A lost frontier revealed: regional separation in the east midlands – By Alan Fox

Book reviewsGREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

Elizabeth Griffiths and Mark Overton, Farming to halves: the hidden history of sharefarmingin England from medieval to modern times (Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan,2009. Pp. ix + 263. 24 tabs. ISBN 9780230202238 Hbk. £52/$69.95)

Sharecropping is familiar to historians of North America, especially in cotton farming, andalso to historians of Europe, especially in viticulture. It arises where the crop is regarded asan expensive element of fixed capital.To that extent it allows relatively poor farmers to rentland, but avoid fixed capital charges embodied in the crop itself (vines, for example), whichthe landowners provided.The landowners protected their capital interest by taking a shareof the harvest instead of rent. Under the more familiar fixed-rent systems landlordsexpected a rental payment regardless, but protected fixed capital (the land itself) byhusbandry agreements. The contrast is stark: capital sunk into arable production—thenorm in England—is quite different from capital sunk into cotton, vine, or olive produc-tion. In the former crops were replenished by recycling seed and field rotation, but in thelatter the basic crop remained in place for many years. This offered an incentive forlandlords to be more involved in sharecropping, ensuring the safety of the significant fixedcapital other than the land itself. It may be for this reason, but also because of his viewabout efficiency, that the doyen of British agricultural historians, Arthur Young, equatedsuch practices with what he saw as backward French farming (métayage), and therefore nota system of husbandry practised in Britain (an opinion he shared with Adam Smith).

From initial discoveries in the archives of Norfolk by Griffiths and her experiences as ashare farmer in New Zealand, which run through this book, the authors mounted anESRC-funded project to see how far share farming existed more widely in England. Herinitial discoveries related to the seventeenth century and involved the landlord leasing dairycattle to a tenant, sharing both the costs of cultivating crops and the crop itself at the endof the year. While this may not mirror traditional sharecropping, it bears a strong resem-blance. It can also be identified in much more recent agricultural regimes under othernames—profit-sharing, incentive payments schemes, animal leasing arrangements, andpayments in kind—but taxonomically the authors consider the term ‘farming to halves’ thebest description of English or British occurrences, where typically the landowner suppliedland, stock, seed, and equipment; the tenant supplied the labour; and they shared theoutput.This avoided money and credit; the tenant could build up his working capital; andthe landlord secured his investment through the output of the farm.

Having discovered that it was more widespread in Norfolk, the authors looked furtherafield, in time and space. One problem is that the practice might have been hidden. In thecase of manorial tenure it might have involved sub-letting, in which case it was not in thetenant’s interest to advertise that he was paying trivial rents but enjoying more substantialincomes via letting ventures. Whatever the reasons for its recent discovery in the docu-mentary record, it appears to have been widely employed, certainly more so than Youngand his contemporaries appreciated, but how widely? In chronology it lingers below thesurface in the manorial record, only occasionally coming to light through those sub-lettingarrangements. From about 1500 or 1600 it appears as letting agreements in survivingestate and family records, which document the formal landlord/tenant relationship. Inaddition, the practice and its variants were employed rhythmically with the underlyingeconomic climate. In difficult financial times, cooperation and sharing offered a way

Economic History Review, 63, 3 (2010), pp. 805–847

© Economic History Society 2010. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 MainStreet, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

forward for otherwise relatively impoverished peasants or tenants. For the landlord,a share contract with a tenant was better than untenanted property. The practice wasstrongest in the seventeenth century, though the evidence is skewed to some well-workedexamples from Norfolk. It seemed to disappear in the eighteenth century coinciding withthe rise of commercial farming, which perhaps explains why both Young and Smithequated the system with the backward farming of the Continent. The authors readilyconfess to finding no archival evidence for the practice of farming to halves in thenineteenth century, though they do claim inferred survival through other sources. Moreenduring was the Dorset system of leasing cows on a share farming arrangement, evidenceof which traverses the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and stretches even into thetwentieth century, as do examples of profit-sharing, especially in sheep farming.That theyare not more readily in view may be related to a stigma felt by farmers who could not raisefully the capital to keep animals, or indeed farmers hiding contraventions of their tenancyagreements.

Hopefully this book and its greater exposure of an agricultural practice will be the spurfor others. The strong hint is that it might more frequently be found in the sub-lettingpractices of tenants than in the emerging capitalist system that we think of in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century British farming. It may take time before enough examples aregenerated for economic historians properly to assess the importance of share farming inBritish agricultural history, but certainly this book offers sufficient encouragement to takeit seriously and to look for the unusual in the farming record.

michael turnerUniversity of Hull

Maryanne Kowaleski and Jeremy Goldberg, eds., Medieval domesticity: home, housing andhousehold in medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Pp. xiv +317. 19 illus. ISBN 9780521899208 Hbk. £55/£99)

These essays are based on a conference held at Fordham University in 2005. Introducedelegantly, they are dedicated to Felicity Riddy, who provides the key paper. She argues thatdomesticity was a product of the fourteenth century and associated with specifically urbanvalues. The homes of well-to-do burgesses were sites of business and manufacture wherethey developed ‘particular notions of privacy, discretion and settledness, of industry andthe pursuit of excellence’ (p. 21).

The other essays in the volume intersect with this key paper while maintaining their ownagenda.Three are devoted to the social context of vernacular architecture. Mark Gardinerexamines the buttery and the pantry, using both literary and archaeological evidence. Hefinds that the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries were times of experimentation andof change in the way domestic space was conceived, reflecting contemporary ideas of socialorder and appropriate behaviour. The resulting domestic plan remained intact until thesixteenth century.

Sarah Rees Jones provides an invaluable survey of English urban housing between theNorman Conquest and the Black Death. Large ‘urban manors’ were often subdivided tocreate the familiar ‘perch-wide building plots’, often misunderstood by historians (manyof whom have confused burgage with house plot). The commercial development of townand country was interlinked, and supported by an extensive network of property own-ership. The holders of ‘urban manors’ attracted new tenants to the towns and so mir-rored the patronal lordship of the countryside. To talk, therefore, of townsmen emulatingrural buildings, or vice versa, misses the point. The hierarchy of buildings reflected thehierarchy of legal and social dependence. Taking York as her focus, she shows that larger

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© Economic History Society 2010 Economic History Review, 63, 3 (2010)

houses with halls or grand upper chambers together with much smaller units along thestreet front ‘reflected arrangements that had emerged over centuries of urban develop-ment’ (p. 84).

Jane Grenville compares urban and rural households inYorkshire, drawing on evidencefrom Wharram Percy, where both lordly and peasant dwellings conformed to the tripartitelayout so ubiquitous in the English medieval countryside. Although manorial halls dem-onstrate greater complexity, the use of space within peasant houses also favoured ‘inter-visibility’, allowing parents to supervise children. The peasant who sent his children intoservice in the town sent them to a household like his own. Therefore, she proposes, therural counterpart of the hall of the artisan or merchant house was in fact the peasant croft.In terms of this house type at least, the town mimics the countryside.

The next three papers deal with furnishing. Goldberg argues—on the basis of thehitherto under-utilized probate inventories—that peasant and bourgeois societies werecharacterized by different value systems and that these were reflected in their materialculture. Several indicators combine to show that ‘bourgeois’ society placed greater value,both culturally and economically, on household goods. Possessing cushions and silverspoons, he argues, was an urban phenomenon. The number of cushions provides a crudebarometer of wealth. Spoons, in addition to their liturgical resonance, were status symbolsas well as a form of savings that could be converted into cash. They also suggested goodbreeding and table manners. He ends by reflecting upon the increasing level of privacyafforded the master and mistress of the household by separate chambers, curtains, andscreens.

Marilyn Oliva examines the domestic life of nuns. The domestic fittings of Englishconvents were more consistent with gentry households than with peasant ones. Silverspoons figure again, although she finds that they were among the least expensive and mostcommon items of tableware in both sacred and secular households. More surprisingly shefails to find any correlation between a convent’s respective wealth and the quality of itshousehold furnishings.

Janet Loengard discusses the personal property a woman might expect to acquire afterher husband’s death. The chattels that a woman received might include not only herclothing but also her ‘widow’s chamber’, linen and wool for the beds and all her clothing.For most women, their girdles were their most precious possessions: ‘a girdle was safely awoman’s own . . . and even with a singularly unloving husband, she could hope to keep itwhen the marriage ended’ (p. 176).

Nicola Nolan Sidhu turns to domestic gender politics in medieval literature. She arguespersuasively that the primary appeal of the story of Griselda, as presented in particular byGeoffrey Chaucer, was to urban laymen, purposely provoking a powerful emotional reac-tion against Walter’s tyranny towards his wife and encouraging them to ‘intervene imagi-natively’, and reflecting the normative role of senior male figures within the later medievalurban community. Continuing with marriage, Isabel Davis deals with Abraham in PiersPlowman as an example of the ideological reaction that permeates the C text. Havingwritten powerfully of matrimony in B, Langland now exhibits ‘a begrudging return to theorthodox preference for chastity over marriage’ (p. 210). Nicola McDonald examines theBrome commonplace book, a late fifteenth-century manuscript from an East Angliangentry household, for evidence of women at play in a domestic context. Antifeminist cipherpuzzles and a dice game entitled ‘Have your desire’, or rather ‘the ludic conversations’ theyprovoked, allowed them to articulate their desires. She concludes with discussion of ‘Ariseearly’, an advisory poem in which daily life is imagined within the household. Finally, thepromulgation of the feast of the Visitation and its first period of popularity encouragesMary Erler to examine the secular domestic visit as an occasion for spiritual conversation.In the travels of Margery Kempe in particular she sees the spiritualization of a traditionalsecular pleasure.

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Not all of the findings and interpretations here are consistent and some are in contentionwith Riddy’s essay. Readers must come to their own conclusions as to how far her thesisshould be modified. Consequently, it is a challenging read.

peter cossCardiff University

Robin Ward, The world of the medieval shipmaster: law, business and the sea, c.1350–1450(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2009. Pp. ix + 260. 7 figs. 2 tabs. ISBN 9781843834557Hbk. £50/$95)

This is an excellent book and one that maritime history has been in want of for a long time.For too many years historians of England’s medieval shipping industry have had to rely, atleast as far as monographs go, on Dorothy Burwash’s English merchant shipping, 1460–1540(1947). Burwash’s book, however, was never more than a published thesis, based on alimited range of sources. Moreover, it relied heavily on early texts, such as the Laws ofOleron (c.1200).This meant that, although her book purported to concern the state of theshipping industry at the end of the middle ages, the business practices, labour relations,and ownership patterns she described were in great part those of a much earlier commer-cial world.Ward, by contrast, has the advantage of drawing upon 60 years of scholarship onlegal and business history in addition to his own research. The result is that, although hisbook focuses on the century before Burwash, the industry he describes is more recogniz-ably modern than the one Burwash depicted. For Ward’s is a world of complex financialinstruments, proletarianized crews, formal charterparties, and sophisticated technologyused to good effect; it is worth reading for this alone.

The book’s coverage, as its title suggests, is broad. The initial chapters focus on thecrucial developments in maritime law that underpinned the increasing commercial com-plexity of the shipping industry during the later middle ages.This is followed by a chapteron shipping ownership and finance. Much of this takes Michael Postan’s work as itsstarting point but then shows, very usefully, how such matters applied to the specificcircumstances of the shipping industry.The next two chapters deal with the responsibilitiesof the shipowner, both onshore and offshore, covering everything from freighting agree-ments and the provision of credit, to the management of mariners and the fulfilment ofcontracts. Finally, there are chapters on navigation and seamanship. The latter is particu-larly refreshing, for while there is a long-established literature dealing with the technicalaspects of medieval navigation and ship design, basic seamanship has been much lessstudied.This chapter helps to redress this deficiency by providing a starting point for thosewho want to find out, for example, how cargoes were laded and stowed, or what issues,both practical and legal, could arise over the anchoring of a ship.

If fault is to be sought in this volume, it might be found in two places. First,Ward’s graspof economics is somewhat shaky, which can result in him making some dubious claims and,indeed, a few mistakes. It is unclear, for instance, where he acquired the notion that theaverage price of a medieval broadcloth was £13 (p. 2); £2 to £3 would be nearer the mark.Second, the central conceit of the volume is open to question. As the title implies, the basicpremise of the book is that shipmasters were the dominant figures of the medieval shippingindustry and that the maritime world can thus be understood, almost entirely, from theirperspective.This may be questioned given that the author’s own discussions indicate that,at least by the fifteenth century, the role of the shipmaster was being squeezed. By this time,the owners of large ships were commonly employing pursers, who were given responsibilityfor the financial and business management of the vessel. While it is true that shipmasterscould act as factors for the merchants who laded on a ship, it is also clear, as Wardacknowledges, that merchants were often appointing one of their own as a ‘capemerchant’

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(supercargo) to look after their interests. Such trends, combined with the increasingseparation of ownership from the management of vessels, meant that some shipmastersended up being mere hired hands, employed by an owner to undertake as little as a singlevoyage, with few responsibilities beyond the handling of the ship and the supervision of thecrew.

