This is an important book. The study of the Nazi economy, and the role of finance and industry in it, has been deeply influenced by the notion that the regime was little more than a cloak for the interests of big business, and the man in charge a mere spokesman for wire-pullers in top management. Although Harold James is by no means the first historian of the Third Reich to shed such preconceptions in favor of conscientious examination of one enterprise with distinct traditions, operating mechanisms, and sets of interests and strategies, his account is in certain respects the most telling yet to appear. The Deutsche Bank was of course the most important institution in the German private economy during the Hitler era, as well as the most prominent one internationally. The focus of the present study on the confiscation of Jewish property obviously raises profound moral as well as serious economic issues. As such, it may well open the whole topic of German big business to more dispassionate analysis.

The last decade has seen an upsurge in research by social historians on the English poor laws, largely in the form of local studies. These have greatly increased our knowledge of the demographic makeup of the “pauper host,” the generosity of relief benefits, and the ways in which paupers combined poor relief with other forms of income assistance in order to subsist. In this book, Steven King uses “poor law and other documentation” for 60 English communities to extend our understanding of the role played by poor relief from 1700 to 1850. He argues that during this period there was not in fact one national system of poor relief, but two macro-regional patterns: a relatively generous and benevolent system in the south and east, and a stinting and harsh one in the north and west.

Anthony McElligott's volume on life in German cities is inventive, informative, and interesting. Like other contributions to the “Routledge Sources in History” series, it combines historical analysis with presentation of a broad assortment of mainly primary documents, both written and graphic. The author has excavated this material to good effect from a variety of sources, weaving it together skillfully under thematic headings. He has accordingly produced a volume that affords a multifaceted view of urban experience in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century, when the big city (Großstadt) both reached its apogee and became an increasingly contested and controversial site of social and cultural processes.

This book is based on papers submitted to a plenary session, organized at the annual meeting of the Japanese Society for the History of Economic Thought. It reflects growing interest in the work of those German scholars, active between the early 1800s and the 1950s, who are usually grouped as the German Historical School. Though economists, they were open to interdisciplinary work, some more historically minded, some more interested in contemporary sociology. The current they formed was international, but particularly strong in Germany. It was concerned with problems of economic evolution, with institutional factors, with ethics, and with the understanding of the changing forms of economic life and their succession. Though classed as a “school,” it may be argued that they were of heterogeneous orientations: politically, some were liberal, some conservative. The essays presented here testify to the amazingly extensive knowledge about the German Historical School in Japan. This has its roots, as is explained in the editor's introduction, in the foundation of Japanese universities on the model of German ones. Although the quality of the essays is not even, the scholarly love for detail and for penetration of the texts deserve praise.

Twenty-five years ago, when I chose the history of old age as my dissertation field, many found it odd, dubious, often snigger-inducing. Why select such a marginal subject? What hang-ups did this young man harbor? We have moved on a good deal since then: ageing has become a preoccupation of developed societies, and the study of its past has mushroomed as worry about its future has spread (neither Thane nor I would say “deepened”). A substantial body of research has been built up on the history of old age in England—just how much is very well demonstrated in the rich footnotes and the 20-plus pages of bibliography in this book. But until now no one has tried to pull it all together, and that has been a particular drawback for those of us who teach on the subject. My students in family-history courses, for example, know that they should include the elderly in their family studies, yet have been frustrated when they have tried to do so.

This delightful, highly readable book—entirely suitable for undergraduate teaching and for interested nonprofessionals (my mother loved it)—presents almost nothing new in the way of research, and indeed relatively few “facts” with which historians of Latin America are not already familiar; but it pulls together bits and pieces from various secondary works and travel accounts in such a fresh and exciting way that a book-length treatment is amply justified. Bauer takes very seriously, and uses systematically, material that most of us are likely to insert almost haphazardly into our lectures in order to spice up the presentation of dry statistics and abstract models of change: how people ate (not just their basic foods but also their cooking methods and equipment, and some pretty funky dietary practices), the ways they built and decorated their homes, the clothes and others items of self-ornamentation they chose or were allowed to wear—in short, the things they acquired. Using changes over time in patterns of consumption of these ordinary goods, he retells the story of Latin America (with a strong emphasis on Mexico, Peru, and Chile) from before the conquest to the present day. He divides the story into six chapters, covering pre-Columbian goods, “contact” goods (i.e., the immediate postconquest period), “civilizing” goods (the remainder of the colonial period, some 250 years), “modernizing” goods (the long nineteenth century, up to about 1920), “developing goods” (from the 1920s to the 1970s), and, finally, “global” goods (the 1980s to the present).

