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Garcia-Swartz, Daniel D.
Business History
History of Technology, including Technological Change
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
General, International, or Comparative
Dec 21, 2012
Published by EH.Net (December 2012)
James W. Cortada, The Digital Flood: The Diffusion of Information Technology across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xix + 789 pp. $99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-19-992155-3.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz, Compass Lexecon.
In The Digital Flood, James Cortada, the author of two dozen books on the history and management of information technologies, undertakes an incredibly ambitious project: to analyze the international diffusion and deployment of IT from the 1940s through the late 1990s. The project is mind-boggling not only because of its geographical scope – the book has chapters on the U.S.,...
Logan, Trevon D.
Historical Demography, including Migration
General or Comparative
General, International, or Comparative
Dec 20, 2012
Published by EH.Net (December 2012)
Louis P. Cain and Donald G. Paterson, The Children of Eve: Population and Well-being in History. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012. xix + 391 pp. $60 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-4443-3690-0.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Trevon D. Logan, Department of Economics, Ohio State University.
Louis Cain of Loyola University Chicago and Donald Paterson of the University of British Columbia have an ambitious agenda, to tell the population and health histories of the world in one volume. Along the way they cover a great deal of health, medicine, economics and anthropology in describing how homo sapiens managed to grow in number, average size, and longevity over the last several...
Pearson, Robin
Business History
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
General, International, or Comparative
Dec 19, 2012
Published by EH.Net (December 2012)
Tilmann J. Röder, From Industrial to Legal Standardization, 1871-1914: Transnational Insurance Law and the Great San Francisco Earthquake. Leiden: Martinus Nijhoff, 2011. xviii + 350 pp. €99/$136 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-90-04-21237-4.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Robin Pearson, Department of History, University of Hull.
Tilmann Röder of the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg currently works on constitutional law projects in countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq. His early research, however, was on the development of contractual forms in transnational insurance, a topic rarely touched upon by historians. This unusual and...
Hilt, Eric
Business History
18th Century
19th Century
Europe
Dec 12, 2012
Published by EH.Net (December 2012)
Mark Freeman, Robin Pearson and James Taylor, Shareholder Democracies? Corporate Governance in Britain and Ireland before 1850. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xiv + 339 pp. $65 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-226-26187-4.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Eric Hilt, Department of Economics, Wellesley College.
Throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the British legal and political systems posed problems for entrepreneurs seeking to establish large firms. Acts of incorporation were difficult to obtain, so multi-owner firms were often organized in the legal forms of trusts or partnerships, which were not always well suited to the needs of...
Schnurmann, Claudia
International and Domestic Trade and Relations
17th Century
18th Century
Europe
Latin America, incl. Mexico and the Caribbean
North America
Dec 11, 2012
Published by EH.Net (December 2012)
Christian J. Koot, Empire at the Periphery: British Colonists, Anglo-Dutch Trade, and the Development of the British Atlantic, 1621-1713. New York: New York University Press, 2011. xv + 312 pp. $39 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-8147-4883-1.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Claudia Schnurmann, Department of History, University of Hamburg.
Christian Koot’s aim in this study is to enrich our understanding of the interrelations between English-Dutch Atlantic trade, the economic behavior of English settlers in North America, and English politics between 1621 and 1713. He hopes to achieve this by dealing in chronological order with three phases of English-Dutch trade: “Beginnings, 1620-1659...
Hands, D. Wade
History of Economic Thought; Methodology
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
Europe
Dec 5, 2012
Published by EH.Net (December 2012)
Susan Howson, Lionel Robbins. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. xiii + 1161 pp. $135 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-107-00244-9.
Reviewed for EH.Net by D. Wade Hands, Department of Economics, University of Puget Sound.
Susan Howson's biography is, and I suggest will remain, the definitive work on the life of Lionel Robbins. At over 1,100 pages it is obviously an extremely detailed biography, but the word "detailed" seriously understates the close-focus character of Howson's investigation. It is a committee meeting by committee meeting, white paper by white paper, and trip by trip, documentation of Robbins's public and professional life. It is an overwhelming research...
Wood, John H.
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
Europe
Dec 4, 2012
Published by EH.Net (December 2012)
Forrest Capie and Geoffrey Wood, Money over Two Centuries: Selected Topics in British Monetary History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. x + 367 pp. $125 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-19-965512-0.
Reviewed for EH.Net by John H. Wood, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.
Two eminent professors emeriti of economic history at City University London have collected some of their published work over three decades into a convenient and useful analytical account of British monetary experiences the last two centuries. Competing hypotheses of connections between money, inflation, central banking, and financial stability are examined to help us understand twenty-...
Rockoff, Hugh
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Macroeconomics and Fluctuations
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
North America
Dec 3, 2012
Published by EH.Net (December 2012)
Robert L. Hetzel, The Great Recession: Market Failure or Policy Failure? New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii+ 384 pp. $50 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-107-01188-5.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Hugh Rockoff, Department of Economics, Rutgers University.
Two standard narratives about the causes of the crisis of 2008 have begun to take shape. A liberal narrative stresses the spread of a conservative free-market ideology, financial market deregulation, the subprime mortgage mania, and the inevitable bursting of the bubble. A conservative narrative stresses the low-interest policy of the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan, the decisions by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to...
Neal, Larry
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
General, International, or Comparative
Nov 29, 2012
Published by EH.Net (November 2012)
Geoffrey Wood, Terence C. Mills and Nicholas Crafts, editors, Monetary and Banking History: Essays in Honour of Forrest Capie. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2011. xxii + 316 pp. $140 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-415-45146-8.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Larry Neal, Department of Economics, University of Illinois.
As Forrest Capie was wrapping up his official history of the Bank of England covering the period 1950s to 1979, a book already a classic in the literature, he was honored at a conference held at the Bank of England organized by his friend, frequent co-author, and former colleague at the Cass Business School in the City University, Geoffrey Wood. Geoffrey solicited...
Margo, Robert A.
Economic Development, Growth, and Aggregate Productivity
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Historical Geography
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII
North America
Nov 27, 2012
Published by EH.Net (November 2012)
Daniel Berkowitz and Karen B. Clay, The Evolution of a Nation: How Geography and Law Shaped the American States. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012. x + 234 pp. $39.50 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-13604-2.
Reviewed for EH.Net by Robert A. Margo, Department of Economics, Boston University.
Empirical work on institutions arguably qualifies as one of the most active areas of research in economic history today. Most of this activity takes its cues from Stan Engerman and the late Ken Sokoloff’s work on endowments and institutions, or from Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson’s work on colonial origins. The majority of recent research...