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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...
Silvestre, Javier
Markets and Institutions
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
Europe
North America
Apr 19, 2013
Published by EH.Net (April 2013)
Bernard Harris, editor, Welfare and Old Age in Europe and North America: The Development of Social Insurance. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. xvii + 270 pp. £60/$99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-184893-189-3.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Javier Silvestre, Department of Economic History, University of Zaragoza.
As noted by the editor Bernard Harris (University of Southampton) in the introduction to this book, there has recently been great interest in the history of mutualism in a variety of countries. This insightful book gathers together several contributions to the literature, almost all of which originated as papers presented at specialized conferences or sessions at congresses....
Brownlee, W. Elliot
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
18th Century
19th Century
North America
Apr 18, 2013
Published by EH.Net (April 2013)
Thomas K. McCraw, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012. ix + 485 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-00692-2.
Reviewed for EH.Net by W. Elliot Brownlee, Department of History, University of California, Santa Barbara.
Thomas McCraw, the Straus Professor of Business History Emeritus at the Harvard University Business School, passed away in November 2012, the year this book appeared. Over his career of more than four decades McCraw often used biography as a tool to reveal and explain important trends and developments in the history of American business and economic life...