The publication of this book in English is good news. Gabriel Tortella presents a synthesis of Spain's economic history during the last two centuries, written with scientific rigor and didactic guidance. He expertly combines economic theory and general historical analysis to formulate his hypotheses and to develop his arguments. The present volume contains some modifications of the original Spanish edition, and Valerie J. Herr's translation is excellent. Its 16 chapters include numerous tables, figures, and maps, and are followed by an updated bibliography and a chronology.

This book is a history of how American foreign policy during the 1950s affected Japan's access to foreign markets. It is not an economic history per se, but rather a political history highlighting the interaction between Cold War security issues and U.S. trade policy. Extensive archival evidence paints a clear picture of U.S. policy toward Japan after the end of the Occupation. Forsberg's main thesis is that the United States contributed to the “Japanese miracle” by fostering an international environment in which Japan could export while maintaining protectionist policies.

This book, a revised University of Pennsylvania dissertation, takes up a “classic” topic in Indian history, that of the conquest of Bengal by the East India Company in the mideighteenth century. As much has been written about this portentous event, it is essential to ask what Sen brings to the discussion that is fresh. At the heart of the book's originality is Sen's insistence upon the central role of markets and marketplaces, subjects rarely examined by Indian historians, who have been primarily concerned with land tenure and rural social organization. As he traces the coming of colonialism to Bengal, Sen makes of the market, not the countryside, “the epicenter of the battle for colonial conquest” (p. 7). Sen's second objective is to challenge the revisionist historiography, associated especially with such scholars as David Washbrook, that insists on an easy transition, with little institutional disruption, from indigenous to early colonial rule. As Sen bluntly puts it in his introduction, he proposes to argue against “the interpretation that, under the surface of administrative and commercial expansion, Indian society moved along at its own pace, unaffected by the colonial rule to which it was being subjected” (p. 5). Contest over markets went hand in hand, in his view, with the creation of an intrusive colonial state.

Yoshihide Soeya's book, which emerged from his University of Michigan dissertation, covers the period from the end of World War II until China's opening outward with the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. This was a period when inordinately complex legal and political arrangements, concocted by particularly astute Japanese politicians, enabled Japan to conduct trade with both Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC). It was also a period, for the most part, in which China and Japan did not have diplomatic ties. Although sometimes a bit tedious in describing the intricacies of all this, Soeya has done quite a creditable job of explicating the often tortuous bilateral ties between the two countries over three decades.

This book is a translation of the first volume of a trilogy entitled History of the Development of Chinese Capitalism published between 1985 and 1993 by a team of researchers at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It focuses on the emergence of what Chinese historians have called “embryonic capitalism” (often translated more literally as “the sprouts of capitalism”) prior to the Opium War (1840–1842), which in Chinese historiography marks the beginning of China's modern era. The authors utilize an explicitly Marxian analysis to distinguish embryonic capitalism as a distinct phase of economic development. Many Western scholars have begun to define the period 1500–1800 as China's early modern era, finding in the emergence of free labor markets, regional specialization in agriculture and handicraft production, rural market integration, the growing autonomy of merchant groups, and increased foreign trade patterns of socioeconomic change comparable to contemporary developments in Europe. The authors of this study, in contrast, distance themselves from the hypothesis, once prevalent among Chinese historians, that China during this period was developing a capitalist economy along lines similar to Europe. Yet at the same time they challenge the tendency to view the late imperial economy as homeostatic, a characterization that gained considerable currency among Chinese historians during the 1980s, most notably in the “super-stability” hypothesis advanced by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng in their 1983 book Prosperity and Crisis: The Super-Stable Structure of China's Feudal Society (Changsha: Renmin chubanshe). The introduction by Chris Bramall and Peter Nolan provides non-specialists with a useful guide to the historiographical background of this book and its methodological approach; but their review of alternative interpretations of the late imperial Chinese economy, which only considers scholarship published up to the mid-1980s, is outdated.

