed by Ritschl and Hautcoeur, but the
question of the ex ante rationale of investment in war bonds, given its general ex
post irrationality, is not deeply explored. Wartime monetization of debt more or less
explains wartime inflation in most countries, except for the significantly modifying
effect of price controls in Germany and Britain.
One ambitious aim was to quantify the costs of the First World War in terms of
losses not only of material but also of human capital; the several estimates of
the authors are summarized by the editors to show the globally greater costs of the
Second over the First World War. Some authors offer insightful analyses of the
political-economy effects of the war: domestically (Gatrell and Ritschl), and inter-
nationally (Ritschl). The editors argue that the permanent effects of the war on
economic growth and state spending were slight. There is also a most informative
chapter by Herman De Jong on the ambiguous but ultimately beneficial effects of
the war on the neutral Netherlands. All chapters are written to an enviable standard
and make compelling reading; the volume is now the starting-point for all future
research into the economics of the First World War.
University of Manchester  
Sandra J. Peart and David M. Levy, The ‘vanity of the philosopher’: from equality to
hierarchy in postclassical economics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005.
Pp. xviii + 323. 26 figs 7 tabs. ISBN 0472114964 Hbk. £27.95/$40)
In the second half of the nineteenth century, so Peart and Levy argue, economists’
thinking about human beings was transformed. The classical economists, from
Adam Smith to John Stuart Mill, worked on the assumption that people were
basically the same, but from around 1850, this was challenged. Attacks came from
many sides: from the evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer;
from John Ruskin and literary scholars. The result, reflected in neoclassical theory,
was an economics based on the premise that there were fundamental differences
between groups of people. Difference inevitably came to be seen as implying
hierarchy, becoming entangled with eugenics and arguments about slavery and race.
In the process, notions of sympathy, very important for Smith and many classical
economists, were pushed aside.
As well as being an historical narrative of changes that took place in nineteenth-
century economics, the story has lessons that are still relevant. According to Peart
and Levy, ‘The questions at issue between analytical egalitarians and their critics
are (1) whether everyone’s preferences count equally and (2) whether everyone is
equally capable of making economic decisions’ (p. 3). To deny either of these is to
embark on the slide to racism and eugenics: ‘the “science” of eugenics is a conse-
quence of analytical hierarchicalism’. Hence the book’s title, the ‘Vanity of the
Philosopher’: the notion that ‘experts’ have some superior insight that places them
above ordinary people. The villains of their story are the scientists, statisticians, and
240 BOOK REVIEWS
social scientists who accepted evolutionary and eugenic arguments. The heroes, on
the other hand are the evangelical Christians who persisted in maintaining the
fundamental equality of human beings and were to the forefront of the anti-slavery
movement.
The book is written vividly and, like Levy’s earlier book (How the dismal science
got its name, 2002) is leavened with the cartoons from which they draw powerful
evidence about attitudes towards racial differences. It draws together evidence from
a wide range of sources, constructing a fascinating argument. Further support for
parts of their story can be found in sources that they do not cite. For example, they
miss the parallels between their own argument and some of the conclusions reached
in the literature on the concept of ‘Englishness’ (c.f. Robert Colls and Philip Dodds
Englishness: politics and culture, 1880–1920, 1986). In that literature, the argument
is made convincingly that, influenced by critics such as Matthew Arnold, and Whig
historians such as Henry Buckle and Lord Macaulay, Englishmen (where gender
is implied) came to see themselves as superior to Celts and the working class. There
is also a clear parallel with the observation made by Gareth Stedman Jones (Outcast
London, 1971) that evolutionary explanations of human nature were fundamental
to the change in social thought that took place towards the end of the century.
Therefore, there is no doubt that Peart and Levy are on to something important.
However, they appear to oversimplify the argument in places. Take Darwin as an
example. They claim that he reached eugenic conclusions in the Descent of man
(1871), but other scholars have found Darwin’s attitude to be much more complex
(e.g. Diane B. Paul in The Cambridge companion to Darwin, 2003, p. 235). Whilst
his ideas led others to eugenic conclusions, Darwin did not countenance such
actions, being prepared to live with the consequences of human degeneration. A
case could also be made that some economists were less clear-cut on these questions
than Peart and Levy claim.
The power of the book stems from its normative implications about ‘analytical
egalitarianism’. But, what does it mean to claim that ‘everyone is equally capable
of making economic decisions’? The phrase ‘equally capable’ is treacherously
ambiguous. A free society presumes individuals can make economic decisions.
However, it is not inconsistent with this to argue that some people are vulnerable
and need protection from money-lenders or from the temptation to gamble them-
selves into poverty—that some people are less able to make good economic decisions
than others. What of the historical argument that denial of analytical egalitarianism
led in practice to eugenics and racism? Even if this did happen (and, as the example
of Darwin suggests, the picture may be much more complicated), there is no reason
why this is inevitable. Against it has to be set the point made by Stedman Jones
that it was acceptance of the idea that human nature could be changed that banished
the Malthusian demon underlying the new poor laws, thereby opening up the way
to serious attempts to tackle the problem of poverty.
The history of attitudes towards human differences would appear to be more
complex than Peart and Levy admit, making it much harder to draw the normative
implications. However, although its conclusions need to be treated with great care,
this is a useful and provocative book that helps focus attention on an important
change that took place in late Victorian social thought.
University of Birmingham  . 


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Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Economic History Review, 60, 1 (2007), pp. 190–240

*Prices given are those supplied by publishers with review copies.

University of Reading . . 

It is now 20 years since the publication of Andrew Pettegree’s Foreign Protestant

literature on exile communities; this is followed by a contextualizing chapter on

Oxford Brookes University  

In recent years the familiar landscape of economic history, of production, consump-

University College London  

Wheal Ellen, St Just in Penwith  

but there was a most frustrating problem of communication to M. A. Rothschild

Southwell, Notts.  

James P. Huzel, The popularization of Malthus in early nineteenth century England:

University of New England  

University of Southern Denmark, Odense  

University of Houston-Victoria  . 

Despite a growing interest in the development of the accountancy profession in

Royal Holloway, University of London  . 

University of Glasgow  . 

This is an important contribution to knowledge and to our understanding of

University of Lancaster . . 

from an indistinguishable activity in the early modern period into a recognizable

University of Portsmouth  

University of Dundee  

Goldsmiths, University of London  . 

© Economic History Society 2007

University of Cambridge . . 

This book presents a collection of 22 essays by a combination of academics, bank

Université Marc-Bloch (Strasbourg-II) - 

University of California, Santa Barbara  

Holland-Wend trade conflict—an excellent, but somewhat limited piece of

Leuven University    

Edinburgh University-CEU, Budapest  

New Mexico State University  

University of Cambridge  

Günther Schulz, Christoph Buchheim, Gerhard Fouquet, Rainer Gömmel,

Social and economic history: fields, problems, perspectives is a volume published to

University of Münster  

Jörg Roesler, Momente deutsch-deutscher Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte 1945 bis

Brunel University  

Jonathon W. Moses, Norwegian catch-up: development and globalization before Word

Norwegian School of Economics &Business Administration   

University of Bristol  

© Economic History Society 2007

University of Liverpool  . 

Corruption is difficult to study empirically. Cross-country work confirms that high

Yale University  -

University of Leicester . . 

University of Glasgow  . 

University of Pittsburgh  . 

Durham University . . 

Cardiff University  

Dennis M. P. McCarthy, International economic integration in historical perspective

International economic integration is claimed here as ‘one of the most important

Chaire Finances Internationales, Institut d’Études

University of Manchester  

University of Birmingham  . 

© Economic History Society 2007

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