The five thoughtful essays collected here “aim to identify distortions introduced in the understanding of China under the influence of cultural and ideological trends that took Western capitalist relations and patterns of development to be the norm” (p. 5). Two trace how intellectuals concerned with finding the patterns of change familiar from European history failed to see change in China; one describes the origins of European capitalism as an accident that says little about basic differences among civilizations; and two trace long-term Chinese developments to show important economic changes proceeding according to a noncapitalist logic.

From the late eighteenth through the nineteenth century, every generation of Americans endured, at more or less regular 20-year intervals, a severe macroeconomic crisis or Panic. In the presidential election after the Panic of 1837–1839, voters chased out the Democrats and gave the Whigs unified control of the federal government. The Whig Congress, rather than following the then standard practice of beginning business a full year after the elections, convened in March 1841. By August, the Whigs had passed a national bankruptcy law. A rush to the courts engendered considerable controversy. The twenty-seventh Congress repealed the act almost as quickly as it had enacted it. The gates to discharge were open only from February 1842 to March 1843. In this brief period, many individuals received a “fresh start.” In fact, discharges per capita were on the order of one in every 100 adult white males.

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.

Economic historians have to respond favorably when sociologist–feminist scholar Christine Bose early in her text writes, “This book is intended to provide a historical perspective on contemporary issues that all too often are analyzed only in terms of the present” (p. 3). She returns frequently to this theme, stressing that female participation in the labor force began long before the late 1960s. Of course, numerous economic historians have noted that such participation began long before 1900 and their work, unsurprisingly, exhibits stronger understanding of historical economic conditions than does Women in 1900. Bose's intent, however, is not to study women throughout U.S. history; rather, she analyzes data on 29,673 women included in the Public Use Sample of the 1900 census to re-estimate female labor-force participation, and determine the effect of gender, race, ethnicity, and class on that participation. Her most valuable contribution comes through matching her sample observations with county economic data obtained through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. She uses these data to generate what she calls contextual variables, basically regional and urban or rural location of the sample respondent, and average female manufacturing wage and population characteristics of the respondent's county.

Until the Articles of Confederation were cast aside, the Continental Congress assigned obligations, known as requisitions, to the states for the payment of taxes and the raising of troops. The state governments were then responsible for meeting the obligations however they wished. This volume by Keith Dougherty studies the history of requisitions over the preconstitutional period and explores how the experience ultimately influenced the framing of the constitution.

By the 1920s over 90 percent of primary-school teachers in the United States were women. But in 1860, only a third of Southern rural teachers were female whereas in New England and Mid-Atlantic rural areas, modern proportions had already been attained. One of the main objectives of this careful and lucid study is to examine the reasons for these different regional patterns.

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.

From the 1890s through the 1930s millions of Chinese farmers and workers migrated from North China, principally from Shandong and Hebei provinces, to seek employment in Manchuria. Their migration was motivated by the opportunities in new industries, as well as in agriculture, and was facilitated by the opening of railways at the turn of the century. Manchuria was one of the most unusual and prized pieces of geopolitical real estate in the world. The homeland of China's Manchu rulers, it was sparsely populated under their dynastic regime (1644–191l), partly because of its ban on migration, which was occasionally lifted during periods of famine in North China. With the decline of the dynasty's power in the nineteenth century, Manchuria became the focus of Russian territorial ambition, to be followed in the twentieth century by relentless Japanese encroachment culminating in the creation of the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932. “From 1906 until 1931 Manchuria was a complex patchwork of Chinese, Japanese, and Russian spheres of authority” (p. 49).

David Jack Cowen aims to clarify the economic history of early America by increasing our understanding of the “premier financial institution of the day, the First Bank of the United States” (p. 235). Cowen exploits archival material on the Bank of the United States (BUS), including new information about BUS balance sheets. He examines actions of the BUS through analysis of its balance sheets and ties this evidence to recent research that has generated information about securities (bond) prices. He also reviews contemporary correspondence as well as the minutes of BUS board meetings to glean information about motivation behind BUS activities. These bits and pieces are used to support Cowen's major interpretation of BUS actions in this era: that the BUS acted as an agent for the U.S. Treasury and, at the direction of various Treasury secretaries, acted as a central bank.

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.

