In 1636 the Kingdom of Castile implemented a royal monopoly that made the manufacture, sale, and distribution of tobacco the exclusive, though alienable, prerogative of the Crown. This new device—politically palatable because it was not levied on a “necessity of life,” and fiscally attractive because tobacco seemed to enjoy inelastic and ever-expanding demand—soon extended to the other kingdoms in Spain and throughout Europe. So it is not surprising that most of the nine essays in this collection concern how the renta de tabaco, as the royal monopoly was known by the eighteenth century, affected the behavior of consumers, suppliers, investors, and royal officials in Spain and beyond.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Liverpool was Europe's foremost seaport for long-distance commerce, and a principal conduit by which Britain's early industrial strength was parlayed into leadership of world trade. Graeme Milne's new book dissects the intermediary and service sector that underpinned Liverpool's prominence during this crucial period of technologically based globalization.

This book is among the “New Studies in Economic and Social History” commissioned by the Economic History Society: a pedagogic series that aims to inform students and teachers about the most significant contributions to a given field of knowledge. Morgan's survey of the relationship between the growth of colonial trade and the development of the British economy is built around scholarly responses to Eric Williams's famous exercise in economic determinism, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). In addition to covering the issues of capital accumulation and profitability in colonial trade, which preoccupied Williams, the scope of the inquiry is widened through the inclusion of material on colonial demand for exports, innovation in the organization of trade, and interport competition in Britain. The book is conscientiously written and provides an excellent non-technical introduction to the subject matter. Morgan's presentation of the material is always clear and objective, and yet, in the best tradition of the series, he imprints the text lightly but indelibly with his own judgements on the stimulus colonial trade gave to product and commercial innovation. Given the breadth of the topic and the limitations of space, some compression of material is unavoidable; still, the omission of the impact of the loss of colonies on economic performance is, perhaps, surprising. Much, however, can be learned by new and established scholars. This reviewer was reminded forcibly of three themes.

This intriguing and well-written book is the fruit of a decade of thorough research and imaginative analysis. It is based on a broad selection of archival material and an impressive number of articles and books, many of them primary sources and recent historical writings. Derek Penslar is a social historian with a pronounced bias for economic thinking and a comparative approach. Two main themes are here interwoven: the first is the economic components of antisemitism, and Jewish intellectual responses to it; the second is the development of behavioral reactions in the public sphere, leading up to Jewish social policy and eventually to social engineering. The book's subject is the period from the mid-1600s to 1933; and as Enlightenment and emancipation have a central role, it concentrates on western and central Europe, especially the German-speaking lands, “where incremental emancipation and powerful antisemitism promoted the development of an unusually rich and complex Jewish economic discourse” (p. 2). The structure is chronological.

This book examines British companies' involvement in the decolonization process in the Gold Coast. Sarah Stockwell argues that British business interests “were much more than bystanders” in the rapid political changes between the end of the Second World War and Ghanaian independence in 1957 (p. 2). Her study fits within an emerging literature on British business and the end of empire, which avoids treating decolonization as the mere product of conflict between nationalist politics and colonial policy. But neither is the book about the “economics of decolonization,” in the sense of asserting some inexorable economic imperative behind the transfer of power. Instead, it documents British companies' struggles to understand—and, more ambitiously, to influence—major political and constitutional changes prompted by intensified African opposition to the colonial order.

Wang Gungwu's 1997 Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, now published as The Chinese Overseas, traces the experience of the overseas Chinese in the last millennium. By the sixteenth century migration overseas had become a steady current, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, promoted by economic opportunities abroad and politics at home, it became a flood. Whereas the earlier migrants consisted primarily of traders settling abroad, the migrants of the nineteenth century included many manual laborers, and by the twentieth century many were middle-class political and economic exiles. Despite the change in composition, these emigrants retained their Chinese identity.

Ann Capling's book deals with Australia's role in the design of the global trade system, from the post-1945 negotiations over the (aborted) International Trade Organization (ITO), up to the 1999 meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. She draws primarily on Australian sources, such as memoranda, reminiscences, and interviews with Australian participants in the negotiation process. The story has not been told before in such detail, and the book will become a standard work on how Australia conducted its international economic diplomacy during the second half of the twentieth century.

