Over the past quarter century, no scholar has done more to document the social history of the colonial Chesapeake than Lorena Walsh. In so doing, she has made important scholarly contributions in a variety of areas, most notably, in agricultural history, demographic history, African American history, and women's history. Along with such scholars as Lois Green Carr, Allan Kulikoff, Darrett and Anita Rutman, and Russell Menard among others in the so-called Chesapeake School, Walsh has helped to create a powerful framework for understanding the evolution of Virginia and Maryland and for interpreting the behavior of the populations residing therein. Two of the hallmarks of the work of scholars associated with the “School” are innovative methodologies and meticulous, painstaking research, both of which characteristics are readily apparent in the volume under review.

This is more than a nice book. This is a relentlessly nice, positive, and upbeat book about Americans in the Great Depression. However “depressing” the Depression was economically, McGovern's aim is to show that “we have not paid them [Depression-era Americans] the attention they deserve. We have overlooked their diverse strengths, poise, creative adaptability, and, above all, their triumphant retention of positive values and commitments despite the beleaguering and enervating powers of the Depression” (p. 267). The larger question that frames the book is why, when the economic Depression in America was more severe than in many other countries, did America not experience the same social turmoil and political instability as did much of Europe, for example, fascism in Germany and Spain. “[A]s the punch line in the old political gag declared, the best America could come up with in these momentous times was Huey Long. Not only was America free from effective threats by extremist leaders, the society, considering the times, was surprisingly tranquil; … Alone in its class, the American ship of state and its crew moved in the main with a kind of classic calm through the Depression's dangerous shoals and turbulent waters” (p. 267).

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.

Historians commonly attribute the origins of the French Revolution to the crown's relative inability to tax members of the elite. The proliferation of tax-exemptions, the argument goes, contributed to the fiscal crisis that brought about the collapse of absolutism. While Michael Kwass sets out to disprove this thesis, taxation nonetheless remains central to his understanding of the Revolution's origins. The crown did indeed succeed in taxing nobles and other members of the privileged elite, he argues, and yet the very debates and contestations that arose from such policies laid the groundwork for a new revolutionary political culture.

Much More Than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921 is the second of two books, the first published in 1994, by Robert F. Burk, Professor of History at Muskingum College, dealing with labor relations, broadly defined, in major-league baseball. Burk has drawn upon extensive primary and secondary sources concerning baseball, and provides readers interested in understanding the economics, history, and economic history of this rather unusual and exciting labor market with much useful information and analysis. Burk provides very useful information on salaries in the minor leagues and describes the changing ethnic composition of the industry's labor force. He also provides material on the history of the minor leagues and of the Negro leagues.

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.

As a result of social historians' desire to investigate nonelite groups, the historiography of the Russian peasantry has burgeoned in the last twenty years or so. Numerous studies on both the macro and micro levels have illuminated various aspects of Russian peasant life during serfdom, the postemancipation period, and the revolutionary era. Others have begun to document the systematic destruction of the Russian peasants' way of life during collectivization, and the peasants' stubborn resistance to that onslaught. It is therefore fitting for David Moon, a recognized scholar of the Russian peasantry in the last decades of serfdom, to write a book that synthesizes the latest scholarship, both Soviet and Western, as well as studies by prerevolutionary historians and observers. The numerous citations in each footnote testify to Moon's prodigious reading and mastery of the literature.

In recent years the study of native Americans has emphasized their response to incentives, among them the economic incentives associated with European contact. Despite the initial cultural and religious divide between aboriginals and the newcomers, historians are becoming increasingly of the view that, in many dimensions, Indians approached the market much as did nonnative consumers and producers. Brian Hosmer's American Indians in the Marketplace is firmly in this once-revisionist tradition. Hosmer presents case studies of two bands that developed successful, resource-based, economies; the Menominees of north-eastern Wisconsin, and the Tsimshians of Metlakatla, on the northern coast of British Columbia. Central to the economic and social development of these groups were the relations between band members and nonaboriginals, relations that are the focus of Hosmer's narrative.

Margaret Walsh has spent 15 years researching and writing articles on the long-distance bus industry in the United States. This book presents the results of this labor. Walsh shows that the history of the long-distance bus industry is one of thousands of small enterprises begun because of limited capital requirements and demand for the service. She documents the growth of two major interstate firms, the difficulties of the Great Depression and the Second World War, the onset of federal regulation, the continuing problems of the last half century brought on by the continuing rise of the automobile and the building of the interstate highway system, the growth of air travel, and the important role played by women.

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.

Readers may obtain from this book an overview of German–Central American relations, the main points of which can be summarized briefly. Germany had a significant presence in the Central American republics since the second quarter of the nineteenth century. Well before Germany's unification, they figured in German public discourse as potential areas for colonization, trade, investment, and performance of the rituals of great-power politics. First the Prussian state and then the Reich displayed a restrained concern for Central America, and engaged in competition with Britain, France, and the United States to advance the interests of German businesses and settlers. German commerce with the region rose at times to not-insignificant levels, especially when measured in terms of the total trade of individual Central American countries. Landowners, businesspeople, and professionals of German extraction have had a significant effect on the cultural and social histories of Guatemala and Costa Rica. However, at no time has Central America been of vital economic importance to Germany or at the forefront of German policy. In general, at least between the 1870s and 1929, German governments were unwilling to challenge U.S. hegemony in the area.

