The five thoughtful essays collected here “aim to identify distortions introduced in the understanding of China under the influence of cultural and ideological trends that took Western capitalist relations and patterns of development to be the norm” (p. 5). Two trace how intellectuals concerned with finding the patterns of change familiar from European history failed to see change in China; one describes the origins of European capitalism as an accident that says little about basic differences among civilizations; and two trace long-term Chinese developments to show important economic changes proceeding according to a noncapitalist logic.

From the 1890s through the 1930s millions of Chinese farmers and workers migrated from North China, principally from Shandong and Hebei provinces, to seek employment in Manchuria. Their migration was motivated by the opportunities in new industries, as well as in agriculture, and was facilitated by the opening of railways at the turn of the century. Manchuria was one of the most unusual and prized pieces of geopolitical real estate in the world. The homeland of China's Manchu rulers, it was sparsely populated under their dynastic regime (1644–191l), partly because of its ban on migration, which was occasionally lifted during periods of famine in North China. With the decline of the dynasty's power in the nineteenth century, Manchuria became the focus of Russian territorial ambition, to be followed in the twentieth century by relentless Japanese encroachment culminating in the creation of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. “From 1906 until 1931 Manchuria was a complex patchwork of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian spheres of authority” (p. 49).

This book addresses the basic issue of human-induced soil degradation. It attempts to resolve several debatable issues, such as: (i) Is accelerated soil erosion the dominant factor responsible for soil degradation? (ii) Does agricultural intensification improve soil quality? (iii) Does increased fertilizer use compensate for low levels of soil organic matter and nitrogen contents? (iv) Does increase in farm income enhance soil quality? (v) Is urban encroachment a principal cause of farmland depletion? (vi) Is soil degradation accelerating? and (vii) Are human activities responsible for exacerbating soil degradation? The author addresses these questions objectively and bases his conclusions on the historical data regarding temporal changes in quality of agricultural soils in China and Indonesia.

In 1901 six of the seven British colonies in Australasia federated to form the Common-wealth of Australia. The collaborative volume edited by Irving is one of a number of recent scholarly publications marking the centennial of that event. It chronicles a federation movement that began in the middle of the nineteenth century, with different contributors telling the story from the perspective of each colony. Emphasis is given to the role of colonial leaders in the drawn-out saga, for this book is designed for readers interested in the political and constitutional dimensions of the process. (It also contains over 100 pages of “short entries,” in the style of a compendium, and reproduces associated documents such as the 1901 constitution.) Although economic issues were important, in Irving's book they are only indirectly recognized.

The tropical forest of Brazil has been a symbol of America's abundance, potential, and mystery ever since the Portuguese first landed there in 1500; but harvesting its potential has never been easy. The complex reality of the forest has always made its exploitation complicated. Whereas the history of the Brazilian forest has previously been studied from an ecological point of view, particularly in Warren Dean's With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), the present book is less interested in what the Europeans should have done to save the forest than in what they actually did to turn the forest into the exploitable resource. Miller does not wish to condemn the colonists for exploiting the forest, nor does he think that slash-and-burn farming or timbering were wholly to blame for the resulting destruction. Instead, his story is centered on the negative effects of the real corte, a royal monopoly of the most attractive wood-bearing species, the so-called madeiras de lei, and on the long-term results of government monopoly on the economic development of the timber industry. In this, Miller follows the lead of F. W. O. Morton (“The Royal Timber in Late Colonial Bahia.” Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 41–61), but he expands the boundaries of that important study both geographically and chronologically.

This is the third volume of the California History Sesquicentennial Series from the University of California Press. The present volume contains 12 essays on social history, and is handsomely illustrated with original photos and artwork, including 16 color plates of California art from the first decades of the American period. Each essay covers a particular topic, such as education, migration, urbanization, popular culture, the status of women, and more. The overarching theme of the book is that the Gold Rush caused a period of barbarism in California society and culture characterized by racism, violence, and drunkenness, but as the seeds of civilization slowly took root, a relatively “normal” society emerged. One irony of this theme is that it undergirds the postmodern sensibilities of several essays that attempt to uncover the hidden narratives of women, minorities, and sexual desire.

A House Dividing serves as much-appreciated example of how narrative political economy remains a persuasive format for historical research. John Majewski addresses the topic of divergence in economic development between antebellum North and South by looking inside the highly political process of infrastructure development. Using case studies of Albemarle County, Virginia, and Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Majewski shows how competition between rival small cities left Virginia without a coherent growth strategy. In marked contrast, eventual domination of Pennsylvania internal improvements by business interests in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh focused development efforts there.

This book is the third volume (of a proposed four) in the Russell Sage Foundation's Multi-City Study of Urban Inequality. The paradox mentioned in the title refers to Atlanta's seemingly contradictory position as both a symbol of Sunbelt South racial and economic progress and a pit of persistent poverty. Yet for all the apparent progress of the post–World War II years, Atlanta in the 1990s remained a highly segregated city and its poverty rate ranked as the fifth highest in the nation. This is “the Atlanta paradox” that the authors set out to try and explain. The chief sources of data for this book, as with other volumes in the series, are household and employers surveys conducted between 1992 and 1994 as part of the Multi-City Study. A useful appendix summarizes the survey methodology (pp. 9–12). The surveys themselves will surely become a useful resource for other scholars.

