EH.net Book Review

Published by EH.NET (June 2011)

David E. Bernstein, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. viii + 194 pp. $45 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-226-04353-1.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Scott Douglas Gerber, College of Law, Ohio Northern University.

David E. Bernstein, Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law, has long been regarded as the nation’s leading authority on the much-maligned 1905 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Lochner v. New York.  His new book, Rehabilitating Lochner: Defending Individual Rights against Progressive Reform, is the culmination of his years of scholarship on the case. I give Bernstein’s book the highest compliment one scholar can pay to the work of another: I learned a lot from reading it. Indeed, after finishing Bernstein’s book I will no longer think of Lochner the way I used to -- as the apogee of the Supreme Court’s activist defense of the capital class -- and I will certainly teach the case differently than I have in the past.

Rehabilitating Lochner is intellectual history in its highest form. Bernstein states in the Introduction that “Lochner is likely the most disreputable case in modern constitutional law discourse” (p. 1). He adds that “What history can tell us is that the standard account of the rise, fall, and influence of the liberty of contract doctrine is inaccurate, unfair, and anachronistic” (p. 6). He devotes the remainder of his book to substantiating this remarkable claim, and he succeeds marvelously.

Published by EH.NET (June 2011)

Noel Maurer and Carlos Yu, The Big Ditch: How America Took, Ran, and Ultimately Gave Away the Panama Canal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.  xv + 420 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-691-14738-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Leticia Arroyo Abad, Department of Economics, Middlebury College.

In The Big Ditch, Maurer and Yu offer an exciting analysis of the creation and development of one of the masterpieces of engineering: the Big Ditch, i.e. Panama Canal. Until now, the literature fell into two dominant views: the Canal as a great waterway or as a reminder of American imperialism. By reconciling both perspectives, the authors successfully show that this imperialistic act was indeed profitable while exploring the crucial factors to the abandonment of this imperial operation. Integrating thorough quantitative evidence with engaging historical narrative, this work is a crucial contribution to the new political economy of Latin America and to the economics of colonialism.

The dimensions of the Panama Canal project are hard to grasp. Fortunately, the authors successfully portray the immensity of this enterprise. This undertaking effectively took eighteen years to complete, employed at its peak over 45,000 employees in a tiered system, displaced around 12,000 inhabitants of the Chagres basin, and dug out millions of metric tons of dirt. All for a tag price of 9 billion dollars (2009 prices).

Published by EH.NET (June 2011)

Bas van Bavel, Manors and Markets: Economy and Society in the Low Countries, 500-1600.  New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.  xiv + 492 pp. $140 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-19-927866-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Anne E.C. McCants, Department of History, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Published by EH.NET (June 2011)

Stephen Broadberry and Kevin O’Rourke, editors, The Cambridge Economic History of Modern Europe, Volume 1: 1700-1870 and Volume 2: 1870 to the Present.  Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Volume 1: xiv + 329 pp. $40 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-70838-8. Volume 2: xviii + 468 pp. $40 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-521-70839-5,

Reviewed for EH.Net by Claude Diebolt, French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), University of Strasbourg.

This collective volume, edited by Stephen Broadberry and Kevin O’Rourke, is a success. It is a scientific success, of course, but also a didactic performance. From an academic point of view, through its thematic organization, this book provides a major innovation. It surpasses traditional monographs in European economic history, which have too often exclusively focused on presenting national economies one by one.

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Published by EH.NET (June 2011)

Ricardo D. Salvatore, John H. Coatsworth and Amílcar E. Challú, editors, Living Standards in Latin American History: Height, Welfare, and Development, 1750-2000. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010. iii + 313 pp. $30 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-674-05585-8.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Richard Salvucci, Department of Economics, Trinity University.

In 1999, the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies (DRCLAS) at Harvard University published a milestone work in the field of economic history, Latin America and the World Economy Since 1800.  I reviewed the book for EH.Net and concluded something to the effect that if you wanted to know where the action was in Latin American history, you had come to the right place. I hate to sound like a broken record, but I can’t help thinking much the same about this volume. Sixty percent of the book (measured crudely, by page count) is still about Argentina, Brazil and Mexico – and whatever “Latin America” is, it isn’t that. However, its authors are an altogether different group and part of a new generation of scholars, which is only fitting. While it is true that there were historians, especially of the “Berkeley School,” who had concerned themselves with historical patterns of indigenous diet and nutrition in Mexico under the stress of European colonization, when Woodrow Borah died in 1999, his publications were still regarded as the best work on the subject.  The highest compliment I can pay to these authors is that Borah would have admired and appreciated their efforts as a decisive advance. For like its predecessor, Living Standards in Latin American History is pioneering work.

