the self-contained village?: the social history of rural communities, 1250–1900 – edited by...

Book reviewsGREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

Bruce M. S. Campbell, The medieval antecedents of English agricultural progress (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xiv + 348. 12 figs. 51 tabs. ISBN 0754659194 Hbk. £65/$124.95)

Campbell’s work in medieval agricultural history over the last 30 years is well known,with this very useful collection reprinting some papers from his jointly authored (withMark Overton) Land, labour and livestock (1991) and (with Richard Britnell) A commer-cialising economy (1995). His sources are equally well known: estate-surveys, especiallythe ‘extents’ attached to many inquisitions post mortem (IPMs), the accounts ofdemesne-agriculture preserved for many thousands of manors, and the lay subsidies of1327, 1332, and 1334. More could have been made of the 1279 Hundred Rolls, thereturns to which are admittedly incomplete, since these also cover holdings of ecclesi-astical estates and especially lay estates not held in chief and therefore unrepresented inthe IPMs. One example from my own research must serve for all: that of the Willintonfamily, who were important landholders in Gloucestershire from the mid-twelfthcentury, expanding into other counties as a result of royal favour, marriage, and activepurchasing. The size of their estate was first revealed by a grant of free warren in 1310and records of contrariants’ estates after 1321, but it was not until after John deWillinton I purchased Frampton Cotterell (Gloucestershire), a manor held in chief ofthe Crown, between 1311 and 1318, that this agglomeration appears in an IPM withextents in 1338. It is also the case that large estates are more likely to preserve recordsfor posterity than small landholdings. Moreover, while the extents attached to IPMs,available in printed calendars down to the 1420s, are well known, the surveys in Mis-cellaneous Inquisitions, 1219–1485, are ignored and other series in the National Archive,being unlisted, are unexploited. Finally, tithe accounts, whose utility was revealedrecently in Ben Dodds’ Peasants and production in the medieval north-east (2007), havebarely been touched by other British historians, though on the continent they are themain source for medieval agricultural history.

Campbell’s introduction points out the limitations of his work frankly and usefully:‘All of these essays relate primarily to the seigniorial sector whose large, surplus pro-ducing farms collectively comprised perhaps a quarter of all agricultural land’, though ashe admits, ‘It remains to be seen whether these results are replicated when tested againstthe evidence of larger and more representative samples of demesnes’ (p. xi). Non-demesne production by the peasantry on the remaining three-quarters of agriculturalland also needs to be brought into consideration. Clearly, as he shows in ‘Progressivenessand backwardness’ (chapter 1), technological innovation was well underway before 1300,marked by windmills, the adoption of traction horses, and the introduction of rabbitsand of legumes, and the influence of widespread markets has certainly been underesti-mated by many previous historians. What I think both Campbell and most previoushistorians have failed to appreciate is the progress of ‘enclosure by agreement’ whichenabled the elimination of rotation-fallow: this was in progress on the Berkeley estates,aided by buying-out sub-tenants, from the thirteenth century onwards, and elsewhere inGloucestershire and adjacent counties by the fourteenth century. As Ross Wordie hasshown in this journal, nearly half of England had been enclosed by 1500. This largelyexplains why, as Campbell emphasizes rightly, it is not true that ‘English agriculturelagged behind that of the Low Countries until the age of the so-called “Agricultural

Economic History Review, 61, 1 (2008), pp. 231–276

© Economic History Society 2008. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Revolution” in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ (‘Agricultural progress in medi-eval England’, chapter 2, p. 27), and in two further studies (‘Agricultural productivity inmedieval England’, chapter 3, and ‘Land, labour, livestock and productivity trends’,chapter 4) he shows that increasing productivity was achieved in some parts of medievalNorfolk. Campbell concludes with a fairly upbeat assessment of medieval English agri-culture (‘Constraint or constrained?’, chapter 10, p. 17): ‘By c.1300 English agriculturewas feeding at least twice as many people as in 1086. It was also provisioning a greatlyenlarged urban population, whose share of the total had approximately doubled from atenth to a fifth.’

My main disagreement is with two papers (‘A new perspective’, chapter 5, and‘Norfolk livestock farming, 1250–1740’, chapter 6) that attempt to contrast agriculturalperformance in medieval and early modern Norfolk by comparing calculations of yieldsand livestock from demesne accounts (1250–1450) with those from probate inventories(1584–1740). The comparison of livestock numbers appears reasonable, and suggeststhat pastoral husbandry was flourishing in the later period (chapter 6, table 5), but thecomparison of arable acreages between the two periods is necessarily conjectural (‘indi-rect’: chapter 6, table 1) because inventories do not provide information consistently ontotal farm size or crop acreages (even if data are drawn only from the pre-harvestmonths of June and July). A further problem is that comparing crop-combinations(chapter 5, table 2) and crop-yields (chapter 5, table 5) over time has the paradoxicaleffect of concentrating major change into the period after 1740, in effect reinstating thetraditional ‘agricultural revolution’! Having myself edited two collections of inventories(The goods and chattels of our forefathers, 1976; Clifton andWestbury inventories, 1981), I amnot convinced that they can safely be subjected to Mark Overton’s attempt at data-transformation. I understand the attraction of being able to use the 2–3 million survivinginventories which are available in record offices as a data source to be compared withmanorial accounts, but unfortunately like is not being compared with like (as chapter 5,table 1 admits). Agricultural historians would be better advised to compare survivingfarm accounts for the period 1500–1900 with the medieval manorial accounts; a simplesearch on A2A (a2a.org.uk) for ‘farm accounts, 1500–1900’ revealed 542 ‘hits’, manywith multiple records. One could add the 4,000 probate accounts listed in PeterSpufford’s Index to the probate accounts of England and Wales (2 vols., 1999), many ofwhich must relate to farmers. Despite my disagreements with these two papers, this is awell-produced collection of essays in which all medieval agricultural historians will findmuch of interest.

john s. mooreUniversity of Bristol

Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod, eds., A social history of England, 1200–1500(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 514. 1 fig. 3 tabs. ISBN0521783453 Hbk. £50/$90; ISBN 0521789540 Pbk. £22.99/$39.99)

This is a useful textbook, which takes a series of individual tilts at a number of importantfeatures of late medieval English social history. It allows a distinguished group of medievalhistorians to offer their perspectives on themes related closely to their own particular areasof research and expertise. The book is organized around five main broad analyses ofdemographic context, social hierarchy, life in the town and in the countryside, forms ofreligious belief, and ‘other kinds of identity’ relevant to an understanding of social organi-zation. In 19 chapters, including a conclusion by Horrox, the contributors to the mainchapters and the authors of additional shorter pieces allied to these five main chaptersexamine a variety of aspects of social history.Thus, for instance, a main chapter on religious

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© Economic History Society 2008 Economic History Review, 61, 1 (2008)

belief by Eamon Duffy is followed by a series of shorter and more particular discussions ofmagic (Valerie Flint), renunciation (Janet Burton), and ritual (Charles Phythian-Adams);similarly, a broad discussion of identities by Miri Rubin is supported by further discussionsof ‘life and death’ (Jeremy Goldberg), the ‘wider world’ (Robin Frame), and ‘writing andreading’ (Paul Strohm).

A good deal of the discussion is founded on a qualitative account of medieval society;there is relatively less quantitative analysis of the features of social history and there is alsofar less evident preoccupation with the agenda of social science history which may oncehave underpinned the organizing principle of such an overview. That said, many of thosesocial science mainstays (family and kin, crime and dispute, social structure, demography)are standards of the discussions within chapters whose titles often speak to a more recenthistoriographical vogue. The volume in fact appears to stand, in many respects, for thepresent supremacy of the cultural turn and also a partial return to elites (there are, forinstance, as many indexed entries to ‘courtesy books’ as there are to ‘manor courts’; andslightly more entries for ‘gentry’ and associated entries than for ‘peasantry’ and its asso-ciates). The editors note in the preface that their book is a response ‘to a new agenda ofsocial history which has extended the range of the sub-discipline from a preoccupationwith the material existence of the lower orders to include a range of non-material aspectsof life including attitudes to work and to crime, the development of ideas about nationality,and the existence (or otherwise) of self-consciousness or “individualism” ’ (p. viii).The listsuggesting a new agenda, however, does have a familiar feel to it; after all, these are hardlynew topics for social historians, with a developed historiography on labour, crime, andnationality extending back at least one generation. Perhaps it is in the focus on these at theexpense of the posited peoccupation with the material existence of the lower orders that anew agenda has been established. That identified prior preoccupation relates presumablyto the various tributaries of what might be termed the transition debate, with its marxistand non-marxist proponents, rather than, as it might also be taken to mean, a simpleinterest in the everyday life of peasants and townsfolk. The range of that earlier transitiondebate is discussed effectively and thoughtfully by Steve Rigby in the opening chapter,while, after a discussion of hierarchy and deference led by a chapter by Peter Coss, andsupported by shorter discussions of war (Michael Prestwich), order and law (SimonWalker), and social mobility (Philippa Maddern), Richard Britnell and Bruce Campbellfollow up with chapters on towns and the countryside. In these three chapters (Rigby,Britnell, Campbell), as well as additional shorter pieces by Maryanne Kowaleski (on ‘aconsumer economy’) and Mavis Mate (‘work and leisure’), the concerns of a recenteconomic and social history, rather than a more narrowly defined ‘social history’, areexplored most evidently.

A major advantage of this collection is its use as a teaching text. The chapters arethoughtful and constructed intelligently. Some of them, often with an appropriate andinevitable inflexion toward the established theses of the author, set out effective assess-ments of the general position; others, especially the shorter ‘specialized studies’, providepithy papers repositioning one issue for a new audience, as in Kowaleski’s discussion ofconsumption and the economy, and also offer to draw on close research in primarymaterial to add detail and authority to the interpretations offered. Mate’s observation,drawn from the Exchequer customs’ accounts for 1480–1, that in that year 13,866 packsof playing cards entered the country through London, is but one of many small, enticing,and potentially illuminating details offered in this collection.The volume is well-supportedby an index and some ‘further reading’ organized by chapter.

phillipp r. schofieldUniversity ofWales Aberystwyth

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Jean Birrell, ed., Records of Feckenham Forest, Worcestershire, c.1236–1377 (Trowbridge:Cromwell Press for Worcestershire Historical Society, 2006. Pp. xxvi + 212. 2 maps.2 plates. ISSN 01414577 Hbk. £28)

In the late thirteenth century, Feckenham Forest comprised some 184 square miles ofnorth-eastern and central Worcestershire and extended into neighbouring Warwickshire,the remnant of a much larger royal forest which had once covered much ofWorcestershire.Early in the fourteenth century, its boundaries were reduced further to a core of some34 square miles, but most of the documents printed here in translation predate thiscontraction. All save one of the 12 documents are products of the administration of forestlaw, which aimed to protect the ‘four beasts of the forest’ (red, roe, and fallow deer, pluswild boar) and to protect forest cover through restrictions on the use of land. Of the fourprotected species, red and fallow deer were common in thirteenth-century Feckenham,and roe deer were probably present, but wild boar seem to have been extinct.

The enforcement of this specialized type of law, through presentments to periodic ForestEyres and other special inquisitions, was the responsibility of the foresters, verderers, andother officials. The records generated contain a mass of information on social, economic,and environmental conditions. Numerous presentments for illegal hunting occur, manyinvolving dogs, of which greyhounds are the most commonly mentioned, followed bymastiffs and bercelets. A hard core of persistent local poachers appear responsible for alarge proportion of the offences, and a bill of complaint dating from some time after 1289highlights the activities of an organized gang, headed by Geoffrey du Park, clerk, and thevicar of Feckenham, who used great purse nets called ‘blyndebycches’ to ensnare largequantities of game. Making ‘great larder and feasts’ with the king’s venison, these criminalswere able to continue in their activities by ‘stopping the mouths’ of the stewards, foresters,and verderers.

Much of the business of the Forest Eyre was concerned with the issue of encroachmenton the forest through assarts and purprestures. Large numbers of mostly small clearanceswere being made for arable cultivation, or to construct stock-houses. Areas as small asone-fortieth of an acre are documented, with the largest assarts amounting to several tensof acres.The crops taken from assarts are recorded, and sometimes a value is placed uponthe woodland cleared to effect them. The evidence suggests that most land was beingbrought into a classic three-course rotation of wheat, oats, and fallow; other crops are rarelymentioned. Animal houses mostly seem to have been constructed for draught animals,although some were intended for sheep, pigs, and the surprisingly large numbers of goatskept within the forest.

As a corollary of the concern with assarting, pleas of vert presented individuals accusedof damaging the forest cover and cutting wood in excess of the allowances for personaluse known as estovers. Although there is little evidence of large-scale industrial activitywithin Feckenham Forest, coopers, arrowsmiths, smiths, and potters are all documented,while charcoal burning and tanning are also indicated. More significant may have been thelocal and regional trade in firewood. The nearby town of Droitwich, with its fuel-hungrysalt industry, is mentioned as a destination for cartloads of firewood in the 1240s, andWorcester would also have constituted a major market.Those charged with preserving theforest were often involved heavily in its exploitation; the 1270 Eyre heard that the Keeperof the Bailiwick of Alta Foresta and one of the foresters ‘had two carts almost continuouslyon the go . . . to remove wood from the king’s wood . . . to sell in local markets all around’(p. 85).

Pressures on the Forest, however, were not simply economic. The lawlessness depictedin the bill of complaint against the du Park gang must have weakened the case for thecontinuation of the peculiar and ineffective system of forest law and administration. Inaddition to their poaching activities, du Park and his band were accused of housebreaking,

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robbery, and murder, including the killings of the parson of Wolverton and a child whowitnessed the crime. Merchants of Evesham were robbed on their way to Alcester, and acartload of cloth from London was seized in Oddingley Wood as it headed to Shrewsburyfair.

The overall picture gained from the records printed here is of an increasingly anachro-nistic system of land management and administration, which was coming under intensi-fying pressure from demographic growth and commercial expansion in the thirteenthcentury. Through Birrell’s expert translations, and an introduction that provides a clearexplanation of the legal and institutional context, this volume provides a valuable supple-ment to the picture of a changing economy derived from the more familiar corpus ofmanorial documentation.

james a. gallowayInstitute of Historical Research

Christopher Dyer, ed., The self-contained village?: the social history of rural communities,1250–1900 (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 148. 19 figs.21 tabs. ISBN 190280659X Pbk. £14.99/$29.95)

The immediate concern to many readers of this book will be that a straw man is being setup for demolition. It is now more than 40 years since Laslett presented his findings onseventeenth-century Clayworth and Cogenhoe to demonstrate the large amount of move-ment by the inhabitants, findings that have since been confirmed amply and which havenow become, to quote Jane Whittle from this volume, the ‘new orthodoxy among his-torians’ (p. 32). So why do we need to revisit the question of whether the village wasself-contained ‘in the sense of having a self-perpetuating population and a self-sufficienteconomy’ (p. xii)? The issue becomes still more cogent when, in turning to Dyer’s briefconclusion, we read that ‘the self-contained village probably never existed, and was cer-tainly not in continuous decline between 1250 and 1900’ (p. 141). Nevertheless, despitequestioning the premise upon which the volume is constructed, the reader will find muchof great interest in the six main chapters, each dealing authoritatively with the issue forparticular time periods.Thus we move in overlapping time sequences from two chapters onthe late medieval (Dyer and Whittle) through two on the early modern (Steve Hindle andHenry French) until we reach two on the post-1750 period (IanWhyte and David Brown).

One overall impression upon reading the book is the sense that absolutely nothing isstraightforward in approaching empirical studies of change through time and space in theEnglish village.Thus each of the chapters approached its spatial coordinates differently: tounderstand the medieval village, one has to deal with its manorial superstructures, andbecause the village and the manor were not coterminous, the use of manorial documentsmight shed light on the latter, but not necessarily the former. Similarly, the early modernperiod brings with it the socio-legal importance of the parish, and again the documentationrelating to the parish (most notably poor law operations) has to be filtered to give us thematerial relating to the object of the enquiry: the village. Of course it is notoriously difficultto define precisely what is meant by a village here. The differing morphologies of ruralsettlement do not allow for easy generalizations and the volume somewhat (and perhapswisely) side-steps any overall definition. Thus, Brown’s chapter on the rise of industrialsociety between 1760 and 1900 encompasses new and model settlements as well assquatter colonies, pointing out quite correctly that the variable impact of industrializationresulted in a wide range of village types by the later nineteenth century.

As well as pointing to the complexity of documentary sources and problems ofdefinition, the volume also raises the key question of representation. If the village wasrepresented formerly as a more self-contained entity, whereas modern research has

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demonstrated that this was manifestly not the case, why was there a discrepancy?To answerthis question, French reappraises the well-known History of Myddle in which RichardGough set out his wonderfully detailed account of a seventeenth-century ‘village in themind’. French concludes that stability was an aspiration and mark of authority within thecommunity; that the lineages of those who stayed could be reconstructed more accuratelythan those who moved; and that although such permanent, more wealthy, and genteelpew-owning families were in a minority, it was they who, like Gough, ensured ‘culturaltransmission’ (p. 95) and handed down representations of self-containment. Whittle rein-forces this theme from her study of resident landholding families in Norfolk.Therefore theidyllic image of the village, beloved of an earlier generation of historians, was to a largeextent the result once again of the commandeering of history by an articulate minority.

The concept of village histories being written by the few also introduces anotherimportant thread running through this volume, namely that self-containment, or at leastthe propensity to migrate, was socially and economically variable. At all times those mostmobile were the young, servants, women, customary tenants, clothiers, and the poor.Thosemost stable were the wealthy and those with interests and expectations of succession inland. There were also spatial and temporal variations. It is possible, if the documentationcan stand the generalization, that the rigorous implementation of poor law legislation at theparish level may have dampened down mobility and brought about a greater sensitivity towhat Hindle calls ‘the moral thresholds of belonging’ (p. 70). Such enforcement may havemeant that early modern stability may have been greater than that experienced in thedifficult times of the late medieval period, or indeed during the period of industrializationafter 1750. In terms of spatial variation across England it is also claimed that mobility wasgreater in the eastern arable districts than in the western woodland areas, a statement thatmight profitably be subjected to further scrutiny to ensure that the fragile, and spatiallyvariable, documentation has not been over-interpreted.