This is an interesting study of institutions and labor relations in Brazil's most important industrial region during a period of impressive industrial growth and productivity improvement. The book's strengths derive from archival research on the internal workings of labor relations at the firm and industry-wide levels. Paying attention to the details of the work-place environment, Colistete argues that labor-training schemes, the organization of work, and factory environments each influenced industrial productivity in São Paulo during the postwar years.

The Federal Tariff of 1901 marked the first of numerous interventions by the Australian government designed to stimulate the production of finished motor vehicles. It was unsuccessful, as was the “Tudor” Tariff of 1911, which imposed a specific duty on body imports; war conditions in 1917 led to an embargo on imports of motor vehicles. Thereafter, the government's need for revenue, which favored protectionist measures generally, in combination with a defense policy that deemed engine production to be of strategic importance, underpinned a series of government measures intended to promote local vehicle production. One effect of the “Green” Tariff in 1920, which afforded protection to manufacturing in general, was to attract American assemblers. By that time, the fierce and often clandestine clash of pressure groups representing special interests, within government, and within the motor industry (broadly defined to include local suppliers of components and equipment, from tires to electrical fittings), had become an important influence on policy. In several instances, the effects were both perverse and hilarious. A fragmented and inefficient industry operated within effective tariff protection, of which the principal beneficiaries were American multinationals. The “complete car project” of the 1930s was a failure, though it was revived under wartime conditions in the 1940s. With subsidies in mind, the government persuaded reluctant American and British producers to submit plans for full car manufacture, the first to do so being GM-H, the Australian subsidiary of General Motors (incorporating Holdens, the, long-established local body manufacturer).

What a difference a decade makes. The Japanese economy has been locked in recession for so long, and everyone is so gloomy about its prospects, that it is hard to imagine that at one time serious commentators spoke of a Pax Nipponica in the offing. Now unemployment is officially (and optimistically) estimated at 5 percent, corporate bankruptcies are soaring, the stock market is roughly 75 percent below its all-time high, and the financial system is on life support. Japan now leads the world in public debt as a percentage of GDP, while the Iron Triangle of government, business, and the conservative Liberal Democratic Party that oversaw the vaunted “miracle” era of growth in the 1950s and 1960s is discredited and unraveling. The Japanese employment system is also fading as firms trim their workforces, renege on implicit guarantees of lifetime employment, and shun seniority-based wages in favor of merit- and skill-related compensation. In short, Japan is in a period of wrenching transformation, in which its most popular politician, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, routinely admonishes audiences with his decidedly unpandering slogan, “No pain, no gain.” This blunt message is a reminder that the verities of postwar Japan are rapidly fading. The new mantra of restructuring and deregulation heralds a new era of uncertainty and insecurity in which most people expect things to get much worse.

As Tirthankar Roy explains in his preface, this book “aims to be no more than an updated and shorter version of the Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. II” (henceforth CEHI), one that will provide an accessible textbook on the economic history of colonial India for the compulsory course in the subject in most Indian universities. In this task he has been successful. Instead of ploughing through the detailed chapters of the otherwise indispensable CEHI, students—and their teachers—now have a useful educational aid which summarizes the latest research by economic historians of India.

The “agent” is almost as emblematic of Australasian farming as akubra hats, water tanks, and windmills. The agent was an employee of “stock and station” firms, who provided farmers with a range of purchased inputs and other goods and services, and assisted with the marketing of their products. As the name implies, they originated in the mid-nineteenth century to serve the needs of pioneer sheep “stations.” The firms later expanded their activities, partly in response to the farms themselves becoming multiproduct enterprises (combining wool with meat, wheat, and other grain crops), and partly to pursue full-line diversification. Having established a network of contacts with farmers through local agents in relation to the wool trade, a distribution system was in place to reap economies of scale or scope by catering to farmers' other needs such as finance, machinery, management advice, the sale or purchase of land and livestock, travel services, etc.