Mexico    

Published by EH.NET (May 2011)

Lorman A. Ratner, Paula T. Kaufman and Dwight L. Teeter, Jr., Paradoxes of Prosperity: Wealth-Seeking versus Christian Values in Pre-Civil War America. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2009. xiii +148 pp. $40 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-252-03453-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Donald E. Frey, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.

This short book looks at popular publications in the 1850s to document middle-class reaction to the tension between economic growth and American republican, Christian values; it adds to the growing scholarly interest in issues other than slavery during the antebellum period. The chapters cover newspapers, literary and general magazines, as well as business publications, novels, and travelogues. They also juxtapose northern and southern writers, and male and female authors. In recent years, Stewart Davenport’s Friends of the Unrighteous Mammon (see review on EH.Net) has dealt with the clergy’s response to the same conflict. See also the EH.Net review of Mark Noll, editor, God and Mammon, which sees more moral continuity as Protestants participated in the new economy.

Published by EH.NET (May 2011)

Ross B. Emmett, editor, The Elgar Companion to the Chicago School of Economics. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2010. xi + 350 pp. $200 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84064-874-4

Reviewed for EH.Net by Arthur M. Diamond, Jr., Department of Economics, University of Nebraska at Omaha.

The Chicago School of economics has been described in a variety of ways.  In the current volume, a useful description is given in the essay of Bruce Kaufman who emphasizes “... a deep commitment to rigorous scholarship and open academic debate, an uncompromising belief in the usefulness and insight of neoclassical price theory, and a normative position that favors and promotes economic liberalism and free markets”  (p. 133).

The volume has been edited by Ross Emmett, a Michigan State historian of economic thought whose previous research has focused on early Chicago economist Frank Knight.  About two-thirds of the volume consists of fifteen “Essays on the Chicago School” in Part 1.  The remaining third of the volume, in Part 2, consists of nineteen brief profiles of “Some Chicago Economists.” 

The only essay that attempts any kind of broad overview of the volume is Emmett’s four-page introduction.  His essay briefly establishes the historical context of the Chicago School and points us toward some of the earlier literature in the history of economic thought that discusses the Chicago School.  But it does not attempt to summarize the diverse messages of the essays of the volume, let alone try to synthesize these messages into any overarching conclusions.

Published by EH.NET (April 2011)

Robert Leeson, editor, Canadian Policy Debates and Case Studies in Honour of David Laidler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. xiii + 234 pp. $100 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-230-23734-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Herb Emery, Department of Economics, University of Calgary.

This Festschrift volume honoring David Laidler presents a collection of papers by prominent economists and policy analysts focused primarily on Canadian policy issues.  David Laidler is one of Canada’s most influential monetary economists. As noted throughout the volume, Laidler’s academic publications and policy commentaries influenced decisions and operations of the Bank of Canada, most notably the Bank’s adoption of inflation targeting in the early 1990s, and other areas of governance in Canada.  Reading the volume, it is difficult to not be impressed by the fact that two previous Bank of Canada Governors (Gordon Thiessen and David Dodge) pay tribute to Laidler in the Preface to the volume and a third, John Crow, provides a discussion of a chapter in which he provides praise of the highest order when he states that “David is also a bit of an economic historian.”

Published by EH.NET (April 2011)

André Steiner, The Plans That Failed: An Economic History of the GDR. (Translated from German by Ewald Osers.) New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. xiii + 228 pp. $60 (hardback), ISBN: 978-1-84545-748-8.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Maria Polyakova, Department of Economics, M.I.T.

In 1945, the Third Reich unconditionally surrendered to the Allied forces of Great Britain, France, the United States and the Soviet Union. The Allies occupied Germany in the same year, splitting the country and its capital into four Zones of Occupation. The northeastern part of modern Germany became the Soviet Occupation Zone governed by the Soviet Military Administration. In 1949, four years after the end of the War, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) proclaimed the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), also known as East Germany, in place of the Soviet Zone. The political history of East Germany has had a number of academic and broad audience publications devoted to it. Detailed analysis of its economic history, on the other hand, has been surprisingly scarce in comparison.

Published by EH.NET (March 2011)

Alan C. Swedlund, Shadows in the Valley: A Cultural History of Illness, Death, and Loss in New England, 1840-1916.  Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.  xiii + 246 pp. $29 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-55849-720-7

Reviewed for EH.NET by John E. Murray, Department of Economics, University of Toledo.

This is a book about sickness and death; not so much about quantitative measures of death and illness rates, but about the setting thereof.  Its geographic focus is limited to Franklin County in central Massachusetts, and its towns of Shelburne, Greenfield, Deerfield, and Montague.  Alan Swedlund, an anthropologist at the University of Massachusetts, has been studying the subject of disease and death in this area for decades, so the book serves to sum up nearly a career’s worth of insights into a very broad topic.  Tables and figures that might appeal to more quantitatively oriented readers appear in an appendix.  Their value for the narrative is that the author can point back to his previously published (in article form) quantitative studies to note which patterns were representative and which unusual but still noteworthy.  The book’s points then are both reliable and interesting.