There is much that is valuable here.The case studies are set out clearly, the illustrationsand tables are well used, and the introductory and concluding passages by the editor aresuccinct and useful. A sequel might concentrate usefully on a more limited time periodor place and perhaps utilize the interdisciplinary advantages to be gained from recentadvances in archaeology, anthropology, and historical geography.

brian shortUniversity of Sussex

Christopher M. Woolgar, The senses in late medieval England (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2006. Pp. xii + 372. 86 figs. ISBN 0300118716 Hbk. £25/$40)

It is still sometimes thought that because the Christian middle ages was an intenselyreligious civilization, it therefore ignored the physical world in favour of the unseen and theheavenly. A slightly more sophisticated version of this is to emphasize the sensual aspectsof the religious environment so that Gothic architecture, stained glass, or chant arepresented as absorbing the efforts of artists and the attention of patrons. Medieval histo-rians, as interested in material culture as their modernist fellows, have for a long timeexplored the extraordinarily sensual riches of an era that paid close attention to such thingsas the colour of food, the symbolism of clothing, the sound of bells, and what created theterrible stench of hell. Jean-Pierre Albert’s Odeurs de sainteté: la mythologie chrétienne desaromates (1990) on the ‘odour of sanctity’ exuded by the spiritually elect, or MichelPastoureau’s Bleu: histoire d’une coleur (2000) on the prestige of the colour blue, areexamples of historians’ interest in what Woolgar refers to as ‘cognitive archaeology’ (p. 3),the physical evidence for thoughts, outlook, and tastes.

Woolgar is the author of an important book on aristocratic households and has alsowritten on medieval cuisine, buildings, and other evidence for both ceremonial and

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intimate life.The present book is in two parts, the first being a relatively detailed overviewof the different senses and how they were viewed, often very differently from now, inmedieval England.The second part revisits the palaces of the leaders of society, in this casespecifically episcopal and queenly households, to look at how the senses were deployed asphysical and symbolic marks of wealth, power, and comfort.

The notion of the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch) is a commonplace ofboth the medieval and the modern, butWoolgar argues that for the middle ages there weretwo additional aspects of sense perception and reception, if not quite two other senses:speech (seen as related to taste, something done with the mouth), and the conveying ofholiness, a form of touch brought to a higher register. In describing the senses, Woolgaroutlines carefully the medieval scientific theories of human perception and presents thepopular and religious meaning attached to their use.The medieval respect for the physicalsenses was so great and the senses tied so intimately to ideas of moral state that, at times,there seems to be a kind of literalism by which goodness and beauty were manifestedby pleasing sensations, while such things as cacophony, unpleasant smells, or deformityconnoted ethical as well as physical disorder and diminution. Devils were hideous andsmelled awful while angels were lovely and fragrant. Certain attributes were bestowedsomewhat more arbitrarily: whiteness and simultaneously ruddiness were good qualitiesfor the human complexion, while blackness was usually bad; bright, expensive dyes such asscarlet were prestigious for clothing, but multi-coloured garments were deemed appropri-ate for fools and wicked servitors.

Because his setting is the sensuously rich, if not over-loaded, atmosphere of the greathouseholds of England,Woolgar has less to say about how unpleasant sensations could bedeliberately cultivated for the promotion of humility and sanctity, inverting the normalvalues of comfort and graciousness ascribed to materials, aromas and sensations. Hementions the life of St Thomas Cantilupe, Bishop of Hereford, who wore hair shirts andlice-infested garments, slept on the floor beside his empty canopied bed, and engaged inother forms of self-mortification that not only minimized the sensory stimuli amidst thegrandeur of the episcopal court but substituted wretched and painful experiences in placeof luxury.The simultaneous mistrust of the senses, obsession with magnificent display, andadmission of a whole world of deliberately produced adverse sensations distinguishes theperiod and gives it a certain internally contradictory intensity.

While Huizinga’s classic account of the violent late medieval contrasts between ostenta-tion and misery is now regarded as exaggerated and misleading,Woolgar’s book evokes someof Huizinga’s descriptions of the gorgeous materialism, spiritual literalism, and heavyelegance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Woolgar blends very effectively thematerial conditions of life with both religious and secular desires whose force would, in turn,have immense practical effects. The peculiar place of the senses in late medieval societyconstitutes the background to a culture whose demand for aromatic products (spices,perfumes) was sufficiently strong as to launch Europe’s first overseas colonial ventures.

paul freedmanYale University

Joan Thirsk, Food in early modern England: phases, fads, fashions, 1500–1760 (London:Hambledon Continuum, 2007. Pp. xx + 396. 13 illus. ISBN 85285538X Hbk. £30/$85)

Food history scarcely existed as an academic specialism before 1980, but now attractsmuch attention. There are seminars, journals, and institutes devoted to the subject. Itbegan with a calorie-counting approach, in which researchers were preoccupied withnutrition and health. Others came to the subject from an aesthetic, culinary direction, andthey read recipe books and recreated meals. This book falls between the two extremes, as

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the author’s base lies in agrarian history and the history of consumption.Thirsk relates thedishes on the table to the production of animals and plants. As the subtitle implies, thebook’s principal themes are changes in taste and practice, resulting in new foodstuffs andnew ways in which they were prepared. This is emphatically not about the origins of themodern diet, as the author gives much space to ephemeral developments, such as the riseof pickled meat in the eighteenth century, or the introduction of long-forgotten varieties offruit and vegetables. Modern readers will be surprised to find that foods now regarded asrecent introductions, such as veal reared in crates, can be found before 1760.They will alsolearn of the consumption of items such as small, wild birds or the lips and palates of cattlewhich we find unacceptable and even repulsive.

A book with an emphasis on innovation, which also had to deal with those continuingelements in the diet, was difficult to organize. The solution was to write a book of twohalves, which begins with seven chapters devoted to quite short periods of 40, 50, or60 years, and then continues with chapters (covering the whole period) on regional andsocial differences, and on the main types of food (bread, meat, condiments, and so on).Theresult provides us with a comprehensive coverage, but with some repetition. The book iswritten in the engaging personal style which is Thirsk’s hallmark. It conveys a great depthof learning, but does not neglect to make contemporary references, and draws on theauthor’s experience in her own kitchen.The content depends on a great range of evidence,but makes most use of books about farming, food, and household management.These aresupplemented by more objective sources such as household accounts.Thirsk’s instinct is tomake broad generalizations when possible, but she is also conscious of individual idiosyn-crasies. For example, she sketches the main regional differences between the wheat eatenin the south and the barley, oats, and rye from which northern bread was baked. However,she notes that individuals might make loaves from a mixture of flours to achieve aparticular flavour and texture. Similarly, the characteristics are sketched of different socialstrata, but we encounter labourers (living on the edge of forests) who ate venison, andgentry households that bought oatmeal occasionally.

Innovations provide the main theme: the rise in consumption of fruit and vegetables; theintroduction of crops from the rest of the world, such as the potato; and the adoption oftechniques, such as new ways of making pastry. Thirsk suggests a wide range of explana-tions for the changes that she documents, but this must remain an area of difficulty ininterpretation. Of course there were novelties from abroad, but some were adopted rapidly,while others, like the potato, took a long time to be accepted. Diffusion from across theseas, as she appreciates, must be combined with social mechanisms for receiving andspreading the new idea. Sometimes writers advocated an innovation, and news spread bythe medium of print, suggesting that the literate and the upper class had a strong influenceon the lower orders.The market had its effect if new production methods made foodstuffsmore easily affordable, or foods that remained expensive were regarded as status symbols.All of these mechanisms, and many others, are cited in this book, but we are still unablereadily to explain the fads and fashions mentioned in this book’s subtitle and fullydocumented in its pages. Changes in taste are almost beyond rational explanation.

This is a book which will be relished by the food historians, but should be included on thereading menu of all economic historians of this period.Two problems must be mentioned.Firstly, the murky illustrations are out of tune with the precise and clear writing. Secondly,in the first two chapters the food history of the period before 1500 is presented as dull andstatic: the volume edited by Christopher Woolgar et al. (Food in medieval England: diet andnutrition, 2006), which has an alternative view, appeared too late to influence this book.

Any review must draw attention to a remarkable scholarly achievement: this stimulating,enjoyable, and innovative work has appeared exactly 50 years after JoanThirsk’s first book.

christopher dyerUniversity of Leicester

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Jeremy Black, Trade, empire and British foreign policy, 1689–1815: the politics of a commercialstate (London and New York: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xi + 219. 2 tabs. ISBN 0415396069Hbk. £65/$120)

In Trade, empire and British foreign policy, Black sets out to examine the evolution ofstrategic culture in Britain from the glorious revolution to the Congress of Vienna. Threeintroductory chapters offer a broad thematic overview of influences on policy-making.These are followed by five chronological surveys, chronicling major episodes of diplomatichistory. Black’s methods and sources consist primarily of illustrative selections from a widerange of correspondence, speeches, and contemporary printed tracts. An analytical narra-tive is interspersed with critical comments and mini-biographies (including Martin Bladenand William Baker).The author also includes some comparative French history. Black is ahighly knowledgeable guide to this material and communicates his findings clearly andeffectively. Broadly speaking, the book is an exercise in positivism and realism: nearly all ofthe contents address state interaction, emphasizing the impact of military engagements onthe balance of power.The principal exception to this consists of intermittent discussion of‘illicit or semi-authorised activity’ (p. 202), including smugglers and non-governmentalorganizations such as trading companies. This is not, therefore, a text which has beeninfluenced greatly by developments in modern international relations theory—the bookoperates with the assumption that states are self-seeking, rational agents and does notexplore the concepts of sovereignty or power in depth. It is an efficient, one-stop intro-duction to British foreign and colonial policy during the long eighteenth century.

s. d. smithUniversity of Hull

Adrian Randall, Riotous assemblies: popular protest in Hanoverian England (Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press, 2006. Pp. x + 354. ISBN 0199259909 Hbk. £65/$117)

Rioting was a quintessential feature of eighteenth-century England, and it has been muchstudied over the past 40 years, including in surveys by Ian Gilmour (Riots, risings andrevolutions, 1992) and John Stevenson (Popular disturbances in England, 1700–1832, 2ndedn., 1992). However, this is the first survey that approaches this subject from a left-leaning perspective, in the tradition of E. P. Thompson. Based on Randall’s own researchinto industrial protest and food riots, as well as the published works of numerous historiansincluding, in addition toThompson, Kevin Binfield, John Bohstedt, Andrew Charlesworth,C. R. Dobson, Douglas Hay, Nicholas Rogers, George Rudé, and D. E.Williams, this bookseeks to reassert the importance of the moral economy as the ‘overarching pattern or modelthat helps to explain and unify our understanding of protest’ within this society (p. 8). Incontrast to Thompson, who was reluctant to admit the pertinence of the moral economyto protests other than food riots, Randall, defining it not as a set of fixed beliefs but as aconflict (the long-running battle between traditional customary practices and the forces ofcapitalist rationalization), applies it to a wide range of disorders which occurred in thecentury after 1714.These include industrial protests (over both wages and the introductionof new machinery), political and religious riots (including election riots and theWilkes andLiberty, Gordon, and Priestley riots), and riots against turnpikes, enclosures, and the 1757Militia Act. Some riots, such as the ‘rough music’ shaming rituals which condemnedneighbours who violated moral norms, are not included, while one set of riots is whichnever actually occurred (as brilliantly demonstrated by Robert Poole), the supposed‘calendar riots’ of 1752. Common themes are the sense of legitimacy expressed by rioters,evident in the widespread use of ceremonial rituals and symbolism; their geographicalmobility; the relative lack of violence against the person (though the extent to which

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members of the crowd were willing to use firearms and risk injury and death in shootoutswith mill owners and the army is notable); the willingness of justices of the peace and othergentlemen to support the crowd, or turn a blind eye to their actions; the weakness of thestate’s powers to suppress rioting; and the extent to which rioting was part of widerstrategies of negotiation (which Randall labels ‘dialogue through disorder’, p. 313).

Although he is not interested in the origins of this pattern of protests, a key focus of thisbook concerns the end of the story, the ‘repudiation of the moral economy’, which Randallargues took place later thanThompson and Bohstedt claimed.While the French Revolutionand industrialization clearly added new dimensions, Randall argues that the moral economycontinued to form the basis of crowd action and the responses of most of the authorities,until the Luddite disturbances of 1811–12.What finally undermined the moral economy asa framework for negotiation by riot was not radical politics nor industrialization per se, butthe triumph of market forces, the adoption by the authorities of the theories of Adam Smith,and the growing military power of the state, following the threatened invasion in 1797.

The views of the crowd, in Randall’s analysis, did not change. Firmly rooted in custom-ary beliefs and practices, workers and consumers remained wedded to the moral economypast the end of this period, but ‘it had mainly become a monologue’ (p. 323). Randall’sapproach is epitomized in his discussion of political riots, where he uses Edmund Burke’scomment that ‘there are two ways of raising mobs, one is by hiring, another by provoking’(cited p. 183) to argue for the importance of the latter; crowds were frequently ‘provoked’into rioting by attacks on perceived customs and liberties, as was the case with the ExciseBill in 1733. But were the crowd’s views more than simply reactive, and did they changeover time, in response to changing social and economic circumstances? In the Ludditeattacks and on other occasions, there was a clear loss of the deference which had charac-terized some earlier food riots; nor were all political riots (such as those in support ofWilkes) ‘provoked’. Not all protests were characterized by a belief in the moral economy;the militia riots, for example, did not involve any claim for the legitimacy of the crowd’sdefiance of the 1757 statute.

The problem is that owing to the limitations of the available evidence only rarely are weable to ascertain the views of the crowd.While much of this book consists of a narrative ofactions from which crowd sentiments can only be inferred, Randall does analyse the widercontext of protests in considerable depth in some of the best-documented industrial andpolitical riots, and some case studies of individual rioters are included at the end.Yet westill know too little about the identities and beliefs of those who chose, as well as those whodid not, to pursue their grievances through protest.

robert b. shoemakerUniversity of Sheffield

Cormac Ó Gráda, Ireland’s great famine: interdisciplinary perspectives (Dublin: UniversityCollege Dublin Press, 2006. Pp. x + 325. 14 figs. 55 tabs. ISBN 1904558585 Hbk. £42;ISBN 1904558577 Pbk. £18.95/$44.95)

The Great Irish Famine, despite being a startlingly central event in nineteenth-centuryEuropean history, failed to catch the eye of economic historians during the rise of theprofession.This is all the more remarkable given that it was the first demographic crisis ofthe statistical age and was an event which in its six terrible years generated a vast amountof quantitative evidence that surfaced in the blue books, or at least survived in adminis-trative archives. Since the 1980s the situation has completely changed. A gifted coterieof historical economists, all well-known to the readers of this journal for their otherendeavours—Joel Mokyr, Peter Solar, Timothy Guinnane, Kevin O’Rourke, LiamKennedy—have produced a series of outstanding essays and monographs on aspects of the

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Irish famine. At their centre has been Cormac Ó Gráda, author of a textbook (The GreatIrish Famine, 1995), a monograph (Black �47 and beyond, 2000), and sole author and/oreditor of four collections of essays, the principal focus of which has been the mid-centuryIrish crisis. From this abiding interest he has from time to time journeyed far, as forexample in his reflections on the global history of twentieth-century famine which formedthe substance of his 2007 Tawney lecture.

The present volume is a collection of 13 essays, five of which are co-authored, and 10have appeared previously (including two in this journal). Taken together they form afascinating mix which captures the intellectual range, technical excellence, and lightness oftouch that is the hallmark of Ó Gráda’s scholarship. Two of the papers are comparativeoverviews; five engage with core problems of interpretation (pre-famine living standards,the epidemiology of famine, potato supplies, the impact on landlords, and the function ofemigration); one is a microstudy of a city workhouse; two deal with the Irish in NewYorkin the wake of the famine; and three with the historiography and recent public history offamine commemoration.

Ó Gráda has had a high profile in that public history. Thanks to his quiet manner andintellectual authority, he calmed the troubled waters during the 1990s sesquicentennialcommemorations. Then and since, he has modified gently the old verities—the horrors ofthe workhouse and the coffin ships, the nationalist narrative of political genocide, thesupposed scandal of food exports, the bankrupting of the gentry, the failure of the market.But it is a new verity of the 1990s—that there was a suppressed collective memory of thefamine in modern Ireland—that earns an outright (and to this reader devastating) rejectionhere (pp. 228–33).

The essay on ‘The NewYork Irish in the 1850s’ (previously unpublished) takes on anothermyth, recycled most recently in Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York (2002)—that of aviolent Irish world crammed into the Sixth Ward of Manhattan. It is a scintillating analysisof the abundant quantitative evidence on the Irish in New York City, the (temporary)destination for perhaps a fifth of the million-strong famine exodus. It should be read againstFrank Neal’s studies of the famine exodus to Lancashire. (And how much worse, reflectsÓ Gráda (p. 191), would the human tsunami engulfing British cities have been had thelabour markets ofAmerica not been available.) However, the essay that will probably be mostwidely cited is that on ‘Famine disease and famine mortality’, co-authored with Joel Mokyrand first appearing in 2003. It is a convincing re-working of Sir William Wilde’s nosology,drawing in twentieth-century data from Russian, Indian, and African food crises. Itconcludes that ‘roughly speaking, half of famine mortality was caused by diseases associateddirectly with bad nutrition and the other half from those resulting from the indirect effectsof the famine on personal behaviour and social structure’ (p. 74). Such a finding hasenormous implications for the wider diagnosis of the famine’s severity and its spatialpatterns.

In what is technically an almost faultless publication, there is one editorial error in table1.2 (p. 20) worth noting: in a summary estimate of total Irish food supplies available forconsumption in 1840/45 and 1846/50, the terms ‘imports’ and ‘exports’ have been trans-posed, thereby suggesting that food exports rose dramatically during the famine years andthat John Mitchel was right after all.

As Ó Gráda notices in the introduction, ‘the literature on the [Irish] famine is nowenormous’ (p. 1). So has it all now been said? Throughout these essays there are signpoststowards the unknown, or at least to many ‘known unknowns’—who were the gainers by thecrisis, and what more precisely was the relationship between the million who perished andthe million who emigrated. There is much still to be done. And it is through this kind ofprobing social science history that the wilder champions of victimhood can be held at bay.

david dicksonTrinity College Dublin

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Michael H. Fisher, Shompa Lahiri, and Shinder Thandi, A south-Asian history of Britain:four centuries of people from the Indian sub-continent (Oxford and Westport, CT:Greenwood, 2007. Pp. xxii + 250. 33 plates. ISBN 184645008X Hbk. £19.95/$49.95)

In recent years the peoples of south Asian origin have emerged as a remarkable leavenin British life and society, contributing to progress across an extraordinarily wide rangeof activity, but also in one or two areas to major concerns of the moment. What tendsnot to be known is that this outcome has been four centuries in the making. This book,a joint project of Fisher, a distinguished historian of Britons in India and of Indians inBritain; of Lahiri, an expert on Indians in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twen-tieth centuries; and of Thandi, an expert on Punjabi migration, sets out to consider ‘thehistories of South Asians in Britain not as an offshoot of race relations or definedby white racist definitions of them, but rather in their own terms, from their ownperspectives’ (p. xi).

