EH.net Book Review

Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History

Reviewer: 
Horn, Jeff

Published by EH.Net (May 2013)

Gareth Austin and Kaoru Sugihara, editors, Labour-Intensive Industrialization in Global History.  London: Routledge, 2013. xiv + 314 pp. $140 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-45552-7.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Jeff Horn, Department of History, Manhattan College.

This timely and important book gathers together a number of challenges to Anglo- and Euro-centric explanations of the process of industrialization in various states and regions around the globe.  This volume, which appears in the Routledge Explorations in Economic History series, developed out of interactions at conferences, large and small between 2001 and 2012.  Collectively, these authors seek to test historically and then extend conceptually Kaoru Sugihara’s influential argument that the East Asian path featuring labor-intensive, resource-saving industrialization is diffusing globally and that this model offers a more realistic means of improving living standards without destroying the environment in areas that have not yet industrialized (p. i).

Geographic Area: 
General, International, or Comparative
Subject: 
Industry: Manufacturing and Construction
Time period: 
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease

Author: 
Harrison, Mark
Reviewer: 
Coelho, Philip R. P.

Published by EH.Net (May 2013)

Mark Harrison, Contagion: How Commerce Has Spread Disease. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. xviii + 376 pp. $38 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-300-12357-9.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Philip R. P. Coelho, Department of Economics, Ball State University.

Contagion is a good book whose subtitle, “How Commerce Has Spread Disease,” is somewhat misleading. The author, Mark Harrison, focuses upon: 1) the political reaction to contagious diseases, 2) an extensive history of quarantines, and 3) the commercial and medical foundations of quarantines. So the book is not so much about how commerce affected the spread of disease, but, instead, how the spread of disease affected commerce through quarantines. The book has nine chapters, a preface/introduction, and a conclusion. It is well documented with extensive notes and bibliography, and a useful index.           

The book is essentially: 1) a chronology of the contagious diseases that afflicted the (western) world from the medieval period to the present; 2) an historical analysis of diseases and the diverse social and political reactions they caused; 3) the history of the development of quarantines and their spread; and 4) the political and economic usage of quarantines as both part of geopolitical statecraft and as competitive tools for producers/merchants who used them to afflict their domestic and foreign rivals. The preface has an accurate summary of Harrison’s thesis: “Each major outbreak of disease elicits a rash of hasty and opportunistic intervention intended to gain economic advantage as much as to protect health. ... Quarantines have become tariffs by another name and the disputes they are apt to generate constitute a persistent and serious threat to global trade” (p. xiii).

Geographic Area: 
General, International, or Comparative
Subject: 
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Historical Demography, including Migration
International and Domestic Trade and Relations
Time period: 
Medieval
16th Century
17th Century
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

Why Australia Prospered: The Shifting Sources of Economic Growth

Author: 
McLean, Ian W.
Reviewer: 
Harper, Ian

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 true of the author of this fine book, who taught for many years at the University of Adelaide in South Australia.

Why Australia Prospered
is the first major survey of Australia’s modern economic history to appear in many years, and it is an outstanding piece of scholarship.  Indeed, in his comment on the dust-cover, E.L. Jones, one of Australia’s internationally distinguished economic historians, confidently predicts that, “it will become the standard work on Australian economic history.”

The book spans the full gamut of Australia’s story from the settlement of the penal colony of New South Wales by the British in 1788 to current debates about the future of Australian prosperity in the wake of the China-driven resources boom.  A great strength of the book is its value to readers interested in Australia’s contemporary economic challenges as much as to those keen to understand more of what distinguishes Australia’s historical experience from that of similar “settler” economies like Canada, the United States and Argentina, with which Australia is often compared.

Geographic Area: 
Australia/New Zealand, incl. Pacific Islands
Subject: 
Economic Development, Growth, and Aggregate Productivity
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

An Economic History of Ireland since Independence

Author: 
Bielenberg, Andy
Ryan, Raymond
Reviewer: 
Barry, Frank

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 years later.  It has been a rocky road, as the title of a previous short economic history of Ireland puts it.

Geographic Area: 
Europe
Subject: 
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
Time period: 
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

German Immigration and Servitude in America, 1709-1920

Author: 
Grubb, Farley
Reviewer: 
Wegge, Simone A.

