EH.net Book Review

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).

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.
 

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.