Fisher examines the growing south Asian presence between 1600 and 1857: the earlyvisitors and settlers who came as seamen, servants, merchants, and wives; the substantialincrease in numbers from the 1750s as the East India Company came to occupy everlarger tracts of Indian territory; the deepening of south Asian penetration, as seamendeveloped significant lascar communities in the ports, as Indian entrepreneurs emerged,as Indian professors came to teach at East India Company colleges, as Indian diplomatscame to plead the cases of royalty whose lands the British had annexed, and as we notethat Lord Liverpool (Prime Minister, 1812–27) had Indian blood in his veins; and thenthe further deepening of this process from the 1830s as the first Indians came to studyand growing numbers at all levels of society came to settle. Lahiri escorts us through theyears from 1857 to Indian independence: the Victorian period which saw a furtherbroadening of the Indian presence in terms of occupations and at all levels of society, thefirst India-born Member of Parliament, Dadabhai Naoroji (1892), and a growing rela-tionship between Indian experience in Britain and the emergence of Indian nationalism;the first half of the twentieth century which saw major Indian contributions to theBritish military effort in two world wars, the radicalization of Indian students in Britain,and growing attempts to control Indian claims to imperial citizenship and rights ofsettlement in Britain. Thandi covers the extraordinary growth of south Asians in Britaindown to the present, when they represent over two million or little under 4 per cent ofthe population. He notes that ‘by the 1980s the foundations of a vibrant, urban, mul-ticultural, multireligious and multiracial Britain were fully laid’ (p. 162), setting out thedistinctive settlement patterns, the village origins of many, and their struggles to securecultural and religious rights. He then charts the growing success of south Asians inBritish society since the 1980s: the emergence of a significant south Asian middle classand their breakthroughs in business, politics, the media, literature, film, television, andsport. He points to the prominent presence of south Asian food in the British diet, theadoption of south Asian dress styles in the world of fashion, and the growing nationalawareness and acceptance of south Asian festivals.

This book tells of a remarkable south Asian success story, and tells it well. This said,it does not shy away from some of the difficulties and nuances of that story. It recognizesthat south Asians have often suffered disproportionately from the restructuring of theBritish economy under the impact of global capitalism; that south Asians cannot beregarded as a group, different communities having distinctly different experiences; thatthere are issues for all the major south Asian religions in the clash between democratictraditions of free speech and religious sensitivities so often tied in with matters of iden-tity. It ends by emphasizing that the work of fashioning a cohesive multiracial society isvery much one in process: ‘Just as many Asians need to demonstrate greater culturalaccommodation and re-affirm their belonging to the state, the British public too

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needs to accept a more re-negotiated notion of Britishness, which is not exclusivist’(p. 214).

francis robinsonRoyal Holloway, University of London

Peter Hennock, The origin of the welfare state in England and Germany, 1850–1914: socialpolicies compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xvii + 381. 3 figs.4 plates. 32 tabs. ISBN 9780521592123 Hbk. £55/$99; ISBN 9780521597708 Pbk.£19.99/$35.99)

The origins of welfare states have commanded much academic attention, and not onlyfrom historians. Mostly, publication has documented developments in single nation states;comparative histories that move beyond chronologies of legislative action or the measure-ment of national statistical outcomes are less common. Hennock has already proved readyto accept the challenges posed by comparative study (British social reform and Germanprecedent, 1987). His new book revisits this earlier work, now reinforced by further researchand extended to offer a more balanced comparison of all social security and state-sponsored medical care introduced in the UK and Germany before the First World War.

In making his comparison, Hennock exposes the very different foundations of Germanand British state welfare and stresses the contrasting roles played by social insurance bothat this time and in shaping subsequent developments. From its very inception, the Britishwelfare state offered central government (and the Treasury) a more definitive role in theprovision of welfare than did its German counterpart. Contrary to what we might assume,a more authoritarian regime thus created, arguably inadvertently, more space for localself-determination in this area than did a more liberal British state. Aided by earnings-related contributions and benefits, social insurance agencies in the Kaiserreich were lessreliant on central government contributions than they were in Britain and exercised fargreater autonomy as a result. In the long run, this explains why Nazis disliked socialinsurance for its potential to incubate political opposition and why, since 1945, theGerman nation has displayed continuously a preference for tackling social risk through thismedium. In contrast, British social insurance schemes were subject to greater centraldirection and their agencies were far more vulnerable to state control. Today, Britishnational insurance contributions are viewed as a tax and the social benefits available tocontributors have all but disappeared.

As this book argues, these very different historical trajectories owe their origins tolegislation passed before 1914 (not post-1945). They are explained partly by contrastingpowers of central government in the two countries.The new German Empire’s legitimacyrequired its respect for long-established powers of the municipal and state authoritiesfound within its borders.Tax-raising capacities being limited, self-funded insurance was anattractive option for providing welfare. In Britain, by contrast, such constitutional limita-tions were less evident and, in years of crisis for local government finance, central statesubsidy and social insurance offered complementary solutions to the problem of poverty.In this sense, this book argues (correctly) that comparing national welfare states requiresa comparison of the nature and remit of national state power.This offers a new dimensionto already established arguments concerning the German preoccupation with the threat ofsocial democracy and the British with the threat of pauperism that has dominated welfarecomparisons between these two countries in this era to date. As this book demonstrates, thepublic sphere is not a common space.

This perspective on the scope of state power reveals a major problem for comparisons ofwelfare states (alluded to in the introduction): where do their boundaries fall? The verynotion of a ‘welfare state’ assumes a degree of commonality that offers historians a given

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body of legislation for comparative analysis. However, matters are not so neat. Should, forexample, legislation on hours of work, minimum wages, and other aspects of labour law(governing industrial bargaining and the right to strike) be included? In Germany, wherethe suppression of free trades unionism accompanied the introduction of social insurance,the answer might be ‘yes’. In the UK, more liberal government separated industrialrelations from state welfare, a feature that shaped subsequent historiography. The focushere stays firmly on areas of apparently similar coverage and concern: the poor law, socialinsurance, and access to medical care.The author claims, reasonably, that time constraintsprevented his casting the net wider. He could perhaps have reflected further on how suchdifferent frameworks are embedded in different state constructions of public welfare—andon the proper role for the state in correcting social problems.

Hennock’s detailed knowledge of the many, major German accounts of policy develop-ment in the period under review endows his work with an authority not found in historiesreliant solely on English sources. The author does a great favour to the non-German-speakers among us by exposing the findings of German scholarship to a wider readership.As indicated above, however, while the scholarly approach and the eye for detail are strong,they do not substitute for an analysis of the broader picture, which is missing. Theconclusions, while historically interesting, do not develop those insights into the signifi-cance of pre-1914 initiatives for our understanding of British and German welfare states ingeneral that appear sporadically in earlier chapters. This is a specialist’s book; it offers awealth of detailed knowledge, but no blueprint for comparative historical policy studies inthe future.

noel whitesideUniversity ofWarwick

George C. Peden, Arms, economics and British strategy: from dreadnoughts to hydrogen bombs(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 384. 35 tabs.ISBN 0521867487 Hbk. £55/$99)

Historical writing on military strategy often neglects the technological and economic baseneeded to generate a country’s military capabilities. In turn, economic historians often shyaway from examining issues of military strategy or assessing the impact of military tech-nology on warfare in their analyses of the impact of national defence efforts on economicdevelopment. Similarly, historians of technology tend to focus on technological develop-ment rather than the wider implications of these developments for the economy andmilitary strategy. These three literatures often coexist happily, with historians rarely ven-turing outside their narrow specialisms. In his latest book, George Peden aims to overcomethese artificial divisions by bringing these different histories together in order to analyseBritain’s military power taking into account technological and economic developments. Asa result, Peden seeks to offer a new appraisal of British military strategy from dreadnoughtsto hydrogen bombs.

Peden’s analysis centres around a set of three major questions: ‘how to compete inter-nationally in military technology; what proportion of national income to devote to defence;and how best to deploy the armed forces’ (p. 2). As Peden notes, his story is on one levela familiar one of Britain’s adjustment from being the leading industrial nation withformidable military capabilities to becoming a medium power with a weak economysustaining an over-ambitious military posture. The six chapters of the book discuss thedevelopments of the British military prowess chronologically. The first four chapters dealin sequence with the build-up to two wars followed by chapters on wartime mobilizationitself. Peden divides the post-1945 period into two chapters analysing the impact of theatomic and hydrogen bombs on the British defence effort. Each chapter is constructed

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roughly along the same pattern, analysing in turn the policy-making environment, weaponstechnology, economics and finance, and military strategy. Throughout the book, Pedendiscusses critically the massive literature on each of these aspects, offering a remarkablesynthesis full of new insights. However, this is not just a work of synthesis. Peden draws onhis own archival research on domestic and foreign economic policy to provide newperspectives on the economics of British defence. In this sense, the book is the result ofmany years of painstaking research and a genuine tour de force of historical scholarship.

In contrast to much of the declinist literature, Peden concludes that Britain managed thetransition from being one of the dominant powers to being merely a European power ratherwell. Agreeing with David Edgerton’s thesis, Peden concludes that British policy-makerschampioned the development and acquisition of the most advanced weapons systems forits armed forces. Indeed, the book documents that for the most part, British weaponssystems could compete with the military equipment produced by rival powers. The risingcost of increasingly sophisticated weapons systems meant that Britain was forced to acquirea delivery system for its nuclear deterrent from the United States and cooperate increas-ingly with European partners to develop new, advanced weapons systems such as militaryaircraft by the late 1960s.This is a point the book might have explored in more detail giventhat the constraints imposed by the spiralling costs of military hardware are the startingpremise for the book (p. 1). In terms of the overall economic cost of defence, Peden arguesthat Britain did not spend excessive amounts of its national income on defence. At thesame time, he seems to accept the arguments of some analysts that the high level of Britishdefence expenditure contributed to the country’s relatively slower economic growth. Pedenconcludes ultimately that the problem remained that of successive governments’ aspiringto a military strategy that overstretched existing economic resources. Even though militaryfirepower continued to increase, the rising cost of modern weapons systems exacerbatedfurther this mismatch between strategy and the level of military capabilities that could beachieved in the circumstances.

Peden’s conclusion raises questions about why Britain persisted in adhering to anoverambitious military strategy for so long. In reply, Peden mounts a strong defence ofBritain’s grand strategy in the twentieth century. In his view, British policy-makers didscale down military commitments in line with diminishing resources and changed circum-stances in the Cold War. His only critical note is directed at bureaucratic politics inWhitehall which allowed service interests to dominate spending decisions. Peden’s analysisimplies that tighter financial controls might have helped to keep defence expenditure underbetter control. On balance, Peden argues that British policy-makers pursued sensiblemilitary strategy during the first 70 years of the twentieth century. Given the emotivenature of the topic, not every reader will be persuaded by his conclusions, particularly asPeden does not consider the implications of alternative strategies, particularly during theperiod of the ColdWar. However, this caveat should not detract from Peden’s achievement.This book combines in masterly fashion separate strands of historical literature demon-strating beyond dispute that arms, economics, and military strategy are linked irrevocablyand together determine a country’s overall power.

till geigerUniversity of Manchester

Peter Scott, Triumph of the south: a regional economic history of early twentieth centuryBritain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Pp. xiv + 324. 20 figs. 36 tabs. ISBN 1840146133Hbk. £60/$99.95)

The central theme of this work is that the complementary relationship which had existedbetween London and ‘outer’ Britain from medieval times became increasingly tense from

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the mid-nineteenth century; from the early twentieth century this relationship rupturedand the economic interests of London and the south-east diverged rapidly from theindustrial interests of the periphery. Viewed from this perspective, Scott’s work enhancesthe research on British regional development conducted by, for example, Nick Crafts,Carol Heim, and Clive Lee.

The volume consists of 14 chapters, which cover just about every conceivable topicrelated to regional economic development and divergence in the early twentieth century.Chapters 2 and 3 focus on the growth of the City and the mechanisms by which theconcentration of financial power in London exercised a progressively deleterious effect onthe staple industries and their respective localities. Following a discussion of the effects ofthe First World War, chapters 5 to 8 examine the processes by which the centre of gravityof British manufacturing moved from the north and the west to the south and east.Tellingstatistics are that in the decade to 1911, London had accounted for 17.5 per cent ofBritain’s population expansion, but during the interwar years this had increased to almost35 per cent (p. 122); between 1930 and 1935, ‘factory trades’ employment in the GreaterLondon area increased by 18.4 per cent, compared to 6 per cent for Britain as a whole, andthat during 1932–8, the metropolis and its satellites such as Slough,Welwyn, and Watfordattracted 47.9 per cent of the British total of plants with 25 or more employees (p. 135).Subsequent chapters focus mainly on the implications of these regional changes forpatterns of employment and address inter alia industrial transference schemes; labourmigration; the dual labour market hypothesis; changes in the gender composition of thelabour force; and suburbanization.

One of the book’s key strengths is that at no time does Scott shy away from a rigorousdiscussion of the economic forces generating regional change. In fact, such treatment isevident in most chapters. For example, the pattern of regional wage and non-wagedifferentials c.1870–1914, and the effects of the ‘Dutch disease’ (the process by whichthe growing surplus on the invisible account raised the ‘real exchange rate’ for sterling,undermined manufacturing exports, and served to reinforce London’s national he-gemony), are explained in chapter 3, while external economies, clustering, and know-ledge spillovers are considered in chapter 8. For this reviewer, at least, the best exampleof this rigour occurs in chapter 9. Here, Scott explains how the operation of industrialestates reduced start-up costs by converting the fixed cost of the factory into a rentalstream; because land and buildings usually accounted for 50 per cent or more of thecosts of establishing a manufacturing business, removal of these up-front costs provideda major stimulus to the building of new factories; factories built on these estates were ofstandard design and therefore suitable for a variety of assembly industries. The overallconsequence of these factors was that powerful locational externalities via ‘localintegration’ were generated and a virtuous cycle of local comparative advantage was setin motion.

Overall, this book represents a significant and original work of scholarship which willappeal to business, economic and social historians, and historical geographers, as well asthose interested in understanding the evolution of policy and the policy framework gov-erning regional development after 1945. Throughout, the arguments are backed up by awealth of convincing data and the bibliography is extensive. Colleagues, like me, whobelieve that ‘north is best’, may grumble about the title, but in no way should this detractfrom a study which is, and will be, an authoritative contribution to regional economicdevelopment in Britain.

david m. higginsUniversity ofYork

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Jeremy Nuttall, Psychological socialism: the Labour Party and qualities of mind and character,1931 to the present (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006. Pp. x + 272. 1 tab.ISBN 9780719071645 Hbk. £60/$74.95)

Early British socialism saw as its goal as much the mental and moral project of ‘makingsocialists’ as the more mechanistic task of convincing electors to vote Labour, or thepreparation of plans for the nationalization of industry. Yet increasingly, according toNuttall, the post-1931 Labour Party has privileged materialist concerns over moral ones:‘Long-term aspirations to liberate people’s minds and personalities were articulated, butwhen it came to methods, nationalisation, economic planning and material redistributionwere the recurring prescriptions, not personal example, goods works, culture or education’(p. 38). Psychological socialism seeks to explain why the Labour leadership (not the partyrank-and-file, who are almost entirely absent from the study) has seemingly downgradedthe moral aspects of the socialist project, and to explore the consequences of this down-grading for Labour politics and policy.

The book is not a critique. Indeed, Nuttall argues that, given the limitations imposed onLabour by ‘the flaws and strengths (in a quality of mind and character sense) of the Britishcitizenry and Labour leaders and activists themselves’, the party have arguably ‘done wellto go as far towards socialism as they ha[ve]’ (p. 22). ‘The British people . . . seem to havebroadly got the governments they “deserved” ’ (p. 193). In fact, given the limited potentialof the British public, ‘social, political and moral mediocrity can legitimately be regarded asachievements as much as failures in history’ (p. 186).

Seen in such a light, the ‘moral’ record of the Labour governments, and particularly ofthe Blair government, does not appear half bad. His defence of New Labour’s moralaccomplishments rests largely on its successful pursuit of ‘synthesis’. By synthesis, appar-ently Nuttall means the advocacy of ‘ideologically centrist’ (p. 19) policies which, say,simultaneously ‘pursue high academic standards (intelligence) and access to those stand-ards for all (equality)’, or achieve a ‘better balancing of rights with moral responsibilities’(p. 177).While some might see such pronouncements as substantively hollow soundbites,‘the aspiration to synthesise values could be seen as reflecting a “constructive” mentality,[whereas] an unwillingness to synthesise might be seen as indicative of certain moral orpsychological failings’ (p. 17). By this rationale, the Bevanite Left in the 1950s wasarguably morally irresponsible in its advocacy of ‘socialist purity’ in that ‘it could beimmoral not to have some sense that the best could at times be the enemy of the good’(p. 84). Ramsay MacDonald and Phillip Snowden offered a similar critique of the rumpLabour Party in 1931, and unsurprisingly Nuttall draws heavily on the historical andtheoretical work of the former Labour politician-turned-scholar David Marquand, whoserevisionist biography of MacDonald emphasized the latter’s sense of responsibility andmoral purpose. However, the question of the moral responsibility of politicians to facedifficult decisions is a separate one from that of the general moral level of politics and ofthe public, and the book’s frequent shifts between discussions of different forms andmanifestations of morality can be confusing.

