The trajectories of American labor-management relations over the industrial era have exerted an enduring fascination dating back to such works as John R. Commons' Trade Unionism and Labor Problems (1905) and Werner Sombart's Why Is There No Socialism in the United States? (1906). In the intervening century, historians from a range of subdisciplines have offered a welter of hypotheses to explain the absence of working-class solidarity, the comparative weakness of American labor unions, and the strength of alliances (paradoxical in a democratic society) that businesses achieved with agencies of the state to counter workers' efforts to achieve political or economic power.

At the dawn of the twenty-first century American historians are unusually qualified to advise on social policy. With the passage in 1996 of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, much of the nation's system of public assistance for the poor was given back to the states and localities. President Clinton promised to “end welfare as we know it,” and he did. But President Clinton did not abolish welfare: in dimensions financial, legal, administrative, and moral, too polyphonous to name here, the new system is trying to revive welfare as historians of the 1870s know it. Likewise, with the inauguration of President-elect George W. Bush, the government's social services—from poverty alleviation to drug abuse treatment—will go, Bush promises, increasingly into the hands of faith-based groups. Of course the economic viability and the constitutionality of the faith-based subsidy is being challenged. And again, history offers ample precedent. The vision of the President-elect, and the immediate reactions against it, are reminiscent of the 1820s and of the 1870s–1900s movement to organize charity. So it is especially fortunate that the historian David C. Hammack has published the essays and excerpts that comprise Making the Nonprofit Sector in the United States: A Reader.

The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present by Martin V. Melosi is a big book in every sense. It spans a multitude of disciplines, including economics, environmental policy, history, law, political science, and public health. It raises important arguments that will provoke debates and stimulate further research for years to come. And it is thorough and comprehensive, revealing an author who has been reading and thinking about the issues at hand for a very long time. A book this big needed to be nearly 600 pages long.

Progressive Era reformers believed that women workers needed to be protected from the hazards of industry because women were mothers. These reformers defined motherhood broadly, maintaining that a mother's duties included caring for and rearing children and maintaining safe, moral, and healthy households. Maximum-hours limits and prohibitions on night work were intended to protect working women from being too fatigued to perform these duties. In Muller v. Oregon, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld gender-specific protection laws, justifying the state's role in this arena by asserting it was in the public interest “to preserve the strength and vigor of the race” (p. 23).

The greater Boston area has experienced a remarkable economic resurgence in the last two decades. Beginning in the late nineteenth century the declining fortunes of its leading manufacturing industries—textiles and boots and shoes—contributed to a sustained economic slide that was not reversed until the early 1980s. By 1982 a Brookings Institution study citing high and rising unemployment, rising crime rates, poor housing, municipal debt burden and tax disparity ranked the Boston SMSA near the bottom of urban America, below cities such as Detroit, Gary, Newark, and Oakland. These trends were sharply reversed in the 1980s and early 1990s, however. Propelled by the rise of high-technology industries, the growing importance of medical care in the economy, and the contributions of its concentration of colleges and universities, Boston ranked first among urban areas in growth of median family incomes during the 1980s, while its surrounding suburbs ranked second among suburban areas.

This is a colossal volume—it is at once a compendium, a survey, a critical evaluation, and a clear exposition of a burgeoning field. It is a study of macroeconomic policy-making in the presence of heterogeneity across actors. Allan Drazen argues that the sine qua non of politics is the conflict of interests; and the core of political economy is that policies are the outcome of the interaction of competing individuals and groups whose concern is their own welfare and not necessarily that of any other individuals or the society as a whole.

Ben S. Bernanke's Essays on the Great Depression make satisfying reading. Spanning microeconomic foundations and macroeconomic outcomes, the book pulls together articles containing some of the best and most conclusive research on the economic catastrophe of the 1930s. Bernanke's work, with co-authors Harold James, Ilian Mihov, James L. Powell, Martin Parkinson, and Kevin Carey, tackles key questions head-on; here the reader will find lucid treatment of the role played in the crisis by worldwide operation of the gold standard, as well as dissection of key developments in interwar labor-market institutions. The work is on the methodological forefront, with a number of careful comparative analyses across nations and industries.

Some economists are confident that they understand labor unions. Viewing unions as monopolies, they believe unions raise their members' wages by reducing labor supply to unionized trades. In this monopoly-union view, nonmembers pay for union wage gains through higher prices for union-made goods and lower wages for nonunion workers due to crowding into nonunion industries and trades. By tampering with the free-market distribution of labor, unions distort the fair distribution of wages and income and lower output by pushing workers from more- into less-efficient occupations.

