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Horn, Jeff
Industry: Manufacturing and Construction
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
General, International, or Comparative
May 24, 2013
Published by EH.Net (May 2013)
Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara, editors, Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History. London: Routledge, 2013. xiv + 314 pp. $140 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-45552-7.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Jeff Horn, Department of History, Manhattan College.
This timely and important book gathers together a number of challenges to Anglo- and Euro-centric explanations of the process of industrialization in various states and regions around the globe. This volume, which appears in the Routledge Explorations in Economic History series, developed out of interactions at conferences, large and small between 2001 and 2012. Collectively, these authors seek to test...
Coelho, Philip R. P.
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Historical Demography, including Migration
International and Domestic Trade and Relations
Medieval
16th Century
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
General, International, or Comparative
May 23, 2013
Published by EH.Net (May 2013)
Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. xviii + 376 pp. $38 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-300-12357-9.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Philip R. P. Coelho, Department of Economics, Ball State University.
Contagion is a good book whose subtitle, “How Commerce Has Spread Disease,” is somewhat misleading. The author, Mark Harrison, focuses upon: 1) the political reaction to contagious diseases, 2) an extensive history of quarantines, and 3) the commercial and medical foundations of quarantines. So the book is not so much about how commerce affected the spread of disease, but, instead, how the spread of disease affected...
Harper, Ian
Economic Development, Growth, and Aggregate Productivity
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
Australia/New Zealand, incl. Pacific Islands
May 10, 2013
Published by EH.Net (May 2013)
Ian W. McLean, Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. xvi + 281 pp. $35 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-15467-1.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Ian Harper, Deloitte Access Economics.
There was a time not so long ago when the study of Australian economic history was taken more seriously than it is today. Australia’s major universities boasted separate departments of economic history, in which some of the authors familiar to any student of Australian economic history studied and taught. Occasionally professional economic historians took their place alongside economists in departments of economics, as is...
Barry, Frank
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
Europe
May 2, 2013
Published by EH.Net (May 2013)
Andy Bielenberg and Raymond Ryan, An Economic History of Ireland since Independence. New York: Routledge, 2013. xxii + 282 pp. £85/$145 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-56694-0.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Frank Barry, School of Business, Trinity College Dublin.
This is a very comprehensive and hugely satisfying survey of its subject matter. It begins with British Prime Minister Lloyd George’s last-minute offer of full fiscal autonomy during the Treaty negotiations that led to independence in 1922, and takes us right up to the bank guarantee of 2008 that would lead to the loss of fiscal sovereignty to the Troika of funders (the IMF, the EU and the European Central Bank) two...
Wegge, Simone A.
Historical Demography, including Migration
Servitude and Slavery
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
North America
May 1, 2013
Published by EH.Net (May 2013)
Farley Grubb, German Immigration and Servitude in America, 1709-1920. New York: Routledge, 2011. xxvi + 433 pp. $190 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-61061-2.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Simone A. Wegge, Department of Economics, CUNY.
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Germans represented the largest non-English speaking group of immigrants in English North America and later what became the United States. Many of them settled in the state of Pennsylvania; by the middle of the eighteenth century those who claimed German ancestry made up over 50 percent of the population of Pennsylvania, and by the first U.S. census in 1790 over half of all Germans in the U.S. could be found...
Nalbach, Alex
Business History
History of Technology, including Technological Change
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
North America
Apr 30, 2013
Published by EH.Net (April 2013)
David Hochfelder, The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. viii + 250 pp. $55 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-4124-0747-0.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Alex Nalbach, Department of History, Baldwin-Wallace University.
Sensitive readers of David Hochfelder’s brief history of nineteenth-century American telegraphy may cringe at the title of his introduction, “Why the Telegraph Was Revolutionary,” fearing sweeping generalizations and a crude technological determinism. In fact, however, the author, a historian of technology at the State University of New York, Albany, develops nuanced analyses of the impact of telegraphy upon American life, noting...
Davidson, Paul
History of Economic Thought; Methodology
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
General, International, or Comparative
Apr 29, 2013
Published by EH.Net (April 2013)
Jesper Jespersen and Mogens Ove Madsen, editors, Keynes’s General Theory for Today: Contemporary Perspectives. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2012. x + 237 pp. $110 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-78100-951-2.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Paul Davidson, Department of Economics, University of Tennessee.
This volume presents twelve papers that relate Keynes’s General Theory to the world we live in today. The papers were delivered at a conference held in 2011 at Roskilde University in Denmark.
A sage once said “A classic is a book everyone cites but no one has read or understood.” For at least five of the authors in this volume, the General Theory is a...
Mokyr, Joel
History of Technology, including Technological Change
General or Comparative
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
General, International, or Comparative
North America
Apr 26, 2013
Published by EH.Net (April 2013)
Jan Vijg, The American Technological Challenge: Stagnation and Decline in the 21st Century. New York: Algora Publishing, 2011. 248 pp. $33 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-87586-886-8.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Joel Mokyr, Departments of Economics and History, Northwestern University.
Jan Vijg is a Dutch-born leading molecular geneticist at one of the most prestigious scientific institutions in the nation. He displays an insatiable appetite for history and technology and an intellectual curiosity that would do credit to the most interdisciplinary of economic historians. He is also well-read, thoughtful, and articulate, and asks excellent...
van der Eng, Pierre
Income and Wealth
20th Century: Pre WWII
Asia
Apr 25, 2013
Published by EH.Net (April 2013)
M.R.P. Salgado, The Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Economy, 1920 to 1938: A National Accounts Study. Colombo: Social Scientists’ Association, 2011. xvi + 323 pp. US$20 (paperback), ISBN: 978-955-1772-99-4.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Pierre van der Eng, Department of Economics, Australian National University
Compared to other Asian countries, Sri Lanka has an abundance of historical economic statistics, particularly since 1802 when Ceylon (as the country was known until 1972) came under British control. For taxation purposes, Ceylon’s British administrators intensified and improved the collection of statistical data throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Ceylon became a...
Ericson, Richard E.
Economic Planning and Policy
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
Asia
Europe
Apr 23, 2013
Published by EH.Net (April 2013)
Eugenia Belova and Valery Lazarev, Funding Loyalty: The Economics of the Communist Party. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. xi + 209 pp. $35 (paper), ISBN: 978-0-300-16436-7.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Richard E. Ericson, Department of Economics, East Carolina University.
The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) has been much studied in the historical, political science, and even economics literatures as a driving force in the Soviet system, the ruling oligarchy’s critical instrument of control. Most work has focused on the Party’s structures, rules, and roles in the Soviet system, and remained rather formal and speculative in discussing its inner workings, with...