Previous Newsletter Issues

Published by EH.Net (August 2012)

Leslie Tomory, Progressive Enlightenment: The Origins of the Gaslight Industry, 1780-1820. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012.  xi + 348 pp. $28 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-262-01675-9.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Peter M. Jones, Department of History, University of Birmingham.

This is a book designed at two levels. On the one hand Tomory, who is a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, offers us a pioneer study of the development of gas lighting on the basis of the destructive distillation of coal. On the other he provides a substantial endorsement of the argument advanced by Joel Mokyr and a number of historians of science that the Industrial Revolution was both...

Published by EH.Net (August 2012)

Response to John Murray’s review of Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress: Diseases and Economic Development -- by Robert A. McGuire and Philip R. P. Coelho.

We feel obligated to comment on John E. Murray’s review (EH.Net, May 2012, http://eh.net/book_reviews/parasites-pathogens-and-progress-diseases-and-economic-development) of our book, Parasites, Pathogens, and Progress: Diseases and Economic Development (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011) because we are puzzled with what Murray wrote.  His review inaccurately portrays the book’s contents, evidence, and hypotheses.  The review was “bad” in the sense that it neither informed the reader what the book was about nor...

Published by EH.NET (July 2011)

Hugh Rockoff, America’s Economic Way of War: War and the U.S. Economy from the Spanish-American War to the Persian Gulf War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012. xii + 357 pp. $27 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-67673-1.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Robert Whaples, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.

Although the general public and professional historians focus considerable attention on wars, economists tend to neglect them as deviations from the norm. Hugh Rockoff (Rutgers) sees this as especially ironic, because America was at war somewhere in the world during a significant portion of the twentieth century and because the basic tools of economics are...

Published by EH.Net (July 2012)

James Halteman and Edd Noell, Reckoning with Markets: Moral Reflection in Economics. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. xvi + 218 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-19-976370-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by J. Daniel Hammond, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.

Reckoning with Markets provides an overview of moral reflection in the economics literature from classical Greece to the current time. At just under 200 pages the book would seem relatively compact for a survey that covers more than two millennia. But given the paucity of moral reflection since economics became a stand-alone discipline two centuries ago, the book’s length is sufficient to the task...