This book is ahead of its time. While the title suggests that Finding Jobs might be a study of the labor market impacts of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (PRWORA), the editors and authors make clear that it is simply too early to study these effects directly. Rather, their purpose is to examine the characteristics of low-wage, low-skill labor markets, along with the effects of policies directed at these labor markets, relying on data from the pre-PRWORA era. Their hope is that this analysis will clarify the questions that we will need to ask as the effects of welfare reform become more pronounced. While the chapters are of varying quality, the book as a whole accomplishes this goal.

Over the years, land use has been the focus of much attention by students of the American West. A recurring theme in a large number of scholarly studies has been a marked tension, in many contexts, between private land use and the so-called common good. Private land use practices, which include water use, mining, grazing, and timber cutting, often appear to militate against the common good, loosely defined as the best interests of society at large. This has led to numerous calls for regulation or planning efforts in order to promote the common good, often in the face of fierce resistance from private land owners and proponents of smaller government. Such real-world conflicts have spurred considerable debate among economists regarding the relative virtues of largely free-market solutions versus some form of government policy. In recent years, as population growth in the West and environmental advocacy in general have both boomed, so have the frequency and sheer economic magnitude of land-use conflicts. Consequently, the rift between the governmental and free-market positions relating to land use in the West has widened into a full-fledged gulf.

Contrary to what its title suggests, this book is not a history of clock design, manufacture, or marketing. It is instead about the rise and fall of commercial time signal distribution by astronomical observatories in the nineteenth-century United States—time-telling rather than timekeeping. It narrates complex interactions of scientific, business, and governmental establishments around the activity of telling any buyer of the service, and therefore also the public at large, what time it was, accurately and consistently. It also discusses the adoption, late in the century, of American standard time zones and the eventual international agreement to accept the location of Greenwich in England as 0°, the prime meridian from which other meridians were calibrated.

It is not every day that I am asked to review a book that discusses telephone sex.

Coast to Coast by Automobile is a detailed account of eight early efforts to drive across the North American continent. The first two expeditions, undertaken in 1899 and 1901, met with failure; but from 1903 to 1908, at least six groups successfully crossed from west to east. Dr. H. Nelson Jackson completed the first transcontinental journey on 26 July 1903, arriving in New York City in a stock 1903 Winton touring car approximately 63.5 days after he and his mechanic Sewall K. Crocker left San Francisco. Chapter 2 reports on the Jackson-Crocker venture, and subsequent chapters describe how later groups using teams of drivers managed to reduce total travel time to a little more than 15 days by 1906 and to five days by 1916.

In what he terms a pursuit of “unwritten history” (p. 197), Thomas Jepsen has penned a social history of women in telegraphy during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Jepsen is well versed in the technology of the industry and has written several articles on women telegraphers. Here in seven chapters he describes the extent of female employment, both in the United States and other countries, and then ranges widely over a host of issues. These include wages, working conditions, personal characteristics of women telegraphers, social class, ethnicity, mechanization, love in the office, and even women telegraphers in literature and the cinema. There is also a considerable discussion of the role women played in the many, mostly unsuccessful attempts of telegraphers to unionize. The book is based on a wide reading of primary sources including the Western Union Archives, as well as much secondary literature.

American employers today enjoy considerably greater latitude in the labor market than do employers in other industrialized economies. Laws protecting unions are weaker, employers can more easily hire and fire workers, minimum-wage laws are less binding, the government plays a smaller role in managing the labor market through public employment offices, and work and unemployment insurance programs are smaller and less costly to employers in the United States than elsewhere. In this book David Brian Robertson, Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, offers an explanation for the unique pattern of labor-market governance that has emerged in the United States.

Feeling panicky? Elmus Wicker might be able to explain why. In 1996, he authored The Banking Panics of the Great Depression (New York: Cambridge University Press); now, pushing the frontiers of our knowledge forward (and chronologically backward!), he has tackled the late nineteenth century in the United States. In this new book Wicker asks an interesting and important question: Were banking panics different under the National Banking System than they were under the Federal Reserve System?

At a time when serious questions in economic history are often delivered by publishers into the hands of either misinformed polemicists (such as Dinesh D'Souza in his remarkably misleading The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno–Affluence) or facile pundits (such as Jeffrey Madrick in his thoughtful yet under-researched The End of Affluence), it is a special pleasure to encounter Gordon Bjork's The Way It Worked and Why It Won't. Here is a work, skillfully rendered by the Lovelace Professor of Economics of Claremont McKenna College and the Drucker School of Management (Claremont Graduate School), that carefully assays the recent economic history of the United States with a view toward understanding the productivity slowdown that has obtained since the 1970s.

Was the Kennedy-Johnson tax cut and the tax surcharge of 1968 a triumph of “new economics” and “fine tuning” as the architects of these policies claimed? Not exactly, according to Martin Prachowny. He concludes that the chairmen of the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) excessively trumpeted their self-described stellar performance and this self-serving propaganda led to the demise of activist stabilization policy.

This book is one of a series in the history of economic thought published by JAI Press. It may be of more interest to historians of economic thought than to economic historians. Nevertheless, because history has shaped what economists have said, especially the American Institutionalists, there is much history in this volume about Selig Perlman.

Retired public historian Walter Dunn has given us a good, old-fashioned narrative economic history that describes the importance of the frontier during “a crucial time in American history filled with turmoil that ruptured a once amicable relationship between the thirteen colonies and Great Britain” (p. 1). Dunn is no econometrician, but his work shows a solid understanding of neoclassical economic principles. His writing is sharp and clear, if generally unexciting due to the overwhelming number of detailed examples that he often supplies.