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 living in the Keystone state. Farley Grubb focuses on German immigration to the state of Pennsylvania in this book, discussing what economic factors guided their decisions, what their immigrant experiences were like, and why they resorted to servitude contracts. The book is divided into three parts, the first on German immigration which focuses on the immigrant experience and immigrant characteristics, a second part covering the servitude market and its demise, and a third part which is an epilogue. The heart of the book consists of the first two parts.

Farley Grubb is a researcher’s researcher, or a scholar’s scholar: he cares more about uncovering the empirical truth than espousing a particular economic model or popular historical theme. Grubb is brutally honest about his work, how he came to the data, what they can do and cannot do, and what is old and what is new in this book.  In another life he would make a great Atticus Finch or Detective Columbo. This is part of the reason this book was such a pleasure to read. I felt like I was getting the truth as best as he sees it, pretty or not.

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Historical Demography, including Migration
Servitude and Slavery
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII

The Telegraph in America, 1832-1920

Author: 
Hochfelder, David
Reviewer: 
Nalbach, Alex

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 that many of the changes it wrought were modest, or partial, or moderated by an array of factors. As Hochfelder writes in his conclusion, “a technology does not effect change by itself but requires mediation through existing institutions.” (p. 179)

To be sure, by eliminating the need for a physical courier of messages, telegraphy “liberated communication from transportation,” a “revolution in technical practice” (p. 3) And it did inspire some users to change their habits, organizations, and expectations in order to maximize its potential. But the high costs of telegraphy in the late nineteenth century restricted its use to only about one in sixty Americans, and many of these users refused to adjust their social preferences and political goals to suit the new technology.

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Business History
History of Technology, including Technological Change
Time period: 
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII

Keynes’s General Theory for Today: Contemporary Perspectives

Reviewer: 
Davidson, Paul

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 classic in the sense of the sage’s terminology.

Geographic Area: 
General, International, or Comparative
Subject: 
History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Time period: 
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

The American Technological Challenge: Stagnation and Decline in the 21st Century

Author: 
Vijg, Jan
Reviewer: 
Mokyr, Joel

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 questions.  The result is a thought-provoking and lively “big picture” book, ideal for undergraduate teachers who want to introduce young students without a strong background in economics and history to global history. 

Geographic Area: 
General, International, or Comparative
North America
Subject: 
History of Technology, including Technological Change
Time period: 
General or Comparative
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

The Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Economy, 1920 to 1938: A National Accounts Study

Author: 
Salgado, M.R.P.
Reviewer: 
van der Eng, Pierre

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 major producer of agricultural exports, such as coffee, tea and rubber, and the data on agricultural export production are particularly extensive. Consequently, when the country received a degree of self-government in 1931 and independence in 1948, Ceylon’s official agencies generated a good amount of economic statistics of reasonable quality compared to other less-developed countries in Asia.

Several authors, such as Snodgrass (1966), have used Ceylon’s historical economic statistics in descriptive ways to assess long-term economic change in the country. Despite their relative richness, these data were hardly aggregated in a more rigorous way, such as through a national accounting framework, to trace the phases and proximate causes of long-term economic growth in the country. This is even more surprising, given that national accounting was introduced into this developing country already in the 1940s, and that a national accounting tradition developed in Ceylon to the extent that by the late-1950s both the Department of Census and Statistics and the Bank of Ceylon (BoC) produced official national accounts separately that retrospectively reached back to 1938, respectively 1950.

Geographic Area: 
Asia
Subject: 
Income and Wealth
Time period: 
20th Century: Pre WWII

Funding Loyalty: The Economics of the Communist Party

Author: 
Belova, Eugenia
Lazarev, Valery
Reviewer: 
Ericson, Richard E.

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 most focus on its highest levels. Belova and Lazarev use heretofore unexploited archival resources – detailed financial records of regional and local Party organizations from 1938 to 1965, their discussion in the Central Committee department, and some records from the 1980s – to cast new light on these workings, in particular on the incentives of these organizations molded by their budgets and revealed in budget implementation. Their analysis is explicitly economic, focusing on costs and benefits, on the “supply” and “demand” sides of the relationships between the Party leadership, Party professionals, Party activists, and others. In ten chapters, including an introduction and conclusion, it systematically builds the case that the CPSU evolved into a largely self-interested business enterprise, still serving the state through maintaining kadre, loyal to its leadership, which spanned all the disparate regions of the Soviet Union. In doing so, this research makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of the Soviet system and how it actually functioned.