The same can be said for its treatment of the concept of education. Education isintrinsically tied up with ‘mental progress’ (p. 1), but the link between the two is compli-cated, and encompasses not only the question of formal schooling but also issues ofcultural awareness and appreciation and of political education. However, while Nuttalltouches on the debates surrounding each of these, his treatment of socialist attitudestowards education is ultimately unsatisfactory. In reference to political education, he notesthat while the 1950s Labour Party has been criticized for refusing to come to terms withthe commercial media and being overly dismissive of ‘public relations gimmicks’ (p. 84),during the Wilson and Blair eras the party embraced a mentally regressive approachto political communication through ‘superficial “touchy-feely” politics’ (pp. 143–4). He

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highlights debates over the attitudes towards working-class culture, contrasting the views ofintellectuals of the Left, such as Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, with politicianssuch as Tony Crosland and Hugh Gaitskell’s conviction that the party should ‘see[k] to“improve” the cultural level of all classes, not romantici[ze] existing working-class culture’(p. 76). Finally, he traces the implications of Labour’s advocacy of comprehensive educa-tion for our understanding of the party’s approach towards issues of ‘equality’, which heargues has too often been posited as a proxy for ‘caring’ (p. 8). Perhaps these differentthemes cannot be brought satisfactorily together in a unified analysis of changing socialistapproaches to education. Similarly a more exacting analysis of why and when certainattitudes towards ‘mental progress’ and ‘moral responsibility’ in government triumphedmay be equally elusive. However, the book’s approach, which examines the ideology andpolicy of various individuals and groups in turn—from R. H. Tawney, to Evan Durbin, tothe ‘Revisionists’ of the 1950s, to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown—is arguably particularlyill-suited to illuminating the connections between these various strands of thought, or whycertain strands, such as ‘Revisionism’ or Blairite socialism, triumphed where others failed.

laura beersUniversity of Cambridge

Martin Gorsky and John Mohan with Tim Willis, Mutualism and health care: British hospitalcontributory schemes in the twentieth century (Manchester: Manchester University Press,2006. Pp. xii + 243. 16 figs. 4 tabs. ISBN 071906578X Hbk. £55/$85)

This book is the result of a long period of research by the authors, some of the findings ofwhich have already appeared in various chapters and articles. Its aim is, as the authors putit, threefold. In the first instance they seek ‘to extend and develop work on the historicaldevelopment’ of hospital contributory schemes. They then locate this history in debates,both historical and contemporary, about how to organize and deliver welfare services(p. 13).

Hospital contributory schemes, a product of the nineteenth century which came fullyinto their own in the interwar period, were many and varied with their constitution andaims differing over time and place. To put it simply, through savings and donations theyallowed individuals access to the services of, primarily, the pre-National Health Service(NHS) voluntary hospitals. Many were workplace-based, with subscribers making regularcontributions through payroll deduction. Some, although by no means all, were alsosuccessful in soliciting further contributions from employers and employers’ organizations.At their best, these schemes were genuinely local, predominantly working-class,community-based bodies which allowed for democratic input to their organization andaims. One of the many virtues of the authors’ research, and this volume in particular, is thatit clearly shows the extent of hospital contributory schemes—some 11 million people weremembers in 1942—and thereby their significant role in health care provision.The authorsare thus correct to call attention to the relative historiographical neglect of the schemes,although their own work and that of, inter alia, Steve Cherry and Barry Doyle has nowenhanced our understanding of these organizations significantly.

Hospital contributory schemes filled the gaps left by, or the shortcomings of, NationalHealth Insurance, the health services provided by local authorities, and the private sector.In so doing, and while providing medical care to those who otherwise might not have hadit, they nonetheless raised a whole range of questions which continue to perplex historiansand policy-makers alike. Did, for example, membership of a particular scheme give acontributor the ‘right’ to gain admission to a particular hospital and what did this say abouthow scheme members—or at least the activists who ran the schemes—conceptualized‘entitlement’? A further complication here was the sometimes fractious relationships

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between different bodies. Leading on from the previous point, did the existence of suchorganizations with a significant aggregate membership increase demand for hospital ser-vices? The authors are convinced that it did (p. 228), and they are almost certainly correctthat this could be a mixed blessing for the hospitals themselves.This was because althoughvoluntary hospitals were glad of the income which such schemes promised, especially asother sources of finance diminished and the costs of medical care began to rise sharply,nonetheless they had to utilize their own resources more efficiently, often a long andpainful process. It is to the considerable credit of the authors that they do not shy awayfrom such complex, and perhaps ultimately irresolvable, problems of health care.

Although not especially good at pressing their own case and expounding theirundoubted virtues, hospital contributory schemes could not have provided an adequatebasis for the NHS as created in the 1940s, largely because of the differences between thesort of coverage and benefits they offered. They did not, however, disappear. Once again,this demonstrated persistence of voluntarism is a further reminder of the inadequacy ofaccounts of social welfare which focus exclusively on the central state. Indeed the authorsseek to embrace such issues in a series of interesting speculations about what lessons, if any,the theory and practice of contributory schemes might have for the future of the NHS.Thiswas the one area of the book where a little more exposition would have been welcome. Itis depressing but true that health policy-makers seem unaware of historical precedents andspend an inordinate amount of time reinventing the wheel. Such an exemplary work ofhistorical scholarship as the book here under review should be required reading for thoseseeking to ‘reform’ the NHS and it would have been useful to have had a little moredetailed analysis, drawing on the schemes’ history, in the last couple of chapters. However,this is an extremely important work which anyone interested in, or researching on, thehistory of modern British health care cannot afford to ignore.

john stewartGlasgow Caledonian University

Natasha Vall, Cities in decline?: a comparative history of Malmö and Newcastle after 1945(Malmö: Malmö Hogskola, 2007. Pp. 242. 8 figs. 12 plates. 17 tabs. ISBN 9171040390Pbk. SEK90)

The problems inherited by the economic, social, and cultural legacies of deindustrializa-tion present European policy-makers with some of the seminal issues of today. In Cities indecline? Vall considers the transition of two, once-powerful industrial cities in northernEurope, Newcastle and Malmö. She asks, ‘What has been the impact of post-industrialismupon the lives of Malmö and Newcastle inhabitants?’ (p. 13), but frames this questionwithin the parameters of two other questions: those of the efficacy of comparative analysisand theories of postmodernism. These methodological and theoretical considerationsshape both the strengths and weaknesses of this study.

The comparative approach is, of course, an essential tool of analysis, but it presents itsown set of methodological difficulties, notably how to establish fruitful and appropriatecategories of comparison and the extent to which we can find, and rely upon, sourcesdrawn from each context. Both Newcastle and Malmö are city regions, historically ‘capi-tals’ of what are seen as cohesive and distinctive economic, social, and cultural areas.However, taken as cities, they do not always typify the regions they are often taken torepresent.The overlap of categories can create analytical distortions and this is a factor inthis book, for the study often links city to region as if they were simply interchangeable.

Vall dedicates chapters to five areas of comparison: the transition from industrialto postmodern cities; labour politics and social housing; social change; the rise of thecultural sector; and urban ‘boosterism’ and the city region (the omission of other key

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indicators—for example, public health and education—of the impact of economic andsocial change are unexplained). Within this framework, the focus upon Newcastle andMalmö often shifts to a wider regional perspective. Given her analytical categories, this isto be expected, but it is a problem unless one proposes a city–region inquiry.Vall’s analysisof the industrial history of Newcastle and Malmö rests upon a largely uncritical represen-tation of familiar secondary sources. Many of these are histories of region or even nationrather than city, and as a result they can produce an unfocused analysis. Thus, in thesection on Newcastle’s engineering and shipbuilding industries, Vall notes that ‘By1900 more than half the world’s shipping tonnage was built in Britain, of which halfwas constructed in shipyards in the North East’ (p. 30). Of course, in practice it wasNewcastle’s great rival, Sunderland, once the largest shipbuilding town in the world, whichproduced a great deal of this tonnage. Thus Vall’s conclusion that, relative to Malmö,Newcastle’s failure to adapt to deindustrialization was a function of a more liberalizedsystem of labour process in the Swedish city, is equally valid for the north-east region as awhole.

In respect of labour politics, this problem presents itself inversely. Vall points to thesustained success of the social democrats in Malmö during the period 1919–84 and to therelative weakness of labour in Newcastle resulting in, inter alia, a less cohesive system ofpublic housing. Some may find it surprising that in the Labour bastion of north-eastEngland the ‘capital city’ was not the epicentre of labour politics; indeed, Newcastle isnotable for its history of working-class conservatism; its failure to produce or attractsignificant labour figures to represent the city; and a Labour Party unable to establish asustained record of electoral superiority until the early 1970s. In fact, the labour bastion ofnorth-east England was largely built south of the river Tyne in County Durham by theDurham Miners Association (DMA) which constructed a powerful Labour Party machineduring the interwar years. The DMA sponsored seven MPs, took a hegemonic grip uponDurham County Council (and in doing so produced the first working man to chair acounty council, DMA agent Peter Lee), and had a powerful influence in the miningdivision of Seaham where Sidney Webb, Ramsay MacDonald, and Emmanuel Shinwellfollowed in succession as consituency MPs.

The analysis is more cohesive when the focus shifts to the concept of the city region andthe rise of the cultural sector. Vall has researched extensively the record of both citycouncils, revealing the origins of a modern polity focused upon regionalism and culturalregeneration and led by city-based activists. The analysis traces a shift in policy fromproduction to consumption. In Malmö, under the influence of Sune Nordgren, the citytransformed from a ‘poured concrete’ socialist stronghold in the 1970s to a vibrant culturalcentre in the 1990s. In Newcastle, T. Dan Smith, and later groups of largely city-basedactivists, built upon the heightened patterns of ‘sociability’ in the city and region as aplatform for regeneration, and produced a campaign for regional governance.

Vall employs postmodern theory to explain this transformation, but one wonderswhether this heuristic is appropriate. The origins of postmodernism lay in literary theoryand its excursions into more scientific modes of enquiry have not always been successful;indeed, sometimes they have been risible.Two problems with the postmodern approach arethat definitions can often be opaque, and that the analysis employs few meaningfulmeasures. Thus in analysing the concept of the city as a cultural capital, Vall notes that‘This represents a degree of discontinuity within continuity and is a reminder of the layeredcharacteristics of cultural change’ (p. 131). Consistency is also an issue. For example,Vallis aware of the postmodern critique of overarching terms and concepts such as ‘workingclass’ and ‘community’, but uses them throughout unproblematically. Vall produces somequantitative data in her analysis of the industrial economies of Newcastle and Malmö, buther study of the impacts of the culture industry has none. However, we need to know howmeasured aspects of social change, such as the slowing down of patterns of social mobility

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and disparities in levels of public health and education, are conditioned by the cultural citymodel. It is far from clear that centralization based upon cities allied to economic culturismcan regenerate industrial regions in decline, or produce sustained economic growth. Vallappears optimistic that it can, but we will need further studies more rooted in formaleconomics to sustain this thesis.

stuart howardUniversity of Sunderland

Francesca Carnevali and Julie-Marie Strange, eds., Twentieth century Britain: economic,cultural and social change (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2007. Pp. xiii + 388. 23 figs.30 plates. 24 tabs. ISBN 0582772877 Pbk. £22.99/$42)

This is the second edition of a much-used textbook. Its structure has been completelyrevised. The first edition was divided into three chronological sections (the Edwardian,interwar, and postwar periods) but this begins with five chapters surveying the ‘longtwentieth century’, followed by two chronological sections which take the Second WorldWar as an historical watershed. Most chapters have a strong narrative of their topic, one ormore ‘problems in focus’, succinct surveys of the historiography, and annotated guides tofurther reading. Like the first edition, this volume is illustrated effectively. However, this isnot an update of the first edition but rather an attempt to chart the changes in historiog-raphy since the early 1990s, bringing new perspectives to bear and engaging with recentdebates. Good examples of the freshness and sense of emerging debates can be seen inMartin Daunton’s deployment of the ‘mixed economy of welfare’ to frame an essay onprovision of welfare before the Second World War, Peter Scott’s discovery of the ‘affluentworker’ on the council estates of the 1930s, and Jim Tomlinson’s exploration of theideology of ‘declinism’ and its impact on postwar policy-making.

The most significant change from the first edition reflects the growing strength ofcultural approaches to the core of economic and social history. Harry Cocks’s extremelyvaluable and illuminating discussion of what modernism means and might mean offersperceptive observations about the meaning and potential usefulness to historians of post-modernism. Similarly, Stephen Brooke offers an excellent discussion of the changingsalience and analytical reach of the concepts of class and gender in the long twentiethcentury that culminates in a perceptive piece on women’s progress and men’s place. Thisessay illustrates very clearly changes in the way that historians have approached questionsof gender since the publication of the first edition. The 1994 edition contained dedicatedchapters on the role of women in the Edwardian, interwar, and postwar periods. Thisedition, by contrast, engages with emerging analyses of masculinity, notably in essays byMartin Pugh (suffrage and citizenship), Sean O’Connell (interwar motoring and moder-nity), Julie-Marie Strange (leisure before 1945), and Penny Tinkler (youth), as well as thetwo cited above. This second volume is also much stronger than the first on the trends insociety and economy in what might be termed the post-Thatcher period. Michael Oliver’ssurvey of economic policy in this period, Chris Wrigley’s assessment of the role of tradeunions, Neil Rollings’s survey of the tortured relationship between Britain and Europe, andNick Crafts’s analysis of economic performance comment authoritatively on developmentsin the last two decades of the century.

There are comparatively few jarring notes.The two essays on poverty and welfare policyare integrated insufficiently and Max Jones’s chapter on war and national identity, byfocusing heavily on the two world wars, has nothing to say about either ‘theTroubles’ or theGulf wars, both of which raised highly significant questions about national identity at timesand locations of acute stress. Some of these issues are explored in Panikos Panayi’sbalanced and incisive essay on multiculturalism, but Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland,

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and the English regions have much less attention devoted to them than in the first editionand it is by no means certain that the wider historiography has relegated the importanceof national and regional identities and experiences.

Overall, this is an extremely useful addition to the textbook treatments of modernBritain. The chapters are very accessible and authoritative without talking down to thereadership. For A-level students and first-year undergraduates, there is nothing better onthe market.

alan boothUniversity of Exeter in Cornwall

GENERAL

Ian A. Gadd and Patrick Wallis, eds., Guilds and association in Europe, 900–1900 (London:Centre for Metropolitan History, 2006. Pp. xvii + 206. 8 figs. 9 tabs. ISBN 1905165137Pbk. £15)

This collection of essays began life at a conference in 2002. Like the earlier Centre forMetropolitan History collection by the editors (Guilds, society and economy in London,1450–1800, 2002), but covering a wider chronological and geographical span, the overalltheme is that of guild diversity. A number of essays take up the notion of guilds as ‘shellorganisations’, institutional forms that could be adapted for different purposes. As thesepapers show, the function of guilds depended upon the specific context (economic, social,political, institutional) in which they operated.The volume takes up two of these themes inparticular (power and identities), whereas economic aspects are generally neglected.

The first group of essays emphasizes guilds in political context. Derek Keene looks at theearly evidence for guilds in England in the period 900–1300, examining guilds in relationto the history of the state, and charting the impact of political events. Different aspects ofthis theme are explored in an excellent essay by Gervase Rosser, who examines guilds andcivil society in early modern England, with a strong emphasis on guilds as channels forindividual agency. Lars Edgren challenges common assumptions about guilds by askingwhat they did in practice, presenting a survey of the kinds of evidence available foreighteenth- and nineteenth-century Sweden. Margaret Pelling presents a micro-analysis ofthe institutional separation of barbers and surgeons in eighteenth-century London, empha-sizing personal and political explanations in opposition to standard histories of profession-alization. Finally, Philippe Minard presents an interesting discussion of life without guildsin nineteenth-century France, examining the debate between convinced adherents of freetrade and those seeking a return to economic regulation.

The second group of essays takes up the theme of identity and strategies of represen-tation. Johan Dambruyne’s comparative study of guilds in the early modern Low Countriesshows how patterns of investment were related to political and religious context. Guilds inthe south invested more heavily in social capital, building prestige through displays ofpatronage (some illustrated here), while guilds in the north applied their reserves tocharitable activities under government direction. David Marsh looks at the gardeners’company of early modern London, a case study of a ‘failed’ guild that struggled to assertcontrol over a wide territory or attract many members. George Sheridan’s essay on the silkindustry in nineteenth-century Lyon argues that the language and identity of specialistworkers must be understood in relation to the technical processes of manufacture. SigridWadauer’s paper is something of an anomaly, since it examines journeymen autobiogra-phies from nineteenth-century central Europe, rather than guilds as such. The multiplecorrespondence analysis presented here (p. 176) remains a mystery to this reviewer.Finally, Malcolm Chase looks at how the nascent trade union movement adopted thelanguage and forms of traditional guilds for new purposes, in particular noting how ideasabout craft skill acted as a source of dignity and honour for industrial workers.

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Overall, with its broad range and critique of common assumptions, this book is stimu-lating reading and will be of special interest to anyone studying guilds in a particularcontext.

james shawUniversity of Sheffield

Isabel Alfonso, ed., The rural history of medieval European societies: trends and perspectives(Turnhout: Brepols, 2007. Pp. viii + 310. ISBN 9783503520698 Hbk. £42/€60)

Work on medieval rural history drawing on evidence from more than one country is rareeven at the level of synthesis; comparative research is rarer still. As a result this book,comprising six chapters by historians concerned with different countries or parts of Europealong with Alfonso’s introductory overview, is to be welcomed.The footnotes are detailedand lengthy bibliographies are provided at the end of each chapter, making the book aunique up-to-date source of references.

The extent to which it is possible to describe the conceptual framework within whichresearch on medieval rural history takes place appears to vary from one part of Europe tothe next. The dangers of a search for ‘grand models with universal application’ (p. 73)in French historiography are discussed by Benoît Cursente. However, he also emphasizesthe importance of the drive provided to the research agenda by the incastellamento andencellulement models for the development of village communities. Christopher Dyer andPhillipp Schofield point to the vitality in British historiography of the frameworks devisedby M. M. Postan and others several decades ago, which continue to be adapted andmodified by present generations of researchers. They observe a recent trend in Britishhistoriography towards a ‘more immediately conceptual’ approach (p. 46), away from thestudy of individual institutions. Although José Ângel García de Cortázar and PascualMartínez Sopena observe the same move away from institutional studies in Spanishhistoriography, they lament the lack of a clear conceptual framework in which researchdrawing on many different approaches can occur.

One aspect of this difficulty is the problem of bringing together work on different regionsand localities. Concentration on certain regions in French historiography has a longpedigree and, in Spain, the direction of research, in thematic as well as geographical terms,has been ‘erratic’ (p. 120). For Luigi Provero, Italian historiography has been marked by alocal rather than regional approach and Julien Demade points out the bewildering effect ofvery different results obtained in parts of German-speaking Europe. Such fragmentarybodies of research can sometimes lead to a lack of works of synthesis, as has been the case,for example, in Italian scholarship.