IfWard’s book is not perfect, it may be observed that few are. In his defence it should bepointed out that the criticisms made above do little to detract from the volume’s overallvalue. Even if shipmasters were not as central to the shipping industry asWard suggests, allthe responsibilities which he deals with in the book still had to be undertaken by someone.Ward can therefore be forgiven if he oversimplifies his account to progress the narrative. Ingeneral he is to be congratulated on the production of what is certainly the best volume onthe pre-modern English shipping industry since Ralph Davis’s Rise of the English shippingindustry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (1962).

evan jonesUniversity of Bristol

Anne Rowe, Medieval parks of Hertfordshire (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press,2009. Pp. xiv + 255. 55 figs. ISBN 9781905313488 Pbk. £18.99/$37.95)

Deer parks have long been of interest, if perhaps sometimes only tangentially, to social andeconomic historians and landscape archaeologists, but a flurry of recent publications hasbrought the subject of parks back into historiographical focus. This attractive volumediscusses the medieval parks of Hertfordshire—which has a reputation as ‘a parky county’(p. 5)—from the time of Domesday to the Reformation, although there is much informa-tion on the fate of these medieval parks in the post-medieval landscape. Students of deerparks are familiar with the county-based study that the pioneering park scholar LeonardCantor made very much his own, and the debt to Cantor and his methodology is verymuch in evidence here. That said, there is more to this book than a list of sites and theirdistribution, and the text is very much concerned with placing the county within a broaderregional and national context.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 is a detailed exposition of the historicalprocesses underlying the origins, development, and use of deer parks across the countyduring the middle ages. Elements of the discussion echo earlier writing on parks andinclude the number and distribution of parks, their relationship with woodland and thestatus of their creators. The value of such research is underlined by the surprises that arethrown up—the distribution of parks does not, for example, straightforwardly echo that ofwoodland as is often the case elsewhere; rather, the concentration of woodland held by theAbbey of St Albans inhibited park creation rather than facilitated it, as the Abbotsseemingly discouraged the creation of parks across their well-wooded estates.Together withthe discussion of the bread-and-butter issues over deer park development, part 1 also dealswith the issues raised by a newer generation of scholars. The role of the park as a huntinglandscape and the use of the park as an adjunct to great residences receive admirabletreatment, with the conclusions firmly related to the weight of evidence in part 2.

Part 2 itself makes up the bulk of the volume and is a detailed gazetteer of Hertford-shire’s medieval parks, nearly 70 in total. Each park has an exposition of its history and theprincipal evidence for its creation and development. Here the breadth of the researchbecomes evident as the historical and landscape evidence is assessed judiciously. In anexcellent presentation idea, the probable bounds of each park are shown on the relevantpart of the first edition Ordnance Survey, which aids an understanding of the site inquestion considerably. A glance at the references to each site in the gazetteer brings homethe amount of detailed work, both archival and on the ground, that has gone into thispublication. A useful glossary of park terminology is provided at the end.

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Anyone who has attempted to establish the bounds of a medieval park, or trace thehistory of a park over time, knows how straightforward or frustrating the task can be.To doso for a county, particularly one with such a large number of parks, and with such aconsistently high level of detail, is some achievement. The conclusions of this volume willnaturally feed into the wider history of medieval Hertfordshire and those who write onparks will find themselves especially grateful for the information contained therein. Thepublication of this book, when placed alongside Hugh Prince’s Parks in Hertfordshire since1500 (2008), means that for those scholars interested in the subject Hertfordshire is nowparticularly well served. For those scholars interested in the social and economic processesof which deer parks were a physical manifestation, this volume is also highly recommended.

robert liddiardUniversity of East Anglia

Claire Noble, ed., Calendar of inquisitions post mortem and other analogous documents preservedin the Public Record Office. Vol. XXV: 16–20 HenryVI (1437–1442) (Woodbridge: Boydell& Brewer and London: The National Archives, 2009. Pp. liv + 802. 2 tabs. ISBN9781843834816 Hbk. £175/$340)

Matthew L. Holford, ed., Calendar of inquisitions post mortem and other analogous documentspreserved in the Public Record Office. Vol. XXVI: 21–25 HenryVI (1442–1447) (Woodbridge:Boydell & Brewer and London: The National Archives, 2009. Pp. lvii+ 614. 3 tabs. ISBN9781843834793 Hbk. £175/$340)

Two new volumes in the series of calendared inquisitions post mortem (IPM) shed newlight on English culture and society during the middle years of the reign of King HenryVI,1437–47. The volumes are particularly useful for their information on manorial extents(Noble: entry nos. 104–7; Holford: entry nos. 322–30, 416–17) and aristocratic landhold-ing (Noble: 503–12 (Anne, countess of Devon); 513–19 (Joan, countess of Westmorland);Holford: 178–94, 382 (John Beaufort, duke of Somerset); 544–60 (Humphrey, duke ofGloucester)). Perhaps their greatest value is the vista they provide on ‘everyday’ life.Describing items that were given (Noble: 298, 446) and lost (Holford: 350) at births andbaptisms, the IPM tell us about attitudes toward wealth and display. In her introduction,Noble suggests that references to feast days in the proofs of age also ‘hold significance forstudies of memory’ (p. xiv). People’s recollections were often simple. Richard Body, forexample, remembered the birth of Agnes Walweyn because ‘the holy-water clerk broke thelamp before the high altar, and . . . the oil fell on his head’ (Noble: 142). Nonetheless,these snapshots provide a personal portrait of medieval English society that other recordsusually cannot.

The editorial conventions of the two volumes continue the high standard of previouseditions in the series. However, explanation of these conventions does differ. Noble’svolume contains a detailed ‘editorial introduction’, which includes a descriptive list of theconventions used in the presentation of her translation (pp. xv–xvi). The correspondingintroduction in Holford’s volume is briefer (pp. xii–xiii).With each volume being the workof different scholars, a certain amount of divergence is to be expected. The publication ofeach new volume will also suggest different ways of presenting material. The decision toinclude dates of service in the ‘Table of Escheators’ in Holford’s volume is an obviousexample (pp. li–lvii; for Noble’s volume, which omits this information, see pp. l–liv).However, one wonders whether it might not be easier, for future editors and users, if thechief editorial conventions were explained in a short introduction that could be printedverbatim in each volume.

In an ideal world, the institution of a standard ‘editorial introduction’ would create roomfor an ‘historical introduction’, which is currently lacking. Public Record Office volumes

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have never contained such an introduction, and the first volume in the new series ofcalendared IPM does have a thorough ‘general introduction’ by Christine Carpenter(CIPM, vol. XII, pp. 1–42). However, a cursory overview of the period covered by thevolumes would surely benefit readers. This point seems particularly pertinent for Nobleand Holford’s volumes, and volume XXVI (covering regnal years 11 to 15 of Henry VI,1432–7) certainly benefits from such an overview. An ‘historical introduction’ could alsodirect readers to some of the more interesting and important content of the inquisitions.Both volumes contain thoughtful commentaries on philology (Noble, pp. xvi, xix; Holford,p. xiii), but only in Noble’s text is there any specific discussion of how the IPM might beof use to scholars. Noble’s introduction contains an analysis of ‘analogous documents’,which includes ‘various writs indicating the stages in the process of setting up an inquisi-tion post mortem’. However, only one missive, sent by the escheator of Somerset andDorset, John Spencer, is explained in detail (p. xii).

Discussing selected cases would also encourage readers to make use of the remarkablythorough indices, which account for almost one-third of the printed length of each volume.The index in both volumes is divided under four headings (jurors, personal names, places,and subjects), although neither one is strictly comparable, making cross-referencing labo-rious. For example, where Noble has separate entries for ‘Ceremonies and ceremonialgoods’ and ‘Religious devotions’, Holford has one entry, ‘Religious ceremonies and prac-tices’. Similarly, where Noble has sub-entries for ‘Building materials’ and ‘Structures andfeatures’, Holford has headings for ‘Building materials’, ‘Building and structures(general)’, and ‘Building and structures (particular)’.The variety of entries does not appearto reflect differences of content, but rather differences in the editors’ research interests;hence, perhaps, Noble’s sub-entry, ‘Natural world’, concerned with meteorologicalmatters.

The historical value of the calendared IPM is beyond doubt, but one wonders whetherfuture editors could not be as attentive to their readers as they are to the presentation oftheir texts. The hefty purchase price of the volumes surely demands this much.

benjamin linley wildSherborne School

Michael A. Faraday, The Bristol and Gloucestershire lay subsidy of 1523–1527 (Gloucester:Bristol and Gloucester Archaeological Society, 2009. Pp. lx + 548. 3 plates. 20 tabs. ISBN9780900197734 Hbk. £30)

Economic historians are much indebted to the county record societies which publish taxrecords, the more so because lists of taxpayers can have little obvious attraction to theirmembers who finance the work. Fortunately most record societies, like that of the Bristoland Gloucestershire Archaeological Society, are influenced still in their choice of publica-tions by traditions of scholarship that value the work of dedicated transcribers, such asFaraday, the editor both of this volume, and of several similar tax records. Through hisskilled voluntary work in the National Archives, he has made available to readers theseGloucestershire lay subsidy manuscripts of 1523–7 whose poor condition has left much ofthem barely legible to the untrained eye.The full indices he has provided also increase thevolume’s practical use for historians investigating English society on the eve of the Refor-mation. Its publication is the more welcome because the same record society has publishedpreviously the Military Survey of 1522 for the county which made a related assessment ofits taxable wealth.The editor of that volume, Richard Hoyle, discussed in his introductionthe documents published here, and the two volumes complement each other as importantrecords of Gloucestershire society in the 1520s, and also as examples of the form andeffectiveness of the new system of Tudor taxation.

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The Tudor subsidies were the first national taxes since 1334 to assess taxpayers indi-vidually, either on their landed incomes, or on the capital value of their goods, whicheverproduced the larger tax. Although the first subsidy was introduced in 1512, the MilitarySurvey of 1522 was the first to return lists of named taxpayers, and it was followed in thispractice by the later subsidies. The assessments published here are particularly importantbecause they include taxpayers of Bristol, street by street, and of Gloucester, which do notsurvive for the Military Survey. This means that historians can trace urban as well asindividual fortunes, over the heavily taxed years 1522–7. Since the majority of taxpayerswere assessed on their goods, rather than on lands—and the former included, besideshousehold possessions, agricultural and trading stock, and harvested crops—it would beeasy to assume that these records enable the local historian to compare Gloucestershire’swealth in the 1520s with that recorded in the lay subsidies of the late thirteenth and earlyfourteenth centuries. In fact, the Tudor subsidy was far more thorough than the medievalfifteenth and tenth, taxing as well as landed incomes, wages, wool, and the coin and debtswhich had been progressively excluded from the medieval assessments long before theywere frozen into quotas in 1334. Another Tudor innovation was that individuals wereassessed where they lived, and not where their goods or property lay, although theassessment was supposed to include their wealth from every source.

If theseTudor innovations reduce the value of these documents as evidence of long-termeconomic change, what can be said of their significance for the early sixteenth-centuryeconomy? Faraday, like Hoyle before him, points out inconsistencies in the work of theassessors which make it difficult to judge the reliability of the picture they present.Nonetheless, his valuable tables summarizing the county’s returns for 1523–7, whichinclude percentages of taxpayers falling into different categories of wealth, reveal evidenceof significant short-term change. His analyses, like Hoyle’s, show a clear decline from theaverage valuations of the Military Survey of 1522, to those of the later returns, although thelatter conceal some increases and also wide variations between townships. Furthermore,nearly one-fifth of the individuals listed in the Military Survey cannot be traced in thesubsidy only two years later. Faraday’s cautious conclusion is that no single influence wasat work in producing these differences, and that custom, the tendency of valuations to fall,or assessments based on a taxpayer’s surplus, rather than his capital, could have played apart. By contrast, Hoyle concluded, on balance, that the falling valuations reflected realimpoverishment created by the consecutive years of taxing capital values. Moreover,Faraday’s suggestion that the subsidies contributed to inflation in the 1520s by drawingmoney from savings is not supported by the reduction in 1526 of the metal content of thecoinage so as to increase the number of coins in circulation, and it seems more likely thatrising prices reflected population growth.This volume provides an opportunity to exploresuch questions, and others such as migration and family history, as well as making possiblecomparisons with results from other counties, and therefore it will be of lasting value toeconomic and social historians of the period. Its editor, formerly a senior tax inspector, hasdoubly proved the debt that historians owe to his profession, old and new, for theinformation they compiled and, in his case, preserved for future generations.

pamela nightingaleOxford

Aaron M. Allen, The locksmith craft in early modern Edinburgh (Edinburgh: Society ofAntiquaries of Scotland, 2007. Pp. xi + 176. 83 figs. 63 tabs. ISBN 9780903903448 Hbk.£50)

This book is a social and political history of the Incorporation of Hammermen in Edin-burgh (the various metalworking crafts organized into what we know of as a guild else-

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where in Europe) from the late fifteenth century to 1750, as well as a deep look into the‘material culture’ of the locksmiths. One wonders, however, to what audience this sump-tuously produced book is directed. It has a coffee-table quality to it; the book’s glossy pagesare replete with dozens of drawings of mechanical processes and photographs of locks andkeys from Edinburgh’s early modern centuries currently housed in the National Museumof Scotland (in 2002 Allen worked there cataloguing its collection of locks and keys,yielding 282 pages of data based on 276 objects).This aspect of the book will surely pleasereaders interested in craft antiquaries and specialists in preindustrial mechanical technol-ogy. The book is also full of data organized in charts and tables that provide informationabout the numbers of artisans (masters, journeymen, and apprentices) in the various craftsthat comprised the Incorporation of Hammermen, their wealth distribution within andacross trades, their access to burgess-ship, the names and numbers of the deacons orpolitical leaders of the crafts, and so on.This part of the book provides well-mined materialaddressed to social and demographic historians and fulfils one of Allen’s stated objectives:to help provide detailed work on specific crafts in Scotland that historiographically is‘severely underdeveloped’ (p. 1).

In his treatment of the Incorporation of Hammermen over the early modern centuries,covering roughly the first half of the book, readers familiar with the burgeoning literatureon artisans over the last 20 years will find few surprises, for the Edinburgh craft experiencelargely conforms to the broader European one. We read here, for example, that in thefifteenth century Edinburgh merchants gained increasing economic power and that crafts-men banded together to protect their interests against merchants importing craft waresfrom outside the city and underselling craftsmen in town, the resulting legal ‘incorpora-tions’ reflecting the Europe-wide development of corporatism. We also read that theincorporations were hierarchical and governed by charters that covered guild administra-tion, admission to mastership, regulation of competition, quality control through shopsearches, and so forth. Politically, the general trend in Europe that saw craftsmen deprivedof any real political power plays out in Edinburgh, too, as the Town Council becameincreasingly oligarchic and dominated by merchants. As elsewhere, the numbers of urbancraftsmen swelled with the total population, booming to the mid-seventeenth century andthen tapering off to 1750. We also read that, as was common across Europe, a wealthy‘aristocracy’ of hammermen emerged, and the wealthiest of them sought to escape pro-duction altogether and join the social ranks of their mercantile superiors who shunnedhandiwork as a mark of inferiority.