Geographic Area: 
Asia
Europe
Subject: 
Economic Planning and Policy
Time period: 
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

Welfare and Old Age in Europe and North America: The Development of Social Insurance

Reviewer: 
Silvestre, Javier

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. One of the major virtues of the book is that it offers evidence from a number of countries. Of further significance is its demonstration of the wide variety of mutual benefit societies, differing on such issues as their voluntary or compulsory affiliation, their range of provisions, and their relationships to different social groups. It is, however, the important subject of the link between mutual aid organizations and the origins and consolidation of health and welfare policy that is the common thread running through almost all of the chapters.

The perspectives and methodological approaches of the chapters vary. For example, mutualism is addressed at different geographical levels and time spans. Some chapters concentrate on economic or actuarial questions, whereas others place more emphasis on political, social and cultural concerns.

Geographic Area: 
Europe
North America
Subject: 
Markets and Institutions
Time period: 
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy

Author: 
McCraw, Thomas K.
Reviewer: 
Brownlee, W. Elliot

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. No historian working in the fields of business and economic history has done so as effectively. His last book, The Founders and Finance: How Hamilton, Gallatin, and Other Immigrants Forged a New Economy, also mobilizes biography as an interpretive tool. The result is a work that lives up to the high standards McCraw set in books like Prophets of Regulation: Charles Francis Adams, Louis D. Brandeis, James M. Landis, and Alfred E. Kahn (Harvard University Press, 1984) and Prophet of Innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and Creative Destruction (Harvard University Press, 2007).

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century

Friedrich Hayek: The Ideas and Influence of the Libertarian Economist

Author: 
Butler, Eamonn
Reviewer: 
Horwitz, Steven

Published by EH.Net (April 2013)

Eamonn Butler, Friedrich Hayek: The Ideas and Influence of the Libertarian Economist. London: Harriman House and Institute of Economic Affairs, 2012. vii + 151 pp. £15 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-857191755.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Steven Horwitz, Department of Economics, St. Lawrence University.

This short book by Eamonn Butler, Director of the Adam Smith Institute in London, is a very accessible and largely well-written “once over lightly” introduction to the work of F.A. Hayek, and not just his economics.  Though a Ph.D. in philosophy, Butler has written other books on Milton Friedman, Adam Smith, and Ludwig von Mises, and those books demonstrated a solid knowledge of all of their works, and others in the classical liberal tradition.  This book is also the work of someone very familiar with Hayek’s ideas and with a talent for translating complicated contributions in economics, political theory, psychology, and philosophy into language that the non-specialist can access. As Butler says early on, the book is written for those “who want to learn more about the case for individual freedom and free-market capitalism – and the deeply insightful case for liberalism put forward by one of its greatest exponents” (p. 2).

Geographic Area: 
General, International, or Comparative
Subject: 
History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Time period: 
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

The Rise of the National Basketball Association

Author: 
Surdam, David George
Reviewer: 
McFall, Todd A.

Published by EH.Net (April 2013)

David George Surdam, The Rise of the National Basketball Association. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2012. vii + 247 pp. $25 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-252-07866-8

Reviewed for EH.Net by Todd A. McFall, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.

The bulk of my growing up occurred in the 1980s in Indiana, a time and place in which basketball was king. Looking back, it’s easy to see why. I’m not exaggerating when I say that Indiana University coach Bob Knight could have staged a coup and become governor of the state, and not many of us would have thought twice about it. This was the era when he was at the height of his powers as a college basketball coach (NCAA championships in 1981 and 1987 and an Olympic gold medal in 1984). Every good hero needs a rival, though, and Knight had one in Purdue University coach Gene Keady, a man who acted somewhat classier and always gave the favored sons in Bloomington a run for their money but fell short in the bright lights of March Madness.

The state’s famous single-class high school tournament hadn’t yet been traded for spiritual pennies on the dollar for the multi-class system that’s used now, so in those years the “three-peat” team from Marion High School and Bedford’s Damon Bailey were taking Hoosier Hysteria to another level. Even Hollywood got in on the action when it released the movie “Hoosiers” in 1986 in order for the world to know the story of the 1954 Milan Indians, the last small, agrarian high school to win the tournament.

Finally, at the world-class level, we had the self-proclaimed Hick from French Lick, Larry Joe Bird, the three-time NBA MVP and league savior who, along with Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan revived the league from its embarrassing state in the late 1970s.

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Business History
Transport and Distribution, Energy, and Other Services
Time period: 
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

The Economics of Edwin Chadwick: Incentives Matter

Author: 
Ekelund, Robert B.
Price, Edward O.
Reviewer: 
Singleton, John D.

