The introduction of commercial jet service in 1959 transformed the face of the Hawaiian Islands. By reducing both the time required to travel to Hawai‘i and the money price of travel, the jet plane brought increasing numbers of tourists to Hawai‘i, and in the process, triggered an enormous wave of development on the four major islands. Mansel Blackford's new book focuses on how tourism affected the development of Maui, a beautiful tropical island of just 727 square miles. In 1956 Maui had unspoiled, beautiful beaches; sugar cane and pineapple as the main industries; small towns with a relaxed lifestyle; just 37,600 residents; and only 29,000 annual visitors. By 1998 Maui had been totally transformed. The population had more than tripled to 121,000 residents; the annual visitor count had soared to 2,244,000 people; only two sugar plantations remained; bumper-to-bumper traffic jams had become the norm; planned resorts in Wailea and K\bar{{\rm a}}‘anapali and a more sprawling tourism complex in Kihei were clustered around the most beautiful beaches; and the small rural towns had grown into tourism and commercial centers.

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).

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

The contraceptive pill is widely assumed to have had a revolutionary effect on society, but its origins and the changes it is said to have brought about have not been fully explored. A recent history of the pill by Elizabeth Watkins did much to fill that gap (On the Pill: A Social History of Oral Contraceptives, 1950–1970. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). Sexual Chemistry adds both an international perspective and a rich level of detail to the story.

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.

Ray Barrell, Geoff Mason, and Mary O'Mahony have compiled a volume that includes a smattering of economic history, the service sector, the IT revolution, international competitiveness, capital markets, R&D, and education. The connections between these topics are surprisingly coherent from one to the next, although the coherence of the whole is mainly implied. In 11 chapters by 23 contributors, this trim volume examines the complex interaction of innovation and productivity in Britain in the last 20-plus years.

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.

This short book contains ten essays, primarily by Polish, Portuguese, and U.S. economists, presented at a 1998 conference in Cracow. In the preface the editors tell us that “the subject of these papers is the connection between moral values and economic activities, and this ‘psychic and spiritual energy’ should supply us with a more complex and complete picture of the problems of economic transition.”

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.

The title of this book is an outline of De Landa's agenda. He wants to convey his philosophical approach to history using examples chosen from the last 1,000 years of human history. “Nonlinear” refers to feedbacks and interactions that prevent movement toward a unique equilibrium. The author interprets history through a series of extended metaphors that link biology, geology, and linguistics to human history. The book is divided into sections corresponding to these classifications. The first, “Lavas and Magmas,” makes connections between history and geology; the second, “Flesh and Genes,” connects history and biology; and the third, “Memes and Norms,” connects history with linguistics. Within each section De Landa illustrates his approach with examples from the (approximately) last “thousand years of nonlinear history.”

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.

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).

In this provocative book, Hernando de Soto argues that the reason why transitional and developing economies have had such limited success with adopting capitalism is the lack of formal property rights for the urban poor. Without legal ownership of the homes they inhabit or the businesses they operate, the poor live in a shadow economy, subject to high risk of expropriation, bureaucratic arbitrariness, and political corruption. The absence of title thwarts investment, limits markets, dampens incentives, and retards economic growth all round. The comparatively poor performance of many Latin American, African, and Asian economies stems not from cultures that are alien to commercial activity, from the legacy of past colonialism, or from low savings rates among the poor. The urban poor are entrepreneurs, and formal property institutions are needed to free their energies and expand their opportunities, allowing them to accumulate desperately needed capital. Currently, the urban poor are forced to hold their wealth in defective forms. This misallocation cripples developing economies. According to de Soto, the potential gain is huge. He argues that despite their lack of affluence, the poor still save, and in the aggregate the amounts exceed by perhaps 40 times all of the foreign aid sent to developing countries since 1945. Freeing up these savings and entrepreneurial energy could lead to a second industrial revolution, and end the disparities of wealth and well-being that differentiate the developed and developing worlds.

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?

What difference did the First World War make to the international economy? Since “one thing leads to another,” avoiding this conflict might have prevented the Bolshevik revolution and the Second World War. The Soviet empire need not have collapsed because it would never have arisen. By the same token, the Fascist rulers of Europe and the militaristic government of Japan might never have come to power. On this reckoning, the impact of the “Great War” was to take the twentieth century on a long detour.

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.