Fiscal regimes have become progressively more centralized and though the trend extends over nearly a millennium, the process accelerated in the early nineteenth century. The growth of central government budgets as a fraction of the economy and relative to local and regional budgets is well known. Many believe that the process has been driven by changes in citizens' demand for social services and therefore have associated it with democratization and with crises such as World War I and the Great Depression. In this paper we take a different tack and consider the evolution of fiscal institutions and changes in the preferences of the central executive. Our reconsideration is prompted by the observation that from and institutional standpoint fiscal centralization long preceded the massive expansion of the welfare state in the twentieth century.

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.

The author concludes with a quotation from J. D. Bernal (Die soziale Funktion der Wissenschaft. Berlin: Akademie, 1986: 22) to the effect that this book will have served its purpose if it manages to demonstrate that there is a problem. This is indeed the case, partly as a result of the author's research, and partly as a result of his omissions. Mikulás Teich, Emeritus Fellow of Robinson College, Cambridge, tries to reconstruct the brewing industry's importance for the German Industrial Revolution, emphasizing the surprising fact that before 1914 the brewing industry ranked first, alongside machine construction, in terms of capital investment. And although there are some general histories of brewing, none of them treats the interdependence of demand, scientific research, and technological innovation.

In the great and complicated equation of modern Asian history, just how important was the variable of opium? This book argues, and in large measure demonstrates, that for China opium was a very large variable indeed. Opium lubricated Western penetration into Asia, especially for the British, and helped significantly to pay for the upkeep and administration of Western colonies there. It was the casus belli that opened imperial China's treaty ports and became the metaphor for the falling dynasty's weakness and disgrace. It was the cash crop that lifted millions of Chinese peasants to new prosperity, and that exposed them to heightened levels of scrutiny and harassment by the state. It was the revenue source indispensable to any number of China's secret societies, warlords, political movements, occupying armies, and “national” governments; as such, it was integral to the power struggles among them. By the early twentieth century, few significant elements of Chinese life were untouched by opium in one way or another.

This paper examines various legal, economic, and technological aspects of economic warfare—particularly naval blockades. It begins with a summary of the rules of international law that most developed countries “agreed” should govern “legal” blockades, and the degree to which they are enforceable. The focus is then narrowed to a particular example of a blockade—the varying success of the German submarine blockade of the British Isles and the Eastern Coast of the United States during World War II. The basis for the early German success is described, as are the contribution of the varying technological (radar, Huff-Duff, the hunter-killer groups) and organizational (convoys and command) innovations in the subsequent allied success. The role of the link between the scientific and military community and the increased ability of the Americans to produce shipping are also discussed as factors essential to successfully ending the submarine blockade. Finally, the paper raised questions about the possibility of enforcing “legal rules” during a “total” war and about the role, pro and con, of individuals in structuring blockades and countermeasures.

When liberal politicians attacked the entrenched power and wealth of the Catholic Church—especially of monastic establishments and endowed chaplaincies—in many areas of Latin America beginning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they were playing out a drama that had already begun in Catholic Europe considerably earlier. In greater or lesser degree, in Peru, Mexico, and other countries these statesmen adduced as justification for the expropriation the idea that the supposedly “dead hand” of the Church had prevented the free circulation of wealth and therefore retarded economic development, a viewpoint that has long survived as conventional wisdom in the economic historiography of Latin America. As historians' research over the last two or three decades has shown, however, in a prebanking age the capital-owning institutions of the Church—and particularly its great urban convents—served a vital function in accumulating and investing capital which often supported productive forms of enterprise, especially in the countryside, in economies that were still overwhelmingly agricultural. This did not mean that conventual life itself was not primarily a religious expression, nor that surpluses generated in the secular economy were not expended in unprofitable ways, but rather that cultural practices and expectations intertwined in a complex double helix with economic life, each influencing the other. Kathryn Burns's informative and beautifully written book on the history of three convents (one founded in 1573, the other two at the beginning and end of the following century) in Cuzco, the former Inca capital in the Peruvian highlands, fits this revisionist trend well. Burns provides the most detailed and theoretically informed treatment yet of the relationship between ecclesiastical investment, the institutional and intimate life of the lending convents, and the local elites of the region, who sent their daughters to the convents, endowed the institutions with funds, and took loans from them at interest. All were bound together in what she calls a “spiritual economy.”

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.

Victoria Thompson's study of the French market begins with the Richard Terdiman's premise that societies faced with rapid change engage in “semiotic activity” (Discourse/Counter Discourse: The Theory and Practice of Symbolic Resistance in Nineteenth-Century France. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). In other words, the tensions surrounding political, economic, and social upheaval send individuals scurrying to categorize and explain the new world confronting them. Certainly, the boom-and-bust economy of nineteenth-century France generated such anxieties. Interestingly, many of those fears focused on female sexuality, a topic that might seem remote from the debates over living wages for working-class men or the appearance of new credit mechanisms. The problem that interests Thompson is twofold. First, how did French society cope with the potentially destructive power of early capitalism, a power that could dissolve familial bonds and up-end social hierarchies? Second, how did new gender norms work within the new market framework? The French answer to both problems was the creation of a “virtuous marketplace,” one in which honor and self-control shaped men's economic practices, and in which distinct gender roles kept women a respectable distance from the temptations of material gain.

