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Previous Newsletter Issues
Ó Gráda, Cormac
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Household, Family and Consumer History
Markets and Institutions
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
16th Century
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
Europe
Feb 16, 2011
Published by EH.Net (February 2011)
John Bohstedt, The Politics of Provisions: Food Riots, Moral Economy, and Market Transition in England, c. 1500-1850. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Books, 2010. x + 312 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-7546-6581-6.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Cormac Ó Gráda, Department of Economics, University College Dublin.
One of the classic set pieces in Alessandro Manzoni’s I Promessi Sposi is a famine scene set in seventeenth-century Milan, in which the hapless hero, Renzo, barely escapes with his life during a food riot. Manzoni was a fan of the Enlightenment and of Adam Smith, so his account of Renzo’s folly is implicitly critical of those who would interfere...
Leunig, Tim
Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Extractive Industries
Economic Development, Growth, and Aggregate Productivity
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
Industry: Manufacturing and Construction
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
Europe
Feb 15, 2011
Published by EH.Net (February 2011)
Robert C. Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 331 pp. $28 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-68785-0.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Tim Leunig, Department of Economic History, London School of Economics.
We all teach topics that are outside the narrow confines of our own research. Textbooks are designed to fill these gaps, but textbooks are balanced by design, and that is not what academia is about. Think of Crafts and McCloskey on whether Victorian Britain failed, or Williamson and Feinstein on inequality. The nature of academia is to argue, and getting that over to students -- who have been brought...
Ağır, Seven
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
17th Century
18th Century
Europe
Middle East
Feb 14, 2011
Published by EH.NET (February 2011)
Gabriel Piterberg, Teofilo F. Ruiz and Geoffrey Symcox, editors, Braudel Revisited: The Mediterranean World, 1600-1800. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010. vi + 281 pp. $65 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-4426-4133-4.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Seven Ağır, Economic History Program, Yale University.
“Fernand Braudel’s monumental study of the Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II is undoubtedly one of the most important historical works written during the past century” (p. 3). This sentence summarizes the editors’ motive to revisit Braudel’s Mediterranean after the “linguistic turn” in historiography. Piterberg, Ruiz and Symcox organized a series of conferences (...
Mayer, Thomas
History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Europe
North America
Feb 8, 2011
Published by EH.NET (February 2011)
Robert Leeson, editor, The Anti-Keynesian Tradition. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. ix + 212 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-4039-4959-2.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Thomas Mayer, Department of Economics, University of California –Davis.
This book is inappropriately titled. It is not an exposition of the anti-Keynesian tradition since it ignores the work of many major contributors to this tradition, such as Karl Brunner, James Buchanan, Friedrich Hayek and Allen Meltzer. While two of the essays discuss Friedman’s work, they deal with his 1953 methodological essay and with his early (1941-43), essentially Keynesian, views. Moreover, the book contains only...
Engen, Darel Tai
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Ancient
Europe
Feb 7, 2011
Published by EH.Net (February 2011)
William V. Harris, editor, The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. xiv + 330 pp. $45 (paper), ISBN: 978-0-19-958671-4.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Darel Tai Engen, Department of History, California State University San Marcos.
Showing that the recent resurgence of interest in the economies of ancient Greece and Rome is still going strong,[1] Oxford University Press has now made available in paperback William V. Harris’ excellent 2008 edited volume, The Monetary Systems of the Greeks and Romans. The collection is the product of an international conference held under the auspices of the Center for the...
Daddi Addoun, Yacine
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
International and Domestic Trade and Relations
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
19th Century
Africa
Middle East
Feb 3, 2011
Published by EH.NET (February 2011)
Ghislaine Lydon, On Trans-Saharan Trails: Islamic Law, Trade Networks, and Cross-Cultural Exchange in Nineteenth-Century Western Africa. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xxviii + 468 pp. $95 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-521-88724-3.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Yacine Daddi Addoun, Harriet Tubman Institute for Research on the Global Migrations of African Peoples, York University.
In a period when the Sahara is mentioned only in relation to terrorism, it is a breath of fresh air to read Ghislaine Lydon's On Trans-Saharan Trails. The author uses the unfortunate succession of deaths, between 1848 and 1850, of four Wād Nūn network traders, who were operating...
Coffman, D’Maris
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
17th Century
Europe
Feb 2, 2011
Published by EH.NET (February 2011)
Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution. New Haven, Yale University Press, 2009. xiii + 647 pp. $40 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-300-11547-5.
Reviewed for EH.Net by D’Maris Coffman, Newnham College, University of Cambridge.
As Steve Pincus tells us in the introduction and at key moments in the narrative, his account of the events of 1688/89 in Britain was a decade in the making. Having heard several of the book’s chapters before as seminars, lectures, or conference papers, this reviewer had looked forward to its publication in the hopes that it would answer some of her own questions about political economy, foreign policy and ecclesiastical politics in the late...
Burnette, Joyce
Household, Family and Consumer History
Labor and Employment History
18th Century
19th Century
Europe
Feb 1, 2011
Published by EH.NET (February 2011)
Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi + 410 pp. $35 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-73623-7.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Joyce Burnette, Department of Economics, Wabash College.
Labours Lost examines the concept and material reality of domestic service from 1760 to 1830. One important question is who counted as a domestic servant. Steedman defines her topic as “waged domestic work” (p. 31) which excludes both unpaid family work and servants hired for agriculture or industry. However, in practice servants often engaged in multiple activities, making a...
McClenahan, William M.
Business History
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
20th Century: Pre WWII
North America
Jan 31, 2011
Published by EH.NET (January 2011)
Gerald Berk, Louis D. Brandeis and the Making of Regulated Competition, 1900-1932. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xi + 282 pp. $85 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-521-42596-4.
Reviewed for EH.Net by William M. McClenahan Jr., Department of Logistics, Business and Public Policy, University of Maryland.
Political scientist Gerald Berk continues themes he explored in Alternative Tracks (1997) about diverse possibilities for the structure of American capitalism in the post-Civil War period and how the regulatory schemes of the Interstate Commerce Commission resisted the mechanisms that would have made such alternative schemes viable. In Louis D...
Tuttle, Carolyn
Labor and Employment History
18th Century
19th Century
Europe
Jan 27, 2011
Published by EH.NET (January 2011)
Jane Humphries, Childhood and Child Labour in the British Industrial Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xiii + 439 pp. $99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-521-84756-8.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Carolyn Tuttle, Department of Economics and Business, Lake Forest College.
Jane Humphries of All Souls College at Oxford University masterfully provides a unique look into childhood and child labor during the British Industrial Revolution that has, up until this point, been largely neglected in the literature. Promoting the view that Britain experienced a “child-intensive industrial revolution” (p. 207) she places child labor into the private and social...