Family relationships were not immune to the complexities of settler life that are a consistent theme in much of the literature on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. Gloria L. Main's work uses patterns of family growth and their influence on land acquisition to explain the English settlement of New England. Her methodology brings together research from several distinct disciplines and uses an in-depth analysis of the history, placing Main's work in the same category as that of noted authors John Demos (A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Kenneth Lockridge (A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736. New York: Norton, 1985). Main incorporates a complex and broad range of disciplines including economics, history, psychology, anthropology, and sociology and applies them to the historical issue of settlement. To support her thesis Main uses diaries of settlers and later generations for a primary-source account of events as well as analysis. Overall, Main presents her ideas in a clear, concise manner and avoids the nit picking that can occur between and within disciplines.

Eighteenth-century America poses a puzzle: why were there no successful commercial banks before the Revolution, and why did they appear soon after? Economic historians have blamed British policy for the lack of Colonial banks. The British limited Colonial development and therefore there was little need for banks. Laws, such as the Currency Acts, may have prevented commercial banks in the Colonies. Banks emerged soon after the Revolution because British rule ended, freeing the United States to establish its own institutional framework and monetary system.

Collections of essays, even those organized around a common general theme, do not always cohere. That, emphatically, is not the case with respect to the essays in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, which originated in a 1998 conference on the impact of human settlement and activity on the Lower Mississippi Valley. The volume's 12 essays and the accompanying introduction by the editor, Craig Colten, together make an integrated and valuable contribution to the fields of environmental history, economic history, and historical geography.

The contribution of the blockade to Union victory during the American Civil War has long been controversial. Among those historians who have questioned the blockade's efficacy are Richard E. Beringer, Herman Hattaway, Archer Jones, William N. Still Jr., Raimondo Luraghi, Frank Lawrence Owsley, and Stephen R. Wise. They note that, until the war's last year, the blockade remained a leaky sieve and that the agrarian South never lost a major battle for lack of arms and ammunition. The blockade's scholarly advocates, including Edwin B. Coddington, Bern Anderson, and Stanley Lebergott, stress in contrast such indirect impacts as the disruption of internal trade, the over-taxing of southern rail-roads, and the dislocation of the Confederate economy overall.

As its title indicates, American Indian reservations are the subject of this book. In particular, this book deals with issues pertaining to the economic conditions of federally recognized reservations, of which there are 314. It does not address the special circumstances of Alaska Native communities or those of reservations established or recognized only by state governments.

One of the most colorful episodes in American business history is the development of the Texas oil industry. From the 1956 movie Giant to the 1978–1991 television series Dallas the Texas oil boom has fascinated millions of people. Among economic historians and economists, the industry has been the basis for studies of firm behavior, regulation, collective action, and regional economic development.

Economic development is a fragile thing. This book examines the transformation of the southwestern corner of North Carolina from a region with intermittent prosperity in the early part of the twentieth century to an economically stagnant region that has not shared in the tremendous recent economic growth in the southeastern United States. For much of the nineties, this southeastern region from North Carolina to Georgia was the fastest growing region in the United States. What happened to the mountain region and how did it get left out? Taylor rejects simplistic models of an isolated mountain region exploited by the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) and outside capitalists. Instead, he presents the process of economic change as similar to development in the rest of the South: that is, the result of an interplay between outsiders and mountain people who were never economically isolated from the rest of the country, and who were adept at taking advantage of whatever economic opportunities presented themselves. Many local residents, for example, were very keen about the establishment of a national park in this part of the Smoky Mountains because they thought it would bring in tourists and boost the local economy. Similarly, many locals supported the construction of the Fontana Dam on the Little Tennessee River; also hoping it would bring economic benefits to the region. Ultimately, however, the result was not one they wanted or intended.

Ian MacLachlan has written an excellent overview and introduction to the beef-commodity supply chain in Canada, as it has existed from the late nineteenth century to the present. From the “kill” of slaughtering, to the “chill” of the refrigerated train car or truck, to the roast or hamburger in the supermarket, MacLachlan concisely describes all aspects of this important, but understudied, Canadian agricultural and consumer product. As there are no comparable studies that cover this time period or this number of aspects of beef production and sale, his book fills a research niche in the examination of Canada's past and “almost present” agricultural history.