These three volumes bring together a set of very useful essays on Latin American economic growth since the late nineteenth century. The first volume focuses on the so-called “export age,” the period 1870–1930. The second (a reprint of a volume originally published in 1984) focuses on the impact of the Great Depression and the process of recovery throughout the 1930s. The third focuses on state-led industrialization from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The essays in these volumes are, with few exceptions, organized around national histories. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico receive particular attention. Some of the volumes also include essays on Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, and Central America. The goal of the volumes is not to provide a synthesis of the literature on each country, running the gamut of economic sectors and the institutions that governed their growth, but to focus on a set of themes related to the industrial development of each country.

I had not realized that “the subject of economic history is in a condition of self-induced crisis” (p. 7) until I read the Farnie–Abe introduction to this book. If economic historians are still capable of producing good quality work as interesting as the essays in this book, then the crisis can hardly be of serious proportions.

Art historians have produced some of the most interesting historical works on China, bringing to the study of the past an immediacy of insight that can elude the historian who works only with texts. Ginger Hsü has provided such an insight into eighteenth-century Yangchow [Yangzhou], a city renowned at the time for its wealth, beauty, and cultural productivity, and now frequently cited as the exemplary site of social change in Ch'ing China. Although Yangchow is as closely associated with painting in China as are Venice and Florence in Europe, Hsü's is the first monograph-length study of Yangchow painting to have been published in English.

Readers may remember some of the ironies of the 1980s debate—largely an American debate—about Japan and industrial policy, the outlines of which are recounted by Takeo Kikkawa and Takashi Hikino in Policies for Competitiveness. On the one hand were the institutional economists, who believed that government industrial policies could be good for growth, and that Japan was a clear illustration of the fact. Institutionalists were themselves divided into those who drew the conclusion that stagnant America could use a strong dose of industrial policy itself, and those (who became known as Japan-bashers and level-playing-fielders) for whom Japan's industrial policies were simply an unfair, quasi-communist arrangement for taking market share away from virtuous Americans who truly believed in freedom. On the other hand were the Chicago true believers, who knew from first principles that interference with market forces was always bad, and so attributed Japan's success to the dynamism generated by brisk market competition. That argument, since it seemed to be not on price but on quality that American industry was losing market share, rather left them in the unpatriotic position of suggesting that America was intrinsically unable to compete.

Shu Guang Zhang is a leader among those revealing Chinese perspectives on international affairs, as found in both Chinese-language publications and in hitherto unused archival materials. He and several other China-born scholars working in the United States—most notably Jian Chen, Qiang Zhai, Simei Qing, and Xiaoyuan Liu—have performed an enormous service to analysts all over the world by uncovering, translating, and incorporating into their work these vital documents. For this book Zhang has also used American, British, and Soviet sources, but to less striking effect.

In a very readable and thought-provoking treatise, Susan Hoffman explores the history of U.S. commercial banks, savings and loans associations, and credit unions in the context of the political structure forming and directing the behavior of these institutions. “Banks do, in large measure, what policy makers have designed them to do,” she contends (p. x).

The transformation of the northern countryside during the first half of the nineteenth century is one of the central themes of American rural history, and it has formed the basis of many excellent studies by economic and social historians. Martin Bruegel's Farm, Shop, Landing, is the latest addition to this literature, and it is a valuable one. Bruegel extends our perspective beyond New England to New York's Hudson River Valley, and he demonstrates a theoretical sophistication and an eye for the telling details that give a familiar story fresh nuance and texture as well as a scope and sweep that transcend the local.

In recent years James S. Olson has become the historical profession's leading producer of historical dictionaries. Beginning with his volume on the New Deal in1985, he has gone on to produce similar reference works for the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, for the ethno-history of China, Africa, and the Indians of Central and South America, and for such diverse topics as U.S. economic history, European imperialism, and the British and Spanish empires. The work under review is the latest addition to this reference shelf and like its companion volumes should be a useful tool in all types of academic libraries, from high school up. Like the others, it is geared to provide quick, concise, sound, and clearly written references to the details of a particular body of historical experience. In it one can consult some 479 short, alphabetically arranged, Olson-authored essays, ranging in length from four lines (“Black Tuesday”) to three pages (“Roosevelt, Franklin Delano”), and take from them the essential facts about and historical significance of the people, events, laws, agencies, products, and other topics deemed worthy of inclusion. In addition, cross-references are marked by asterisks within the essays; each essay is followed by at least one “suggested reading”; and appended at the end are a list of acronyms, a useful chronology, a brief but good general bibliography, and a well-constructed index.