Published by EH.Net (April 2013)

Robert B. Ekelund, Jr. and Edward O. Price III, The Economics of Edwin Chadwick: Incentives Matter. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2012. xi + 246 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-78100-503-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by John D. Singleton, Department of Economics, Duke University.

To the extent that Edwin Chadwick is known to historians of economics, Robert Ekelund  (Professor Emeritus in Economics at Auburn University) and Edward Price (Professor Emeritus at Oklahoma State University) have helped inform this awareness through a number of articles over the past 35 years. The Economics of Edwin Chadwick: Incentives Matter collects these insights and aims to establish Chadwick’s import, both within classical economics and to modern economics. The book therefore combines exposition Chadwick’s writings and interpretation in modern terms and frameworks with comparisons to contemporary analysis and evaluation. Interested readers will discover an engaging and frequently thoughtful examination of Edwin Chadwick’s economics.

The book is organized into three parts totaling nine chapters. The first, “Who Was Edwin Chadwick?” provides an introduction and useful biographical sketch of Chadwick’s life, while the second chapter presents the book’s overriding theme: Chadwick’s modernity. Two parts, “The Regulation of Markets” and “Law, Sociology, and Economics,” structure the discussions of the numerous areas to which Chadwick applied his economic analysis. His contributions in the areas of competitive bidding for exclusive contracts, the railways, funeral and burial markets, education, business cycles, criminal justice, sanitation and others are reviewed in turn. The final chapter offers the authors’ reflections on Chadwick’s relevance for contemporary society.

Geographic Area: 
Europe
Subject: 
History of Economic Thought; Methodology
Time period: 
19th Century

Female Economic Strategies in the Modern World

Reviewer: 
Arthi, Vellore

Published by EH.Net (April 2013)

Beatrice Moring, editor, Female Economic Strategies in the Modern World. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. xiii + 201 pp. £60/$99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84893-350-7.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Vellore Arthi, Faculty of History, University of Oxford.

In Female Economic Strategies in the Modern World, Beatrice Moring and her contributors add to ongoing debates on women’s work and wellbeing, compiling varied but thematically linked historical accounts of female survival.

Moring, in her introduction, argues that women were more resilient and had greater access to diverse survival strategies than is traditionally assumed. The eight cases presented in the chapters that follow suggest, perhaps less optimistically, that women faced grim realities fraught with uncertainty. Indeed, even where they found the means to get by, women rarely enjoyed stability, comfort, and upward mobility.

While these studies hang together rather loosely, and examine women’s lives through broad-ranging sources and contexts, they reveal striking similarities in female economic strategies. The thematic patterns that emerge – for instance, reliance on interpersonal networks or the importance of housing-sharing – emphasize women’s creativity and self-sacrifice as engines of survival, and patriarchal ideology, gender-segregated labor markets, and institutional barriers to women’s autonomy as impediments to their wellbeing. Below, I provide a brief look at some of these patterns in the contexts of propertied women, working-class women, and women in today’s developing world.

Unique among the contributions to this volume, and indeed, rare in studies of women’s welfare,
Marie-Pierre Arrizabalaga and Margareth Lanzinger examine the fates of women of means.

Geographic Area: 
General, International, or Comparative
Subject: 
Household, Family and Consumer History
Social and Cultural History, including Race, Ethnicity and Gender
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution, 1757-1857

Author: 
Ray, Indrajit
Reviewer: 
Tomlinson, B. R.

Published by EH.Net (March 2013)

Indrajit Ray, Bengal Industries and the British Industrial Revolution, 1757-1857. New York: Routledge, 2011. xiii +290 pp. $145 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-59477-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by B. R. Tomlinson, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

The topic of the enforced deindustrialization of Asia as a consequence of the rise of industrializing Europe at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century is an ancient staple of global economic history.  This is especially true for stories of the interaction between Britain and India as colonial rule was being established after 1750.  The key concept of a “drain of wealth” from India to Britain was developed by Edmund Burke and other critics of British rule in the 1780s; accounts of the bones of the cotton-weavers bleaching the plains of India, and of British soldiers cutting the thumbs from Bengali weavers to prevent them competing with imports from Lancashire, still figure prominently in popular histories of the period.  Such traditional narratives have now melded into more modern histories of the “great divergence” between European and Asian economies from the late eighteenth century onwards; colonialism, capital export and unfair trading practices are now often seen as key reasons why Europe grew rich in the nineteenth century while Asia did not.