Allen selects the hammermen in general and the locksmiths in particular because of thesources they provide: the artefacts in the National Museum and the charters and minutebooks of the meetings of the Incorporation and of the locksmiths in particular (thelocksmith minutes are continuous from 1494). Thus, the second half of the book is atechnological treatment, and one gains valuable insight into, among other things, thespecific processes of technology transfer, something we know took place but have fewdetailed studies of the specific processes by which it occurred. Allen, for instance, exploresthe overlap between gunsmiths and locksmiths, pointing out that they shared the knowl-edge of a technology of moving, interlocking metal parts, just as they shared the termi-nology of ‘lock’, ‘tumbler’, and ‘lock plate’. The same could be said of locksmiths,clockmakers, watchmakers, and stocking-frame makers. The boundaries between themwere remarkably porous, and the knowledge and skill passed through them surprisinglyfluid.

The first half of Allen’s book is based largely on the charters and minutes. Readersfamiliar with some of the most contentious debates about guilds, craftsmen, and the larger,emerging market economy will be disappointed in Allen’s uncritical reliance upon theseprescriptive sources as indicative of reality. True, the masters of the incorporations, inEdinburgh and across the towns of Europe, expressed a keen desire to impose what Allen

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calls ‘social control’ through corporate rules, privileges, and regulations, and this broughtthem face to face with the vagaries of the commodity and labour markets which wereundergoing such dramatic changes at this time. But how effective was the regulatoryapparatus in practice? Was much of the market effectively ungovernable, the regulatoryreach short and incomplete? Or did the regulations have a real effect on economic activity?One would like to see this debate explored explicitly through the Edinburgh experience.Allen states that ‘markets were highly regulated’ (p. 90), but he cites the prescriptive 1483charter of the hammermen as evidence. He says little about illicit production and unli-censed competition, although he does mention in passing that ‘it was a common complaint[among masters] that hucksters [illicit vendors] walked up and down the town plying theirwares’ (p. 91). He also adds that during periodic fairs ‘the freedom’ or privilege to sellgoods within the town walls was open to all, providing ‘golden opportunities for unfree-men’ (p. 91). He refers to journeymen being an ungovernable lot, and ‘a thorn in the side’(p. 34) of the town council, but he says little of their mobility, their working conditions,their organizations, or their place in the roiling labour market. Elsewhere in Europesubstantial evidence points to a large, even vast arena of unregulated market activity, ofboth labour and commodities. One would like to know whether or not Edinburgh reflectsthis, and why or why not.

james r. farrPurdue University

Shani D’Cruze and Louise A. Jackson, Women, crime and justice in England since 1660(Basingstoke and NewYork: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. viii + 227. 7 figs. 3 tabs. ISBN9781403989727 Hbk. £55/$93.95; ISBN 9781403989734 Pbk. £18.99/$28.95)

The growing maturity of criminal justice history has been demonstrated in recent years bythe publication of a number of important synthetic overviews of this complex, wide-ranging field. This readable and insightful book joins their ranks, offering not only avaluable introduction to the contributions of feminist and gender studies to the historiog-raphy of crime but also a broader consideration of the cultural, social, and institutionalregulation of women. Most chapters are organized according to criminologicalcategories—property crime, violence, sexual offences, and punishment—but those onsocial protest and ‘delinquency’ range furthest over the blurry and historically changingboundary demarcating ‘criminal’ behaviour. A chapter on the participation of women in‘control’ organizations (such as the police, magistracy, or prison system) is especiallyinnovative, analysing women working within the system.

One focus is on the social arrangements that have affected women’s participation inactivities defined as crimes. The chapter on property crime, for example, considerswomen’s economic opportunities and working lives, as do the sections on prostitution andinfanticide. Another consistent concern is to examine how the ways women were seenaffected their treatment by the police, courts, and prison service. Sexuality plays anespecially strong role, not only in sexual offences but also with regard to how women’sreputations were shaped by their adherence to (or deviation from) dominant notions offemininity. Discussions of historical change and continuity recur, with the balance shiftingdepending on the topic. For instance, there are references to a change from early modernviews of feminine ‘unruliness’ (p. 86) to later discourses emphasizing women’s passivity.Continuities in practices used to control fertility are highlighted, as is the resort toprostitution ‘as a resource-gaining strategy by marginal and vulnerable young womenwhose access to familial or other support networks was limited’ (p. 84). By combining aneffective empirical synthesis and theoretical summary with a coherent argument all theirown, the authors have produced an important work that will be necessary reading foranyone interested in the history of women and crime, in the broadest sense of that term.

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Nonetheless, a few aspects of the authors’ approach inspire more critical reflections.Quantitative methods are too broadly dismissed, with even sophisticated and subtle sta-tistical analyses dismissed as ‘crude’ (p. 24) or part of a ‘sterile’ debate (p. 163).True, theinfluence of ‘gender ideologies’ cannot be ‘reduced to a simple argument about leniency orharshness [in the justice system]; they are played out in complex ways that are difficult tomeasure in quantitative terms’ (p. 25). Nevertheless, when carefully applied, quantitativeapproaches have posed clearly defined questions and offered well-grounded answers.‘Lenience’ may be a complicated notion that numbers cannot fully encapsulate, butknowing (as some studies have shown) that, typically, women have been convicted lessoften and given lighter sentences has not only told us something important about thecriminal justice system but also brought into question the argument that women weresystematically ‘doubly damned’ (as criminals and violators of gender norms) when theycame before the courts. Although acknowledging these critiques, the authors seek to rescuethe ‘double deviance’ thesis by emphasizing more ‘diffuse’ forms of institutional controland informal disadvantaging (pp. 141–2, 163).

The authors also follow recent feminist scholarship in emphasizing women’s participa-tion in violence. Women’s violence has indeed been too often neglected; however, itspresentation here seems exaggerated by the amount of attention given to categories ofbehaviour whose inclusion is questionable (such as witchcraft and verbal ‘violence’) andtruly violent crimes (such as highway robbery and piracy) that women perpetrated rarely.Here, the aim of rescuing female ‘agency’ effectively obfuscates one of the most interestinghistorical issues: the clear (and enduring) differences in the use of physical aggression bymen and women.

Finally, the book’s main theoretical innovation—drawing our perspective back so as tosee the criminal justice system as part of a broader patriarchal social ordering—has positivebut also negative aspects. It certainly illuminates how social patterns and cultural under-standings have affected women’s interactions with crime and the justice system, but thisgain may be balanced by a reduction in clarity. Just to take one already noted example: ifit is difficult to measure the ‘lenience’ of sentencing patterns, how much thornier is judgingthe criminal justice system’s contribution to ‘patriarchy’? That, in the end, the authors are‘reluctant to construct any overarching metanarrative’ (p. 164) demonstrates awareness ofthis point, even if, overall, they seem to see the criminal justice system as primarilycomplicit in women’s oppression. It is certainly important to recognize the role of thecriminal law in regulating womanhood; however, it is worth noting that—even according tothe numbers here—most of those people arrested, sentenced, imprisoned, and executed bythe criminal justice system have been men.

john carter woodOpen University

Alan Fox, A lost frontier revealed: regional separation in the east midlands (Hertfordshire:University of Hertfordshire Press, 2009. Pp. xiv + 210. 86 figs. 11 tabs. ISBN9781902806969 Hbk. £35/$80; ISBN 9781902806976 Pbk. £18.99/$37.95)

The study of regional and local history has burgeoned in recent decades, much of whichhas been given expression in the North East England History Institute’s ‘Regions andRegionalism in History’ series (Boydell Press) and the ‘Studies in Regional and LocalHistory’ series in which this book appears.The proliferation of regional and local historicalstudies has been in no inconsiderable part due to the endeavours of Charles Phythian-Adams, and the purpose of A lost frontier revealed is to test his hypothesis that majorwatershed areas were often frontier zones between regional societies (p. 1), by focusing onthe area lying on the boundary between Leicestershire and Lincolnshire and concentrating

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on the early modern period, with particular emphasis on the eighteenth century (thoughhe considers pre-Conquest precedents and subsequent developments up to the presentday). Fox’s analysis is executed through a detailed study of a large ‘test area’, encompassingseven ‘landscapes’, which he introduces and rationalizes in the first part of the book.

In the second part of the book Fox examines the area’s population distribution, economictrends, and cultural expression—in other words, the ‘human divisions’ of the early moderncountryside—to determine the distinctions within and between the seven landscapes.Thus,he makes interesting observations regarding the relationship between the proposed frontierzone and population patterns, which he discovered to be less straightforward than antici-pated. He considers cultural expressions across the whole of Leicestershire and Lincoln-shire, rather than confining himself to the test area, from which he concludes that vernaculararchitecture and traditional dialects are much more convincing indicators of the chosen areahaving been a major cultural division than evidence from popular culture and folk traditions.

Fox moves on to concentrate on the personal in part 3 of the book. In particular, heconsiders personal spatial loyalties through marriage horizons and evidence from wills.Marriage registers reveal little evidence of marriages across the proposed frontier, espe-cially lower down the social scale, while probate records show a marked ‘in-county bias’,thereby supporting the view that the area was a frontier zone in the eighteenth century. Hethen assesses these findings against his computer-generated family reconstruction analysiswithin a more tightly defined ‘focus area’ comprising 14 parishes astride the countyboundary, which demonstrate that most of the population was static in the same period.Within the same focus area he uses the database to identify a series of dynastic familieswhich he interrogates to discover that, while they were more likely to stay put rather thanmove, some did migrate within the focus area, though there is no indication of dynastiesstretching across the whole of that area.

Finally, Fox opens out the study again to contextualize the whole through a discussionof transport systems and networks in the east midlands.These indicate that the area was atransitional zone where individual links tended to be forged within the county, yet someeconomic needs were met by larger market towns that were nearer but across the countyborder. This contextualization might have been more meaningful had Fox made broadercomparisons with other major watershed areas, or ‘frontier valleys’, identified by Phythian-Adams, such as the river Tees, which has excited a lively debate in the past around preciselythose issues addressed in this part of the book.

However, as a discrete study of a specific (albeit fluctuating) area, Fox’s book has muchto commend it. Perhaps inevitably, he does not claim to offer definitive conclusions aboutthe chosen frontier region. Instead, by means of rigorous investigation, he shines a lightinto the area to reveal its more kaleidoscopic nature. Thus is demonstrated Phythian-Adams’s reminder that landscapes ‘bleed’ uninterruptedly across boundaries (CharlesPhythian-Adams, ‘Differentiating provincial societies in English history: spatial contextsand cultural processes’, in B. Lancaster, D. Newton, and N.Vall, eds., An agenda for regionalhistory, 2007, p. 7) making them questionable as ‘unambiguously discrete arenas for pastsocial interaction’. Accordingly, A lost frontier revealed is tantalizingly exposed, occasionally,and by degrees, to the reader.

diana newtonUniversity of Teesside

Gregory Stevens Cox, The Guernsey merchants and their world in the Georgian era (Guernsey:Toucan Press, 2009. Pp. xx + 235. 42 figs. 21 plates. 39 tabs. ISBN 9780856946035 Pbk.£35)

A prodigious research effort has been expended on the compilation and arrangement ofinformation presented in this study. Augmenting the evidence that underpins his mono-

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graph on St Peter Port 1680–1830 (1999), Cox has gathered further material from docu-mentary sources held in Guernsey, the National Archives, and several provincialrepositories in Britain, France, Spain, and Sweden, and from an array of printed primaryand secondary works. The outcome is a work that is rich in detail regarding the businessand lives of Guernsey merchants in the Georgian era, with particular attention afforded tothe trades in which they engaged, the cargoes they consigned and purchased, the ports inwhich they conducted their commerce, and the modus operandi of their enterprise. This isnot an all-encompassing collection, however, for the author has excluded material onsmuggling and privateering, largely because the former contravened English and French(and not Guernsey) laws, while the latter was essentially a wartime activity that made nocontribution to peacetime trade (pp. xviii–xix).These are perhaps surprising decisions, forboth activities were significant in relative and absolute terms, and both consumed produc-tive resources as well as generating capital that was redeployed subsequently in mercantileand shipping activity (see A. G. Jamieson, ed., A people of the sea: the maritime history of theChannel Islands (1986), chs. 5–8).

Cox presents much of the primary source material he has collected assiduously in a veryfull, occasionally verbatim, form.There are lengthy extracts—one extending to 19 pages ofthis large-format (A4) book (pp. 116–35)—from personal letterbooks and apologia, busi-ness accounts, and contemporary descriptions of ports, as well as substantial lists ofcargoes transported, and detailed statements of shipping movements, gleaned from Lloyd’sList and Customs, Treasury, and Foreign Office records. This assemblage of informationis seemingly designed to serve two main purposes. First, it is rendered in a semi-encyclopaedic manner, with discussions of cargoes, ports, and merchants arranged inalphabetical order to facilitate access to what is effectively a well-stocked data store.Second, it yields evidence that Cox utilizes to identify the individuals who engaged inGuernsey’s commercial enterprise during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.This enables him to establish that the island’s trade and shipping was not based narrowlyon the enterprise of Nicholas Dobrée and Carteret Priaulx, as previous works have implied.Rather, Guernsey’s entrepôt function was sustained by at least 62 merchants by the 1790s,some of whom were from indigenous aristocratic families, while others were descendedfrom religious refugees and economic migrants from England, Scotland, and mainlandEurope. In terms of activity and status, these merchants have been categorized by manyhistorians as either négociants, who were wholesalers engaged in le grand commerce, ormarchands, who operated le petit cabotage and concentrated on retailing goods. Cox insertsa caveat into this oversimplified classification, arguing that in practice the island’s mer-cantile class not only comprised various grades of négociant and marchand, but was alsoflexible and opportunistic in its approach to business (pp. 93–6).