With this important collection of essays on the independent economic activities of slaves, freedmen, and indentured Indians in colonial Mauritius, Richard Allen takes the history of Mauritian labor well beyond the familiar themes of exploitation and resistance. This is careful economic history from below, with important implications for Mauritian social and cultural history. Allen's argument is that inhabitants of the vast bottoms of the social pyramid—gens de couleur (free persons of color), ex-apprentices, and Indian immigrants—not only shaped their own destinies in difficult legal and social conditions, but that their independent choices profoundly influenced the insular economy as a whole. Through attention to subalterns' acquisition and management of land and capital, Allen sheds new light on key questions in Mauritian social history (especially the social “disappearance” of the Afro-Mauritian population and the rise of Indian entrepreneurship in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). As do all provocative and well-researched works, this one proposes solutions to old problems and allows us to ask new questions about the roles of Malagasy, Africans, Indians, and their descendants in Mauritian history.

Studies of the social and economic history of the Amazon are few and far between, and long-term studies that attempt to link the history of the colonial and post-colonial periods are especially unusual. The demands of academic careers make it difficult for many scholars to undertake the time-consuming research required to produce a book covering such long time spans in a serious way, especially since the “long” nineteenth century saw three different political regimes in Brazil: colonial, imperial, and republican. Moreover, the isolation of the Amazon, the conditions of its archives and documentary collections, and its lack of a well-developed historiography further complicate efforts to study this vast region. Thus, Robin L. Anderson has undertaken an especially difficult task writing a book on the settlement of the Amazon from 1758 to 1911.

Forty years after it was first published, Celso Furtado's seminal The Economic Growth of Brazil (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), is still one of the most widely used books in undergraduate, and even graduate courses, on Brazilian economic history. Although short, Furtado's book set forth many hypotheses that generated several memorable academic debates amongst specialists in Brazilian history. Even when Furtado was wrong on a given topic, his analysis often stimulated discussions that pushed forward the frontiers of knowledge. Such is the case with the scholarly literature arising in the 1970s and 1980s around the development of the region of Minas Gerais after the abrupt end of the mining boom in 1760. Furtado's view, that the end of mining activity had brought a generalized economic decadence to the region, was widely accepted. It was believed that this collapse had caused a reversion to subsistence activities, together with dispersal of the population and underutilization of slaves, leading eventually to their emigration to other regions where coffee was becoming the center of the economy.

Since the revolution of 1979 there has opened a great gap in scholarship on the economic history of premodern Iran. As the author of the present study has appropriately noted, over the past two decades the historiography of premodern Iran has suffered from ideological constraints (on Iranian scholars) as well as lack of access to local sources for western scholars. In light of these limitations, the present study on the political economy of silk trade in Safavid Iran is a refreshing reminder that not all is lost in an otherwise hopeless situation. Using predominantly western (including Russian) archival sources, the author has made a significant contribution to the histories of western European (and particularly Dutch maritime) trade with Iran, of Safavid commerce, and of the politics of the Middle Eastern silk trade.

Professor Woody Holton makes two important points in this fine study of rebellion: the elite gentlemen of Virginia did not always lead the Revolution, but were sometimes pushed from below, and the Chesapeake is not New England. Those of us who live and teach below the Mason-Dixon Line are often painfully aware that the general outlines of U.S. history are not the history of our region. As this detailed study of Virginia's path to Revolution makes clear, many of the generalizations about the origins of the American Revolution only hold for the northern colonies. But this work's greatest contribution is its carefully researched and documented argument that race and class mattered in creating a Revolution.

This volume is a throwback to an older style of labor history, one based on the leaders of the labor movement. Craig Phelan has produced an intriguing, and in places even inspiring, history of Terence Powderly, the leader of the Knights of Labor from 1879 to 1893. Powderly's story deserves to be retold. His history stands at the cross-roads of an older American set of ideals dating back to the founding of the nation and the emerging corporate values associated with the late-nineteenth-century rise of big business. This is a story of one of the earliest attempts to break from an elitist model of craft unions and replace it with a broad-based labor movement, one that welcomed skilled and unskilled, men and women, and people of all races. This is the story of how this movement was ultimately crushed by larger forces at work in society. It reminds us of what might have been, and perhaps encourages us to think of what still might be.

The history of the modern corporation is the history of institutional change and of the corporation's attempt to influence and respond to that change. In this book, Harland Prechel supplies a multilayered analysis of the development of big business from the 1880s to the 1990s. Prechel's approach is to draw linkages between the micro (individual managers), meso (corporate), and macro (institutional) levels of behavior and change. This multilayered analysis allows Prechel to expose the connections and also the inherent “irrationalities” between each layer of decision making.