Geographic Area: 
Asia
Subject: 
Industry: Manufacturing and Construction
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century

Slaves For Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia

Author: 
Zaborney, John J.
Reviewer: 
Bourne, Jenny

Published by EH.Net (March 2013)

John J. Zaborney, Slaves For Hire: Renting Enslaved Laborers in Antebellum Virginia.  Baton Rouge, LA:  Louisiana State University Press, 2012.  xi + 218 pp. $42.50 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-8071-4512-8

Reviewed for EH.Net by Jenny Bourne, Department of Economics, Carleton College.

John Zaborney has sifted through numerous secondary and primary sources – including letters, account books, diaries, and court records – to craft a description of slave hiring in antebellum Virginia.  Although he claims to provide a “picture ... radically different from any yet advanced” (p. 5), his contribution is actually a bit more modest.  What the book does well is to offer specific examples of hiring practices; where it falls short is in making sweeping pronouncements with little backing evidence.

The book consists of seven confusingly titled chapters.   Chapter 4 (Hired Slaves, Whites, and Slavery) seems ill-distinguished from Chapter 5 (White Ladies, White Men, Masters All: Slave Hiring and White Society), for example, and Chapter 7 (Slave Hiring and Slavery) may as well not have a title.  I don’t mean to sound curmudgeonly, but the vagueness of the chapter titles signals something about the loosey-goosey nature of this book.

Throughout, Zaborney argues that the ubiquity of slave hiring in Virginia strengthened white solidarity and made the state unique (pp. 3, 5, 7, 8, 161, 165, and elsewhere).  Yet he fails to substantiate his claims.  Mightn’t free laborers in fact have resented the competition, creating schisms among whites?  Whites at the Tredegar Iron Works went out on their first strike in 1847 to protest the use of hired slaves, for instance.  And what made Virginia’s hiring practices so special?  Perhaps they were, but Zaborney doesn’t really show us.

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Servitude and Slavery
Time period: 
19th Century

Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century

Author: 
Popp, Andrew
Reviewer: 
Lubinski, Christina

Published by EH.Net (March 2013)

Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century. London: Pickering and Chatto, 2012. viii + 188 pp. $99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84893-236-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Christina Lubinski, German Historical Institute, Washington, DC.

Entrepreneurial Families is an example of micro-history at its best. Andrew Popp, professor at the University of Liverpool Management School, describes his agenda as one of “writing outwards, towards wider concerns” (p. 5) through a case study – in this case the history of John and Elizabeth Shaw who founded their wholesale hardware business around 1800.  He was able to rely on the extensive, if sometimes fragmentary, correspondence between John and Elizabeth Shaw, as well as with other family members and business partners.

Extensively utilizing over 200 private letters, a type of source he reflects on in Chapter 1, Popp manages to paint an unusual picture of the entrepreneurial couple that focuses on the individuals' personal, even interior, life by asking how they made a life for themselves and how they decided what was valuable and worthwhile to them. To this end, Popp offers the guiding concept of an “unlimited partnership” (p. 4) wherein love and marriage are viewed as intrinsically intertwined with entrepreneurship, organization building, and economic decision-making. While the firm's shift from unlimited to limited liability may give the impression that it was professionalizing and reducing the influence of individual actors and emotions, Popp argues that even today modern firms remain built on a foundation of personal ownership and management. He, thus, advocates greater reintegration of family and religious spheres, on the one hand, and business strategy and organization, on the other.

Geographic Area: 
Europe
Subject: 
Business History
Time period: 
19th Century

The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations

Author: 
Morris, Ian
Reviewer: 
Jones, Eric

Published by EH.Net (February 2013)

Ian Morris, The Measure of Civilization: How Social Development Decides the Fate of Nations.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.  xvi + 381 pp.  $30 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-691-15568-5.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Eric Jones, La Trobe University.

Ian Morris is one of the most energetic researchers around, one of the most ambitious and one of the most talented.  Not content with narrative observations on world history, he tries in this book to ground them by measuring four traits: energy capture (the output of food, fuel and raw materials), organization, the capacity to make war, and information technology.  Of the four, energy capture bulks largest in the combined result, which he calls a Social Development Index.  Data, or proxies for data, are identified and graphed at regular intervals over the entire 16,000 years since the Ice Age. 
  