Such findings offer an illuminating insight into the economy and society of GeorgianGuernsey.Yet Cox is reluctant to drive his analysis harder and relate his conclusions to widerscholarly debates. For instance, more could have been made of the islanders’ relationshipwith the sea. It has been contended that this relationship has generally been passive for thelast 2,000 years, in that maritime services have been provided largely by outsiders. Duringthe 1550–1870 period, however, the islanders pursued overseas interests actively throughtheir engagement in seaborne trade, shipping, seafaring, privateering, and the fisheries(Jamieson, People of the Sea, pp. xxix–xxxvi). Cox’s study infers that the entrepreneurship ofGuernsey’s merchants was one of the most significant explanatory variables in this activephase, but does not assess why this was the case or to what extent Guernsey’s experienceresembled that of other island nations (see F. Broeze, Island nation:a history ofAustralians andthe sea, 1998). Likewise, the material presented in The Guernsey merchants provides its authorwith an opportunity to add to the burgeoning literature on the concept and contours of the‘Atlantic world’, which arguably offers a robust framework within which early modernmercantile endeavour can be analysed. Cox is evidently aware of this opportunity

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(pp. xviii–xx), and as this book ‘constitutes a beginning, not an end’ (p. xx), he will hopefullycontribute a fuller, more analytical study to the literature in due course.

david j. starkeyUniversity of Hull

Mark Casson, The world’s first railway system: enterprise, competition and regulation on therailway network inVictorian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 523.37 figs. 16 illus. 42 tabs. ISBN 9780199213979 Hbk. £60/$99)

This is an important study casting new light on an old issue, the over-capitalization ofBritain’s Victorian railway industry. Casson contends that the network was plagued byduplicate lines, and in order to demonstrate his point, and in the spirit of the greatcounterfactualists—Fogel, Fishlow, and Hawke—constructs a rational and efficient alter-native, with which the actual network is compared. In this imaginary world, Parliamentresponded to the ‘Railway Mania’ of 1845–7 by planning the network rationally, and thenrequired competing companies to share the use of railway hubs and joint stations in orderto optimize interchanges (p. 104). The scale of the inefficiency revealed is greater thanprevious writers have suggested, contends Casson. Britain, it seems, would have beenbetter served by a network of 13,000 miles (2,000 of it new), some 7,000 miles less thanthe 20,000-mile system of 1911. To arrive at this conclusion the author devises aningenious alternative system complete with defined traffic requirements and timetables,which, he asserts, would have outperformed the real network by providing shorter journeytimes and, in many cases, shorter distances (table 3.2). In Casson’s model there is only oneLondon–Scotland route instead of three, and only one line from London to Exeter.Thereis no Ipswich–Norwich railway, and only one line to Inverness from the south.

Most of the book is devoted to an explanation of how the counterfactual network wasconstructed. Chapter 1 sets out the major elements of the model, and these are articulatedin more detail in chapter 3 and in the appendices. Chapter 4 explores the differencesbetween the counterfactual and the actual networks on a regional basis, finding (unsur-prisingly) that inter-competition tended to be wasteful at this level, while chapter 5questions the idea that the 1,000 miles of joint lines represented a degree of inter-companycooperation.The final chapters deal with two important issues: regulation and the businessstrategies of the railway companies. After examining the extent of railway regulation at thetime of the Mania, Casson asserts that regulatory failure led to regional monopoly, with themajor companies behaving in such a way as to inhibit consumer choice. ‘Strengtheningcompetition’, he argues, ‘may not always have the beneficial consequences that simpleideologically driven arguments suggest’ (p. 279). Regulatory weakness and failings incentral government policy are thus blamed for the inefficiencies that resulted from thelarger rail system. A duplicating, overly dense network was the result of the way in whichpoorly regulated railway companies were allowed to build up regional systems; they thencompeted for more business by invading each other’s territories. Parliament, havingrejected the advice of the Railway Committee of the Board of Trade in 1845, went on tosupport a promotional free-for-all as the consumer’s best defence, then acted to restrictcompany mergers. A chapter on ‘Business strategies and their effects’ explores the motivesunderpinning promotional and operating activity in the industry. This is an impressivesynthesis which invites further work.

Is this a piece of serious scholarship or an elaborate ‘glass bead game’? I must confess tohaving some doubts about a 500-page book in which 375 pages are devoted to setting outan alternative universe, but the product of this painstaking labour—42 tables, 37 figures,7 appendices—is important. It challenges us to question the impact of the railway networkwe did create. Unfortunately, Casson makes no attempt to put a figure on the cost to

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Britain of the inefficiency he has detected, which will surely limit the appeal of the book tonon-specialists. Railway buffs may well challenge some elements in his counterfactualschema, while others will quibble with some of his assertions. For example, the circum-stances in which Northampton was bypassed by the London & Birmingham Railway aremuch more complex than is suggested here (p. 17); and it is surely not the case that byc.1850 the company secretary ‘was becoming the major strategic thinker in the railwaysector’ (p. 56), or that East Anglia ‘was a large and prosperous agricultural area in theVictorian period’ (p. 106).The railways’ deposited plans are scarcely a ‘major new source’,as the book’s blurb asserts, although they have rarely been used to such good effect as here.Some academics will raise eyebrows at the assumption that rail customers would havebenefited from a constraint upon inter-company competition, especially given the vocif-erous complaints of traders from the 1870s. Finally, the absence of footnotes surelyrepresents a frustration to those who wish to follow up some of the diverting points raised.Nevertheless, Casson is to be congratulated for having produced such a tour de force ofscholarship, demonstrating that, however much a subject may have been researched andchronicled, there is always room for a fresh insight when a leading academic turns his orher attention to it.

terry gourvishLondon School of Economics & Political Science

Donald Winch, Wealth and life: essays on the intellectual history of political economy in Britain,1848–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 419. 13 illus. ISBN9780521887533 Hbk. £50/$95; ISBN 9780521715393 Pbk. £18.99/$34.99)

Chronologically this volume follows on from Riches and poverty: an intellectual history ofpolitical economy in Britain, 1750–1834 (1996), a work that turned on arguments advancedby Adam Smith, Edmund Burke, and T. R. Malthus that originated in eighteenth-centurydebates on wealth, luxury, and providence. It formally ended with the death of Malthus,more substantively, with the echoes of these debates in the writings of John Stuart Mill andColeridge.Winch begins his new book at this point, first by placing the arguments of Mill’sPrinciples of political economy (1848) in the context of his broader political thinking, andthen outlining the criticism levelled against Millian political economy by John Ruskin, firstin Unto this last (1862) and then in writings and statements from later in the century. It isfrom Ruskin that the title of the book is adapted, posing the question of what kind of lifeshould be led, and with what means, as the true subject of political economy.

By the early part of the twentieth century this question had been transformed by AlfredMarshall, and subsequently Arthur Pigou, into a different kind of economics which soughtto elaborate the mechanics of consumption and redistribution—Winch demonstrates, forexample, that Marshall developed what he came to call ‘consumers’ surplus’ as part of apractical framework amenable to rigorous quantification and fiscal application in thepromotion of social welfare, and reports Marshall’s eventual disappointment that hiscreation turned out after all to be more theoretical than practical in nature (p. 280). By the1890s the economics of Marshall and (somewhat later) of Pigou was being subjected tocriticism by J. A. Hobson, who, by writing John Ruskin, social reformer (1898), both updatedand reorganized Ruskin’s earlier critique of political economy and relaunched the Toryarguments of a mid-century Ruskin as a liberal-leftist critique of twentieth-century capital-ism.This critique was articulated in the writings of Hobson himself, but also symbolized bythe foundation of Ruskin College, Oxford the year after his book on Ruskin was published.

Rather like trying to erect a tent single-handedly in a stiff breeze, it is easier to state theopening and closing points of the argument in this way (wealth and welfare from theeighteenth to the twentieth centuries) than to organize its execution. As is plain in the case

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of Ruskin, his significance was continuous, seeing a particular upsurge in the 1880s, butwhat this significance was thought to consist of altered. It is much the same betweenWinch’s two books: whereas in the first book early readings of Smith were sophisticatedand ramified, by the time of the centenary of the publication of Wealth of nations in 1876‘Smith’ had become reduced to formulas regarding free trade, laissez-faire, and theManchester school. This is well brought out by the chapter devoted to Louis Mallet,‘keeper of the Cobdenite conscience’ (p. 181) and a career civil servant. Mallet’s friendshipwith Frédéric Bastiat enables Winch to draw a contrast between French liberal economistsand what Mallet saw as the ruined heritage of Smith attributable to Ricardo, Mill, and theirfollowers. The lasting importance of Mill’s political economy is another thread, Winchnoting that Hobson first learned his economics in a Derby extension class of the early1870s, using as his texts Mill’s Principles and Millicent Fawcett’s version of her husband’sown précis of Mill (p. 299). Jevons himself was, of course, quite adamant that the earlyClassical economists had set off down a cul-de-sac and that his own work represented afresh start; but then part of the differences that separated Jevons and Marshall was thelatter’s proclivity to emphasize continuity in economic theorizing, seeking out in Ricardoeven the most slender basis for such consideration (p. 247).

Winch by no means follows Marshall here, but he does make quite plain that the starkhistory of classical and post-classical economics espoused by W. S. Jevons, and also byMarshall’s teaching colleague Herbert Foxwell, is unsustainable. Indeed, for most of theperiod under consideration Mill’s Principles provided a point of balance on which muchdebate, political as well as economic, turned—it was still the text of choice for Oxfordundergraduates in the early 1900s, and the last edition, with an introduction by W. J.Ashley, appeared in 1909, the year after Marshall retired from the Cambridge chair.

Winch offers a path through this kaleidoscopic field of debate over the nature of wealthand its proper distribution—involving land reform, industrial and consumer cooperation,and Imperial protectionism—as a set of linked essays on Mill, Ruskin, Walter Bagehot,Mallet, Henry Sidgwick, Foxwell, Marshall, and Hobson. This allows the emphasis to fallin different ways—Bagehot, for example, despite the contemporary importance of LombardStreet (1873) and his editorship of the Economist (1861–77), comes out looking more likean unreliable narrator than anything else, while Sidgwick has at last been clearly placed inrelation to the tangled development of later nineteenth-century English political economy.

keith tribeUniversity of Sussex

Fergus Campbell, The Irish establishment, 1879–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2009. Pp. xvii + 344. 54 tabs. ISBN 9780199233229 Hbk. £55/$110)

In his doctoral thesis of 1968, the late Tony Hepburn lamented the absence of a ‘GeorgeLefebvre’ figure in Irish historiography. Campbell’s book suggests that Hepburn’s call forIrish historians to become more engaged with ‘the social’ might be met. Functioning as acompanion piece to his monograph on the Irish revolution, Land and revolution: nationalistpolitics in the west of Ireland (2005), Campbell provides the first systematic analysis of thechanging social composition of the Irish establishment in the years leading up to the FirstWorld War. This is an important book that is both original and ambitious in its scope,interrogating the older historiographical debate about blocked social mobility in Irelandfrom the new perspective of the Irish elite.

Campbell has two key research questions: was the Irish establishment an open elite, anddid it undergo a process of ‘greening’ during this period, becoming progressively moreaccommodating towards Ireland’s Catholic majority? These questions test the hypothesisthat the closed nature of the elite and its disappearance after 1918 explain the outbreak of

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revolution in Ireland, countering historians (such as Lawrence McBride) who have arguedthat the Irish establishment had become increasingly representative of Catholic opinion atthe beginning of the twentieth century.

The book is structured around six sub-groups within the Irish establishment, withchapters on landlords, the upper echelons of the civil service, senior police officers, MPs,businessmen, and religious leaders.The first and last chapters, on the landed and religiouselites respectively, are the least successful, in part because of the static nature of thesegroups. Campbell’s analysis gains traction, however, in the second chapter, which engagesdirectly with McBride’s ‘greening’ thesis by examining the social background of the topcivil servants in the Irish administration. Campbell concedes that there was a partial‘greening’ of this elite group; the proportion of Catholics in senior posts increased slightlybut this paled in comparison with the overwhelmingly Catholic composition of the rankand file. The Catholics who did make it to the top of the Irish administration were,Campbell argues, from privileged social backgrounds and, therefore, in the eyes of theBritish state, suitably loyal. For the majority of Catholics, then, a ‘glass ceiling of discrimi-nation’ (p. 98) prevented promotion to the highest ranks and, according to Campbell,fuelled anger and resentment.

The third chapter considers the Irish police force. Instead of recruiting openly, the upperranks were selected using the cadet system, whereby senior figures in the Irish governmentnominated candidates. Given the social composition of Dublin Castle, this system limitedthe proportion of Catholic officers to just one-fifth of Irish-born senior officers. Echoingthe previous chapter, Campbell concludes that this was a case of ethnic discrimination,especially given that middle-class Protestant officers were often promoted from within theranks.There was, in fact, an ‘orange-ing’ of the Royal Irish Constabulary (p. 299), with theproportion of Irish-born Catholics in senior positions declining between 1881 and 1911. Asimilar picture of Catholic under-representation emerges in the chapter on the Irishbusiness elite. As the economic power of Ulster-based industry grew, so too did theinfluence of the largely Protestant directors of Irish big business, confirming D. P. Moran’searly twentieth-century analysis of discrimination against Catholics. The few Catholicswho did rise to positions of power were ‘landed, loyal and “loaded” ’ (p. 231). The focusof Campbell’s analysis shifts subtly in chapters 4 and 6, in which he examines the role oflarge numbers of Catholics in the party political and religious elites of Ireland. Instead oftesting whether a ‘greening’ process occurred within the Irish Parliamentary Party and theCatholic church, Campbell suggests that the centrality of Ireland in British politicsincreased their position of power and influence during this period, thereby ‘greening’ theBritish state. Campbell concludes by addressing the implications of his research for thestudy of the Irish revolution. Returning to the notion of blocked Catholic social mobility,he provides compelling evidence to support John Hutchinson’s argument that the Irishrevolution was at least partially the result of middle-class Catholic frustrations when facedwith a ‘glass ceiling’ in key areas of Irish life.

