Published by EH.NET (September 2010)

Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, editors, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. vi + 469 pp. $55 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-674-03318-4.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Bruce Caldwell, Department of Economics, Duke University.

In April, 1947 thirty-six liberals from Europe and the United States gathered in Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland for a ten-day conference convened by the Austrian economist Friedrich A. Hayek.  Discussion centered on reconstituting, elaborating, and defending the general principles of a new liberal economic, social and political order in an age in which liberalism had become a dirty word. The Mont Pèlerin Society was born.  Fifty years later, the Soviet bloc had disintegrated and “neoliberalism” was apparently rapidly emerging as the reigning economic and political philosophy worldwide. What did the intellectual movement that was launched in 1947 have to do with the change? That question motivates the collection of papers in The Road from Mont Pèlerin. 

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

Catherine Mills, Regulating Health and Safety in the British Mining Industries, 1800-1914. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. xxvi + 284 pp. $115 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-7546-6087-3.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Donald Rogers, Department of History, Central Connecticut State University. 

Catherine Mills, lecturer at Stirling University, England, has meticulously chronicled the legislative and bureaucratic growth of British government’s intervention into mine safety and health during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.  Her book draws upon a large corpus of Parliamentary papers and annual mine inspection reports, as well as newspapers, periodicals, archives and a broad reading of the historical secondary literature.  Importantly, it examines both the coal and the metal mining sectors, constructing its narrative in line with recent theories of Victorian-era British state development. [1]  Specifically, Mills revises historian Oliver MacDonagh’s notable 1958 model, arguing that British regulatory expansion was not simply a logical, if “phased” response to industrialization (pp. 4-5), but an “accumulative” and “ad hoc” (p. 126) process shaped by political, technological and economic factors.

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

James L. Hunt, Relationship Banker: Eugene W. Stetson, Wall Street, and American Business, 1916-1959. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2009.  xxv + 386 pp. $35 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-86554-915-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by J. Peter Ferderer, Department of Economics, Macalester College.

In August 1919, after months of cloak-and-dagger intrigue, the Coca-Cola Company was taken public in what was at that time the largest business transaction in the history of the South.  The deal was brokered by Eugene W. Stetson of Guaranty Trust Company of New York and involved the sale of $25 million of stock, much of which was purchased at bargain prices by a small group of bank insiders.  Importantly, none of the shares had voting rights.  Rather, control over Coca-Cola rested in a three-person voting trust composed of the company’s president, the owner of a small Atlanta bank which bought a large stake (Ernest Woodruff) and Eugene Stetson.  At the time of his death in 1959, Stetson was the company’s longest serving board member.   

James L. Hunt, Associate Professor of Law at the Eugene W. Stetson School of Business and Economics and Walter F. George School of Law at Mercer University, has written an excellent biography of Eugene Stetson, full of illuminating stories such as these.  The more ambitious objective of the book is to shed light on the practice of relationship banking during the first half of the twentieth century.  Hunt contends that scholars have not fully appreciated the role of the “human element” in banking history and attempts to address this shortcoming by exploring Stetson’s career.

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

Marc Egnal, Clash of Extremes: The Economic Origins of the Civil War. New York: Hill and Wang, 2009. xiii + 416 pp. $30 (hardback), ISBN: 978-0-8090-9536-0.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Robert A. McGuire, Department of Economics, University of Akron.

In this story of the American Civil War, Marc Egnal, professor of history at York University, chronicles the history of the events leading to southern secession and the Civil War, arguing that the war’s origins can be found in the changing economy of the nineteenth century.  In short, Clash of Extremes “presents an economic interpretation of the origins of the Civil War” (p. 17).  The thesis of the book is straightforward: “It contends that the evolution of the Northern and Southern economies, more than any other factor, explains the conflict” (p. 17).  Egnal concludes his story with the bold assertion that “Economics more than high moral concerns produced the Civil War” (p. 348).

­Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

Geoffrey Jones, Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry. Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2010. xiv + 412 pp. $45 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-19-955649-6.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Ingrid Giertz-Mårtenson, Centre for Business History, Stockholm.

In the introduction to his new book, Beauty Imagined: A History of the Global Beauty Industry, Geoffrey Jones makes two points that instantly trigger the reader’s interest. The beauty industry is said to be one of America´s most profitable industries with a yearly global turnover of around $330 billion. And yet, according to Jones, it is remarkable that so little has been written about the extraordinary work and people who made beauty a business.