Social development is defined as an amalgam of material production, organization, culture (elsewhere dismissed), and offense and defense.  Morris’s gloss is that his index charts what people have accomplished in the process of “getting things done” in the world.  It is total history, based on a colossal effort at consistent measurement.  There are further purposes, chief of which is comparing the performance of East and West, the latter being something of a double-yolked egg since it includes the Middle East.  Power, notably the West’s supposed domination of the world, is treated as going hand-in-hand with economic success.  There is a bow towards the fashionable downplaying of the West’s achievement.  Rather more elliptical is the intoning of its bleak future relative to China, as if world affairs must be a zero-sum game.

Geographic Area: 
Asia
Europe
Middle East
Subject: 
Economic Development, Growth, and Aggregate Productivity
Economywide Country Studies and Comparative History
Time period: 
General or Comparative

The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom from 1870 to 2005

Author: 
Lee, Clive
Reviewer: 
Earley, Martin

Published by EH.Net (February 2013)

Clive Lee, The Growth of Public Expenditure in the United Kingdom from 1870 to 2005. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. ix + 285 pp. £67.50/$100 (hardcover). ISBN: 978-0-230-35414-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Martin Earley, Department of History, Bristol University.

Clive Lee (emeritus professor at the University of Aberdeen) is a noted authority on the Scottish economy and on Britain and its regional economy more generally. He wrote a short discussion paper, in 2000, on “The Origins of Leviathan: The Growth of Public Expenditure and Taxation in the United Kingdom, 1880-1938.” This book is a considerable expansion of the discussion paper in 247 pages of text plus a statistical appendix of 28 pages. Lee selects from other works on the growth of public expenditure in order to describe and explain the extraordinary increase in public expenditure in the period covered. The primary thrust of his explanation for such growth appears early, “it was driven largely by demand for public services on the part of those who saw themselves as its probable beneficiaries” (p. 2) and this pressure was largely channeled through the Labour movement. 

Geographic Area: 
Europe
Subject: 
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Time period: 
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492

Author: 
Botticini, Maristella
Eckstein, Zvi
Reviewer: 
Chiswick, Carmel U.

Published by EH.Net (January 2013)

Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein, The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492.  Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012.  xvii + 323 pp.  $39.50 (hardcover) ISBN: 978-0-691-14487-0.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Carmel U. Chiswick, Department of Economics, George Washington University.

The Chosen Few by Maristella Botticini (Bocconi University) and Zvi Eckstein (Tel Aviv University) reminds us – for those who need reminding – how Cliometrics can transform our understanding of historical events. They examine Jewish history from an economic perspective with results that are both innovative and insightful. 

The book is structured around a skeleton of straightforward economic theory, fleshed out with data – quantitative and qualitative – obtained from an extraordinary array of documentary evidence.  The historical period covered is a few decades short of 1,500 years, requiring us to step back and look through a very broad lens, yet the proof offers details on everyday economic life and on the timing of events.  The economic model is simple but not simplistic, presented elegantly without bells and whistles, sophisticated but accessible to a general reader.  (Technical language is wisely confined to appendices that spell out the model mathematically and present details on statistics that are new or controversial.)  And the overall result is a new perspective that will change forever the way we understand the economic history of Jews over a broad spectrum of time and space.

Geographic Area: 
Europe
Middle East
Subject: 
Education and Human Resource Development
Time period: 
Ancient
Medieval

The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700–1917

Author: 
Mironov, Boris
Reviewer: 
Baten, Joerg

Published by EH.Net (January 2013)

Boris Mironov, The Standard of Living and Revolutions in Russia, 1700–1917.  Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2012. xxxii + 668 pp. $145 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-60854-1

Reviewed for EH.Net by Joerg Baten, Department of Economic History, University of Tuebingen.

Geographic Area: 
Europe
Subject: 
Living Standards, Anthropometric History, Economic Anthropology
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII

The Development of American Finance

Author: 
Konings, Martijn
Reviewer: 
Redenius, Scott A.

Published by EH.Net (January 2013)

Martijn Konings, The Development of American Finance.  New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.  xii + 199 pp.  $90 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-521-19525-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Scott A. Redenius, Department of Economics, Brandeis University.

