This is an important book. The study of the Nazi economy, and the role of finance and industry in it, has been deeply influenced by the notion that the regime was little more than a cloak for the interests of big business, and the man in charge a mere spokesman for wire-pullers in top management. Although Harold James is by no means the first historian of the Third Reich to shed such preconceptions in favor of conscientious examination of one enterprise with distinct traditions, operating mechanisms, and sets of interests and strategies, his account is in certain respects the most telling yet to appear. The Deutsche Bank was of course the most important institution in the German private economy during the Hitler era, as well as the most prominent one internationally. The focus of the present study on the confiscation of Jewish property obviously raises profound moral as well as serious economic issues. As such, it may well open the whole topic of German big business to more dispassionate analysis.

This book examines the links between a culture of modernity and inflation on the basis of literary works, films, cartoons, and photographs (all taken from Hans Ostwald's Sittengeschichte der Inflation [Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931], or “Moral History of the Inflation”). Bernd Wittig's point of departure is the suggestion by Elias Canetti in Masse und Macht (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1960) that there was a link between the depreciation of money and the degradation of personal and social identity, and that the Weimar Republic's experience of inflation in a significant way prepared the path for National Socialism and genocide. People grew accustomed to enormous but personally meaningless figures (millions, billions) and developed a brutal indifference. According to Canetti, “An inflation cancels out distinctions between men which had seemed eternal and brings together in the same inflation crowd people who would scarcely have nodded to each other in the street.” Wittig then brings this perspective to bear in a detailed analysis of a short novella by Thomas Mann, films by Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) and G. W. Pabst (Freudlose Gasse). These are familiar works, and Wittig adds little in the way of new analysis. Nor does he give any rigorous quantitative evaluation to his striking claims, for instance that prostitution increases in the course of inflations. He gives figures for prostitution in Berlin in 1910, and tells us that the number of women charged with illegal prostitution in Vienna rose from 1918 to 1920, and that more of them had venereal diseases.

In 1636 the Kingdom of Castile implemented a royal monopoly that made the manufacture, sale, and distribution of tobacco the exclusive, though alienable, prerogative of the Crown. This new device—politically palatable because it was not levied on a “necessity of life,” and fiscally attractive because tobacco seemed to enjoy inelastic and ever-expanding demand—soon extended to the other kingdoms in Spain and throughout Europe. So it is not surprising that most of the nine essays in this collection concern how the renta de tabaco, as the royal monopoly was known by the eighteenth century, affected the behavior of consumers, suppliers, investors, and royal officials in Spain and beyond.

In the third quarter of the nineteenth century, Liverpool was Europe's foremost seaport for long-distance commerce, and a principal conduit by which Britain's early industrial strength was parlayed into leadership of world trade. Graeme Milne's new book dissects the intermediary and service sector that underpinned Liverpool's prominence during this crucial period of technologically based globalization.

This book engaged my attention in a way that few textbooks do, and if I have some critical things to say, these do not detract from my overall view that the book is a carefully considered and well-executed account of its subject. The subtitle accurately describes the book as being about “English Economy and Society, 1700–1850.” It is not, however, a conventional textbook treatment. The idea of the Industrial Revolution as great transformation, and any attempt to specify carefully what was transformed and how, is deliberately downplayed by the authors, who repeatedly refer to the view of contemporaries that “something was happening,” and sometimes seem as uncertain as those contemporaries as to what it was.

The last decade has seen an upsurge in research by social historians on the English poor laws, largely in the form of local studies. These have greatly increased our knowledge of the demographic makeup of the “pauper host,” the generosity of relief benefits, and the ways in which paupers combined poor relief with other forms of income assistance in order to subsist. In this book, Steven King uses “poor law and other documentation” for 60 English communities to extend our understanding of the role played by poor relief from 1700 to 1850. He argues that during this period there was not in fact one national system of poor relief, but two macro-regional patterns: a relatively generous and benevolent system in the south and east, and a stinting and harsh one in the north and west.

Anthony McElligott's volume on life in German cities is inventive, informative, and interesting. Like other contributions to the “Routledge Sources in History” series, it combines historical analysis with presentation of a broad assortment of mainly primary documents, both written and graphic. The author has excavated this material to good effect from a variety of sources, weaving it together skillfully under thematic headings. He has accordingly produced a volume that affords a multifaceted view of urban experience in Germany during the first half of the twentieth century, when the big city (Großstadt) both reached its apogee and became an increasingly contested and controversial site of social and cultural processes.

The borrowing crisis of 1856–1881 was a crucial episode in late Ottoman history; by focusing on its course, Christopher Clay has performed a real service for generalists and Ottoman specialists alike. In its 11 fact-packed chapters, plus introduction and conclusion, the book is mainly a study in the history of financial diplomacy. It seeks to trace the unfolding relations between Western and Central European bankers and the Ottoman state in era from the Crimean War through the 1870s bankruptcy, the subsequent Decree of Muharrem, and the formation of Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881. Its lengthy treatment of the negotiations over the loans contracted by the Ottoman state on the road to bankruptcy fill a longstanding gap in our knowledge. Between 1903 and 1929, in the decades surrounding the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, as it was taking on huge international debt, a number of important works traced its finances and its international debt obligations. But thereafter, until the late 1990s, very little was written on the subject despite an explosion of scholarship on Ottoman economic history in general.