In Deep Souths, J. William Harris looks at three distinct regions in the American South from Reconstruction through the Great Depression. The regions are similar in that they all had majority black populations before the Civil War, with economies dominated by slave plantation agriculture. However, the economies of these regions diverged once the war was over. The Georgia sea-island culture of long-staple cotton and rice collapsed in the late 1800s, as the extremely labor-intensive work of maintaining ditches and dams could not survive a free-labor regime. The eastern Piedmont of Georgia made the conversion from plantation agriculture to sharecropping and expanded cotton production until 1920. But low cotton prices and the boll weevil crippled this economy by the beginning of the Depression. The Mississippi Delta, on the other hand, witnessed a major capital expansion as the swampy wilderness of antebellum times was converted into the South's premier cotton production center.

This book documents efforts to integrate the southern paper industry during the post–World War II period. It makes an important contribution not only to the vast and growing literature on the civil-rights movement but also to economic and legal history. In contrast to the traditional focus of civil-rights historians on voting rights, school desegregation, and public accommodations, Timothy Minchin takes up the issue of fair employment and access to jobs as components of the broader civil-rights struggle. Building on his earlier research on the textile industry (Hiring the Black Worker: The Racial Integration of the Southern Textile Industry, 1960–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), Minchin focuses specifically on the role of black activists and civil-rights advocates in utilizing the legal machinery put in place by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (specifically, Title VII) as a vehicle for litigation against companies and unions seeking to deny black workers equal employment opportunities. Drawing on the vast record generated by Title VII litigation and oral interviews with key actors, Minchin provides considerable insight into the lived experiences and strategic thinking of those struggling to integrate the industry. The overall story provides powerful support for the efficacy of federal civil-rights legislation in opening up new opportunities for black workers.

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.

The precise role of the Marshall Plan in stimulating economic recovery in Western Europe after 1945 remains problematical. One thing, however, is for sure: writing about the Plan has given employment to many scholars. Over 50 years on, the scholarly literature is extensive and growing. Happily, a consensus of sorts has emerged. Firstly regarding the overall purpose and impact of the Plan, the New Left's contention of naked American imperialism has been replaced by the view that Marshall aid was, in Geir Lundestad's words, an instance of “empire by consent.” Secondly, it has been established that while the role of Marshall aid in fueling the West European economy was marginal, that margin was critical. The workings of what Charles Maier has called “a consensual American hegemony” have been investigated in several key works. Michael J. Hogan's The Marshall Plan (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987) has shown how and why the British Labour government fought so tenaciously against America's vision fot the post-World War II world, concluding that “the Marshall Plan had aimed to remake Europe in an American mode. In the end America was made the European way” (p. 445). Anthony Carew's Labour under the Marshall Plan (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987) is equally ambitious, focusing on American initiatives and on their reception of four major European countries (Germany, France, Italy, and Britain); Carew does inquire in detail how the British Labour leaders and Trades Union movement influenced the Marshall program. In this context Manipulating Hegemony is an important new study, because it offers the first in-depth scrutiny of British responses.

Are economic development and political democracy compatible? If so, how? Richard Franklin Bensel's latest book answers the first question affirmatively but suggests that compatibility is not inevitable. Most of the book addresses the second question by explaining how the United States accomplished the compatibility feat over the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This rich, intricate analysis demands attention by those interested in the politics and economics of U.S. development.

In some inquiries, racism is a given, a fundamental assumption and fact that is known to shape economic and social and spatial inequalities. In such inquiries, from the empirical studies of W. E. B. Du Bois to the social thought of Patricia Williams, the world is believed to be racialized “always already”: the task of the researcher, then, is to probe the roots of racism in particular cases, and to liberate (or compensate) the people who are oppressed by its institutional manifestations. Other inquiries—guided by a methodology of rational choice—do not assume racism to be a given. For example, in mainstream economics after Gary Becker, race is a possible “factor,” one vector of a matrix, whose strength and direction of force on earnings or housing differences is to be examined in a regression equation once all other factors have been held constant. Indeed, some economists after Becker argue that racism cannot explain differences in earnings or in opportunities because if the marginal product of labor (or the bid on a house) of a person of color exceeds that of the white competition, the argument goes, then no profit-maximizing employer or seller would deny the offer of the person of color. And since all employers and households are assumed to be profit-maximizers, the color of one's skin will have no economic significance at all.

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.

Patterns of commercial development have varied widely across the world. At one end of the spectrum is the experience of premodern Europe, where commercial centers grew up in cities that were independent of the surrounding feudal political system. Over the centuries these commercial centers developed their own laws and other institutions that laid the foundation for the capitalist economic system based on the rule of law that exists today. In regions such as Southeast Asia and East Africa, by contrast, commerce was mostly a foreign import with citizens of the colonial power running the larger commercial enterprises and immigrants from China or South Asia owning and staffing the rest of the system. China fit neither of these patterns: over the centuries it developed a commercial system that was entirely Chinese, but was based on networks of traders who set many of their own rules and yet were in no sense independent of the governing bureaucracy whose power ultimately rested with the emperor. This system led to a level of commercial development that was marveled at by European visitors into the eighteenth century.

Taken together, these three short monographs tell a portion of the story of how the Canadian federal civil service embraced and applied Keynesian ideas during the Second World War. Parts of the tale have been told elsewhere and with considerably more finesse; others have been generally overlooked and receive their first full explanation here in the work of Enid Barnett. Unfortunately, important components of the application of Keynesian ideas in the Canadian context are missing entirely from these volumes, and thus the series as a whole is incomplete and offers only a partial introduction to the complexities of wartime finance and reconstruction planning.