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Previous Newsletter Issues
Noll, Franklin
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
20th Century: Pre WWII
North America
May 9, 2012
Published by EH.Net (May 2012)
Kenneth D. Garbade, Birth of a Market: The U.S. Treasury Securities Market from the Great War to the Great Depression. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012. xii + 393 pp. $50 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-262-01637-7.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Franklin Noll, Noll Historical Consulting.
Kenneth Garbade has been doing path-breaking work for years in what I like to call the mechanics of Treasury finance. In various case studies and articles, Garbade, Senior Vice President at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, has charted the origins of the sometimes revolutionary developments in Treasury financing that we now take for granted, including book-entry securities and Treasury...
Murray, John E.
Economic Development, Growth, and Aggregate Productivity
Servitude and Slavery
Living Standards, Anthropometric History, Economic Anthropology
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
North America
May 8, 2012
Published by EH.Net (May 2012)
Robert A. McGuire and Philip R. P. Coelho, Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress: Diseases and Economic Development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. viii + 343 pp. $30 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-262-01566-0.
Reviewed for EH.Net by John E. Murray, Department of Economics, Rhodes College.
An old saw proposes that holding a hammer makes everything look like a nail. When Robert McGuire and Philip Coelho suggest (p. 5) that Jared Diamond’s bestseller (1997) should have been titled Germs, Germs, and Germs, the reader may think that the authors carry not a hammer but a microscope. Everywhere in this history, germs appear as the critical and virtually only...
Petracca, Enrico
Development of the Economic History Discipline: Historiography; Sources and Methods
General or Comparative
General, International, or Comparative
May 4, 2012
Published by EH.Net (May 2012)
Francesco Boldizzoni, The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. xi + 216 pp. $39.50 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-14400-9.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Enrico Petracca, Departments of Philosophy and Economics, University of Bologna.
In a well-known passage quoted by Carlo M. Cipolla (1991), the ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano wrote: “The historian works on the assumption that he is capable of reconstructing and understanding the events of the past. If an epistemologist manages to convince him that this is not so, the historian should change profession.” More difficult – but to a certain extent more interesting – would be...
Diamond, Arthur M.
Business History
History of Economic Thought; Methodology
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
General, International, or Comparative
Apr 19, 2012
Published by EH.Net (April 2012)
Robert F. Hébert and Albert N. Link, A History of Entrepreneurship. London: Routledge, 2009. xix + 121 pp. $115 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-77738-4.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Arthur M. Diamond, Jr., Department of Economics, University of Nebraska at Omaha.
A History of Entrepreneurship is a brief survey of what several well-known, and several less-well-known, economists have had to say about the role of the entrepreneur in the economy. Hébert and Link have collaborated on the history of entrepreneurship before. Besides some papers, their 1988 monograph is substantially the same as the current monograph and their 2006 monograph appears identical...
Smith, Roy C.
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
North America
Apr 11, 2012
Published by EH.Net (April 2012)
Vern McKinley, Financing Failure: A Century of Bailouts. Oakland, CA: Independent Institute, 2011. xvi + 381 pp. $17 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-59813-053-9.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Roy C. Smith, Stern School of Business, New York University.
This book looks deeply into the extensive history of financial bailouts in the United States, mainly focusing on the 1930s, the 1980s and the 2000s, and concludes that although there is little evidence to justify them, they continue to be repeated when financial crises appear. The author, a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute and a consultant to central banks and financial institutions, has brought to light many details from...
Huberman, Michael
Economic Planning and Policy
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
General, International, or Comparative
Apr 2, 2012
Published by EH.Net (April 2012)
Richard Pomfret, The Age of Equality: The Twentieth Century in Economic Perspective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. xi + 283 pp. $29 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-06217-7.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Michael Huberman, Department of History, Université de Montréal.
Remember the 1970s? As an undergraduate I recall taking a course in Comparative Economic Systems which dealt with different manners of organizing production and economies more broadly. We studied the interdependence of politics and economics, using as examples workers’ self-management in Yugoslavia, countervailing forces in the U.S., import-substitution policies in India, and the social market economy of...
Hartzmark, Amanda
Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Extractive Industries
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
Latin America, incl. Mexico and the Caribbean
Mar 23, 2012
Published by EH.Net (March 2012)
Gail D. Triner, Mining and the State in Brazilian Development. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2011. xvii +253 pp. $99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84893-068-1.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Amanda Hartzmark, Department of History, University of Chicago.
The scholarship on Brazilian iron and steel production is extensive. Historians have examined numerous aspects of these industries ranging from their general impact, to performance, to labor relations and to the characteristics of state-owned enterprise. Conversely, only a few works address the mining of the minerals that undergirded the iron and steel industries, such as iron ore. ...
Carruthers, Bruce G.
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
17th Century
18th Century
Europe
Mar 22, 2012
Published by EH.Net (March 2012)
Carl Wennerlind, Casualties of Credit: The English Financial Revolution, 1620-1720. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. x + 348 pp. $40 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-04738-9.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Bruce G. Carruthers, Department of Sociology, Northwestern University.
Talk about credit!! No seriously, this is a book about talk about credit. And in the period surrounding the Financial Revolution of late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century England, there was in fact a great deal of talk, debate, commentary, rhetoric, prognostication, discourse and fulmination on the topics of money and credit. The South Sea Bubble, it turns out, was preceded by a discursive...
Patterson, Perry L.
Economic Planning and Policy
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
Transport and Distribution, Energy, and Other Services
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
Europe
Mar 21, 2012
Published by EH.Net (March 2012)
Lewis H. Siegelbaum, editor, The Socialist Car: Automobility in the Eastern Bloc. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011. vii + 242 pp. $25 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8014-7738-6.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Perry L. Patterson, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.
The Socialist Car continues along a journey begun in Siegelbaum’s earlier work, Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile (2008, reviewed at http://eh.net/book_reviews/cars-comrades-life-soviet-automobile, August 2008). The result of a workshop at the Berlin School for Comparative European History in 2008, the present volume extends Siegelbaum’s research both...
Johnson, Noel
Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Extractive Industries
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
International and Domestic Trade and Relations
Markets and Institutions
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
General, International, or Comparative
Europe
Mar 20, 2012
Published by EH.Net (March 2012)
James Simpson, Creating Wine: The Emergence of a World Industry, 1840-1914. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. xxxvii + 318 pp. $39.50 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-691-13603-5.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Noel Johnson, Department of Economics, George Mason University.
After his inauguration as President of France in May of 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy received not one, but two, threatening videos from balaclava wearing terrorists. The first came from the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigade, an Islamic group upset with the new President’s association with “Zionists.” The second video came from discontented wine growers from the South of France, the ...