This book is among the “New Studies in Economic and Social History” commissioned by the Economic History Society: a pedagogic series that aims to inform students and teachers about the most significant contributions to a given field of knowledge. Morgan's survey of the relationship between the growth of colonial trade and the development of the British economy is built around scholarly responses to Eric Williams's famous exercise in economic determinism, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). In addition to covering the issues of capital accumulation and profitability in colonial trade, which preoccupied Williams, the scope of the inquiry is widened through the inclusion of material on colonial demand for exports, innovation in the organization of trade, and interport competition in Britain. The book is conscientiously written and provides an excellent non-technical introduction to the subject matter. Morgan's presentation of the material is always clear and objective, and yet, in the best tradition of the series, he imprints the text lightly but indelibly with his own judgements on the stimulus colonial trade gave to product and commercial innovation. Given the breadth of the topic and the limitations of space, some compression of material is unavoidable; still, the omission of the impact of the loss of colonies on economic performance is, perhaps, surprising. Much, however, can be learned by new and established scholars. This reviewer was reminded forcibly of three themes.

This book is based on papers submitted to a plenary session, organized at the annual meeting of the Japanese Society for the History of Economic Thought. It reflects growing interest in the work of those German scholars, active between the early 1800s and the 1950s, who are usually grouped as the German Historical School. Though economists, they were open to interdisciplinary work, some more historically minded, some more interested in contemporary sociology. The current they formed was international, but particularly strong in Germany. It was concerned with problems of economic evolution, with institutional factors, with ethics, and with the understanding of the changing forms of economic life and their succession. Though classed as a “school,” it may be argued that they were of heterogeneous orientations: politically, some were liberal, some conservative. The essays presented here testify to the amazingly extensive knowledge about the German Historical School in Japan. This has its roots, as is explained in the editor's introduction, in the foundation of Japanese universities on the model of German ones. Although the quality of the essays is not even, the scholarly love for detail and for penetration of the texts deserve praise.

Aside from a few articles and chapters in books, there has been no comprehensive history of Japan's informal empire in the three northeast provinces of China (called Manchuria) between 1904 and 1932. That void no longer exists. Y. T. Matsusaka's brilliant account explains how Japan's expansionist aims meant that its leaders and elites could never consider withdrawing from Manchuria.

This intriguing and well-written book is the fruit of a decade of thorough research and imaginative analysis. It is based on a broad selection of archival material and an impressive number of articles and books, many of them primary sources and recent historical writings. Derek Penslar is a social historian with a pronounced bias for economic thinking and a comparative approach. Two main themes are here interwoven: the first is the economic components of antisemitism, and Jewish intellectual responses to it; the second is the development of behavioral reactions in the public sphere, leading up to Jewish social policy and eventually to social engineering. The book's subject is the period from the mid-1600s to 1933; and as Enlightenment and emancipation have a central role, it concentrates on western and central Europe, especially the German-speaking lands, “where incremental emancipation and powerful antisemitism promoted the development of an unusually rich and complex Jewish economic discourse” (p. 2). The structure is chronological.

This book examines British companies' involvement in the decolonization process in the Gold Coast. Sarah Stockwell argues that British business interests “were much more than bystanders” in the rapid political changes between the end of the Second World War and Ghanaian independence in 1957 (p. 2). Her study fits within an emerging literature on British business and the end of empire, which avoids treating decolonization as the mere product of conflict between nationalist politics and colonial policy. But neither is the book about the “economics of decolonization,” in the sense of asserting some inexorable economic imperative behind the transfer of power. Instead, it documents British companies' struggles to understand—and, more ambitiously, to influence—major political and constitutional changes prompted by intensified African opposition to the colonial order.

Not only have the small island states of Melanesia undergone a process of rapid social and economic change over the past few decades, from largely subsistence-based, small-scale societies to at least partially globalized nation-states, but in recent years several seem to have been heading towards the status of “collapsed states.” Since its first coup in 1987, Fiji has been stumbling through a series of crises fueled by ethnic differences between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians—and, increasingly, amongst indigenous Fijians themselves. Papua New Guinea, whose national airline promotes the country to tourists as “the land of the unexpected,” has similarly staggered from crisis to crisis with, amongst other things, tensions between civilian authorities and the armed forces, and the recent killing of students by police in demonstrations against globalization. The Solomon Islands have been riven by conflicts related to ethnic divisions and migration by non-Guadalcanal people to the national capital, Honiara, precipitating a virtual collapse of the state. And West Papua, in the wake of President Suharto's demise, has seen its nationalist aspirations raised and then dashed by Jakarta with renewed military repression. Apart from New Caledonia, which is enjoying a period of relative tranquility after the turbulence of the 1980s and early 1990s, only Vanuatu seems to be achieving a reasonable degree of social and economic progress, and even in Vanuatu there have been signs of political instability, including an instance of intervention in politics by the police mobile force.

Twenty-five years ago, when I chose the history of old age as my dissertation field, many found it odd, dubious, often snigger-inducing. Why select such a marginal subject? What hang-ups did this young man harbor? We have moved on a good deal since then: ageing has become a preoccupation of developed societies, and the study of its past has mushroomed as worry about its future has spread (neither Thane nor I would say “deepened”). A substantial body of research has been built up on the history of old age in England—just how much is very well demonstrated in the rich footnotes and the 20-plus pages of bibliography in this book. But until now no one has tried to pull it all together, and that has been a particular drawback for those of us who teach on the subject. My students in family-history courses, for example, know that they should include the elderly in their family studies, yet have been frustrated when they have tried to do so.