Karl Gunnar Persson engages a daunting scope of history in this book: four centuries of grain-market evolution covering all of Europe is a broad sweep indeed for some 154 pages of text. The task is facilitated by his view that the particular countries' experiences were sufficiently similar as to be seen as parallel examples of one more-or-less uniform story. Thus the book does not attempt to analyze and contrast distinct political or regional developments; the focus is on what Persson sees as the “uniformity of the European experience” (p. xv).