Written with vim and wit, this book engages with the broader literatures on Irishnationalism, the social history of elites and elite theory. Campbell’s analysis, however,occasionally lacks coherence. For example, in the conclusion, Campbell argues correctlythat Catholic university students were a diverse bunch, whose thoughts and behaviourembraced the full spectrum of opinion in Edwardian Ireland (p. 317).Yet two pages later,referring to James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’, Campbell collapses this diversity into a stark,stereotyped dichotomy between a future Home Rule Ireland and an Irish Ireland.However, this does not detract from an exceptional contribution to our understanding ofthe nature of Irish society at the beginning of the twentieth century which will inspire anynumber of future research projects.

d. a. j. macphersonUniversity of Bristol

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Tony Slater, Andrew Bryans, Colin Redman, and Martin Hewitt, 100 years of state pension:learning from the past (Eynsham: Information Press, 2009. Pp. vi + 266. 9 figs. 23 tabs.ISBN 9781903965160. Pbk. £16.95)

This book was published by the Faculty and Institute of Actuaries to mark the centenaryof the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908. Although it draws on a range of sources, it owes aparticular debt to a small number of well-known historical studies, including Pat Thane’sOld age in English history, John Macnicol’s The politics of retirement, Leslie Hannah’sInventing retirement, NicholasTimmins’ The five giants, and Rodney Lowe’s The welfare statein Britain since 1945.

As the pre-publication reviews suggest, the book gives an admirably clear account ofthe development of pension provision over the last century. It begins by summarizing thedebates that preceded the 1908 Act before examining the terms of the Act itself. It thenprovides a brief review of pension policy during the First World War, before going on tolook at the introduction of contributory pensions in 1925 and the role played by theBeveridge Report in the genesis of National Insurance in the 1940s. However, thegreater part of the book is devoted to the history of pension provision since the imple-mentation of the National Insurance scheme in 1948. As such, it contains detailed sum-maries of the development of Conservative pension policy between 1951 and 1964; theevolution of Labour’s National Superannuation Scheme; Conservative efforts to intro-duce earnings-related contributions in the early 1970s; the establishment of the StateEarnings-Related Pension Scheme by Labour in 1976; the arguments over pensionpolicy under Margaret Thatcher and John Major; and recent debates under NewLabour. It also contains 40 pages of appendices, summarizing the main legislative devel-opments and the history of the current basic state pension, a short profile of WilliamBeveridge, and a selection of tables and graphs illustrating demographic changes,changes in pension rates, the ratio of state benefits to GDP, and the relationship betweenpensions, earnings, and prices.

As the book’s title suggests, its ultimate aim is to use the evidence of history to drawlessons for the future. The authors argue that the history of pension provision has beendominated by two contradictory approaches. The first approach emphasizes the impor-tance of means-testing as a way of targeting resources at those in greatest need, while thesecond approach advocates the use of social insurance payments as a basis for universal(and non-means-tested) entitlements. They conclude that the first approach has beenfound wanting, partly because the application of means tests to future benefits discouragescurrent saving, and partly because the existence of means tests also leads to problems oflow uptake.

If this is the case, why does means-testing still play such an important part in UKpension provision? The authors identify two key moments in pension history that havecontributed to this. The first was the failure of the postwar Labour government to ensurethat benefits rates were sufficiently high to enable recipients to survive without needing toapply for means-tested National Assistance benefits; and the second was the Conservativegovernment’s decision to abandon the link between pensions and earnings at the beginningof the 1980s. As a result, they are clearly sympathetic to the Turner Commission’sarguments for the restoration of this link in 2005.This recommendation formed one of themajor points of conflict between the Commission and the then Chancellor, GordonBrown, but, ultimately, the government agreed that the link should be restored, either by2012, or by the end of the next Parliament. Given the recent economic crisis and thecoming General Election, it will be interesting to see whether this pledge is actuallyimplemented.

bernard harrisUniversity of Southampton

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Peter Dorey, British conservatism and trade unionism, 1945–1964 (Farnham: Ashgate 2009.Pp. xi + 200. 6 tabs. ISBN 978074666592 Hbk. £55/$99.95)

Dorey’s study deals with the Conservative Party’s attitudes and actions towards tradeunionism during the era of ‘One Nation’ leaders: Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden,Harold Macmillan, and (the future leader) Edward Heath. Dorey also comments on theother views that were expressed in the party in those years, most notably the monetaristviews of Enoch Powell, who was an intellectual forerunner of Keith Joseph and MargaretThatcher.

Dorey provides a well-researched analysis of Conservative Party views, drawing on arange of contemporary books and articles by the leaders and influential advisors as well aspolicy statements and documents from government and Conservative archives.This was anunusual era when the trade unions were not demonized as earlier (notably 1919 to 1927),or later (notably 1980 to 1993). Chastened by the 1945 election defeat and seeking thevotes of over nine million trade union members and their families in 1947 onwards, theConservative leadership sought to work in harmony with the trade union leaders, even ifmany Conservative members remained very hostile to the trade unions.

This is a story that has often been told before. The most surprising feature of Dorey’sbook is his apparent unawareness of this, especially for the trade union side. For example,on the earlier postwar period, he does not draw on or discuss the three huge volumes byKeith Middlemas, Power, competition and the state (1988–90), or Justin Davis Smith, TheAttlee and Churchill administrations and industrial unrest (1990). Nor does he draw on therich industrial relations literature on the period by such scholars as Hugh Clegg, HenryPhelps Brown, Alan Fox, Richard Hyman, and Sid Kessler. Dorey’s book appears in a‘Modern Economic and Social History;’ series, but it draws on very little work by eco-nomic and social historians, not even the relevant book in the series written by the serieseditor, Derek Aldcroft with Michael Oliver, Trade unions and the economy (2000). Indeed,nothing after 2000 is referred to in the book.

For all this, the book has much merit on the Conservative side. It does have fresh thingsto say about the Conservative Trade Unionists (CTU) and provides greater understandingof Conservative attitudes to trade unionism. However, Dorey has explored this area morebriefly in his The Conservative Party and the trade unions (1995). The earlier book (notmentioned in the current one) had four chapters on the period after 1964, and only threebefore. The new book revisits 1945–64 in much greater depth. It would have benefitedfrom archival research in the TUC and other trade union records as this would haveprovided insights as to how Conservative approaches were received by the trade unions. Itwould also have encouraged weightier discussion of the changing nature of British indus-trial relations, not least on the shop floor, which the Conservatives faced in the postwaryears.

chris wrigleyNottingham University

GENERAL

Steven A. Epstein, An economic and social history of later medieval Europe, 1000–1500(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi + 290. 32 figs. 5 tabs. ISBN9780521880367 Hbk. £50/$85; ISBN 9780521706537 Pbk. £17.99/$28.99)

Textbooks serve as landmarks and the new short survey is consciously exactly that. Suchworks function both as summaries of the state of knowledge and as the starting point forstudents of the next generation, and Epstein looks back deliberately to earlier examplesthat served the same purpose. At the same time he incorporates recent scholarship which

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has changed the understanding of the economy and society in the high and late middleages. The Big Death of the mid-fourteenth century is the watershed which divides thebook. The first half is a general summary up to about 1350, incorporating easily recog-nizable topics such as agriculture, trade, urbanization, money, political economy, andeconomic thought. The second half is less focused. While Epstein begins with the four-teenth century, a time acknowledged, though with limited enthusiasm, as one of creativedestruction, he goes on to treat warfare, technology, and increases in consumption acrossthe entire 500-year period. The lack of some chronological anchor is purposeful, the goalbeing to demonstrate that the Big Death may have had general and lasting repercussionsbut was not the root cause of all change in late medieval Europe. The book closes with aseries of portraits from the fifteenth century, individual in the cases of Jacques Coeur andFrancesco Datini and collectively in the cases of the Pastons of Florence in 1427, amongothers. The geographical range is broad, with efforts to integrate the Middle East and theByzantine Empire into the description, though admittedly less successfully in the secondhalf of the book.

Each chapter ends with a short selected bibliography. There are few titles from before1990 and virtually all works are in English. Though there are no notes, Epstein makes apoint of mentioning authors when describing major recent advances in scholarship. Thebook is not a substitute for a comprehensive study of the period and a solid knowledge ofthe political context is assumed. The social history is heavily demographic, thoughwomen’s history and divisions along lines of status and income are certainly part of thenarrative. The economic history incorporates institutions such as guilds, manors, andespecially the evolving legal structures of commerce as well as changes in the physicalenvironment into the description of long-term growth, sudden contraction, and thengradual recovery in population and output.

The book carries the marks of Epstein’s earlier work on Genoa, ideas about usury, therise of ethnic stereotypes, slavery, and the emergence of racism, with many examples andsome topics derived from what he has done before. The discussion of ideas about theeconomy, from both ecclesiastical and lay perspectives, sits somewhat less comfortably inthe book than other themes. The discussion of public finance under the guise of dealingwith war and social unrest is a welcome addition, but the placing of the origins of thefiscal-military state in the Crusades seems to push the concept back considerably furtherthan is necessary. Epstein accepts the Malthusian model of the late thirteenth-centuryeconomy, that is, of a population so numerous it was pressing against available resources,despite recent suggestions of alternative views about conditions on the eve of the BigDeath. He seems convinced about a rise in welfare after the mid-fourteenth century, thanksprincipally to a rise in the capital/labour ratio, but does not consider the deterioration incapital stock over time nor the seeming oddity that real wages peaked not in the aftermathof the plague but rather more than a century later. The concentration on placing thistextbook in the framework of both earlier similar efforts and the desire to describe recentadvances gives an overly self-conscious air. The organization, which refreshingly lacks asingular overarching theory, theme, or template, opens the door to some accidentalrepetition. The book ends with the voyages of Da Gama and Columbus when there aresigns of a modern economy, though Epstein does not define what he means by ‘modernity’effectively and, by implication, what made the economy of medieval Europe less thanmodern.

Since this is a textbook designed for a general undergraduate audience it is easy tocomplain about gaps, under- or overstatement, and minor errors.This example of the typeis notably free of problems. Choices of emphasis may at times seem unusual but thefunction of a survey is admirably served. Too few general works about any period or fieldof history are produced now. Steven Epstein, working against the trend, has made a highlyuseful contribution by offering an outline of where economic and social history stands and

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how it got here. The double-digit typographical errors and the light copy-editing that hisdistinguished university press allowed will presumably be corrected in subsequent editions.

richard w. ungerUniversity of British Columbia

Anne Winter, Migrants and urban change (London andVermont: Pickering & Chatto, 2009.Pp. x + 318. 8 figs. 11 maps. 25 tabs. ISBN 9781851966462 Hbk. £60/$99)

Winter tackles a central historical conundrum: how can findings that urban migration hasbeen relatively undisruptive be squared with the fundamental economic transformationsand population redistributions of the past three centuries? She does this by taking on thehistory of Antwerp as it more than doubled in size and shed its identity as a textile-producing town of some 50,000 at the end of the eighteenth century to become a majorport city of over 115,000 in the 1860s, a change that began with the radical shifts duringFrench rule (1796–1814) that spelled an end to the textile industry and a restart ofmaritime activity. The reader, then, learns about the growth of the city and the transfor-mation of the economy at the same time: the waning of the textile centre is seated side byside with the growing port and its expansion of employment for highly skilled and unskilledworkers alike.

Winter understands migration as an adaptive strategy for changing times to be analysedon the macro level of changing conditions at home and destination, on the meso level ofnetworks and social relations, and on the micro level of the individual. Her investigationweighs carefully several kinds of complex data, analysed from immigration registers,censuses, population registers, hospital admission lists, settlement examinations, and otherrelief institution records. This tri-level analysis, along with close attention to the changingurban economy, allows a complicated understanding to emerge of migration and urbanchange that attends both to structural change and the agency of historical actors. Fortu-nately, Winter is a clear and communicative writer, whose well-considered findings aredelivered with a care that is a credit to the author and to the publisher’s series ‘Perspectivesin Economic and Social History’.

Important lessons emerge from this study, the first of which is crucial but without surprise:the push and pull of macroeconomic conditions set the primary framework for departuresfrom home to this city. Deteriorating conditions in the countryside paired with the economicsuccess of the port. Second, repertoires and established patterns of movement account fornewcomers’ places in the urban economy; ‘history mattered’, as Winter explains (p. 190).This finding reflects the complex and interesting finding that in the eighteenth centurynewcomers had been relegated to service, retailing, and shipping work; their repertoires ledthem to have, essentially, ‘a rural occupational profile’ (p. 84). Migrants, then, had not beenpart of the textile manufacturing for which Antwerp had been so well known. When thismanufacturing went into decline, migrants continued to enter other sectors and took up theproliferating unskilled and the more highly skilled positions available in the new porteconomy. Reasonably,Winter generalizes from this finding that newcomers are likely to haveenhanced chances in an economy that develops new activities, an observation borne out bycontemporary situations (for example, by the South Asian medical and technical personnelto whom the depressed industrial city of Detroit offers employment).

Third, Winter’s study shows the power of networks to constrain as well as aid. That is,what are called dense channels of information lead newcomers along well-trod paths honedby a century of regional practices, well-trod paths that may not lead to a fruitful future.Winter labelled more effective sources of information ‘thin channels’ that allowed for moreflexibility—reminiscent of the ‘strength of weak ties’ so helpful to job-seekers who managedto look outside their immediate circle that were invoked by sociologist Mark Granovetter’s

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Getting a job (1974). This meant that some migrants proved to be more adaptable toAntwerp’s new labour force than others in this period of great economic change, and thatintegration with long-standing contacts did not necessarily translate into success. Winteroffers a sobering assessment of migration as a mechanism for coping with economicdislocation and change, informed by an understanding of the suffering of the former textileworkers and older newcomers displaced by rural crises. Although the prosperous portgrew, the working poor of the city suffered from deteriorating conditions, and the peopleof the hinterland were pushed out by increasing proletarianization. Thus physically fityoung men benefited from a move to Antwerp, but the prosperous port proved to be lessremunerative for others.