This is a book about bilateral bargaining between countries over economic issues such as trade and finance. As such it is of great interest to economic historians, who often need to understand why countries entered into specific treaties or established certain relations with other countries. However, in some respects it is an uncomfortable book for economists. This is so because the book is written from the point of view of the discipline of International Relations, which, unlike economics, does not have a well-developed theory. The author recognizes this and his objective in the book is precisely to take some first steps towards developing “…a better grounded and more useful theory” (p. 17). He is not after something similar to game theory or other formal models that economists have already developed. He reviews this literature, and although he recognizes its many strengths, he has strong reservations about the rationality assumption and the many simplifications that are necessary to make the models tractable. Under such circumstances it turns out that outcomes are determined by background conditions, that is, the parameters of the model, and therefore negotiation ends up having no role. That is, whichever economic diplomat a country sends to negotiate a treaty would reach the same end result.

Economic development is for many communities and policy makers a familiar and worthy goal, but sadly, it can also be an elusive goal. Familiar, because the standard by which many policy makers and their advisors are evaluated is their ability to attract industries and firms, to create jobs, and otherwise to expand the capacity and economic base of a community. Elusive, because not only are no two communities identical, but also because the outcomes of specific policies and actions can be difficult to predict with certainty. The collected case studies in this book offer more than 30 examples of programs and policies enacted in the pursuit of economic progress across various small towns and rural communities.

This collection of eight-and-a-half essays makes an important contribution to both the theory and practice of business history. Six essays employ the new institutional economics and evolutionary theory to examine central issues in economic history and economic development as they arose in specific historical contexts in Western European countries. The other two-and-a-half, by S. R. H. Jones and the editors (the “half” is a brief but wonderful introduction), examine and critique the theoretical literature that provides the basis of the new institutional economics, laying out clearly its strengths and its limitations for contributing to our understanding of business and economic history. The volume thus provides a model of how business history should be done.

Richard Grassby, an economic historian of Early Modern England now at the Institute for Advanced Studies, has written a sly, slender contribution to the Rowman & Littlefield “Critical Issues in History” series. An extended essay on the question of what capitalism is, it begins by examining the attempts of Marx, Weber, Sombart, and Schumpeter, among others, to locate the essence of capitalism in this or that particular feature of economic, social, or political life. Grassby's method is to select a theory and then debunk it by producing a piece of evidence for which it cannot account. Hence, for example, comparison of “traditional marxist teaching” to the basic facts, as he sees them, of agrarian capitalism in Early Modern England (p. 26). Where a Marxist theorist would assert that a change in the mode of production transformed the rural economy, a dogged empiricist like Grassby finds that the motors of change were “in fact” demographic pressure and “the market with some government support.” To the extent that he allows himself a general theory, it is a non-linear, cyclical one reminiscent of the Enlightenment thinkers: equilibrium and disequilibrium, freedom and regulation, activity and decay all wrestle one another in eternal combat, and there is no final victory to be had (pp. 30, 45).

Globalization and History is an impressive book. It asks a big question: What was the economic impact of globalization in the late nineteenth century? To answer it, Kevin O'Rourke and Jeff Williamson deploy new data—principally purchasing-power-parity-adjusted real wages and land values for major economies in Europe and the Americas—and analyze them with regressions and computable general-equilibrium (CGE) models. The analysis is always incisive and frequently elegant; the writing is accessible to the general reader as well as the professional. The message is upbeat: nineteenth-century globalization was a “good thing” because it allowed poor countries to catch up to rich ones. But unskilled workers in the leading countries suffered, leading to a backlash against globalization. Today's leaders should take heed, lest history repeat itself.

The history of coffee is a tale of romance and complexity, sometimes bitter, sometimes enlightened. Mark Pendergrast weaves this tale with the art of a master storyteller. From its legendary discovery in the ancient land of Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), coffee became a source of stimulus for new ideas, work, and social controversy. Traded throughout the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century, the curious beverage was brought to the hands of Pope Clement VIII by priests who wanted to ban it. He tasted and replied: “Why, this Satan's drink is so delicious,… it would be a pity to let the infidels have exclusive use of it” (p. 8). So the Western European romance with it began. By the eighteenth century, coffeehouses provided an egalitarian meeting place and a social context for emerging liberal institutions and the American and French Revolutions.

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).