In this book, Marco van Leeuwen attempts to answer three questions about poor relief in Amsterdam during the period immediately preceding Dutch industrialization: “Which groups provided poor relief and why? Which groups received poor relief and why? What effects did poor relief have on society?” (p. 2). To answer these questions, van Leeuwen develops a model whereby the poor-relief system served as an “exchange mechanism” (p. 33). On the one side, the rich used the system as “a control strategy” (p. 3) to influence the behavior of the poor in ways advantageous to themselves. According to van Leeuwen, there were a number of ways in which the poor-relief system met elite needs. Economically, it allowed them to control the labor market by ensuring there would be a labor reserve on hand to meet seasonal demand. Politically, it helped legitimize the social order and prevent unrest. Medically, it helped prevent the spread of disease through compulsory vaccination schemes. Finally, the poor relief system helped to instil proper values in the poor.

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.

History's broadest pattern, and its biggest unsolved problem, are its very different course on different continents. Why did Aboriginal Australians remain stone-age hunter-gatherers, while agriculture and empires were arising among Native Americans, and while widespread literacy and metal tools were arising in Eurasia? Why were Europeans the ones to conquer Africans, Aboriginal Australians, and Native Americans, instead of vice versa? For lack of an accepted explanation, many people fall back on racist explanations. I shall show instead how the different fates of different peoples were stamped by differences in continental environments.

Malaysia is unusual even among Southeast Asia's highly open and (often) extremely rapidly growing economies. Beginning about 1905, and known as Malaya prior to independence from Britain in 1957, the country's prosperity was built on the world's greatest boom in any agricultural commodity—rubber. By 1929 Malaya's per capita income was substantially higher than Japan's. Although at independence still with so little manufacturing industry as to surprise even knowledgeable observers, Malaysia subsequently emerged as a showcase success among less developed countries. As such it figured prominently in W. W. Rostow's valedictory article in the New York Times on the Johnson administration. Through the last third of the century Malaysia continued to industrialize swiftly, with a combination of alternating export-oriented and import-substitution phases orchestrated through considerable, though not extreme, state intervention.

The Great Depression was a global phenomenon. Therefore, a comparison of the U.S. and Canadian experiences is helpful, because of the close economic ties the two countries share and because of significant differences between the two countries' financial structures. Yet, both countries experienced the Great Depression at roughly the same time and of comparable economic magnitude. The survey finds that a single cause is not responsible for this event. Nevertheless, what is striking is that despite differences in the two countries' financial structures, both countries suffered a tremendous slump. Institutional differences are insufficient to insulate a country from foreign shocks or their role in insufficiently understood. I conclude that the “ideology” of the Gold Standard was significant in overcoming the potential for institutional differences to cushion the blow of the Great Depression in Canada.

In the Western countries, Japanese technological development continues to be seen largely as an effort of imitation and refinement; but any foreign visitor who has operated a Japanese-style bath or observed the processes of small-scale mechanized rice farming will understand that, besides refining originally Western technologies, Japan has also developed its own modern, yet distinctively non-Western, technological tradition. The theoretical questions involved in “Japanese-style” technological modernity are nontrivial, as are the practical implications. For instance, in newly industrializing Asia Japanese technological practices are now frequently proving more efficient or culturally comfortable than Western ones. The present volume's goal of exploring the “relations between the economic and the cultural” (p. vii) is thus timely as well as theoretically important.

Original and useful ideas are infrequent in both economics and history. Most of us have to make do by appropriating from others and repackaging. But this book develops an idea that is both novel and ingenious. The author deserves much praise. The idea is to extract information on time use in Industrial Revolution England from witness statements in criminal trials. His central conclusion is that average hours of work for male workers increased by 30 percent between the 1750s and 1800, and by 20 percent between the 1750s and 1830. Indeed, his estimate of 3,500 hours per male worker in 1800 is the all-time high for England. Thus Voth finds evidence that the Industrious Revolution posited by Jan de Vries did accompany the Industrial Revolution. He concludes that even the meager productivity growth reported by Nick Crafts is still too high, since some increase in output was due to increased labor inputs. This reviewer has doubts, explained below, whether he has large enough samples of the appropriate types of workers to convincingly assert this central finding. But his method is correct in principle, and if extra data can be secured they will tell us a lot.

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.

This volume, comprising papers given at a session of the International Economic History Congress in Madrid in 1998, positively invites uneven treatment, at least in a short review. Three of the four sections contain papers on industrialization, technology and institutional transfers, and the monetary history of East Asia and the Pacific Rim. It is not a discourtesy to say that these items are standard conference fare, some of them very interesting, others rather inconclusive, and the whole so diverse as to defy generalization. What lifts the collection above the routine is a piece by Jeffrey G. Williamson on “Globalization, Factor Prices and Living Standards in Asia Before 1940.” As the editors recognize in giving this essay the first section of the volume entirely to itself, it is so innovative and challenging as to dominate the book and hence to warrant concentrating on it here.

For almost 20 years now, Professor Wrightson's book English Society 1580–1680 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1982) has probably been the most widely used text to introduce the social history of England in this period. But at the same time it is much more than this, in that it presents a powerful argument about change in religious belief, education, social hegemony, and concepts of order, all of which has provoked much scholarly debate. Now Wrightson has produced a volume on the economic history of Britain in the longer period from 1470–1750, which deserves to become as central and as widely read. Its arrival is doubly welcome because, since Christopher Clay's Economic Expansion and Social Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) went out of print some time ago, there has been no current text covering the economic history of early modern England or Britain. In part this unfortunate situation has reflected declining student interest, as economic history became identified with econometrics. But this lucid and engaging work should revive interest in a vitally important subject. As its title indicates, this is economic history with a human face, in which the main focus of analysis is always the social context and meaning of economic change to those whom it affected.

A marked acceleration of total factor productivity (TFP) growth in U.S. manufacturing followed World War I. The paper analyzes this development, attributing it to the confluence of diffusion of a general-purpose-technology (electrification) with a regime change in the industrial labor market.