This book addresses the basic issue of human-induced soil degradation. It attempts to resolve several debatable issues, such as: (i) Is accelerated soil erosion the dominant factor responsible for soil degradation? (ii) Does agricultural intensification improve soil quality? (iii) Does increased fertilizer use compensate for low levels of soil organic matter and nitrogen contents? (iv) Does increase in farm income enhance soil quality? (v) Is urban encroachment a principal cause of farmland depletion? (vi) Is soil degradation accelerating? and (vii) Are human activities responsible for exacerbating soil degradation? The author addresses these questions objectively and bases his conclusions on the historical data regarding temporal changes in quality of agricultural soils in China and Indonesia.

The central policy questions of the early decades of the American republic concerned internal improvements, that is, programs and projects aimed to aid the security and prosperity of the newly united States. Over time, “internal improvements” became synonymous with public works for improved transportation, reflecting the role of geography as perhaps the greatest obstacle to economic growth and political integration. In this book, John Lauritz Larson explores the causes and consequences of the mostly failed early federal and state government attempts to implement designs for transportation infrastructure.

In 1901 six of the seven British colonies in Australasia federated to form the Common-wealth of Australia. The collaborative volume edited by Irving is one of a number of recent scholarly publications marking the centennial of that event. It chronicles a federation movement that began in the middle of the nineteenth century, with different contributors telling the story from the perspective of each colony. Emphasis is given to the role of colonial leaders in the drawn-out saga, for this book is designed for readers interested in the political and constitutional dimensions of the process. (It also contains over 100 pages of “short entries,” in the style of a compendium, and reproduces associated documents such as the 1901 constitution.) Although economic issues were important, in Irving's book they are only indirectly recognized.

The point of departure of this book is the assertion that recent scholarship has treated the British cotton-textile industry unfairly because of the strong tendency to situate the industry in the U.S. blueprint of development. The result, Mary Rose believes, has led to some misunderstanding of the rise and decline of the British industry. Rose reverses the standard approach and views the development of U.S. industry through British lenses.

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).

Published in 1991, Robert J. Steinfeld's The Invention of Free Labor was something of a milestone in the relationship between the fields of legal and economic history. Through a detailed comparative study of employment law in England and America across several centuries, Invention showed that meaning of “free labor” was by no means self-evident to historical players. The clearest evidence for this proposition is that law and practice were very different in two self-proclaimed free-labor societies, England and the U.S. North. In England criminal prosecutions for breach of employment were common until 1875, whereas they had all but disappeared in America by the time of the Revolution. Beyond its substantive conclusions, Invention was noteworthy as a rare example of legal history that looked to empirical evidence from outside the courtroom in an effort to understand the law in historical context.

The tropical forest of Brazil has been a symbol of America's abundance, potential, and mystery ever since the Portuguese first landed there in 1500; but harvesting its potential has never been easy. The complex reality of the forest has always made its exploitation complicated. Whereas the history of the Brazilian forest has previously been studied from an ecological point of view, particularly in Warren Dean's With Broadax and Firebrand: The Destruction of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), the present book is less interested in what the Europeans should have done to save the forest than in what they actually did to turn the forest into the exploitable resource. Miller does not wish to condemn the colonists for exploiting the forest, nor does he think that slash-and-burn farming or timbering were wholly to blame for the resulting destruction. Instead, his story is centered on the negative effects of the real corte, a royal monopoly of the most attractive wood-bearing species, the so-called madeiras de lei, and on the long-term results of government monopoly on the economic development of the timber industry. In this, Miller follows the lead of F. W. O. Morton (“The Royal Timber in Late Colonial Bahia.” Hispanic American Historical Review 58 (1978): 41–61), but he expands the boundaries of that important study both geographically and chronologically.

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.

Written as his doctoral dissertation at Johns Hopkins University and published as a book in 1921, Mitchell's study was a highly influential study of the explosive growth of cotton manufacturing in the southeastern United States from 1880 to World War I. The first scholarly assessment of what would become the leading industry of the region and set within the historical context of that region, Mitchell's book was, as Carlton says, “[r]ooted in the militant modernizing ethos of the Progressive era reform milieu” (p. x).

This book, designed for undergraduates, fills a unique niche—to show students turned off by the “narrow approach” of Economics 101 that the discipline has something to say about the broader issues with which they are concerned. Much of the discussion, carried out in nontechnical language, focuses on topics lying at the boundaries between technical economics and the other social-science disciplines. The vast range of topics can be best viewed by looking individually at the major themes of the six chapters.