Irish-Americans, by which we mean immigrants to the United States from Ireland, the descendants of those people, and perhaps some who found it convenient to assume an Irish identity even without any Irish ancestry, have a large and rich historiography. Like most mature historiographies this literature now has its models, its orthodoxies, and its gadflies. Many recent useful contributions to this literature have taken one of two approaches. One is to set the Irish in a comparative perspective, and think about how Irish-Americans differed from other overseas Irish groups; how Ireland differed from other relatively poor European economies in the nineteenth century; and how the Irish in the United States differed from other “ethnic” groups in the country. Studies taking this comparative approach have accomplished a great deal in undermining old myths and have at the same time sharpened the aspects of the Irish-American experience that were distinctive and require further study. Another approach has been to choose a particular Irish-American community and to study that community in as much detail as possible. This tactic has been especially effective in understanding how particular locations or circumstances affected Irish-American communities and has helped scholars of this group to be more careful about generalizations.

In this brief volume Nancy Cohen “offers a new narrative of the origins of modern American liberalism” (p. 4). As this agenda suggests, the book is primarily a history of political thought. Briefly, her argument is that the values and programs of Progressive Era corporate liberalism originated in the debates among two generations of Gilded Age political intellectuals. Men such as Edwin L. Godkin, David A. Wells, and Francis A. Walker represented the first generation in the immediate post–Civil War decades. These were not simply classical liberals but “the pioneering theorists of economic consolidation and the active liberal state” (p. 13). A second generation of liberals emerged around the American Economic Association in the 1880s and was led by economists such as Henry C. Adams, John B. Clark, Richard T. Ely, and Edwin R. A. Seligman. Initially more radical, this group was purged in the 1880s, often with the aid of their older colleagues. Together these two generations “confronted the problem of the relationship between democracy and capitalism” (p. 15), and they provided “ideological legitimization of the novel economic, political and social relationships attendant on the rise of corporate capitalism.”

Leon H. Keyserling (1908–1987) participated in almost all of the major macroeconomic debates in the United States from the early 1930s to the late 1970s. From 1933 until 1937 he served as a key aide to Senator Robert F. Wagner (D-NY) and drafted pathbreaking labor and housing legislation. As general counsel of the United States Housing Authority from 1937 to 1945 he played a central role in formulating and implementing New Deal housing policy. Keyserling was a founding member of the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) in 1946 and was appointed chairman in 1950. After his term on the CEA ended in 1953, he became a private consultant, wrote frequently for major newspapers and magazines, and testified regularly before Congressional committees.

Jean Heffer's book is a translation from a French edition published in 1995 in the collection L'Evolution de l'humanité by Editions Albin Michel. The work is a synthesis of United States history in the Pacific.

The author uses the concept of a dynamic frontier moving from the American shores to Asia. Heffer considers the Pacific Ocean, “as it is usually defined by oceanologists, i.e., ending at the Bering Strait in the north and including the seas along the Asian continent in the west, from the Sea of Okhotsk to the Java Sea, and washing the eastern coast of Australia” (p. 5). This choice avoids the customary pitfalls of studies that ignore some of the identifiable regions that form part of the Pacific.

Ronald A. Smith, professor emeritus of Kinesiology at Penn State University, has written several books on the history of college sports, most notably, Sports and Freedom: The Rise of Big-Time College Athletics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). This book dealt with the development of American intercollegiate athletics from crew races in the middle of the nineteenth century until the beginnings of the NCAA in response to a football crisis in the first decade of the twentieth century. His focus was on the role of commercialization in college sports from the start, and the attempts by coaches, athletic directors, and university presidents to benefit from athletics.

John Pencavel is a highly respected labor economist who in this work has written a small gem of new institutional analysis. This book deserves a readership among economic historians because it is a model of how institutional differences can be analyzed empirically. In this work Pencavel undertakes a theoretical and empirical analysis of cooperatives in the lumber industry in the Pacific Northwest.

Pencavel begins his work by pointing out that the bargain between employers and workers tends to favor the employer. That is, that labor markets at their most fundamental level are not as efficient as, say, the market for tomatoes. Participants, especially employees, face relatively large search and information costs, which, along with the public-goods aspect of work, means entry and exit does not necessarily lead to optimal outcomes.