The long, slow decline of the handicraft industries in Western Europe was attended by protracted hardship and misery for the artisan classes, short-term exploitative opportunities for crass merchants to whom the old medieval communal values were outdated cant, and confusion and eventual rout for the town fathers who attempted to maintain such values in the face of ineluctable economic change. Professor Friedrichs draws these conclusions from his research on woolen cloth weavers in the German town of Nördlingen in the seventeenth century and shows how, once the old values were no longer useful, the state itself took the initiative in the eighteenth century in facilitating the conversion of handicraft industry to the modern wage-labor system.

To the literature on social mobility and the question of earned versus inherited fortunes, Professor Jaher and Dr. Ghent add findings for the city of Chicago in the late nineteenth century that are in strong contrast to simuar studies for other cities. From the Civil War to the turn of the century, Chicago's rate of economic growth far exceeded the national average, and out of 1186 members of the Chicago business elite whose careers were embraced by the years 1830 to 1930, fully two-thirds made their own fortunes. This phenomenon was especially strong in manufacturing and the aggressive young industries of meatpacking and railroading.

Dramatic evidence of the vital role played by the British East India Company in Britain's rise to preeminence in world trade is revealed in the intimate relations between the Company, Parliament, and Charles II. Britain needed an agency for pressing the struggle against the resourceful Dutch, and the King needed revenue. The Company needed assurance in the form of a charter that its existence would be continuous; Navigation Acts to give meaning to its trading monopoly; laws against “interlopers” in its trading areas; and relief from mercantilist prejudices so that it could buy for cash where British goods were not in demand. Government and Company provided each other with all these, in a pragmatic arrangement that overrode prejudices and political sensitivities.

As the westward movement gained momentum after the Civil War, the demand for farm mortgage credit grew rapidly. At the same time, the supply of lendable funds in the East and especially in Europe, although continuing to grow, turned away from U.S. government securities and American railroad bonds. The time seemed ripe for Eastern capitalists to expand their non-bank financial services to include intermediation between lenders and borrowers. Using the United States Mortgage Company and the Mercantile Trust Company as examples, Mr. Brewer shows that the opportunity was lost due to poor organization and management, faulty communication, and most of all to an innate conservatism and mistrust of the unfamiliar that caused the companies to disapprove the bulk of the mortgage loan applications that energetic field agents brought in.