As the blurb on the inside cover notes, the decline of the U.S.-led international financial order has been long predicted.  Yet, despite financial crises and the buildup of debt, the U.S. state retains significant financial flexibility and international influence.  In The Development of American Finance, Martijn Konings, Lecturer in Political Economy at the University of Sydney, looks to U.S. financial history to better understand the nature and origins of this financial order and the position of the U.S. within it.  Starting with the colonial period, Konings describes how U.S. economic conditions, business practices, and politics reshaped transplanted British financial institutions to produce a more dynamic and innovative financial system that has aggressively broadened access to credit.  Since World War II, U.S. financial practices and institutions have spread globally and bolstered the country’s position within the global financial system.

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, the Contract Clause, and the Great Depression

Author: 
Fliter, John A.
Hoff, Derek S.
Reviewer: 
Wheelock, David C.

Published by EH.Net (January 2013)

John A. Fliter and Derek S. Hoff, Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, the Contract Clause, and the Great Depression. Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2012. x + 222 pp. $20 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-7006-1872-9.

Reviewed for EH.Net by David C. Wheelock, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

John A. Fliter and Derek S. Hoff, professors of political science and history, respectively, at Kansas State University, have written an engaging history of mortgage foreclosures during the Great Depression – Fighting Foreclosure: The Blaisdell Case, the Contract Clause, and the Great Depression.  The focus of Fighting Foreclosure is on the Minnesota Mortgage Moratorium Act of 1933 and its adjudication in state and federal courts, all the way through to the U.S. Supreme Court decision that deemed the act constitutional. That decision, Home Building and Loan Association v. Blaisdell (1934), was precedent setting and, the authors argue, revealed the Court’s “increased willingness to uphold state efforts to respond to the Great Depression and augured the Court’s complete acceptance of the New Deal”; that acceptance would culminate in the Court’s later and more famous decisions, West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937) and NLRB v. Jones and Laughlin Steel (1937).

Twenty-seven states enacted mortgage foreclosure moratoriums during 1933-34 after a collapse of incomes and property values had caused farm and residential mortgage delinquencies and foreclosures to soar. Mortgage lenders argued that state foreclosure moratoriums violated the Contract Clause (Article 1, Section 10) of the U.S. Constitution. However, in the Blaisdell case, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that temporary moratoriums, enacted in national emergencies, did not violate the Clause.

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Financial Markets, Financial Institutions, and Monetary History
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Time period: 
20th Century: Pre WWII

‘Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750-1815

Author: 
Haggerty, Sheryllynne
Reviewer: 
Hoppit, Julian

Published by EH.Net (January 2013)

Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’? Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750-1815. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012. xiv + 287 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84631-817-7.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Julian Hoppit, Department of History, University College London.

In a way, this book is a behavioral study of merchants trading across the Atlantic in the era of the American, French, and early industrial revolutions. As such, it is much less concerned with prices and profits, supply and demand, ships and ports, laws and government, than with hopes and fears, conventions and customs, friendships and networks. It explores the culture of business practice, not how merchants conspicuously consumed, engaged in philanthropy, or donated to the libraries and assembly rooms of the ports they worked from.

The great strength of the book is the extent of primary research on which it rests and how that evidence is related to modern research into business practice from the fields of economics, business studies, and sociology. Throughout that relationship is developed thoughtfully and suggestively. Moreover, Haggerty also engages with a large body of secondary work by economic historians. Given such efforts, the many footnotes provide lead after lead to follow up on. This is a book to make one think, even if its conclusions are unsurprising.

Geographic Area: 
Europe
Latin America, incl. Mexico and the Caribbean
North America
Subject: 
Business History
International and Domestic Trade and Relations
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century

Mountains on the Market: Industry, the Environment, and the South

Author: 
Hall, Randal L.
Reviewer: 
Reback, Charles

Published by EH.Net (January 2013)

Randal L. Hall, Mountains on the Market: Industry, the Environment, and the South. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. vii + 288 pp. $40 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8131-3624-0.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Charles Reback, College of Business, University of South Carolina Upstate
 

In Mountains on the Market: Industry, the Environment, and the South, Randal L. Hall provides a nuanced interpretation of 250 years of Southern economic development, adding to the large literature correcting the misconception of the South as a pre-capitalist, slow-moving, agrarian society.  Using the New River valley of southwestern Virginia as a microcosm for American and Southern history, he shows us how the unrelenting pursuit of profits led to the exploitation of the region’s natural resources despite its geographic isolation, lack of transportation infrastructure, and small population.  He details the rise of industrial capitalism in the mid eighteenth century, its pinnacle in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, its decline in the mid to late twentieth, and finally the recent rise of the service economy.  Additionally, he details how from the very beginning wealthy Southern planters invested in industries and locations far from their agrarian roots.