Geoffrey Jones, Isidor Strauss Professor of Business History at Harvard Business School, sets out to tell the story of this outstanding but little-known industry. The book can be seen as a continuation of Jones’ earlier work on global business, entrepreneurship and consumer products. Here he provides the first global study of the beauty business, starting with its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the present. This is not a small task, covering some 200 years of growth, and at the same time offering an analysis of the development of the industry and the men and women who created it.

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

José Luís Cardoso and Pedro Lains, editors, Paying for the Liberal State: The Rise of Public Finance in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 310 pp. $85 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-0-521-51852-9.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Mark Dincecco, IMT Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies.

Paying for the Liberal State is a novel collection of case studies about the development of modern systems of public finance in core and peripheral European countries from the start of the nineteenth century to the eve of World War I. The work is edited by José Luís Cardoso and Pedro Lains, both Research Professors at the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon. The contributors are prominent scholars in European economic history.

By my count, Paying for the Liberal State makes three key contributions. Prior to its publication, there was no book-length investigation of the development of public finances in Europe after 1815. I view Paying for the Liberal State as a nineteenth-century counterpart to works on pre-modern public finances like The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, 1200-1815, edited by Richard Bonney (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). With its focus on detailed case histories, Paying for the Liberal State also complements the cross-country, econometrics-oriented literature that covers the classic gold standard era from the 1870s to 1913. Finally, by providing a clear and accessible account of the evolution of public finances over the long run, Paying for the Liberal State will be of use to scholars in neighboring disciplines that study the interplay between politics and fiscal change. I describe other notable attributes of this book throughout my review.

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

Jeffrey T. Young, editor, Elgar Companion to Adam Smith. Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009.  xxv + 374 pp. $215 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-84542-019-2.

Reviewed for EH.Net by Jonathan B. Wight, Department of Economics, University of Richmond.

The Elgar Companion to Adam Smith contains a set of papers by outstanding scholars, many of whom have made a career of studying Smith and have separately written book-length treatises on him. The reader is thus treated to a mature and nuanced treatment of Smith throughout. While the steep price will preclude many individuals from owning it, it is an essential work for research libraries to own.

The volume contains an introduction by the editor, Jeffrey Young, and nineteen papers mostly by economists, all but two of which are original for this collection. The articles “give testimony to the richness and enduring appeal of Smith's principles and wisdom” (p. xi).  The editor notes that he allowed contributors to write on topics they selected. This approach is an attractive feature of the book when you have high quality sources and it provides the reader with a window onto the issues of current importance for Smith scholars.

This volume is distinguished from the Companion to Adam Smith (Cambridge 2006) by its focus on questions of interest to economists and historians of economic thought, rather than mainly philosophical issues.  A theme of the book is the growing importance of The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS) to economists seeking to understand the role and evolution of institutions in society (e.g., systems of justice) and behavioral economics. 

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010. x + 270 pp. $25 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8014-7612-9.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Christopher Grandy, Public Administration Program, University of Hawai‘i (Manoa). 

This volume describes and analyzes the phenomenon of tax havens -- sovereign locations that seek to attract financial activity by offering low, or nil, levels of taxation and/or regulation.  Two of the authors are based in the UK, Palan at the University of Birmingham and Murphy with Tax Research, LLP; Chavagneux is in Paris in editorial posts with Alternatives Economiques and L'Economie politique. They assemble a range of tax haven-related information that haven participants probably prefer not to have assembled, and they take the position that tax havens represent the seedy underbelly of globalization, sucking the life-giving marrow of public revenue away from (a) developed countries, which could use it to ameliorate widening income/wealth disparities, and (b) developing countries, which could invest the resources in building their economies.  This book is not an economic history; instead it strives to summarize what we know about tax havens, to articulate the policy dilemmas they pose, and to review recent responses.  However, the authors seem disinclined to think about the systemic functions of tax havens, and so to consider their role in an evolving global political economy.

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

George Selgin, Good Money: Birmingham Button Makers, the Royal Mint, and the Beginnings of Modern Coinage, 1775-1821: Private Enterprise and Popular Coinage. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2008. xvii + 345 pp. $40 (cloth), ISBN: 978-0-472-11631-7.

Reviewed for EH.NET by John Wood, Department of Economics, Wake Forest University.

This book is an absorbing and informative study of the intersection of the industrial revolution and the development of the British coinage, particularly the private sector’s solution, over the government’s obstruction, of “the big problem of small change.”  It treats the problem, its causes and consequences, the (mainly profit) incentives to solve it, and the contributions of technology and competition to its solution. 