As revealing as the varied geographical and thematic approaches are, different chrono-logical emphases emerge in the six essays. The late medieval crisis, for example, has beenfairly central to British and German historiography for decades. It has received lessattention in France, despite a greater availability of surviving documentation, and in Spainhas only attracted attention recently. Although there has been some important work on thefourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy, there has also been a tendency ‘to settle for thecollection and presentation of serial data’ (p. 150) at the expense of analysis. A number ofcontributors point to the potential for taking forward the study of certain aspects of thecountryside in the middle ages into the modern period, whether this be through the studyof surviving institutions (Italy) or the adoption of methods and approaches of historians oflater periods (Germany).

The rural history of the middle ages is bound up inextricably with the notions ofthe ‘peasant’ and ‘peasant economy’, although Alfonso reminds us that the equivalenceof these terms in the languages in which the contributions were originally written is

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problematic. Although Piotr Górecki is convinced his co-contributors work in traditionswhere the history of the peasantry is a ‘fully differentiated area of inquiry’ (p. 254), theimpression left by these essays is that the role, and even definition, of the peasant is notalways clear. Many of the contributors point to the emphasis on peasant ‘agency’ in recentwork. However, Demade’s unsettling description of the persistence of National Socialistassumptions in German historiography demonstrates that this has not always changed thevision of the static peasant community of equals, always working collectively and uninter-ested in the accumulation of wealth. Underlying assumptions of this kind explain partlywhy new data, particularly those from archaeology, have not always been assimilated intohistorical analysis.

Some contributors write about the ‘crisis’ in historical work in their field.This can be theresult of institutional factors, in the sense that the interdisciplinarity of rural history meansresearch suffers in a system of separate academic departments. Collaborative projects,especially between those working on different countries, are shown to have had consider-able impact on the direction of scholarship, but interdisciplinary methods can often makethis kind of work expensive and slow.To conclude, this is a challenging book, both becauseof the breadth and seeming incompatibility of the intellectual traditions described, andbecause of the boost it gives to the hitherto largely untapped potential for illuminatingcomparative work.

ben doddsDurham University

Lawrin Armstrong, Ivana Elbl, and Martin M. Elbl, eds., Money, markets and trade in latemedieval Europe: essays in honour of John H.A. Munro (Leiden and Boston, MA: Brill, 2007.Pp. xx + 648. 26 figs. 40 tabs. ISBN 900415633X Hbk. €149/$201)

John Munro’s contribution to medieval economic history since the 1970s has helped totransform the subject by advancing interpretations which have challenged prevailing ortho-doxies and also produced the enormous and wide-ranging scholarly output celebrated inthis festschrift.The 19 articles in this volume, written mostly by his former students, are notonly a tribute to the affectionate loyalty which his generosity as a teacher and colleagueinspires, but also to his encouragement to question the received, or fashionable, interpre-tations which often inhibit new explorations of the subject.

One popular, current interpretation that several of these essays discuss afresh is thegeographer’s theory of central places, and the related subjects of urban demand andmarket integration. Through his study of credit transactions, David Nicholas shows thelimitations that even so important a town asYpres had as a central place for the accumu-lation of capital in the thirteenth century. International fairs, the dispersal of the textileindustry in the villages, and the concentration of Flemish trade with England limited thecreditors of Ypres mainly to the financing of their fellow citizens. James Masschaele’sdiscussion of English tolls shows that although individually small, they could nonethelessbe a burden to peasants marketing produce, while the cumulative effect of numerous tollson exporters and importers who travelled across country could have a deleterious effect ontrade. Even in the fifteenth century Mark Aloisio finds that Sicily’s export of grain toMalta, which made these islands prime candidates for market integration, was in fact oftendisrupted by feudal interference, by rivalries among towns, and by corruption among portofficials.

Richard Unger concludes that there was little market integration in northern Europeoutside the Low Countries, because warfare and government regulations inhibitedexchanges, and because towns were too small and were therefore supplied easily by a smallarea. Charlotte Masemann’s piece on Lubeck’s gardens illustrates the latter point by

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showing how it paid townsmen to grow small amounts of hops and cabbages in theirgardens as cash crops rather than relying on more distant supplies. These contributionsindicate that, despite the allure of mainly Italian, long-distance trade, and the delights ofMartha Carlin’s Parisian shops, the case for the integration of markets in this periodappears a slender one.

Several articles show, though, that effective central political control could do much toenhance economic development or, conversely, to inhibit it. John Drendel illustrates fromProvence how resurgent comital authority in the thirteenth century allowed peasants toescape serfdom. Masschaele credits the English Crown’s power over its towns with thelimitation of tolls, while even warfare, when directed centrally by English kings, could, asMaryanne Kowaleski argues, enrich rather than impoverish the ports of the west country.Where there was no strong central authority, as in Catalonia, Jeffrey Fynn-Paul illustrateshow inter-urban wars could create huge civic debts which burdened later populationsshrunken by plague. Conversely, Ivana Elbl shows how the desire of the rich PortugueseCrown to maximize its profits from Africa led to inefficiencies and distortions of theAfrican market.

As befits a volume dedicated to Munro, money touches many subjects. The Catalancities collected huge taxes in cash in the early fourteenth century, while access to cash fromcustoms was fundamental to the relative strengths of the English and Portuguese Crownsin the early sixteenth century. Urban control of capital and coin in Italy led to the spreadof share-cropping. Two articles discuss usury, while Martha Howell shows how the needsof commerce in Ghent were in tension with older concepts of patrimony and propertyrights. James Bolton and Guidi Bruscoli illumine helpfully the workings of internationalfinance through the bills of exchange which allowed fifteenth-century Italian firms likethe Borromei to buy English exports worth more than their continental imports. TheBorromei, though, were ultimately financed by Venetian bullion, while David Nicholaspoints out that the growth of credit in Flanders was also linked to an increased supply ofsilver coin. Ian Blanchard shows how the long-term stability of gold prices rested on anequilibrium between the supplies of silver and gold from independent sources north andsouth of the Alps, and how the restructuring of trans-Saharan trade routes led gold to flowfrom Europe to Egypt, causing the bullion famine of the early fifteenth century. MartinElbl demonstrates the Datini firm’s involvement in the Venetian trade in copper withMajorca which helped to link northern Europe with Africa.

One or two of the articles are marred by an excessively technical approach, but in itsrange and diversity the collection is a fine tribute to Munro’s work, and the bibliographies,not least that of his own publications, provide most valuable references.

pamela nightingaleOxford

Harold J. Cook, Matters of exchange: commerce, medicine and science in the Dutch golden age(New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 562. 57 illus. 3 maps.ISBN 0300117965 Hbk. £25/$35)

Foreign scholars studying early modern Dutch history will generally focus their researchon the political, military, and economic successes of the Republic, on its socio-culturalachievements, or on its contributions to the development of modern political theory.Cook’s book is of a different nature.The extraordinary expansion of Dutch trade overseasduring its golden age is used only as a framework for exploring in depth to what extentDutch trade has enhanced scientific interest and scientific development in Europe. Hisconclusion is explicit and very original: the global and dynamic character of Dutch worldtrade during its golden age created an enthusiastic interest in the detailed study of natural

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objects and the human body. This new interest grew into a new philosophy, encouragingthe rise of modern science and leading ultimately to the European ‘scientific revolution’ ofthe eighteenth century.

In order to prove his thesis, the author analyses the structural changes in the mental andintellectual attitudes of the elite in the United Provinces by following step-by-step thecareers of the most eminent natural investigators of the Dutch golden age: botanists,naturalists, physicians, medical professors, philosophers, anatomists, even some ship cap-tains, officers, surgeons, diplomats, and merchants.The Dutch seaborne empire, based onits dominant position in the trade with the East Indies, and based also on its important,albeit less dominant, position in the trade with the West Indies and the Levant, generateda clear acceleration of exchanges, which not only encompassed the exchange of commercialgoods, and the financial transactions involved with it, but also included the exchange ofinformation about exotic objects, natural history, medicinal plants, and medical practice.In this way, commerce and scientific interest became closely interconnected, generating inthe Republic a multiplication of publications on natural history, medicinal plants, andmedical practices overseas. The author found out that the Dutch elite became greatlyinterested in the new publications too. Natural history, for example, became an importantgeneral topic at the Dutch universities and at the Amsterdam Athaeneum; botanic gardensand collections of exotic objects multiplied; anatomic lessons were integrated into medicaleducation and in some cities they even became public events. Last but not least, the interestin the human body, in the description of nature, and in experiments led philosophers, suchas René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, to reorient philosophy towards the objectiveanalysis of nature and to make nature the starting point of their new vision of mankind andsociety.

The book is a major achievement. It took the author 20 years of intense research tofollow the full careers of all of the most eminent figures responsible for the expanding newinterest in the fields of natural history, medicine, and philosophy in the Dutch Republic.The result is impressive. The description of the careers proves the determining impactof the first wave of commercial globalization upon the emergence of modern science andthe crucial role the Dutch played in it. In my view, the author goes a bit too far with thisargument, but in his conclusion he does introduce a comparative perspective, from whichit becomes clear that new interests in natural history and in medicine were emerging inmany other places in Europe at the same time, in particular in other centres of expandingworld trade in northern as well as southern Europe. A second critical remark concerns thechronological framework of the book. Indeed, one cannot deny that in late medieval andsixteenth-century Europe signs of the new interest were already evident. The authorhimself acknowledges it by giving some credit to the role of Antwerp’s world trade in thesixteenth century. However Italy, Portugal, and Spain should also be included.

Finally, some minor errors should be mentioned; in particular, in the chapters inwhich the expansion of world trade is specified. The innovative role of late medieval Italyin the field of commercial and financial techniques is barely mentioned. The crucial roleof late medieval Flanders, Brabant, England, and the Hanseatic area in the introductionof the technique of circulating commercial paper, and the invention of the endorsementtechnique and of discount banking in sixteenth-century Antwerp are also not empha-sized. All these innovations were not of Dutch origin and were not innovations of theseventeenth century, but of earlier periods, and already-intensified information exchangeto a large extent. The same is true for the origins of modern public finance via thesystem of annuities: the system, indeed, originated in the Low Countries, but in thesouthern Low Countries as well as the northern; moreover, not in the sixteenth century,but in the fourteenth century. These are marginal remarks, but they illustrate once morethe fact that the roots of the ‘scientific revolution’ are older than just the seventeenthcentury.

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These few remarks in no way diminish the many qualities of the book. The author hasproduced a magnum opus, methodologically innovative in approach and at the same timedeepening substantially our understanding of the rise of modern science in early modernEurope.

herman van der weeLeuven University

Mercedes Cabrera and Fernando del Rey, The power of entrepreneurs: politics and economy incontemporary Spain, Robert Lavigna, trans. (NewYork and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007.Pp. xii + 207. ISBN 1845451856 Hbk. £45/$75)

It is five years since Cabrera and del Rey published their path-breaking study on therelationship between entrepreneurs (including pressure groups) and political elites incontemporary Spain (El poder los empresarios: política e intereses económicos en la Españacontemporánea, 1875–2000, 2002). This splendid volume chronicled the activities of land-owners, manufacturers, industrialists, traders, and businessmen in the period from thebeginnings of the Restoration monarchy in 1875 to José María Aznar’s first centre-rightadministration of 1996–2000. By comparison, the new English edition omits the first fourdecades of the Restoration and begins—crisply—with two short chapters on the Crisis ofLiberalism, the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, and the ill-fated Second Republic. Thedecision to jettison the first three chapters is surely mistaken since, by common consent,they constitute by far the best account on the relationship between economic and politicalforces in Spain before the FirstWorldWar. Above all, the two authors discredited clearly the‘regenerations’ approach of writers such as Manuel Tuñón de Lara who depict fin-de-siècleSpain as a power system dominated by an agrarian, industrial, and financial oligarchy, orportray the country’s rulers as a caste of professional politicians whose power was based onthe patrimonialization of the public administration.Thanks to their meticulous analysis ofpatron–client relations, a detailed and much more complex picture emerged, which showsa surprisingly independent Spanish state, well able to assert its authority in the face ofnon-stop demands for special treatment from the atomized world of local and regionally-based lobbies, except when the political elite was mindful to go along with their petitioning.

The relative brevity of the opening two chapters in this new version, dealing with theeventful period 1914–36 (when economic interests supported two military coups—Primode Rivera in 1923 and Franco in 1936) no doubt reflects the state of Spanish economichistoriography. Both writers had already published seminal works on employers’ groups inpre-civil war Spain. Del Rey was the author of an exhaustive study of business groups inthe late Restoration (Propietarios y patronos: la política de las organizaciones económicas en laEspaña de la Restauración, 1914–1923, 1992), while Cabrera’s book on business organiza-tions during the Second Republic (La patronal ante la II República: organizaciones y estrate-gia, 1931–36, 1983) was widely acclaimed by both political and economic historians.

What are the merits of this abbreviated version of their work aimed at an English-speaking market? Most importantly, it offers new readers some flavour of government–business relations south of the Pyrenees in a topsy-turvy period characterized, succes-sively, by enhanced protectionism, economic nationalism, flawed attempts at corporatism,the quest for autarky, interventionism à outrance, and economic liberalism. Howeverunpropitious the political circumstances, Spanish entrepreneurs managed to find plenty ofways of making money. Even during the dark days of the incompetent Francoist dictator-ship, farmers and manufacturers earned a comfortable living through speculation, rent-seeking, gaining access to privileged information, bribery, and corruption. Moreover,scandals involving politicians, businessmen, and bankers did not go away with the returnof democratic rule in 1975. Indeed, we should be aware that the corruption scandals that

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eventually brought down Felipe González’s socialist government in the mid-1990s werenot confined to Spain.They proliferated almost everywhere in the capitalist world, includ-ing Belgium, Germany, Japan, and the UK—up to a point. In the Spanish case, the authorscontend, they were the result of a combination of factors, including greater state inter-ference in the economy, a pre-modern economic ethic in many sections of society whichtolerated such behaviour (old Spanish practices?), and the concentration of power in thehands of a single party.To my mind, by concentrating on the illegal activities of a bunch ofwell-connected crooks, the book loses some of its focus; better to have rewritten a moreup-to-date conclusion for a different readership. Yet others may well be interested in therise and fall of Luis Roldán, the director general of the Civil Guard, who pocketed vastsums of money from businessmen in search of juicy contracts; Mariano Rubio, the socialistcandidate for governorship of the Bank of Spain, forced to resign after being exposed by thepress for insider trading; or a host of dodgy financiers, prominent among them MarioConde, the high-flying president of Banesto.

Cabrera and del Rey’s well-written and nicely illustrated study on the changing rela-tionship between economic and political forces in contemporary Spain is certain to remainthe definitive work on this topic for the foreseeable future. This shorter translation offersEnglish-speaking readers fresh insights into what is becoming a major area of researchsouth of the Pyrenees.

joseph harrisonUniversity of Manchester

Barry J. Eichengreen, The European economy since 1945: coordinated capitalism and beyond(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007. Pp. xx + 495. 22 figs. 39 tabs.ISBN 0691127107 Hbk. £22.95/$35)

This is an important book that covers a huge amount of ground. In 13 chapters, the authorprogresses from postwar reconstruction to a tentative look—from the perspective of theearly 2000s—at Europe’s economic future. Moreover, in contrast to many earlier suchhistories that looked at either one or the other halves of Europe, both east and west areconsidered together, with numerous interesting parallels drawn between these two verydifferent experiences.

At one level, the work can be assessed as a straightforward survey of what actuallyhappened. It does this admirably, displaying in the process a prodigious amount ofknowledge. All the major episodes of the period are explored and all the major actors figurein the narrative. The book includes, for instance, a brilliant, blow-by-blow account of thereconstruction period; an excellent survey of the European integration process, whichcovers the institutional and historical background in great detail; and a very solid discus-sion of the early achievements and subsequent failures of central planning. However, thisbook is much more than just a very comprehensive and extremely useful record of trendsand events. It also puts forward a major interpretation of why western Europe in particularwas so successful during what has been called the ‘golden age’, yet looks to many as beingsclerotic and (almost) stagnant today. Adapting a terminology often used in easternEurope, the author divides the postwar experience into two phases of ‘extensive’ and‘intensive’ growth respectively.The former prevailed in the 1950s and 1960s and involvedcatch-up, technology transfers from the US, and the employment of surplus labour. Thelatter has characterized the last three decades and relies on home-grown innovation, onflexible labour markets and on agile financial intermediaries.

Europe’s institutions were particularly well-suited to the former phase, but are particu-larly ill-suited to the latter. Three major actors combined in the catch-up period to fosterrapid growth: trade unions that accepted wage moderation in exchange for future pay

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gains; cohesive employers’ associations that favoured long-term investment over short-term profit maximization; and growth-minded governments that helped forge consensusby, formally or informally, coordinating private sector action. These same institutions,however, did not adapt to the requirements of intensive growth and indeed becameobstacles to the necessary change and innovation. In a sense, early success bred eventualproblems.

There is much in this thesis that rings true and is appealing.There was a concerted pushfor growth in many countries in the 1950s and 1960s, while Europe today is riddled withvested interests that prevent change, with conservative financial institutions that shuninnovative start-ups and trade unions that defend a ‘permanent’ work force (or, indeed,in some cases even pensioners) at the expenses of young entrants. It is also refreshing tosee how notions such as corporatism, consensus, and social partners (derided today byso much of the mainstream literature) were able to deliver outcomes that were almostcertainly vastly superior to those that would have been produced by relentlessly maximiz-ing atomistic ‘agents’ (as people are nowadays called). Nor were such corporatist successeslimited to the early postwar years, as shown in the discussion devoted to the stellarexamples of the Netherlands and, especially, Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s.

Yet, as with all monocausal explanations, it leaves something to be desired.The corporatistinstitutions that Eichengreen so praises were, no doubt, a feature of some countries andhelped them to grow. However, the corporatist sample is almost exclusively made up of smallopen economies whose growth, inevitably, also owed a lot to the simultaneous expansion ofEurope’s larger states. In these larger economies, trade unions preaching wage moderationand governments practising efficient coordination were much less frequent. Germany mayhave had some of the former; France some of the latter; but the UK, Italy, and Spain appearto have had neither moderate trade unions nor efficient government coordination.

Not enough weight, on the other hand, seems to have been given to two other features ofthe west European record that may well vie in importance with Eichengreen’s main story;one economic, the other institutional. At the economic level is the earlier presence, and themore recent (semi-) absence, of elastic labour supplies.The old Kindleberger thesis can stillthrow a good deal of light on why the ‘golden age’ occurred and was then superseded. Cheaplabour, cheap technology, and an explosion of ‘animal spirits’ led to rapid growth; fullemployment, combined with the oil shocks, led to sharp deceleration. At the institutionallevel, there is the approach by Lars Calmfors and John Driffill which stresses the centralizedor decentralized nature of trade union negotiations, rather than their readiness to forgoimmediate gratification for longer-run gains.This approach is also able to illuminate manyof the inter-country differences in performance, particularly in the latter period.