Due to its universality and finality, at least in physical terms, death is a fascinating subject.  Swedlund’s focus on cultural practices and beliefs that surround death reinforces what we can learn from mortality rates and life tables; combined with the detailed explication of these cultural practices, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

Published by EH.Net (March 2011)

John Majewski, Modernizing a Slave Economy: The Economic Vision of the Confederate Nation. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiii + 240 pp. $40 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-8078-3251-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Susanna Delfino, Department of European Research, University of Genoa, Italy.

“A Modern Economy without Modernization” -- A Southern Paradox

Scholarship of the past few decades has amply documented that, from the late 1700s, capitalist-oriented entrepreneurial and business forces were at work in the southern states, and that their strength and visibility increased during the first half of the following century. Defining the contours of a univocal southern economic vision in the antebellum era has, however, proved extremely challenging, exposing all the ambiguities and inconsistencies immanent in the thinking of elite southerners, from political economists to politicians, from planters to manufacturers, and to businessmen in general. Even the staunchest agrarians, in fact, did not fail to appreciate the desirability of an albeit moderate industrial development. The seeming contradictions, which stemmed from their effort to reconcile economic development -- including industrialization -- with the preservation and protection of the institution of slavery, resulted in the shaping of a distinctively southern idea of economic modernity which rejected the tenets of modernization as commonly understood in the North and Europe as well by the mid-nineteenth century.[1]                

Published by EH.Net (March 2011)

David E. Nye, When the Lights Went Out: A History of Blackouts in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010.  x + 292 pp. $28 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-262-01374-1.

Reviewed for EH.Net by John Neufeld, Department of Economics, University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

David Nye, Professor of American History at the University of Southern Denmark, has previously (in his well-received Electrifying America) discussed the enormous impact electrification has had on all aspects of American life. In this book he tackles the issue of what happens when electricity has been temporarily cut off. Nye’s very readable writing style enables him to target an audience beyond academia; indeed, his previous work has been reviewed by both the New York Times and the Washington Post. In this book, Nye uses an even-handed approach that tries to present both sides of any argument. This is often very well done -- and well-served by his deep knowledge of the ways in which electricity structures modern life and in his use of psychological and sociological theory to explain human behavior. He is weaker on issues involving economics and technology. Although not at all polemical, his final conclusion is unrealistic and does not do justice to the work that precedes it.

Nye begins by tracing the energy revolution that began in the eighteenth century and led to the development of large electrical grids. The earliest electrical utilities covered small areas and were not interconnected; outages were frequent but confined to small areas. The development of hyper-complex electrical grids covering large geographical areas not only made large-scale blackouts possible; he argues they are inevitable. Although small-scale outages are still common, it is the loss of electricity over large areas, their causes, and the reactions to them, that interest Nye.

Published by EH.Net (February 2011)

Deirdre N. McCloskey, Bourgeois Dignity: Why Economics Can’t Explain the Modern World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xvi + 571 pp. $35 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-226-55665-9.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Jared Rubin, Department of Economics, California State University, Fullerton.

Bourgeois Dignity, the second part of Deirdre McCloskey’s (University of Illinois, Chicago) four-volume magnum opus, is a daring, innovative, extremely well-researched, and important addition to “big think” economic history. McCloskey provides a new answer to the question, “Why did Western incomes grow from an average of $3 a day prior to the Industrial Revolution to anywhere between 16 and 100 times that amount today while the rest of the world (for the most part) lags behind?” McCloskey suggests, as in the first volume (Bourgeois Virtues) that it was the changing of attitudes and rhetoric towards the bourgeois, markets, and innovation -- first in northwestern Europe and then in the rest of Europe -- that heralded the changes in incentives and production necessary for the emergence of the modern economy.

Published by EH.Net (February 2011)

Helen J. Paul, The South Sea Bubble: An Economic History of Its Origins and Consequences. London: Routledge, 2011. xx + 155 pp. $145 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-415-46973-9.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Anne L. Murphy, Department of History, University of Hertfordshire.

As Helen Paul argues in the introduction to this book, the South Sea Bubble has become a byword for human folly. Despite the passing of nearly three hundred years, it is still cited by journalists seeking examples to prove the ubiquity of irrationality and fraud in financial markets. Popular histories of the Bubble too, present a world momentarily driven mad by the possibilities and disappointments of speculation. Perhaps in reaction to this characterization, when economists and economic historians consider the Bubble, they often view it a test case for the efficiency, or otherwise, of early modern financial markets. The consequence has been that the real history of the South Sea Company and the scheme of 1720 has disappeared behind disagreements about the nature of bubbles, how they blow up, why they burst and whether they can ever be judged as rational.