Winter’s study offers a genuine contribution to history that elucidates the sea changes ofthe nineteenth century: the wane of proto-industry and the great waves of urbanization tocome. Written in a reflective and lucid style, it offers a theoretically informed and richanalysis that addresses successfully a major paradox of urban and migration history.

leslie page mochMichigan State University

Herman van derWee and Monique Verbreyt, A small nation in the turmoil of the SecondWorldWar: money, finance and occupation (Belgium, its enemies, its friends, 1939–1945) (Leuven:Leuven University Press, 2009. Pp. 494. 12 tabs. ISBN 9789058677594 Hbk. €59.50)

During the Second World War, the Belgian financial system was regulated by six institu-tions or persons: the National Bank based in Belgium; the newly created Banqued’Emission; the secretary-general for Finance, Oscar Plisnier (the highest ranking civilservant, who took the position of the Minister after the government had left the country);the German administration; the minister for Finance in London, Camille Gutt; theNational Bank in London; and, finally, the Belgian private financial sector, of whichAlexandre Galopin, the governor of the Société Générale holding, was the uncontestedleader. Another private banker, Georges Theunis, played a key role in the US defendingBelgian interests. Thus the least one can say is that the institutional setting was complex.Financial history is technical and complicated in itself and is often regarded as the moreboring discipline of economic history. However, this book cannot be described as boring orcomplicated: the two authors, who have published extensively on the history of the Belgianprivate banks, have written a clear, sometimes even exciting, book.

In 27 chapters, the history of the Belgian National Bank and the financial system isnarrated and explained in all its aspects and nuances. The book pays attention to thesituation in occupied Belgium and relations with the occupier, but also to the actions takenby the London government, often motivated by the concern to keep control of the Congocolony. The very moving history of the Belgian monetary gold is told in great detail. Thefinal chapters analyse the preparations of the postwar period, including the Belgianparticipation in Bretton Woods and the monetary normalization after the liberation, theso-called Gutt operation, one of the explanations for the ‘Belgian miracle’ (a combinationof high economic growth and a rise in the standard of living). The postwar purges and itseffects on the National Bank are not forgotten in this publication, which was written in thecontext of the commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the institution.

The book is based on extensive archival research.The authors had access to the archivesof the National Bank, but also used other relevant archival sources kept in Belgium andabroad. As a result, they are able to give a complete account of the history of Belgianfinance under German occupation, including the international ramifications. Centralquestions are analysed in detail, including the judicial aspects, which are of special interestin the context of occupation (the issue of collaboration) and the safeguarding of Belgian

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interests in the postwar order. Law is seen as an element in political and economicstrategies.The rich documentary basis enables the authors to go beyond what was alreadyknown from previous research, which is also, however, taken into account. The authorsshow that the presence of a big liberation army complicated the Gutt operation, which wasin reality also prepared in occupied Belgium by the National Bank.

The most striking aspect of this book is the attention devoted to individuals, and theirrole in the history of central banking during the war. Moreover, the position of thesecretary-general of Finance, Plisnier, who wanted to avoid the cost of the occupationbeing financed predominantly by the state, is explained well and put in context. Despite thecommon economic policy advocated by the Galopin committee, a kind of shadow gov-ernment of the Belgian economic elite, the so-called united front of all the elites in financialmatters broke down in 1942 as a consequence of the discussion over the abuse of theclearing system by the occupier. In contrast to many publications on Belgian war history,the authors also analyse in detail the position of the German administration and thedifferent decision-makers within it.

This book is obviously an important and innovative contribution to the economic historyof the SecondWorldWar in Belgium. It is well written and well researched and the authorsare eminent specialists in the field. One point, however, deserved more attention. Althoughthe political aspects of the actions of the financial decision-makers are one of the centralelements in this book, at one particular point, the analysis could have been developedfurther. Accommodation is used to characterize the attitude of the financial and economicelite.This is correct, in the sense that the elite tried to make the best of it and defended theinterests of the Belgian economy in the context of occupation. However, from another pointof view, accommodation suggests a passive or receptive attitude, neglecting the fact that theelite used the opportunity to extend its power to the detriment of the public sector, whichalso explains the conflicts with Plisnier.This aspect is not neglected but somewhat under-exposed in its effects and as an explanation for the action of the leaders involved. Moreover,the criteria for evaluating the consequences of the financial policy were formulated by theeconomic elite itself, and therefore biased in the sense that they interpreted these effects fromtheir own economic perspective,which was a specific one. In this respect, it is true that Gutt’spostwar policy was inspired by liberalism, not paying enough attention to the need foreconomic modernization, but to a certain extent the same goes for the policy of the Belgianelite during the war, where financial considerations and liberalism also prevailed.

dirk luytenGhent University/CEGES Brussels

Jacques G. S. J. van Maarseveen, Paul M. M. Klep, and Ida H. Stamhuis, eds., Thestatistical mind in modern society: the Netherlands, 1850–1940. Vol. I: Official statistics, socialprogress and modern enterprise; Vol. II: Statistics and scientific work (Amsterdam: Aksant,2008. Pp. 420. 37 figs. 19 tabs. ISBN 9789052603216 Pbk. €59.90; Pp. 496. 50 figs. 7 tabs.ISBN 9789052603223 Pbk. €59.90)

This two-volume book investigates the history of statistics in the Netherlands during theperiod 1850–1940. At the start of this period, politics, business, and science were involvedin statistics only to a limited extent. At the end of the period, statistics were playing a majorrole in Dutch politics and business. Similarly, in Dutch science, statistics and probabilisticthinking had become important. This book sketches in nearly 30 chapters a fascinatingoverview of this development of a statistical mindset. Some examples can illustrate this.

The constitution of 1848 increased the role of Parliament drastically and decreased thatof the king. The liberal model of publicity became the basis of the political system, andstatistics became the basis of that publicity. Modernization of the economy and societal

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conflicts increased the need for reliable and comparable statistical data. The educationalarena was dominated by two conflicts: school dispute (should the government also financeprivate schools with a religious background?) and the fight against poor attendance inschools and child labour.The rapidly rising public expenditure on education also gave riseto budgetary concerns.The 1850–7 government reports provide a large amount of data onthe ability and behaviour of teachers, number of boys and girls attending schools, qualityof classrooms, and teachers’ living conditions, all analysed for the various kinds of publicand private schools separately. Not only absolute numbers were given, but different kindsof ratios were also computed, for example, of number of pupils per inhabitant, per teacher,and per school.

In the conflict over child labour, the survey of a State Commission played an importantrole.This five-volume study was published from 1869 to 1873, comprising 1,500 pages ofdescriptive statistical work. The commission focused on quantifying physical damage bymeasuring height, lung capacity, and muscular strength. Using also military and mortalitystatistics, comparisons were made between the physical condition of children in factoriesand other groups of working and non-working children.The public was deeply shocked bythe detailed information and an intense public debate developed. A proposal by the radicalliberal van Houten to ban child labour was in 1874 accepted by Parliament. The long-lasting agricultural crisis in the 1880s was a major cause of emigration of young farmers toAmerica and also initiated an inquiry by a State Commission. This concluded thatlaissez-faire was not the appropriate economic and social policy for agriculture; rather, thatgovernment should stimulate the diffusion of agricultural knowledge, improve transportand credit facilities, and help to organize agricultural interests. Statistics were also impor-tant for other economic activities such as private and social insurance, railways, manufac-turing, and banking. Private business was generally resistant to government interferenceand it took often a lot of time and effort to overcome distrust and realize common interestsin compiling and publishing statistics.

Statistics and science did not always make a good marriage in the Netherlands. TheDutch statistical society was founded by the lawyer De Bosch Kemper in the year of thenew constitution (1848). The purpose of its statistical yearbook was to inform voters byproviding a statistical description of the Netherlands. When the government took overthese statistical activities, the society started focusing only on economic topics and aban-doned statistics. Somewhat similarly, the worlds of mathematicians and actuaries becamecompletely separated.

Quantification was often disputed. Doctors opposed the reduction of unique patients toentities in particular categories of diseases. Probabilistic thinking was rejected for ethicalreasons. It was felt that success rates of treatments or drugs could scarcely be applied toindividual cases. Moreover, was it defensible to withhold a certain medicine from a controlgroup of patients in order to establish its effect? Professors of economic history stimulatedthe use of statistics in historical research, but continued to stress the role of unique eventsand persons. Using statistics was often also made ridiculous, as, for example, ‘Womencommit ten times fewer crimes than men; therefore, they are morally ten times better’.

By ending in 1940 the book misses a major period in the development of the Dutchstatistical mindset which occurred directly after the Second World War, with reconstruc-tion. In this period, national accounts started to be published regularly and planning andconsultation using all kinds of statistics and econometric models became a trademark ofDutch society and politics. Perhaps this episode will be covered in a new volume. Mean-while, these volumes are both interesting and invite similar investigations for other coun-tries and other periods. As the authors make clear, this would not only serve the history ofstatistics, but would also be important for the history of politics, business, and science.

frits bosCPB Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis

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Chandra Mukerji, Impossible engineering: technology and territoriality on the Canal du Midi(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. xix + 304. 87 plates. 2 tabs. ISBN9780691140322. Hbk. £24.95/$35)

The Canal du Midi was an extraordinary achievement of seventeenth-century engineering,a 150-mile waterway cutting through the Languedoc to connect the Atlantic and theMediterranean seas via the Garonne River. Ordered by Louis XIV in 1666, it was com-pleted fully only in 1694, long after its original architects—the entrepreneur Pierre-PaulRiquet, the engineer Louis Nicolas de Clerville, and the statesman Jean-BaptisteColbert—had died. Historiography has usually considered the canal to be the creation ofthose three dead white men, and more specifically the heroic feat of the provincialtax-farmer Riquet. Mukerji’s revisionist history seeks to reassess their contributions to thecanal in light of the sociology of technology in early modern France and the actual processof its construction.

Three main arguments structure her book. Most importantly, she emphasizes theRoman history, nature, and goal of the canal-building endeavour. Not only was France touse monumental engineering to become more like the Roman Empire of old, but it reliedon a subterranean, millennial tradition of Roman hydraulics which, through ruins and oraltradition, contributed to the ‘habitus’ of the peasants of Languedoc (p. 63). This bringsabout the second main argument, which is that historians ostensibly have neglected thevital importance of indigenous female workers for the canal’s successful construction.Nobody at the time, she argues, had all the skills necessary to construct the Canal du Midi,which lay beyond the realms of tested engineering. There were thus no real precedentsexcept those of Roman hydraulics inherited tacitly by the peasant women of the Pyrenees,‘who maintained classical traditions of hydraulics as commonsense elements of their dailylife’ (p. 117).Though humanists at the time could not followVitruvius’s writings on the useof the volcanic sand known as pozzolana to fasten cement under water, for example, thepractical knowledge of this process had survived through the centuries and was employedsuccessfully in the canal (p. 121). This leads to Mukerji’s third major argument, namelythat the Canal du Midi, far from being the epic construction of Carlylean heroes, was a‘collaborative’ effort in which numerous people, none of whom could claim total expertise,came together to form a ‘superhuman intelligence’. Mukerji here draws on Ed Hutchin’stheory of ‘distributed cognition’ to argue the canal resulted from ‘a form of social intelli-gence organized for practical ends’ (p. 10).The result was a non-antagonistic manifestationof collective power in which the distinction between man and nature was erased to a certainextent, such that the Canal du Midi became ‘an experience in engineering that integratedtechne, praxis, episteme, simultaneously changing the world, and transforming the way theearth was known’ (p. 221).

Mukerji’s book is illustrated gorgeously with scores of evocative photographs, the engi-neering of the Fonseranes staircase, in particular, having an almost Tolkienesque flair(p. 149). It uses contemporary theory to great historical effect, supplying new perspectiveson the nature and interrelationship of patronage, knowledge, and technology inseventeenth-century France. That said, the same theories by which we are supplied withfruitful new insights at times overpower the historical analysis itself, and a more nuancedmeditation on the legacy of Rome at the time (Racine, after all, compared Louis XIV toAlexander, not to Caesar) and on the relative importance of Dutch engineering expertswould certainly have been in order and would have made for a more coercive argument.These latter, in particular, appear at times but are never assessed properly (pp. 103, 156,158); the exigencies of political correctness aside, their contributions to the construction oflocks and sluices might not have been entirely overshadowed by the indigenous women ofthe Pyrenees. Indeed, we are treated with something of a theoretical pot-pourri. TheLanguedoc was a ‘memory palace’ (p. 225), Riquet could ‘see like a state’ (p. 156), his

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Canal was ‘Bruno Latour’s knot’ (p. 203), and its water ‘an independent nonhuman actantin Michel Callon’s sense’ (p. 204). Colbert was a ‘virtual witness’ (p. 27) and the workerswere not unlike Michel Serres’ ‘African termites’ (p. 217). But no matter how folksy theknowledge harnessed by the wealthy and powerful tax-farmer Riquet was, Mukerji’scomparison with Carlo Ginzburg’s forlorn miller Menocchio seems strained (p. 158). Abetter Ginzburgian analogy would be with his Night battles and Ecstasies, in which millen-nial oral traditions likewise inform quotidian life. Both Mukerji and Ginzburg, in fact,provide us with striking perspectives that are simultaneously penetrating and nearly impos-sible to verify. Such frustrations aside, Impossible engineering is an insightful meditation onthe nature of stewardship, the sociology of knowledge, and the role of accountability inseventeenth-century France, and an extraordinary proof of how rich and challenging thehistory of material constructions can be.

sophus a. reinertUniversity of Cambridge

Noelle Plack, Common land, wine and the French Revolution: rural society and economy insouthern France, c.1789–1820 (Farnham: Ashgate Publishing, 2009. Pp. xv + 215. 3 figs.5 maps. 9 tabs. ISBN 9780754667285 Hbk £65/$99.95)

In social and economic terms, perhaps the most momentous aspect of the French Revo-lution was its redistribution of property.The confiscation and sale of ‘national good’—firstthe lands and goods of the church, then those of émigrés and condemned counter-revolutionaries—led to a vast turnover in landownership. Apart from the elimination ofecclesiastical property, it changed no basic structural patterns or long-term trends, but itaccelerated the previously steady diminution of noble holdings, while consolidating thegrip of the bourgeoisie on large ones, and that of the peasantry on smaller.