This being said, the book is still a major tour de force. The breath and depth of thematerial that it covers are extraordinary. The way it weaves politics and history intoeconomics is masterful. Its main thesis, even if debatable in some of its details, is fasci-nating and refreshingly novel.The text does not display any of the American triumphalismwhich so often colours recent US comments on the European economy. On the contrary,it is written with profound sympathy for European institutions. In a nutshell, this is a bookworthy of one of the world’s foremost economic historians.

andrea bolthoMagdalen College, Oxford

Jaak Valge, Breaking away from Russia: economic stabilization in Estonia, 1918–1924(Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 2006. Pp. 232. 20 tabs. ISBN 9185445266 Pbk. $79.50)

Valge’s opening survey of stabilization mechanisms in Europe after the First World War,with its helpful summary of theoretical options available to governments, provides a useful

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context for his detailed analysis of stabilization in newly independent Estonia. Even so,what made Estonia (as Latvia) different was that it had virtually to build an independenteconomy from scratch. The markets of Russia, which Baltic industry and enterprise hadbeen developed to serve, had collapsed with the Bolshevik revolution; resources andmaterial goods had been stripped from Estonian territory by the retreating Russian forcesduring the war; and banking was in total disarray, with both Russian roubles and wartimeGerman occupation currency still circulating.

Unsurprisingly, therefore,Valge devotes most attention in his analysis of stabilization inEstonia to monetary policy and public finance. Fears that this will lead to a numbingsuccession of tables and figures are quickly dispelled as the book probes the interconnect-edness of political factors in economic decision-making. Significantly, those individualstaking key economic decisions after 1920 at first escaped close scrutiny by the democrati-cally elected Riigikogu (Parliament). Konstantin Päts, who headed the governmentbetween January 1921 and October 1922, together with his finance minister, GeorgWesteland a handful of other politicians from the ‘inner sanctum’ of the Farmers’ Party, workingthrough, among other things, the State Economic Council, are identified by Valge as themost important shapers of economic policy up to March 1924.

Their influence quickly made itself felt through the Bank of Estonia, whose statutes hadbeen approved in February 1919. As a result of the bank’s share issue not being taken upby private investors at home or abroad, the government became the sole shareholder.Finland alone of the foreign powers helped by giving 10 million Finnish marks. Since allmembers of the bank’s management board and supervisory board were appointed by thegovernment, the Bank of Estonia’s policy was ‘under the direct control’ of Westel ‘andconsequently, most probably also Konstantin Päts’ (p. 66). At their disposal,Valge reveals,were the huge commissions made between 1920 and 1922 from laundering Russian goldin Estonia, among other things through the Tallinn office of the Bolsheviks. Very active inthe trading of gold was the Harju Bank, which happened to be owned by Westel and Päts.Admitting the difficulty of putting exact figures to the commissions made in this way, bothby the StateTreasury and the Bank of England,Valge reaches a combined and conservativeestimate of 20.7 million gold roubles but possibly as much as 30 million: ‘This was a sumthat would have required some effort to spend’ (p. 118).Yet spent it was, chiefly on massiveloans directed at increasing employment by trying to revive the large concerns andenterprises that had functioned to meet the insatiable demands of prewar Russian markets.After Päts took over the government in 1921, the Bank of Estonia no longer even had toask permission from the State Treasury before making loans. In addition, the governmentbegan to guarantee larger loan applications from businesses, often extending the repay-ment date, and at an interest rate somewhere around 8 per cent. It became highlyprofitable, when commercial banks were paying between 15 and 20 per cent interest,simply to deposit a Bank of Estonia loan in a private institution.

It was obvious by the end of 1922 that the revival of the Russian market was not goingto take place and that the industries to which most of the bank’s loans had been directedwere very weak. Any charitable thoughts about mistakes being made are soon dispelled.Päts,Westel, General Laidoner, and other businessmen tied in with the influential Farmers’Party-dominated Centum Club turn out to have either owned or managed the 25 com-panies which between them absorbed as much as 76 per cent of the total loans advancedby the bank. An audit was requested in December 1923 by the Labour Party member OttoStrandman, and it transpired subsequently that the bank had also depleted the StateTreasury’s reserves, the gold and currency holdings of the bank and Treasury combinedhaving dropped to about one billion Estonian marks.

The change in economic policy launched after Strandman became Finance Minister ina new government under Friedrich Akel comes as a bit of an anti-climax after all of this:significant increases in customs duties, reductions in state spending, reduction of loans,

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and the valorization of existing debts all combined to deprive the influential debtors of theBank of Estonia of a motive for bringing about hyperinflation and helped stabilize thecountry. Thus economic disengagement from Russia took place and Estonia pushedtowards new markets in the west. Plus ça change.

john hidenUniversities of Bradford and Glasgow

Roxani Eleni Margariti, Aden and the Indian Ocean trade: 150 years in the life of a medievalArabian port (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Pp. xiii + 343. 4maps. 3 tabs. ISBN 0807830763 Hbk. £35.50/$55)

Hardly any student of early modern maritime history is unfamiliar with Aden, theYemeni port which was, for a long time, a major emporium of trade in the westernIndian Ocean. Almost every scholar of early modern Indian Ocean commerce hasnoticed Aden’s pivotal role. It is, however, to the credit of Margariti that one really getsa detailed picture of the commercial world of medieval Aden. Through a combination ofprimary sources, consisting of the invaluable Geniza documents, some contemporaryArabic accounts of the city, and its material remains, the author illuminates variousaspects of the port and its commercial culture in the period 1083–1228. Having trainedin medieval archaeology, Arabic, and the language of the Geniza documents (Judaeo-Arabic), Margariti gathers the scattered evidence to weave a coherent story of the com-mercial dynamics of Aden.

The book is divided into two parts.The first details the physical features like the location,topography, climate, and environment that bestowed nautical advantages to Aden. Theauthor gathers literary and archaeological evidence to trace the location and functioning ofthe harbour, anchorage space, customs-house, storehouses, and markets. Aden stood at themaritime intersection of the Red Sea and the western Indian Ocean and was therefore agreat centre of transit trade. Its prominence was also conditioned by the flow of monsoonwinds, which necessitated the transient traders to lay anchor at Aden for transactingbusiness as well as replenishing water and provisions. The author tracks the historicaltrajectory of Aden from an independent city state under the Zurayid dynasty (1083–1174)when conscious efforts were made towards controlling and defending the city and its port,to a major port of theYemeni state under the Ayyubid rulers (1174–1228).The second partcontains the most valuable information on the commercial activities of the port.The authorreconstructs some major institutional features that made Aden ‘the centre of westernIndian Ocean commercial networks’ (p. 2).

Describing the commercial milieu of early medieval Aden is by no means an easy task.From some Geniza letters and documents, the author squeezes out interesting informationon numerous commercial institutional aspects such as merchant networks, commodities,business partnerships, shipbuilding, customs duties, mode of collection, and legal proceed-ings. Margariti discusses at length the functioning of the port and its institutions andargues that the commercial culture at Aden was, in many ways, distinct from that of theRed Sea and the Mediterranean Sea ports. Features like uniform customs duties, theprominence of Jews in the city’s political economy, and trans-sectarian commercial tiesbetween Indian Banias, Jews, and Muslim merchants distinguished Aden from many otherport cities.The author taps the rich contents of business correspondences between foreignmerchants and their representatives at Aden to spot the position and functions of wakil-altujjar (trustee or representative) in particular, the legal mediation which, according to theauthor, constituted the major role of a trustee. The details about how the trade accountskept by trustees were notarized and used in Adeni and Egyptian courts of adjudicationrender the book very exciting.

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The book contributes to our understanding of the position and significance of Aden inthe early medieval maritime commercial world. It illuminates the diverse aspects of theport and its people and underscores the trade connections that it forged all along thewestern Indian Ocean region between the late eleventh and early thirteenth centuries.The book thus prefigures Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European hegemony (1991) in whichshe identified the existence of world economies between 1250 and 1350.

Aden and the Indian Ocean trade, in its reconstruction of the port’s history from a tradeand economy perspective rather than that of religion and politics, provides a valuableaddition to the publisher’s series on Islamic civilization and Muslim networks. It demon-strates unequivocally that an Islamic port city, like Aden, possessed all the features thatcould be found in any other contemporary European or Asian port. The non-differentialtaxation, and the dominance of Jewish merchant families in the political economy andtheir role as trustees of foreign merchants irrespective of religion or region testify to thecosmopolitan character of the port.The text is slightly difficult for the non-Arabic reader,since it is interspersed with Arabic and occasionally Hebrew phrases and terms. A glossaryof the non-English terms or concepts used in the text such as farsakh, makayyal, bahar,funduq or sharif might have made the book reader-friendly, especially for non-specialists ofMiddle-Eastern history.

ghulam a. nadriGeorgia State University

Mark R. Wilson, The business of Civil War: military mobilization and the state, 1861–1865(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Pp. xii + 306. 9 figs. 11 tabs.ISBN 0801883482 Hbk. £30/$45)

The Civil War is central to the political and economic development of the United States.In The business of CivilWar,Wilson revives that venerable but now largely discredited thesis,although he does not follow in the footsteps of Charles Beard and others who establishedthe argument. In a quasi-marxist vein, Beard depicted the Civil War as a struggle overfederal economic policy between landed aristocrats of the south and the rising bourgeoiselite of the north. Wilson does not address the underlying causes of the war, political orotherwise. Similarly, Beard highlighted tariff, banking, and other legislation written—in theabsence of southern opponents—during the war by northern congressmen that insuredpresumably the triumph of industrial capitalism in the post-bellum period.Wilson does notconsider the economic programme enacted by Republican Party legislators; rather, heconcentrates on the build-up of federal government administrative capacities that accom-panied the Union’s military mobilization, implying that the war spawned a structure ofgovernment that matched an advanced capitalist order.

The thesis of the centrality of the Civil War in US political and economic developmentis now difficult to sustain.The economic impact of the war has been greatly discounted byscholars in recent decades.With the growth of manufacture, construction of transportationand communications infrastructures, and expansion of market economy during the ante-bellum period, the US was well on the way toward economic modernization by 1860; ashistorians thus emphasize, the Civil War did not usher in a new era in economic activity,but rather entailed the use of the products of prior industrial capitalist advances. Similarly,the vast economic progress of the post-bellum period, including the critical rise of thecorporation, had little to do with the war. The essential leap in federal governmentcapacities and interventions came in the first decades of the twentieth century, being aresponse to the economic dislocations of the late nineteenth century. The growth of thestate during the Civil War was episodic.

The war required a massive mobilization of the economic resources of the north.Wilsonprovides a valuable history of the organizational achievement of equipping Union soldiers

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for battle. The numbers are staggering. The army secured 1 million horses and mules,1.5 millions barrels of pork, 100 million pounds of coffee, 6 million woollen blankets,10 million pairs of trousers, and something in excess of 1 billion rounds of small armsammunition.The procurement effort greatly expanded the administrative capacities of thefederal government, and Wilson argues that a modern state was born in the process.

When President Lincoln first called upon the states to raise troops to suppress thesouthern insurrection, the task of supplying the recruits also fell to the states; the federalgovernment would foot the bill.Within six months, the local effort at procuring everythingfrom knapsacks, canteens, tents, and uniforms to boots and shoes proved wanting. Pres-sured by local producers, state officials did not purchase goods from other states; com-plaints of shoddy products and political favoritism in the awarding of contracts emerged.Controlling the power of the purse, Simon Cameron, Secretary ofWar, announced in early1862 that the Quartermaster General of the Army would now assume total managementof the process for securing basic supplies.

The great scholarly contribution of Wilson’s book lies in his study of the Office of theQuartermaster. The agency had been established after the War of 1812 and grew underthe remarkable leadership of Thomas S. Jesup into a far-flung, efficient system of federalarsenals and depots. Jessup assembled a corps of administrators and the veteran, trainedgroup was in place at the outbreak of sectional conflict. Jessup died in June 1861, butleadership passed into the capable hands of Montgomery C. Meigs, an army engineer.Union soldiers remained equipped in unprecedented ways and Meigs deserves as muchcredit for the Union victory as Ulysses Grant and others. However, the Office of theQuartermaster did not operate free from problems or conflict. Wilson details strikes ofseamstresses and other workers at federal facilities over wages and hours. More impor-tantly, a debate persisted throughout the war on whether the army should produce goodsdirectly or rely on private contractors. No-bid contracts to major manufacturers andmerchant suppliers rankled small-scale producers. Meigs did not resolve the tensionssuccessfully (which obviously persist to our own times), but he and other federal author-ities did fight corruption, order court martial trials against offending contractors, andhonour a ‘producerist vision of military economy’ (p. 173).

Did military mobilization create a modern state? Wilson describes the dismantling offederal agencies after the war and thence concludes that the CivilWar’s impact on politicaland economic development was ‘indirect and incomplete’ (p. 214). In the absence ofconcrete examples, he ends by suggesting that the military bureaucracy imparted newvalues of organization and planning. In short, he has somewhat overreached himself, buthis book should be read simply for its fine history of a federal bureaucracy, one createdbefore the Civil War.

walter lichtUniversity of Pennsylvania

Carroll W. Pursell, The machine in America: a social history of technology (Baltimore, MD:Johns Hopkins University Press, 2nd edn., 2007. ISBN 0801848172 Hbk. $55;ISBN 0801885795 Pbk. £15.50/$22.95)

In the 1995 edition of The machine in America, Carroll Pursell provided one of the first, andstill most widely referenced, surveys of recent work in the history of American technology.In this second edition, Pursell has expanded his coverage to include more recent devel-opments, both technological and historiographic. Pursell describes this book as a ‘socialhistory’ (p. xi) of technology, by which he means a history of technology focused not onmachines and processes, but on the people who create, use, and make sense of them. ForPursell, technologies are best understood as social products, as the reflection of very

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particular times, places, and relationships.Thus Pursell looks beyond inventors, engineers,and capitalists to consumers, policy-makers, and everyone affected, directly or indirectly,by the creations of our technological society. His goal is to integrate the study of technologyinto the mainstream of American history. Citing his mentor A. Hunter Depree, he arguesthat the history of American science and technology, properly understood, is the history ofAmerica.

The first few chapters of the book describe the migration of tools and techniques—firstmedieval agriculture technologies, and later textile and other industrial manufacturingmachines—from the OldWorld to the New.Throughout the colonial and early Republicanperiod, Americans begged, borrowed, and stole technologies from Europe, often trans-forming them significantly in the process. Although Pursell makes no claim to compre-hensive coverage, which would be impossible in a single-volume survey, he covers all thetraditional topics, including agricultural, manufacturing, transportation, and domestictechnologies.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the US developed into a technological andindustrial powerhouse in its own right. It is in his treatment of this important and formativeperiod that the value of Pursell’s social history approach becomes apparent. He tiestogether neatly what are often treated as separate or even contradictory histories: the riseof industrial manufacturing in the north-east, the opening of the agricultural heartland ofthe Great Plains regions, and the ‘winning of the west’ through mining and irrigationprojects. In each of these cases, for reasons economic, social, and political, Americansdeveloped a propensity for a certain kind of technological solution: large-scale, high-capital, and labour-saving, but also resource intensive. These solutions often had unin-tended consequences. The same technologies that enabled increased productivity forfarmers, for example, also distanced them from their customers, and made them vulner-able to the monopolistic practices of intermediaries such as grain silos and railroads.

One of the important themes of the book is the growing relationships among industry,science, and government. Despite the initial reluctance of the federal government to fundtechnological development (as in turnpikes and canals), by the middle of the nineteenthcentury the US government was committed to devoting its resources to the service ofindustry.The US Geological Survey was established in 1879, for example, in large part tosubsidize essential research required by the mining industry. The Department of Agricul-ture served a similar purpose for the agricultural industry. By the early twentieth century,organizations such as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the NationalBureau of Standards, and the National Resources Committee were unabashedly commit-ting federal resources to ‘supplying the people with important scientific findings which theyneed for their private purposes’ (p. 232). The Second World War and the Cold War onlyaccelerated this ongoing trend towards government-directed industrial research.

Clearly, Pursell laments the rise of the modern military–industrial–academic complexand its distorting effect on American social and political life. He points to the uninten-tionally ironic slogan of the 1933 Century of Progress World’s Fair—‘Sciencefinds—Industry applies—Man conforms’—as the beginning of an emerging critique of anarrow, corporate, and technocratic mindset. In the chapter that ended the first edition ofthe book, Pursell highlights social, environmental, and political consequences of thismindset, and looks hopefully towards a more balanced, post-industrial, postmodern worldin which technology once again becomes the servant, rather than the master, of society.Thenew material in this second edition attempts to bring the survey up-to-date with coverageof computers, the internet, and globalism. These are big topics to cover in just twochapters, and although Pursell touches on a wide variety of topics (including videogamesand the iPod), he does not provide much by way of analysis. He does not make use of thebest and most recent sources, and his text is unfortunately marred by a number of technicaland historical errors, including a misunderstanding of the significance of the stored

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programme computer and the conflation of the concepts of ‘cybernetics’ and ‘cybernation’.The chapter on globalization is stronger, but similarly episodic. Both chapters raise morequestions than they answer. Nevertheless, The machine in America remains one of the bestsurveys of the history of American technology, and an excellent overview of recent work inthe field.

nathan ensmengerUniversity of Pennsylvania

Hugh Grant and David Wolfe, eds., Staples and beyond: selected writings of Mel Watkins(Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 275.ISBN 0773531440 Hbk. £54/$80; ISBN 0773531459 Pbk. £16.99/$29.95)

Comprising three sections, on theory, national policy, and the history of economic thought,this selection of Watkins’s papers by his former students is nicely composed. It does,however, raise the question of whether at the time of their writing (the most recent paperis 1994) Watkins was really an economic historian. Certainly, he was an analytically gifted,ideologically motivated intellectual historian who chose economic thought (I deliberatelyavoid the narrower term, economics) as his principal subject. In the papers he styleshimself a marxist. In fact, he was a late convert to western marxism, and in the selectedpapers he appears more of a fellow traveller than a true believer, though this is a taxonomic,not a negative judgement. The papers selected are a rewarding read for more than theirtruth-laden content, though truth-laden they are.The presentations are erudite.They haveclarity and display strength of conviction. They have style and are eminently readable(though the many lapses in copy-editing and proof-reading lessen the enjoyment).Watkins’s personal charm and wit is evident in every selection put in the book. Despite thepassage of time, all of this is still true of these papers. I do not hesitate to recommend thecollection to anyone interested in the Canadian situation in the last half of the twentiethcentury; that is not to say that I recommend agreement with everything therein written.