The scarcity of small-value coins hindered efficient exchange in the rising market economies from the Middle Ages until well into the nineteenth century.  Their scarcity was due to several reasons, including the technological infeasibility of sufficiently small gold, silver, and even copper coins, their disappearance because of differences between nominal and market values, and hoarding induced by their liquidity premia.  Fundamentally, the problem was due largely to the government’s failure to address it -- not for technological reasons, Selgin points out, but to the complacency and inefficiency of the Royal Mint, compounded by its refusal, erratically enforced, to let others supply the need because of the belief that money was a royal prerogative.

Costly consequences of the scarcity included time-consuming searches for coins to meet payrolls, non-monetary payments (often of disputed values) to workers in lieu of cash, and credit by retailers, on little security, until feasible amounts accumulated, and delays in wage payments for the same reason.

Published by EH.NET (August 2010)

Alan Beattie, False Economy: A Surprising Economic History of the World.  New York: Riverhead Books, 2010.  xii + 353 pp.  $16 (paperback), ISBN: 978-1-59448-444-5.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Eric Jones, LaTrobe University.

This is a work of haute vulgarization by the world trade editor of the Financial Times, where Alan Beattie writes about economics, globalization, and development.  He does here, too, though concentrating on the historical background to an extent that presumably would not appeal to the everyday newspaper reader.  The book is framed around a number of contrasts and puzzles, including why the performance of the United States exceeds that of Argentina and how Washington, D.C. outclasses ancient Rome.  It asks why Egypt imports half its staple food; why asparagus is imported from Peru; why oil and diamonds can be more trouble than they are worth; why Africa does not grow cocaine; why Islamic countries sometimes perform poorly; why Indonesia prospered under a corrupt ruler whereas Tanzania stalled under an honest one; and why many situations are path-dependent.

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Published by EH.NET (June 2010)

Robert E. Wright, editor, Bailouts: Public Money, Private Profits.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. vii + 147 pp. $18 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-231-15055-2.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Andrew Jalil, Department of Economics, Reed College.

Bailouts: Public Money, Private Profits presents a detailed study of the history of bailouts.  Divided in four chapters, the book provides a historical analysis of the issues that are at the forefront of the current policy debate on bailouts.  How should governments respond to crises?  What are the unintended consequences of bailouts?  Do bailouts speed economic recovery?  What can governments do to prevent crises?  Bailouts provides a solid introduction to these issues for non-specialists as well as a detailed historical account for experts in the field.

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Published by EH.NET (June 2010)

Ranald C. Michie, Guilty Money: The City of London in Victorian and Edwardian Culture, 1815-1914. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. x + 278 pp. $99 (hardcover), ISBN: 978-1-85196-892-3.

Reviewed by Leslie Hannah, Department of Economic History, London School of Economics.

Ranald Michie, Professor of History at the University of Durham, England, probably knows more about the history of stock exchanges than anyone. His 1987 study, The London and New York Stock Exchanges, 1850-1914, remains the classic source for those wishing to understand their different institutional characteristics. In this new book, however, he explores new and unfamiliar ground, admirably summarized in his preface: “Though its theme is the City of London as a financial and commercial centre, it is not a factual account. Though it relies heavily on novels it is not an exercise in literary criticism. Though it attempts to identify ideas and images it is not a cultural history. The fact that it does not fit into any obvious category may explain why referees for journals and publishers found it easy to be critical rather than to understand what I was trying to achieve. This book sets out to test one simple theory and that is whether it is possible to establish, with any degree of precision, the place occupied by a financial centre in the culture of a nation, and the degree to which that changed over time.”

Published by EH.NET (June 2010)

Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes, The Provocative Joan Robinson: The Making of a Cambridge Economist.  Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. x + 320 pp. $24 (paperback), ISBN: 978-0-8223-4538-1.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Michael V. Namorato, Department of History, University of Mississippi.

Nahid Aslanbeigui and Guy Oakes have written a most interesting and insightful book on the early career of Joan Robinson at Cambridge University. Using a wide variety of primary source materials such as correspondence, lectures, and personal papers, the authors have put together a very detailed account of how Joan Robinson broke through the “male” barrier at Cambridge to become not only a close advisor and defender of John Maynard Keynes but also a controversial lecturer at this most prestigious university. During the 1930s, Joan Robinson went from a somewhat unknown economist to one of the most outspoken proponents of the Keynesian revolution while simultaneously making her own significant contributions to the theory of imperfect competition and monetary theory in general.