Nationalized properties, however, were not the only lands made available. It is oftenforgotten that the Revolution brought into question the whole status of common lands,since time immemorial a very substantial element in the French rural landscape. Eco-nomic thought in the eighteenth century had turned against commons. They wereregarded as unproductive wastes which could be exploited much more effectively ifpartitioned into private property. Increasingly, ministers shared this view, but commonswere protected by a powerful complex of laws and customs which pre-revolutionarygovernments had only just begun to erode with edicts promoting clearings. This provedone of the many Gordian knots which modernizing revolutionaries were determined tocut, and from an early stage they committed themselves to encouraging the partition ofcommon lands. But they could not agree on whether they should be shared out by head,or allocated only to existing property-owners in proportion to the size of their holdings,or redistributed in some manner combining both. In many communes, impatient peas-ants began to enclose commons on their own initiative. Finally, in June 1793 the JacobinConvention decreed that in any commune where a third of the inhabitants voted infavour, commons could be divided up equally among all adult inhabitants, womenincluded. Where that left peasants who had already taken the law into their own handswas uncertain, and this and other procedural problems convinced later legislators thatthe issue would have to be revisited before it could be finally resolved. Accordingly therewas much discussion of it in the directorial councils, but periodic turns in the politicalwheel kept postponing action. Thus it was not until 1804 that usurpers of common landswithout a prior valid vote were ordered to return them to common ownership or agreeto become leaseholders. Naturally there was much resistance, and it was still going on in1813 when Napoleon, desperate to find new financial resources as his empire began tocrumble, decided to sell off all remaining commons, including those on lease. The yield

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proved disappointing, but as in so many other spheres the restored Bourbons maintainedNapoleonic policy broadly, and commons continued to be eroded steadily throughoutthe nineteenth century.

In the footsteps of Nadine Vivier, who traced this process in the 1990s largely fromnorthern evidence, Plack follows it in a classic Mediterranean environment, the depart-ment of the Gard. The long-term pattern that she reveals mirrors that of national goods.Nobles were net losers, because their pre-revolutionary right to pre-empt any division byclaiming a third (triage) disappeared. Small peasant holdings multiplied or were aug-mented by the invasions which took place in anticipation of laws to promote partition.Even if they ended up as tenants rather than proprietors, the usurpers still often held on towhat they had taken. However, confiscation and resale from 1813 allowed bourgeoise,often not locals, to snap up many of the choicer lots as they had in the earlier sales ofnational lands. Contrary to classic left-wing assumptions, larger proprietors had oftenopposed partition, especially if they bred cattle which could graze more widely oncommons. Smallholders or the landless had less use for commons, preferring to beawarded small plots from division rather than having little or no land all. In the Gard,however, all benefited from the steady expansion in the market for wine which marked thewhole of this period. Vines could make small plots viable. Plack stops short of endorsingthe idea, much touted by marxists in retreat, that the responses of petty proprietors to themarket demonstrates that there was a ‘peasant way’ towards agrarian capitalism. She isclearly somewhat disappointed that the evidence does not allow her to go further, but atleast she feels able to conclude that in this region the revolutionary upheaval was not theeconomic disaster for the peasantry that some (though not me, whatever she implies on hervery first page) have claimed.

william doyleUniversity of Bristol

Gabriel Galvez-Behar, La République des inventeurs: propriété et organisation de l’innovation enFrance (1791–1922) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008. Pp. 352. 9 figs. 2maps. 9 tabs. ISBN 9782753506954 Pbk. €19)

This book is the first study devoted specifically to the history of inventive activity and thepatent system in France in the long nineteenth century. In the introduction, Galvez-Beharstresses the lack of interest in the history of inventors in France, owing to the reception ofSchumpeter’s thesis. Hence, there is a strong dichotomy between invention and innova-tion, which has benefited the latter. Entrepreneurs eclipsed inventors in French historiog-raphy. Galvez-Behar also underlines the inventors’ long-lasting negative image in France,as quacks. Inventors were seldom heroes. They kept on fighting for recognition, and thispolitical agenda was a major factor in explaining the prominence of the individual inventorin France, even during the second industrial revolution.

The first part focuses on the institutions of invention. In 1791 the brevet was created asa natural right. A new law in 1844 reasserted this ‘jusnaturalism’; it was less expensive, andinformation started to be a preoccupation for authorities, enhancing the duties of theConservatoire des arts et métiers. There was a democratization of invention in France,benefiting artisans and small entrepreneurs, also thanks to a range of ‘intermediarybodies’—societies of encouragement, industrial exhibitions, and some state agencies thatcredited inventions timidly. This context fostered markets for technology and the promo-tion of the ‘autonomous inventor’.

How far could this pattern be sustained during the second industrial revolution? In part2, Galvez-Behar shows that inventions remained linked to the consumption of goods ratherthan to investment into processes: patent agents, journals, and inventors’ associations

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played a growing role in organizing inventive activity. Firms managed intense networkingwith autonomous inventors, rather than developing internal research. However, owing tothe increasing number of brevets, the decentralized pattern of invention, and the numerousintermediary bodies, the value of inventions was highly uncertain. Improvements camefrom international pressure, as German law (1877) favoured collectivity and industrialists.This resulted in the Union of Paris (1883), and in a weekly publication of brevets. Activedefenders of inventors, like patent agents who enhanced the republican ethic of invention,considered wide diffusion a threat to inventors. Although there was an urge for reform,there also was debate.

The third part is devoted to the Belle Époque, a period of reform in France, as socialistsentered government. Alexandre Millerand created a central office, the Organisation Natio-nale de la Propriété Industrielle (ONPI, 1902). Millerand also started the full publicationof brevets during their term and set up a national lab for testing inventions. Nevertheless,wholesale reform of the brevets was not achieved as there was tension over issues such asexamination (a procedure opposed by patent agents but requested by industrialists). Thisechoed changes in the profile of inventors: centralized industries had high rates of growthfor brevets. Firms did manage invention, but inventors’ associations were never so activeand tried to organize their activity collectively, reinforcing the idea of the autonomousinventor. They faced scientists who began to claim they could rationalize invention.Invention became a ‘social question’. With the outbreak of war, it entered the politicalagenda.

The last part deals with the politics of invention during the First World War and theemerging invention policy in the 1920s. While inventors were still not heroes, they were‘good soldiers’. They received strong support from Paul Painlevé, a mathematician andminister of education, who praised the utility of science and the necessity of coordinatingefforts to foster the spirit of invention.This resulted in the ‘Direction of inventions’, whileother scientists advocated a centralized management of invention (Henry Le Chatelier).The interest in invention was not limited to military purposes, although experiences duringthe war did prove beneficial. Not only did France expropriate German industrial property,but it launched a project to modernize industry. The ONPI became an independentinstitution, brevets were improved and the ‘Direction’ was continued in a state agencywhich institutionalized collective invention.

Thanks to a constructivist and conventionalist approach, Galvez-Behar frames patentsinto the organization of invention and the politics of progress. In France, the inventor wasa product of the République and of the making of citizenship. In the long run, this highlypolitical meaning of invention limited the emergence of other models, such as centralizedinvention. It also fostered intense debates and slowed down the pace of reform. AfterChristine MacLeod and Zorina B. Khan, Galvez-Behar provides a fundamental under-standing of inventive activity as an economic practice, embedded into social networks andpolitics.

liliane perezCentre d’histoire des techniques et de l’environnementConservatoire national des arts et métiers (Paris)

Quentin van Doosselaere, Commercial agreements and social dynamics in medieval Genoa(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xvi + 262. 28 figs. 9 tabs. ISBN9780521897921 Hbk. £50/$95)

Genoa and other medieval Italian city-states are seen by some scholars, most notablyFernand Braudel, as the font of capitalism. However, Genoa’s inability to translate com-mercial dominance in the Mediterranean into sustained capitalist development casts doubt

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on efforts to locate modern economic forms in that time and place. Nor did the Genoesealways, or even mostly, follow the profit-maximizing behaviour posited by rational choicetheorists. How then can we explain Genoese economic behaviour and the limited innova-tions of their enterprises?

Van Doosselaere offers a new answer to that question, one based on vast archival workand original analysis. He examines the actual documents of Genoese economic activities:the commenda, the equity partnerships of the tenth and subsequent centuries that allowedGenoese military men who had conquered trade routes and outposts to draw in capital tomount trading voyages, and then the credit agreements and insurance contracts thatconcentrated commerce in the hands of an ever narrower merchant elite.Van Doosselaereis concerned with tracing the links among Genoese economic actors. Among other achieve-ments, van Doosselaere offers a primer on how to compile and evaluate historical docu-ments and subject them to network analysis. At times, van Doosselaere discusses his dataand analytic techniques with a tone and attention to detail more often heard from vintnersdescribing the terroir and qualities of their grapes, yet readers unfamiliar with networkanalysis can easily read and profit from this book. The real difficulty, which all readers ofthis book will face, is that van Doosselaere is far too restrained in drawing attention to theimplications of his findings for social science theory and for the trajectory of Genoese andItalian medieval history.

The social actors that emerge in van Doosselaere’s analysis are families rather thanindividuals. Families above all attempted to preserve their social positions. As Genoa roseto economic pre-eminence in the Mediterranean, social position came to depend oncommercial assets as well as title and office. Families responded to that changed reality bygrasping for investment opportunities.Thus, the growth in trading ships, made possible bythe military aristocracy’s success, opened investment opportunities to commoners. Thenumber of Genoese participating in trade, at least as passive investors, grew as the Genoeseeconomy expanded.Van Doosselaere does not explain whether new investors were a causeof, or response to, the growth of trade. In any case, the heterogeneity of commenda networksallowed Genoese to mobilize the capital needed to secure the trading opportunities openedby their military victories. However, he is clear on how Genoese responded to the newopportunities to get rich and to the social flux created by the entrance of so many newfamilies into commerce.

Commenda designed to finance single voyages were largely replaced in the fourteenthcentury by a combination of credit agreements that bound investors together over the longterm for multiple voyages and maritime insurance contracts. Van Doosselaere demon-strates that these were social rather than business innovations. They did not make themobilization of capital more efficient, nor did they rationalize trade networks or thepost-voyage distribution, processing, and sale of goods. Rather, credit agreements were‘consolidators of commercial identities that induced occupational categories’ (p. 140).Each mutation in the form of credit agreements served to consolidate control over com-merce in the hands of fewer families that were ever more sharply differentiated from therest of the Genoese by their aristocratic status and/or their occupational specialization incommerce. Merchants sold one another insurance policies to reduce the risk of eachvoyage. However, Genoese insurance was sold at fixed prices, so ‘providing coverage to amember of a fellow elite family would be viewed more as a duty or a favor than as afinancial decision based on fiscal criteria’ (pp. 205–6).

Credit agreements and maritime insurance policies served to bind elite families togetherinto alberghi, tight federations of families that lived together in compounds and ‘abandonedtheir patronymic surnames to adopt a common name that was either that of the mostpowerful family in the clan or entirely new’ (p. 176).The alberghi were concerned primarilywith maintaining their status and their political control over the Genoese city-state.Business ventures, as van Doosselaere demonstrates by tracing the narrowing corps of

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commercial creditors and the unprofitable structure of insurance policies, became tools ofpolitical dominance.

The precocious ability of the Genoese to profit from the trade openings created by theCrusades, and their subsequent failure to further develop a commercial economy, wereboth consequences of the social relations that they formed as they navigated their multipleinterests in making money, securing familial standing, and preserving political power.Thesuccessive networks analysed by van Doosselaere were artefacts of the strategies Genoeseadopted to balance those different interests in the context of the social relations they hadcreated previously. This book provides the empirical and analytic bases for understandinghow and why economic interest remained subordinated to status and political concernseven in the most advanced Renaissance Italian commercial society.

richard lachmannState University of NewYork at Albany

Guido Alfani, Fathers and godfathers: spiritual kinship in early-modern Italy (Farnham:Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xiii + 273. 12 figs. ISBN 9780754667377 Hbk. £55/$99.95)

In recent years there has been an increasing interest in the social and economic role ofbaptism. Instead of focusing on the religious aspects of baptism, historians, anthropolo-gists, and historical demographers have been interested in how the baptismal ceremonycreated different network relations in local society, which went further than blood relations,and how these relationships shaped new patterns of social and economic dependence. Bychoosing godfathers and godmothers who were not related by kin to the parents, familiescreated new relationships, which had both social and economic consequences.The Italianeconomic historian Guido Alfani discusses in his new book how the theological and socialnature of spiritual kinship and godparenthood influenced changes and reforms within theCatholic church. From a wide range of historical sources, such as records of baptisms andmarriages, pastoral visitations, diocesan statutes, synods, and provincial records, Alfani hasmade it possible to give a broad picture of how the Catholic church in Italy during the earlymodern period had to resist and compromise in a time of reform.