Watkins’s contribution derived from his ‘blending the fact of dependent industrializationexplicitly into the staples approach’ (p. 220) to elaborate a staple theory of truncatedeconomic growth. However, because his application is so narrow—straying not beyond theboundaries of Canada—the theory is better taken as a history thesis.This draws upon thework of H. A. Innis, W. A. Mackintosh, and A. O. Hirschman, becoming a synthesis inwhich primary product exports are seen to be the fundament of the economy in question,with all else in the economy thereby dependent. Having drawn this judgement from hischosen sources, Watkins considers it a closed matter, dismissing contrary suggestions byVernon Fowke, K. J. Buckley, E. J. Chambers, and Donald Gordon. Dependence on stapleexports having been taken as the whole story, Watkins then turns to the consequences ofdependency: of foreign (largely US) ownership of industry by international corporations;a domestic comprador entrepreneurial class; truncated economic development; and con-strained national sovereignty. Judging these consequences as unacceptable, he proposesdemocratic socialism—government replacing the failed or missing local bourgeoisie—as acorrective to take the nation into independent balanced growth and perhaps even to ahigher average standard of living. In none of these papers, however, does Watkins spell outprecisely the instruments and objectives of that democratic socialism.

There is much in Watkins’s analysis that is right, but much is missing. Consider, forexample, his 1970 paper, ‘The dismal state of economics in Canada’. Here he argues thateconomic history, having been swamped in the 1950s by Keynesian economics andpositivist neo-classical theory, was then betrayed by the counterfactuals and empiricalnegations of the new economic history. However, Watkins seems unaware that the eco-nomic history off which he fed was an element in a set of histories constructed in the

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fashion of grand narratives in the early twentieth-century US. The representation of thatphase in historiography in Canada was a deliberately constructed simulacrum of FrederickJackson Turner’s frontier thesis and Thorstein Veblen’s institutionalism. With the arrivalof postmodern epistemology, that style of history passed away in favour of the smallernarratives of sections of nations and of subsets of populations. Indeed, Watkins’s ownenlisting of history in a new political economy intent on defending Canadian democraticsocialism was part of that general dismemberment.To blame the arrival of formalism andquantitative testing in economics for the passing of what he thought to be economichistory, was to blame the north-east wind for the storm that generated it.

Neo-classical economics in the 1960s was indeed naive, but acknowledgement of theconsequences of technological advance in the form of economies of scale and external-ities has brought the discipline into another mode. In economics the big picture hasagain appeared in the historically sensitive theory of, inter alia, Elhanan Helpman andRichard Lipsey. Watkins’s narrowness of vision about economic history is mirrored in thenarrowness of his reading of Canadian history. He should have looked earlier in thenineteenth century than R. C. Brown’s depiction of Canada’s national policy, 1883–1900(1964) in the 1890s. He should have looked at the economic thought of the Maritimes,of Quebec, and of the west, because the new political economy that Watkins supportedin these papers was a contemporary southern Ontario phenomenon. It was the productof a western marxist movement centred at the Universities of Toronto and Carleton.Furthermore, it should be kept in mind that the staple thesis was a product of theToronto school of Canadian history. Those who accepted it in other parts of Canadawere schooled into it.

It is hardly fair, however, to lay on Watkins the sins of his fathers in Canadian eco-nomic thought. The postmodernists are right. All we can say is that he betrayed abetrayal, if betrayal it was. Still, what would Innis say? Perhaps ‘Et tu, Brute?’ For, afterall, Brutus was not just motivated similarly by the good of the state; he was also Caesar’snatural son.

robin neillUniversity of Prince Edward Island and Carleton University

Lillian M. Li, Fighting famine in north China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,2007. Pp. xix + 520. 28 figs. 16 maps. 6 plates. 27 tabs. ISBN 0804753040 Hbk.£52.50/$85)

This important book offers a loosely chronological, multifaceted analysis of famine in animportant Chinese province over the past three centuries. It sets the scene with sevencontextual chapters on topics such as climate, infrastructure, agricultural output andtechnology, Beijing’s role as capital city, and the impact of storage and food markets onprice fluctuations and supply imbalances. Those interested in the comparative history offamine will note the regime’s abiding concern about provisioning the capital; the officialrecording of price data in order to monitor rather than control markets; and the huge sumsspent on flood control schemes during the first half or so of the Qing dynasty, the so-calledHigh Qing era (c.1650–1800).There follow five chapters on famine during the High Qing,the nineteenth century, and pre- and post-1949.

If there is anything to the principle enunciated by Robert Malthus in 1796 that increas-ing population was ‘the most certain possible sign of the happiness and prosperity of astate’ (cited in J. M. Keynes, Essays in biography, 1931), then the inhabitants of High QingChina were relatively lucky. Between 1700 and 1820, while the population of westernEurope grew by two-thirds, that of China almost trebled. ‘Enlightened’ Manchu despo-tism, increasing interregional trade, and agricultural improvement are usually cited as

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factors in this Qing ‘golden age’. Wars were few, and the diffusion of new crops eased thepressure on subsistence. For the most part, at least in peacetime, China was spared seriousfamine. Such hints of a relatively ‘low pressure’ demographic regime vanished in thenineteenth and early twentieth centuries. China’s population hardly grew during thenineteenth century, and neither the area under cultivation nor crop yields per acreexpanded much. In the twilight of the Qing dynasty, the peasants of Zhili province (today’sHebei), the main focus of this study, enjoyed a standard of living involving on average(p. 109) a diet that did not exceed subsistence level.

The lack of reliable agricultural and demographic data means that cases of effectivefamine relief are not easily separated from ones of mild harvest shortfall. Yet Li’s claimthat famine mortality was relatively ‘light’ during the High Qing is surely plausible. Thenear-absence in official documents from the High Qing of ‘heart-wrenching stories’ aboutfamine victims, of mass migration and famine foods, or of child sales and cannibalism,contrasts with frequent references to such evidence both earlier and later (p. 34). None-theless, Zhili clearly suffered a severe famine in 1759 (pp. 241–3), while in southern Chinain 1787—as Malthus noted—‘mothers thought it a duty to destroy their infant children,and the young to give the stroke of fate to the aged, to save them from the agonies of sucha dilatory death’ (An essay on the principle of population [hereafter Essay], 6th edn. [1798]1826, I.XII.35). Towards the end of the Qing era, China became ‘the land of famine’.Sources cited by Li put famine mortality in 1876–8 at ‘an estimated 9.5 million to perhaps13 million or more’, in 1928–30 at 10 million, and during the Republican period as a wholeat 21 million (pp. 272, 308). Such staggering numbers place the 15–18 million lives lostduring the cataclysm of the Great Leap Forward famine in clearer perspective, given thattotal population is reckoned to have been 360 million in the mid-1870s, 485 million in thelate 1920s, and 650 million in the late 1950s.

Long-run demographic trends in China are surely evidence of the ineffectiveness offamines as checks on population growth since, as Malthus conceded, they ‘produce[d] buta trifling effect on the average population’ (Essay, II.XIII.11). So was China Malthusian?The broad secular contours of population change, living standards, and the incidence offamine would suggest so. Nonetheless, Li stresses rightly the role of human action inpreventing mass famine mortality—sometimes. She highlights, in particular, the painstaken by the Qianlong emperor in 1743–4, whose effectiveness in relieving disaster issuggested by the relatively modest rise in food prices in the wake of extreme weather.Indeed, Li’s point that price peaks in eighteenth-century China rarely rose to the levels ofmedieval or early modern Europe (p. 380) is well taken. Following Pierre-Étienne Will’sclassic Bureaucratie et famine en Chine au 18e siècle (1980), Li stresses that the policymix—relief in food and in cash, reliance on markets, public works, controlledmigration—mattered too. But if relief was successfully administered in 1743–4, there isample evidence that on other occasions administrative delays and corruption preventedeffective relief, so that ‘those who are suffering have time to die with hunger before theremedy arrives’ (Essay, I.XII.36). Although the huge variation in China’s climate andtopography meant that interregional trade reduced the impact of regional scarcities,China’s size also meant that when disaster struck, it was difficult for the centre to monitoragents in the periphery. In sum, the concerns of an emperor, and the energy of hislieutenants, could make a difference; but so too could the corruption of an official,such as Gansu’s governor, who was executed for embezzlement in 1781 (p. 248).Tragically, effective relief relied on the whims of despots and the honesty of theirunderlings.

Finally, although this very impressive study contains a good deal of material aboutprovinces other than Zhili, its stance on Qing relief is inevitably coloured by its focus on aprovince containing the capital city and most of the occupying Manchu population. Zhiliwas atypical. It was heavily subsidized by the rest of the empire and, as Carol Shiue has

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shown (Journal of Economic History, 2004), famine relief there was out of all proportion toits relative poverty and population.

cormac o gradaUniversity College Dublin

Ian Hunter, Age of enterprise: rediscovering the New Zealand entrepreneur, 1880–1910(Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2007. Pp. viii + 280. 20 figs. 47 plates. 10 tabs.ISBN 1869403819 Pbk. £15.95/$29.95)

Hunter, like many an economic historian who is based in a business school, brings aninterdisciplinary and comparative focus to his research which concerns a significant periodin New Zealand’s development. After introducing the notion of entrepreneurship, Hunterprovides a narrative of the chronology of New Zealand businesses in the periods 1820–80and 1880–1910, and then investigates a number of themes. He looks at the origins ofentrepreneurs, attitudes to enterprise and industry, social capital and immigrant entrepre-neurship, methods of overcoming scarcity of capital and pursuing innovation, and the lifecycles of entrepreneurs. The material is clearly presented and ends with some generalconclusions.

Much of Hunter’s analysis depends on the standard techniques of historical research,including creative plundering of relevant concepts and techniques from cognate disci-plines. His major innovation relative to existing literature is the assembly of a sample ofabout 130 entrepreneurs. He uses an essentially ethnographic approach but makes noclaims to statistical representativeness. It is, however, a useful gathering together of infor-mation, about some well-known figures and some more obscure. (Hunter is right that evenfor the well-known, the existing literature is scattered and uneven in quality and coverage.)The presentation is admirably enhanced by a fine set of photographs, drawn from a widerange of business archives.

The subtitle of the work is ‘Rediscovering the New Zealand entrepreneur’, but theentrepreneur was never lost. Entrepreneurs were buried in biographies, business histories,and economic histories. Furthermore, while the entrepreneur is at the centre of Hunter’sanalysis, he does not really distinguish between the entrepreneur in the sense ofSchumpeter, the disruptive influence which prevents achievement of an equilibrium, fromthe more general idea of the organizer of economic activity, a tradition which goes back atleast to Cantillon and which avoids the assumption of Adam Smith that opportunities willbe exploited so that the details of how this is achieved are not very important. Hunterbelongs mostly but not exclusively in this latter tradition. The alternative approaches dealwith different aspects of history and are not mutually exclusive. The Cantillon traditiongenerates interesting information, especially for those concerned with management.Hunter distinguishes innovation from invention (p. 206), but he takes a simple approachto risk-taking rather than a modern concept of risk management (for example, p. 207).Thelatter would have reinforced his discussion of the importance of bringing together skills inseveral areas, including shipping and marketing as much as farming. Hunter adds addi-tional information about growth in specific industries, enriching our knowledge of howprogress was achieved, but not adding a great deal to what we know about the springs ofthat knowledge.

Sometimes Hunter discovers what serious scholars have long known. A one-dimensionalapproach to the ‘long depression’ is certainly not tenable and the only puzzle is why itpersists among so many historians.The notion of a long period of depressed incomes from1879 to 1896 is convenient to those who want to see a period of enlightenment beginningwith the Liberal government of the 1890s, but it has not had serious support fromeconomic historians for many years. Differential regional patterns were recognized long

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ago and so were distinct trends in various industries. Fundamentally, a downward trend inprices does not translate into falling real incomes; that depends on differing degrees ofdownward trends among output and input prices.The stickiness of interest rates relative tooutput prices created problems for indebted estate owners but not for urban industrialistsoperating with low debt levels in industries where input prices at least matched falls inoutput prices. Brewers gained while land developers suffered—unless they were the samepeople. This knowledge depends on analytical insight more than an accumulation of casestudies, and Hunter adds illustrative and supplementary information rather than newknowledge.

Similarly, Hunter reports his careful tracing of relationships among entrepreneurs, buthe does not stop to consider how dairy farmers could not market their products individu-ally and so needed institutions which enabled them to avoid being at the mercy of tradersand other urban interests. Sheep farmers on the other hand could consign their productsindividually to export markets and so could rely on competitive pressures to disciplinetrading and urban interests. Hence there was a different history of the cooperative move-ment in dairying from the meat and wool industries. Even more prosaically, New Zealandbusinesses could form relationships in London more easily than Latin Americans simplybecause they could move easily between New Zealand and London, passing as ‘native’ inboth places.

Hunter displays considerable quantitative sense, but he can get his counting wrong or atleast is misleading by not first clarifying his conceptual argument. He counts the foundingof newspapers in several places as separate innovations rather than one innovation repeatedseveral times. One can make a case for either procedure, but if one is focusing oninnovation, repetition looks less important than changing a product available in aneconomy. There are also a few specific weaknesses, such as valuing all production ofexportables at export prices (p. 160) when it is very likely that there were differencesbetween what was used in the domestic economy and what was exported, especially in suchcases as timber products which are inherently varied in nature. Questions can also be askedabout quantitative techniques such as in fitting a curve to grain prices which shows declineto 1910, although elsewhere Hunter shows that he knows perfectly well that there was aturning point in the mid-1890s (p. 214). Even in one of his principal contributions, theassembling of a sample of entrepreneurs, he notes that there are no native-born exampleswithout thinking about the age of those he considers in his essentially networking con-struction of the sample.

The great strength of Hunter’s work is that he knows that American and British patternsin the growth of large firms do not transfer directly to New Zealand, and he shows howNew Zealand experience adds to international knowledge. He tells us a lot about businessmanagement in late nineteenth-century New Zealand, including the importance of man-aging with imperfect knowledge as the key characteristic of an ‘entrepreneur’, somethingwhich is easily related to his argument that while many entrepreneurs experimented in avariety of fields, they tended to be successful in areas where they had real knowledgethrough experience. Hunter has made a very welcome addition to the literature of severalfields.

g. r. hawkeVictoria University ofWellington, New Zealand

Melanie Nolan, Kin: a collective biography of a New Zealand family (Christchurch: Canter-bury University Press, 2005. Pp. 251. 126 illus. 5 tab. ISBN 1877257346 Pbk. NZ$39.95)

This book explores the lives of five members of the McCullough family—Jack, Margaret,Jim, Sarah, and Frank—who participated in and, in various ways, helped shape the culture

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and politics of New Zealand from the late nineteenth century through to the mid-twentiethcentury. In part, Kin is an exercise in collective biography, in which an ‘empirical stocktake’of the five siblings is provided. Of the group, only Jack McCullough is well-known in NewZealand, due to his high-profile association with the arbitration court and labour politicsmore generally. Each family member is examined in a separate chapter and each of thesealso has a thematic focus on a type of working-class milieu or experience. Jack’s story is toldwithin the context of international socialism; Margaret’s is centred around religion; Sarah’sstory also has a theme of religion, but is mainly linked to patriotism and domestic life; Jim’slife is explored through the lens of municipal labourism; and Frank’s explores the possi-bility of transition from the working class to the middle class via managerialism.Thus, evenat the most basic empirical level, we learn a great deal about five lives and the culture inwhich they were lived, and for this achievement alone we should welcome this addition tothe corpus of New Zealand history.

While the book outlines admirably the lives of the McCullough clan, doing so in part viaa generous collection of illustrations, the author has ambitions beyond the empirical.Nolan seeks to raise broader questions for historians about key dynamics in New Zealandhistory, such as the nature of class in a settler society and the complex intersections of class,religion, gender, family, politics, and social mobility. Nolan also raises issues surroundingthe methodology of biography.

The debate about class in New Zealand has a long and rich history. The dominantculture of colonization constructed New Zealand as the best of Britain, freed from theworst excesses of ‘home’, including class inequality.Yet such constructions were contestedfrom the outset as workers tried to make their experience fit colonial rhetoric. Thosewith such expectations were disappointed frequently. Since formal colonization, citizens,politicians, and eventually historians have wrestled with the implications of class in NewZealand: some contesting the validity of class in a New Zealand setting, others firmlyanchoring their analysis upon the concept. Since the 1960s, some of the country’s finesthistorians—Keith Sinclair, W. H. Oliver, Erik Olssen, and Miles Fairburn—have partici-pated in the debate on class, and with this book Nolan not only joins the debate but takesa significant step towards joining the list.

The book sends a strong and clear message to the local labour history community whichis charged rightly with overstating the significance of militant industrial labour in themaking of the New Zealand working class. While this is not a new point of view, Nolan’sengaging demonstration of the possibilities of opening up the field to create space forreligion, for ‘conservative’ craft unions, for family dynamics, and even for upward socialmobility makes the case impossible to ignore. For those seeking a nuanced, multifacetedintroduction to the working class in New Zealand history, Kin will now rank alongside ErikOlssen’s marvellous evocation of community in Building the new world: work, politics andsociety in Caversham, 1880s–1920s (1995). Nolan picks up the often stated, but seldomdeployed, notion of class as a relational concept, generally understood in a New Zealandcontext as classes mutually constituting each other. Her particular contribution is toremind us that this relational approach has as much, perhaps more, mileage when used toexplore the dynamics within a class.

The target for Nolan is not simply the tiny cluster of New Zealand labour historians;more general points about the problem of constructing a unitary national story are wellmade and relevant to the broader historical community. Again, the general point here is notnew, but Nolan’s skilful use of the concept of multiple narrative in the body of this bookhas taken us a significant step further to imagining what a truly ‘multi-vocal’ history of NewZealand might be like.