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Urban and Regional History
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm

Author: 
James, Harold
Reviewer: 
Guinnane, Timothy W.

Published by EH.Net (January 2013)

Harold James, Krupp: A History of the Legendary German Firm. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012. vii + 360 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-691-15340-7.

Reviewed by for EH.Net by Timothy W. Guinnane, Department of Economics, Yale University.

 
Harold James’ subtitle places this work in the genre of business history, but it is also the story of one of the most important families in modern German history. Any good history of the Krupp family has to be a history of the Krupp firm and vice versa. One can argue that the firm’s success depended on the personalities of individual family members, as well as successful dynastic politics. At the same time, control of the Krupp firm meant the Krupp family could never be just another wealthy family.

The first three generations of Krupps created a huge firm responsible for several technical innovations in steel and related industries. The firm helped establish German industry’s reputation for technical prowess and low costs, and Krupp exports were part of the export success that shaped the German economy in the late nineteenth century. The firm also pioneered innovations in labor management. Krupp built housing, subsidized education, and supported consumer cooperatives for his workers, among other “progressive” measures. These policies reflected an appreciation that the core of the firm’s success was a cadre of workers and managers whose skills would be rewarded by other firms, and who might take production secrets with them.
 

Geographic Area: 
Europe
Subject: 
Business History
Time period: 
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII
20th Century: WWII and post-WWII

Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South

Author: 
Giesen, James C.
Reviewer: 
Hall, Randal L.

Published by EH.Net (January 2013)

James C. Giesen, Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. xvi + 221 pp. $40 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0-226-29287-8.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Randal L. Hall, Department of History, Rice University.

James C. Giesen, an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, has completed a challenging task in Boll Weevil Blues: Cotton, Myth, and Power in the American South. He has written the first monograph on the boll weevil in the U.S. South, and he succeeds in exploring this long-snouted insect’s effects on both the economy and the culture of the region from the 1890s to about 1930.

Long present along the Rio Grande, the boll weevil caused major problems in the United States only when large-scale cotton production in Texas extended far enough south to offer the beetle access to a nutritious pathway from Texas to Virginia. The female weevil punctures immature cotton bolls with its probiscis and then lays an egg inside, ending the cotton fiber’s development. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) identified the boll weevil as a pest in Texas in 1894. It slowly made its way across the South, destroying vast amounts of cotton in each state along the way. The weevil reached Louisiana in 1903 and Georgia in 1915. Giesen explains succinctly the popular image of this infestation’s agroecological effect: “Newspapers, entomologists, family storytellers, traveling country and blues singers, tenant farmers, and planters have presented the boll weevil as a wrecker of plantation agriculture, an unstoppable natural disaster that swept through the South unchecked and brought ruin to its people” (p. xi).

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Agriculture, Natural Resources, and Extractive Industries
Time period: 
19th Century
20th Century: Pre WWII

Buying America from the Indians: Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights

Author: 
Watson, Blake A.
Reviewer: 
Wishart, David M.

Published by EH.Net (December 2012)

Blake A. Watson, Buying America from the Indians:  Johnson v. McIntosh and the History of Native Land Rights.  Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2012. xvi + 494 pp.  $45 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-8061-4244-9.

Reviewed for EH.Net by David M. Wishart, Department of Economics, Wittenberg University.

Blake Watson, formerly an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice, and currently a Professor of Law at the University of Dayton, has written an erudite and provocative history of land sales by the Illinois and Piankeshaw Indians in 1773 and 1775 that encompassed large of portions of present-day central and southern Indiana and Illinois to land speculators who were never able to gain clear title.  The ultimate failure of their efforts to secure a deed to the land came in the context of the case argued before the Marshall court in 1823, Johnson v. McIntosh.  The case is an example of a “legal fiction” in which the plaintiff, Johnson, represented those who still had an interest in validating the original land sales as shareholders of the United Illinois and Wabash Land Companies, most of the original buyers having passed away years earlier. The defendant, William McIntosh, was intended to represent those who had purchased land ceded variously by bands of the Illinois Indians and the Piankeshaws (also known as the Wabash) to the United States government by treaties concluded in 1803, 1805, and 1818 that, according to the plaintiff, had already been sold in 1775.
 

Geographic Area: 
North America
Subject: 
Government, Law and Regulation, Public Finance
Time period: 
18th Century
19th Century
Syndicate content