Buy this book, read it, and keep it on your shelf as a reference. Dora Costa has written an award-winning book about retirement over the past century. She examines long-term trends in the propensity to retire and the impact of health, public pensions, income, and other determinants on the retirement decision.

Dr. Jon Lauck's book focuses on the problem of monopoly in grain-belt states from 1953 to 1980; in doing so, he analyzes a long-standing conflict that has touched the entire agricultural sector during the entire twentieth century. The late-nineteenth-century shift from small-scale farms, spread across the nation, to regional specialization in production, often on large farms, created a struggle in the agricultural and political community that has remained alive until today. Economic, political, and philosophical factors have been integral parts of the controversy. The media has been involved, as evidenced through discussions of unfair practices inflicted on chicken farmers by processors and discussion of rural outmigration. Environmentalists have added to the debate, suggesting that large farms deplete the environment by overusing resources. Politically, as the author states, many have felt that the USDA has supported agribusiness firms rather than the small-scale farmer. The political economy of these issues raises two questions. One, are the increases in farm and processor size efforts to gain market power, making it possible for these firms to engage in anticompetitive behavior? Two, farmers are often loath to leave the family farm behind, and are often thought of as the essence of U.S. history, raising questions as to whether policies should be implemented to maintain the family farm. Dr. Lauck's thorough documentation of the political economy of grain-belt farming from the late 1800s until the late 1980s indicates that answers to these questions are not easily found.

The no-longer-so-New Labor History has reached that venerable age where its founders write reflective autobiographical essays to introduce collections of their publications. And well might Melvyn Dubofsky prepare such an essay and collection. Present at the creation of the New Labor History, Dubofsky has shaped the development of labor history as a teacher and researcher since the 1960s. He has written works essential to any study of American labor history, including the history of the International Workers of the World, We Shall be All (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1969), biographies of labor leaders John L. Lewis (John L. Lewis: A Biography. New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Book Co., 1977, written with Warren W, Van Tine) and William D. Haywood (“Big Bill” Haywood, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), and a study of labor in American political economy, The State and Labor in Modern America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

The first of the two books, Wealth in America, fills an important gap in the recent literature on inequality in America. The most recent comprehensive treatment of wealth inequality in the United States is, perhaps, Robert Lampman's book, The Share of Top Wealth-Holders in National Wealth, 1922–56, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962). However, its coverage of wealth inequality ends in 1956.

The Impact of International Trade on Wages is a volume of ten papers, along with remarks by discussants, which were originally presented at a National Bureau of Economic Research conference in early 1998. In general, the papers have a strong empirical orientation, and they are focused squarely on the experience of the United States over the last thirty years or so. Although economic historians cannot expect to learn anything about the international economy prior to 1960 from this volume, they might learn a great deal about different methodological approaches to the study of international trade and factor prices.

With the word information on nearly everyone's lips, it seems an opportune time for historians to finally join the bandwagon and bless this new factor of production that apparently is giving rise to a “new economy.” (And they had better do so fast, before the darkening clouds of recession rain on the parade.) In this book, experts drawn from history departments and business schools take a look back at how we got to the present, and more than that, the unique role that information has played in economics, business, politics, and culture in the United States.

This fascinating little book recounts a century of labor struggles at the John Morrell and Company meatpacking plant in Ottumwa, a small city in south-central Iowa and the author's hometown. The book is based on a series of articles that appeared in the Annals of Iowa. “Iowa's Pride” in the title refers to a trademark once used by Morrell.

In this impressive study of American immigration Nancy Foner presents an “interpretive synthesis” that “brings together strands from the mass of literature on past and present immigration” (p. 4). She argues that the historical and contemporary literatures have developed separately and that there is virtue in bringing them together. Here the historical period covers 1880 to 1920, and the contemporary period begins in the mid-1960s. Of necessity, Foner selects a narrow and manageable range of topics to review. Geographically, Foner limits her coverage to New York City, the “quintessential immigrant city.” In terms of immigrant groups, for the earlier period Foner considers only the experiences of Italians and of Russian Jews, who dominated that immigration; for the later period, in which no two national groups are so dominant, she emphasizes the experiences of West Indians, Asian Indians, Chinese, and Korean immigrants. The chapters consider who the immigrants were, where they lived, the work they did (with a separate chapter on immigrant women and their work), the dynamics of race and prejudice, the maintenance of transnational ties, and the role of schooling.