Some critics may wonder whether a ‘full’ political biography of Jack McCullough wouldhave been a better book and of more lasting use to readers. Certainly Jack is a key figurein New Zealand labour history, and the surviving evidence would be sufficient to sustain

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such a work. Perhaps one day we will have the chance to welcome such a book; after all,Nolan began this project with a conventional biography in mind.Yet it would be churlishto lament a book we have not received. I am firmly in the camp that will welcome thedecision to redirect the lens from an admirable ‘bloke’ to a complex and multifacetedfamily. We are the richer for this decision.

kerry taylorMassey University

Benjamin M. Friedman, The moral consequences of economic growth (NewYork: Knopf, 2005.Pp. x + 570. 6 figs. ISBN 0679448918 Hbk. £17.40/$35.00)

For Friedman, moral progress is openness, opportunity, tolerance, mobility, fairness, anddemocracy. When everyone is improving, the rich are more generous, and failure is lesspainful. It is not levels of affluence that count, but rates of change, because people gethabituated to affluence.They come to care more about their relative position, and feel lessanxious about it when prospects are good. That is why economic growth drives moralprogress. Evidence is sought in long narratives of American, British, French, and Germanyhistory of the last two centuries. Few would question that prosperity is good, and evenfewer would turn away the moral payoffs. But doubts soon begin to mount. In thenarratives, economic and moral progress sometimes coincide, but often they do not, andthe claim is reined in to ‘a general coherence over significant periods of time’ (p. 111).Social progress occurred during economic downturns, under Bismarck, Asquith,Roosevelt. Progress has often emerged out of war and revolution. Rapid economic growthhas taken place under tyranny.The link between progress and growth is not spurious, butit is uncertain, and its mechanisms are not straightforward.

Statisticians would hesitate to explain one nebulous variable with just one other singleand quite heterogeneous variable over such a long period of time.The moral goods here aremostly the freedom from interference and the freedom to succeed. Ethical trade-offsbetween equity and efficiency (like those considered by Rawls) are absent. The ‘positivefreedoms’ from insecurity and relative deprivation are given lower priority.Tall ladders arevalued more than solid floors. ‘Economic growth’ is not unbundled either.There is no hinthere that it excludes substantial goods (domestic production and leisure), and embracescostly bads like prisons, wars, congestion, pollution, and resource depletion.The world waryears in Britain are taken to provide a growth impetus for reform, as if wartime outputenhances human welfare. That causation can point from growth to war is not mentioned.And what probative value does discursive history have for the hypothesis? Evidence is oftenselected to support the argument.The downside of growth might provide a more searchingtest. Economic growth is liberating for poor societies, but once quite moderate affluence isreached, its incremental payoffs diminish, whether estimated in terms of ‘extended nationalaccounts’, of social indicators, or of psychic satisfaction. Consider the US, for almost twocenturies now among the very richest of societies. It also leads the developed world in theseverity and scale of its prisons. Its medicine is expensive, but coverage and outcomes areindifferent. Obesity and drug use are rife. Life expectation at birth ranks in the mid-20sworldwide. The incidence of mental disorder is high and rising, and is correlated withnational income per head. Materialism is empirically associated with frustration andunhappiness, and rapid change can be unsettling as well as liberating. In such a richcountry, perhaps freedom and dignity might be better served by redistribution than byhigher growth.

The air is cleaner in affluent societies, and emissions per unit of output lower, but carbonemissions per head are much higher than in poor ones. The looming menace of climatechange is driven by consumerism, but will not be dissipated by competitive markets. The

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book is a polemic, but against whom? Growth sceptics do not seem to be the target.Whenthe culprit is disclosed, it is the Republican presidencies of the last 25 years, for misguidedpolicies that have kept growth down. They have cut taxes and accumulated deficits, andconsumption debt (both public and private) has crowded out the construction of physicaland human capital. Because of low investment and productivity growth, median incomeshave now stagnated for more than three decades. Prioritizing growth (like all normativepreferences) implies a sacrifice by somebody, and the author promises some ‘policy choicesthat are hard’ (p. 436).The concern is avowedly not for the poor (although there are plentyremaining in the US). Much hope is invested in more rigorous competition in healthand education. There is a New Labourish belief here in the transformative value of‘choice’, which (like New Labour) fails to explain why—if services are provided free bygovernment—anyone should choose less than the best, and if services are to be allocatedby the market, how opportunity and mobility are to be saved. Overall, however, this is anenlightened, humane, erudite, North-American Liberal vision, in which there is much toagree with, but which avoids querying some of the harsher self-regarding norms of its ownsociety. One admires the faith in history and the effort to master it, but as a probativemethod it does not quite deliver here. If the book had engaged more with the disorders ofgrowth, it might have been more balanced, more persuasive, and shorter.

avner offerAll Souls College, Oxford

Thomas K. McCraw, Prophet of innovation: Joseph Schumpeter and creative destruction(Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 719. 68 plates.ISBN 0674025237 Hbk. £22.95/$35)

McCraw’s new book, seven years in the making, joins a VIP roster of Schumpeter schol-arship headed by Richard Swedberg’s Joseph A. Schumpeter (1991) and Robert Allen’sOpening doors (1991). Meticulously documented, beautifully written, elegantly produced,and well-stocked with photographs, McCraw’s account of Schumpeter’s life and times, hisworldview, and his socio-economic predictions is essential reading for historians andeconomists who want to understand what it was in ‘his own tumultuous experiences’ (p. ix)that made an erudite bookworm into a pro-capitalist Marx.

Prophet of innovation is divided into three parts.The first, covering the period 1883–1926,tells how Schumpeter, born a German-speaking Catholic Moravian, was uprooted toAustria where, educated at the Theresianum, alienation set in early, such that ‘Schumpeternever felt that he quite belonged’ (p. 18). McCraw has immersed himself in the physicaland intellectual climate of late Habsburg, multinational Vienna, and well explains how asan economics student Schumpeter was exposed to historical process, competitive novelty,and kaleidoscopic disequilibrium. He then describes the time in Berlin and at the LSE, themeetings with Marshall and Walras, the early marriage to Gladys Seaver (which evenMcCraw cannot explain), the years in Cairo and the months in NewYork.While an authorhas a right to his priorities, it is possible that something is lost when McCraw devotes lessthan two pages to fully 626 pages of Schumpeter’s early Nature and content (1908) in whichthe intellectual entrepreneur pioneered the axial principle of methodological individual-ism. McCraw says hardly anything at all about the manuscript on money that, long fearedlost, was published in 1970. He writes more, some 10 pages, on The theory of economicdevelopment (1911), but relies on the shortened 1934 translation. Discussing the Sociali-sation Commission and the Cabinet post, McCraw does not explain why Schumpeter wasso eager to work with socialists in the shadow of the Russian revolution; nor, surprisingly,does he ferret out any new archival material on the failure of the Biedermann Bank, ofwhich Schumpeter was a director. It is possible that the papers were destroyed in the war.

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Part II, which covers 1926–39, takes up the story from the next ‘tumultous experience’,the death in quick succession of his mother, his second wife, and his newborn son early inhis career at Bonn. Emigrating to the US in 1932, McCraw reconstructs in detail thecircumstances of Schumpeter’s relocation to Harvard. As might be expected, McCraw iswell informed on the institutional history of his university and its famous professors likeParsons and Taussig. McCraw does not speculate on the difference between American andEuropean capitalism, the former with its ideology of perfect competition and the latterwhich was always open-minded about scope and size, but would Schumpeter have writtenabout innovation in the way that he did had his application to Berlin not been turned downjust before the approach from Harvard? Did his worldview alter when he went to Americaor did his economic vision remain, as Hobsbawn says, quintessentially central European?Did Schumpeter really have only a ‘rudimentary grasp’ (p. 385) of American democracyas compared to European politics? Even McCraw cannot be expected to answer everypossible question about an author who was a mystery on Mondays, an enigma all the restof the time.

Part III covers the period 1939–50, a sad final decade in which Schumpeter had agrowing obsession with death, even ‘voluntary’ death, and was depressed by the grimnessof world events: a Europe in ruins and Roosevelt’s makeshift Keynesianism which wasauthoritarian and dictatorial. Schumpeter’s prodigious output during this period, McCrawsays, was the response to the ‘isolation and self-doubt’ (p. 345) of a brilliant but chronicallydepressed European elitist who was desperately using academic work ‘as a means ofharnessing his personal grief ’ (p. 160). Scholarship was a release from ‘morbid loneliness’(p. 197). Learning was an obsessive’s momentary freedom from thoughts of mental andphysical decline.This endgame was a period when the outsider on the edge was ‘very closeto a breakdown’ (p. 243).Yet it was also the decade in which Schumpeter produced threeclassic works totalling in all about two million words. Business cycles (1939) is economichistory: it charts and explains the ups and downs of the post-1790 world where innovationbreeds oscillation, entrepreneurs are a threat to conservatism and there is no end tochange. Capitalism, socialism and democracy (1942) is evolutionary economic sociology:it contends that new departures are being routinized within giant bureaucracies, thatindividual genius is being squeezed into committees, and that even corporate capitalismis socialistic. History of economic analysis (edited by his third wife, Elizabeth BoodySchumpeter, who helped with research at the Kress as if the book, posthumously publishedin 1954, was the child they never had) is intellectual history. A work of astonishingscholarship and culture, it traces economic thought from the beginnings to the present day.Schumpeter in his uncompleted History never explained why the entrepreneurial econom-ics of Cantillon and Say was so rapidly eclipsed by the overconfident steady states of theneo-classical orthodoxy. McCraw writes that Schumpeter is today read more in depart-ments of sociology, government, and history than in departments of economics. It will beinteresting to see if the growing interest in innovation—and in Schumpeter—will lead to amore tolerant acceptance of Austrian, institutional, and other minority interpretations ofthe economic problem.

McCraw has made exemplary use of the Schumpeter papers at Harvard: there are132 boxes. He went to Johns Hopkins for Hollander, Basel for Spiethoff, Koblenz for theGustav Stolper Archive, and the Hoover Institution for the Haberler Collection (but not,apparently, the LSE for Robbins and Wootton). Richard Musgrave was interviewed: thereis no indication if McCraw also spoke to Samuelson, Galbraith, Sweezy,Wolfgang Stolper,and other survivors from the age of giants. There are 187 pages of endnotes: enough foranother book. McCraw is able to draw upon years of background reading to show therelevance of Carnegie, Strumilin, the Japanese economy, inflation, globalization, SiliconValley, and deficit finance. He has also looked up the student feedback on Schumpeter’slectures. The phrase ‘a rounded gentleman who could never be accused of knowing only

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economics’ (p. 415) would seem to describe not just the subject but the author of this rich,perceptive, and very important book.

david reismanNanyang Technological University

Lawrence H. Officer, Pricing theory, financing of international organisations and monetaryhistory (London: Routledge, 2007. Pp. xii + 324. 25 figs. 41 tabs. ISBN 0415770653Hbk. £75/$135)

Rarely do scholars have the chance of putting a lifetime’s worth of work into a singlevolume; here Officer makes much of this opportunity with a collection of his articles,papers, and reviews. Their reprinting, together with four ‘afterwords’, which encompassapproximately 20 per cent of the volume, enables him to review systematically his work ofthe past 40 years and how the literature has developed over that time. Scholars of pricingtheory, economic history, and international political economy will find much to think overin this collection.

Officer’s first section of four chapters deals with microeconomic topics of pricing theory.This is the most theoretical of his four sections. The first two chapters argue for theoptimality of pricing under perfect competition and explore conditions of multidimen-sional pricing—that is, an examination of prices where attributes of products differ (Officeruses the example of peak and off-peak time pricing of electricity). Chapters 3 and 4 dealwith freight pricing in circumstances of monopolistic competition in the internationaltransport industry and the role of discrimination in these transactions. Chapter 3 providesa useful addition to the international trade literature which is largely silent on the trans-portation costs of trade.

Section II, ‘Financing of international organisations’, will be of great interest to studentsof international political economy and those specifically interested in the distribution ofpolitical power in the International Monetary Fund and the distribution of costs within theUnited Nations. Officer’s econometric analysis of IMF quotas reveals that political factorsplay an important role in determining how much a country’s IMF quota deviates fromwhat might be expected from an economically-based formula, whether it is measured ineconomic size, income, trade, or reserves. Interestingly, the most obvious political factor indetermining IMF quotas—the US’s preservation of a voting share of at least 15 per centwhich allows it to veto changes to the IMF charter and other important policy changes—isunmentioned. The two chapters on the UN make for revealing reading for both interna-tional relations scholars concerned with power and advocates of UN reform concernedthat the US is not paying its fair share of UN costs. Under Officer’s admittedly normativeassessment criteria (based on ability to pay), the US’s assessment was roughly at theappropriate normative level in the 1980s and 1990s. Of course, this says nothing abouttimes the US withheld its payments. It is the other developed countries that were over-assessed based on Officer’s model, with less-developed countries being the major benefi-ciaries of the corresponding under-assessment.

Sections III and IV deal with aspects of monetary history, in particular gold. Themonetary history segment concentrates on some well-known and studied monetary con-troversies such as an analysis of the monetary base in New England in the first half of theeighteenth century and the Bullionist debate in Britain in the first decades of the nine-teenth century. He concludes the section with a more broadly ranging econometric analysisof the US specie standard (1792–1932). The final section on gold highlights one ofOfficer’s well-known areas of speciality. Although this might be thought odd for a collec-tion of essays, this begins with a review of an edited volume on gold documents (which,incidentally, I edited): The monetary history of gold:a documentary history,1660–1990 (2004).

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This serves as the nominal starting point for Officer’s survey, which encompasses sevencollections of documents on gold published between 1879 and 2004. Innovatively, he usesa series of tables to compare the contents of these works and demonstrates his mastery ofthe historical material. For those interested in gold’s monetary role, this review provides abreadth of coverage not simply of the volume reviewed, but the range of literature availableover the 125 years. Officer’s final chapter deals with central bank preferences on thecomposition of their reserves in the final years of the BrettonWoods system. Officer arguesagain for the role of political, power-related explanatory variables as opposed to moredeterministic portfolio-management measures. In this piece, originally published in 1974,Officer makes a proto-political economy argument that would not become mainstream foranother decade.

Those new to Officer’s scholarship will find the contents of this edition broad-based,substantive, and thought-provoking. Those already familiar with his research will find thereintroduction to his thinking in such a systematic way a refreshing revisit of a lifetime’sworth of intellectual effort. Both groups will find this a rewarding book, despite itsdaunting retail price.

mark e. duckenfieldLondon School of Economics

Ranald C. Michie, The global securities market: a history (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2006. Pp. x + 399. 12 tabs. ISBN 0199280614 Hbk. £60/$110)

No one is better qualified than Ranald Michie to write a history of the global securitiesmarket that has emerged with stunning rapidity since 1990 and which shows no signs ofabating to date. Drawing upon his comparative studies of the London and NewYork stockmarkets and his examinations of their various competitors in the nineteenth and twentiethcenturies, Michie describes and analyses the rise of international markets for securitiesfrom the twelfth century to the present. Not content merely to chronicle the varioussecurities markets that have arisen over time across the globe, he also tries to explain theunderlying causes of success or failure of the various markets to realize their full potential.Individual households and firms have a latent demand for negotiable, income-generatingsecurities because of the benefits they can gain economically. Governments have the powerto create a substantial body of transferable securities that meet this demand, but they havetheir own goals as well, which lead more often than not to misguided regulation and controlof the securities markets. Formally organized stock exchanges, such as the London StockExchange, are needed to make secondary markets in securities work efficiently. Com-munications technology, starting with the telegraph and developing through the telephone,radio, and now the internet, enable members of stock exchanges to expand their activitiesprofitably, but it also allows competitors to arise to keep central exchanges from exploitingtheir monopoly potential. Currently, all these elements seem to be in place to create aglobal securities market that is beyond the capacity of national governments to stymie,leading to rising economic prosperity worldwide to date, much as in the last period that aglobal securities market flourished, namely 1900–14.

Beginning with the forced loans of the Italian city-states in the twelfth century, Michiedistinguishes six separate epochs in the rise of global securities markets that culminated intoday’s truly global securities market. The first epoch stretched from Venice’s forced loanin 1171–2 and lasted through the collapse of the Mississippi and South Sea bubbles in1720. Throughout this epoch, it was government demands to raise funds for war financethat created negotiable securities, but also led successive governments to try to control theemerging secondary markets in their debt and ultimately stifled the demands of theircitizens for fiduciary assets that could be liquid as well as sound investments. No formal

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stock markets arose for various reasons: lack of liquid securities or lack of control overentry of occasional and opportunistic outsiders, but all stemming from government actionor inaction.

The next epoch, 1720–1815, saw experiments at self-regulation in Amsterdam andLondon, ultimately frustrated by the difficulty that private groups of traders faced inprotecting themselves against opportunistic outsiders.The Anglo-Dutch efforts contrastedwith the French experiment in government control of the secondary market in its debt,which stymied the growth of markets in private debts. Continually rising government debt,however, led informal markets to prosper in both Amsterdam and London until the FrenchRevolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1789–1815, saw these gains lost on the continent.London, however, gained both in expertise and in scale of tradable securities, leading to theformation of an organized stock exchange with a set of rules that proved very beneficialfor its future growth in the third epoch, 1815–1914. This saw the flowering of a trulyglobal securities market by 1900–14, anchored in the dominating role of the London StockExchange in government, railway, utility, commercial and manufacturing stocks, andbonds from around the world.

Michie divides the twentieth century into three phases: 1914–39, with crisis, crash, andcontrol as the shocks motivating increasing degrees of government control over nationalstock exchanges; 1939–70, with suppression, regulation, and evasion the dominatingfeatures of triumphant national stock exchanges, and the virtual elimination of a globalsecurities market save for the nascent euro-dollar and euro-bond market arising inLondon; and then 1970–2005, in which first the shake-up of the NewYork Stock Exchangecreated by twin forces from inside (led by major stockbroking firms) and outside (led bythe SEC and institutional investors) eliminated fixed commissions. In response, the BigBang in the London Stock Exchange followed in 1986, enabling London to resume its roleas anchor of the resurgent global securities market of the twenty-first century.

Specialists in each country and each time period will, no doubt, wince at the occasionalmisstatement or exaggeration in the chapter of their specialty, but they will also beimpressed with the range of knowledge and research exhibited overall and in the otherchapters. Generalists will wonder why Michie focuses on the internal mechanisms of theserecondite markets while slighting broader historical forces as, for example, the effects of theBlack Death, the classical gold standard, the inherent deflationary bias of the interwar goldexchange standard, or the Triffin dilemma leading to the eventual collapse of the BrettonWoods system. Perhaps, however, they will eventually recognize that the internal incentivesand external constraints operating on securities markets, both nationally and internation-ally, deserve more attention and appreciation for their effects on general economic history.Certainly, Michie has made a valiant effort to convince them.

larry nealUniversity of Illinois/London School of Economics

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the self-contained village?: the social history of rural communities, 1250–1900 – edited by...

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