The concept of spiritual kinship plays an important role in this discussion. Spiritualkinship meant that the child, in acquiring godparents, created bonds outside his or her ownfamily.What it really meant to be a godparent is a matter about which we know very little.It has been argued that godparenthood served three different purposes. First, it extendedkinship relations beyond those based on blood and marriage. Second, it had some kind ofco-parental function, which meant that if the parents of the child died the godparentswould take care of the child.Third, the spiritual kinship created some kind of patron–clientrelation, especially when the family asked people of higher ranks to become godparents.Sometimes godparent relationships could involve a lot of people, which the Catholicchurch disapproved of, and therefore it wanted to change this custom. The turning pointcame with the Council of Trent (1545–63), where it was decided that only one godfatherand one godmother could be present at each baptism. One of the consequences of havingmany godparents was that when families had the possibility to choose among a lot ofgodparents, a priest was often included. Priests had a personal interest in establishing linksof spiritual kinship, because they were excluded from other means of social alliances, suchas marriage. After the Council of Trent the choice of a priest as godfather became veryrare.

Alfani has created a very interesting typology of different godparenthood models thatexisted in the historical sources he has studied. He calls them: pure multi-godfather;asymmetric multi-godfather; limited multi-godfather; limited asymmetric multi-godfather;pure single godfather; and asymmetric single godfather. Each one had its own character-

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istics, and they seem to function very well when different regions or countries are com-pared. The first model was characterized by many godparents with no significant limit tothe number of spiritual kin. The second is similar to the first, but godmothers were oftenexcluded. The third shares the characteristics of the first, but there was a limit to themaximum number of godparents.The fourth shared similarities with the second type, butthere was a limit to the maximum number of godparents.The fifth type was very rare, andAlfani has found only a few examples. The last type was the one dictated by the Councilof Trent: only one godfather and only one godmother. The model makes it possible todistinguish different patterns in different areas of Italy, where the majority of the sourceshave their origin, but he can also extend his comparative perspectives by making compari-son with parts of France, Switzerland, and Protestant areas in northern Europe.The majorchanges to godparenthood during the early modern period also included a social change,according to Alfani, which meant that godparenthood became a factor of social closure.Social relationships to different classes were, to use Alfani’s own words, ‘drasticallyreduced’ from a situation where parents have chosen godparents from a variety of occu-pations and social strata.

The major contribution of the book is that it gives a broad picture and understanding ofthe development of godparenthood in Italy, and at the same time includes a comparativeperspective, which goes further than the Italian peninsula, and therefore gives importantinformation for others interested in the role of godparenthood in a long time perspective,and where other major religions are studied. Unfortunately, there are some minor errorsdue to bad proofreading. The most important one is on page 232, where the page endswithout a full sentence.

tom ericssonUmeå University

Pieter C. van Duin, Central European crossroads: social democracy and national revolution inBratislava (Pressburg), 1867–1921 (NewYork and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2009. Pp. xii +466. ISBN 9781845453954 Hbk. £58/$95)

I admit that reading van Duins’s Central European crossroads was love on the second glance.Looking at the contents I feared that I was not getting one, but three different studies,bound together in one book, because each topic was too small to constitute a book in itself.Van Duin deals concretely with outbreaks of violence that took place in Bratislava in late1918 and that preceded the much better known Hungarian revolution of Bela Kun.Thus,one merit of van Duin’s book is that it has left aside the well-analysed revolutionary eventsin St Petersburg, Budapest, and Berlin, to reconstruct a local hotbed of nationalist andsocial unrest in times when the Habsburg Monarchy collapsed.

As mentioned above, the book has three parts, which are arranged chronologically aspre-revolutionary, revolutionary, and post-revolutionary phases.That is relatively easy andlogical, but for me two different problems occurred. One concerns the length and depth ofeach chapter, which differs significantly. The post-revolutionary events in particular arebriefly presented and then rapidly put aside. Another consequence is that stimulatingtheses (that convinced me finally to appreciate this book) are hidden in the text and hardto discover. That forces the reader to read the book very thoroughly—a laudable aim anda necessity for the reviewer, but hard to realize for most of van Duin’s future readers.

What made me write a positive review finally were van Duin’s theses. First of all, hebreaks with the assumption of a leftist revolution and underlines the break-up of a commonsocialist movement not just into communist radicals and social-democratic moderates, butinto different ethnicities, each with differing ideological colours. The result is a history ofideas with real analytical depth. For me it was stimulating, too, to discover insights into the

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dynamics of social upheaval, even if van Duin did not choose a psychological perspective(as he assumes in his preface), but a historical-anthropological one. Most of the violenceseems to have been committed not by socialists, but by plundering workers and returningsoldiers. The core of van Duin’s analysis is the question of whether diverse groups ofsocialists started to dominate these riots ideologically or if they better deserve the role ofmore or less helpless, established politicians who tried to pacify an anarchic situation.VanDuin’s answer is ambivalent but nonetheless still convincing.

The book contains detailed and wide-ranging argumentation and in my reaction Ioscillated between admiring an exciting reconstruction of revolutionary events andworking through extensive descriptions of newspaper articles and party documents. None-theless, questions remain unanswered.The first is prompted by his description (p. 172) ofanti-Jewish pogroms in the winter of 1918. I read that chapter first and later wonderedwhy—in his paragraphs concerning demography—he simply included the Bratislava Jewsin the German-speaking population.That seems also to affect his analysis of the Bratislavasocialists. It is rather strange to read a systematic comparison concerning ideological andpolitical standpoints of all Germans, Hungarians, Slovakians, and Czechs, but not to findany hint of separate Jewish positions.

Another question concerns the connections between the Bratislava riots and those a fewmonths later in Budapest. In Bratislava, as van Duin assumes, the riots had been domi-nated by Hungarian workers who feared the Czechoslovak occupation of their city andsuffered a lack of supplies during the breakdown of the Habsburg Empire. What interestsme is whether there were direct (organizational, personal) links between both violentoutbreaks, or whether there were separate riots that answered only to local circumstances,but had nothing to do with each other.With that question van Duin would have broken uphis local focus and embedded his analysis in a national, if not European context. I awaitprospective articles with impatience.

angela harreEuropean UniversityViadrina

Roland Wenzlhuemer, From coffee to tea cultivation in Ceylon, 1880–1900: an economic andsocial history (Leiden: Brill, 2008. Pp. xxii + 336. 11 figs. 6 maps. 49 tabs. ISBN9789004163614 Hbk. €106/$148)

Export-led development in the periphery is a familiar theme. This book studies theexperience of Ceylon as the country specialized in exports of plantation crops in thenineteenth century. The title does not prepare the reader for what is to come. The bookstarts with the transition from coffee to tea in Ceylon’s development as an export economy,but it is much more than the title suggests. It is about changing nature of the economy,politics, and society of Ceylon. It is about the entry of colonial capital, immigration oflabour, social and religious divides, and also how policies shaped infrastructure andeducation within this context.

The rise of coffee production in the middle of the nineteenth century paved the way toa transition from subsistence to a primary product-based export economy. This had theclassic features of export-led growth and the problems of uncertainty associated withmonoculture, development of infrastructure geared toward exports, and immigration inresponse to labour shortage on the plantations. It is a rich narrative of how the economyand society transformed over the next few decades.

Coffee production had involved both British planters and local peasants and bothresponded to the rising demand in the world market. The system came to the verge ofcollapse as a leaf disease destroyed plantations on the island. Faced with declining pro-ductivity and increased competition from other producing countries, the planters invested

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in crops such as cinchona until tea emerged as an alternative. The local conditions suitedthe cultivation of tea.While coffee plantations had coexisted with peasant cultivation, in thecase of tea, the need for capital per unit of labour was greater. The economies of scale inproduction made plantations the viable economic unit. The planter-based export systemmade way for an increasing role for joint-stock, sterling companies. These met the capitalrequirement of tea plantations in Ceylon and India and built up the infrastructure neededto supply a rising demand for black tea in the British market. The narrative stops in 1900and we do not get a picture of how the tea economy coped with the decline in prices afterthe First World War. It would be interesting to know how the British companies dealt withthe crisis of declining prices and over-production in the interwar years, given the differentorganizational structure of tea in comparison with coffee.

What happened to the subsistence economy? There is a very interesting discussion oftaxation on rice cultivation during the decline of coffee. Output was inadequate to meet thelocal demand. Productivity remained low. partly due to the cultivation methods and qualityof rice, but also due to lack of investment in irrigation. Here it was the familiar tension incolonial policy between investments in the railways versus irrigation. The book also hasinteresting chapters on the changing composition of the population, their demand foreducation and public goods, and how the colonial government dealt with these issues.Thesocial aspects of this period of transition are analysed and the reader has much to learn.The growth of the plantation sector created new elites. The British planters becameimportant players, but so did the local traders and intermediaries who participated in theexport. The underclass were the immigrant workers from India who worked first on thecoffee plantations and then in increasing numbers in tea.The religious divisions reinforcedthe social and political divisions in Ceylonese society. This is explored in the context ofexpenditure on education and the creation of an administrative class.

It is not clear why the author chooses 1900 as a cut-off point, except that this is theperiod of transition from coffee to tea. Many interesting issues are lost by choosing toignore development during the early twentieth century. The First World War marked animportant turning-point in the colonial economies. It led to the rise of new importsubstituting economic activities in different parts of the world. It led to realigning ofinterest groups. How Ceylon coped in this transition would be of much interest. The teacartel of the interwar years was an important development in the history of the tea industry.The role of the British companies in organizing the cartel and its effect on the industry inthe international context relate to the changes in colonial economies in this period.Thesedevelopments are, as indicated by the subtitle of the book, outside its scope, but given thatthe book is an economic and social history of Ceylon in the colonial period, it had thepotential go beyond this boundary.

bishnupriya guptaUniversity ofWarwick

Price Fishback, Robert Higgs, Gary D. Libecap, John Joseph Wallis, Stanley L. Engerman,Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Sumner J. La Croix, Robert A. Margo, Robert A. McGuire,Richard Sylla, Lee J. Alston, Joseph P. Ferrie, Mark Guglielmo, E. C. Pasour, Jr., RandalR. Rucker, and Werner Troesken, Government and the American economy: a new history(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 2007. Pp. xix + 613. 17 figs. 27 tabs.ISBN 9780226251271 Hbk. £58.50/$85; ISBN 9780226251288 Pbk. £24/$35)

The 17 chapters in this volume are all written by authorities, some of them top names.Thewhole span is covered, from colonial times to the recent past. Chapters are arranged bytheme, and some by period. Many are excellent, and none is less than competent.They arelong enough to provide detail, and short enough to sustain interest. No editor is named,

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but Fishback opens, concludes, and writes on the New Deal. Such is the centrality ofgovernment that the volume makes a good overall introduction to American economichistory. There is some internal tension between a justified pride in national achievement,and exasperation with politics, bureaucracy, and voters. Most bases are touched,and the cumulative effect is powerful. For all these virtues, however, it is not entirelysatisfying.

There is no single conceptual framework, and economic analysis (with some exceptions)is subdued. This may be an advantage: perhaps no single framework can currently coversuch diverse experiences. Several authors draw on public choice theory, particularly in theagenda-setting opening and concluding chapters. Starting with the Civil War, governmentexpenditures and revenues have grown persistently faster than market outputs, rising fromabout 4 per cent of GDP to more than a third. From its eighteenth-century role asrule-maker and umpire, government gradually became an active player, until, by thetwentieth century, it was thoroughly entangled with economy and society. This persistentexpansion presents a large analytical challenge. The public choice approach of severalauthors here is about the distribution of rents, not the creation of value. The implicitassumption is that markets are productive and governments not. A ‘ratchet effect’ isinvoked: crises and shocks jack up government activities, which cannot be forced downagain. Some chapters admit grudgingly that people have benefited, and that activities areworth preserving. Little indication is given as to why Americans have chosen to pursuetheir interests increasingly in political rather than economic markets. There are somesolemn tutorials on the virtues of property rights, but these are not entirely compelling.Slave owners invoked property rights, and the South maintained actively (as Lee Alstonand Joseph Ferrie show in a powerful chapter) a system of semi-serfdom for blacks(‘Paternalism’) that lasted until the mechanization of cotton. The protection of propertywas not just a matter of underpinning natural rights, but also involved coercion andviolence, the dispossession of Native Americans, military intervention in hundreds ofstrikes, and, more recently, the largest penal system in the world.The standard theories ofpublic goods and market failure are mentioned in passing, but are not given much work todo. The New Institutional Economics, which is premised on the possibility of marketfailure, is not utilized much. There is a reluctance to acknowledge the contribution ofpublic and social goods to productivity and well-being. When market counterfactuals areimplied, it is rarely in a form that is clear enough to criticize. No comparisons are madewith governments elsewhere, and there is no reference to Peter Lindert’s importantGrowing public (2004), which demonstrated the constructive role of governments, includ-ing the American one. However, if the volume leans a little to one side in current policydebates in the US, even a sceptical reader will still get good bearings.

By far the largest category of expenditure of American government today (all levelscombined) is on welfare, defined broadly: pensions, education, health, and housingaccount for almost 60 per cent of general government expenditure (an average of 57 percent from 1990 to 2007, according to the OECD).There is no easy way of finding this outfrom this book. Governments try to redress market outcomes and, arguably, to improveupon them, but there is no chapter devoted fully to what has become government’s corefunction. Alston and Ferrie, already mentioned, focus on the persisting Southern veto, noton welfare as such, nor is there any separate discussion of government’s effect on incomedistribution. Individual chapters treat welfare with considerable reservations, and Fishbackcalls government ‘predatory’. Of all interest groups, organized labour gets the shortestshrift.

American government is smaller proportionately than comparable ones elsewhere, buttries to do most of the same things, an exception to American exceptionalism. In 2010American government is larger than ever in peacetime, bloated by the need to bail out afinancial industry whose health is acclaimed prematurely in one chapter. Students and

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scholars who wish to study the rise of government’s economic role in the US would do wellto begin here, and will learn a great deal, but they will find that some of the most centralquestions have not been asked.

avner offerAll Souls College, Oxford

Lars Magnusson, Nation, state and the industrial revolution: the visible hand (London andNew York: Routledge, 2009. Pp. xi + 183. ISBN 9780415461771 Hbk. £75/$130)

The trend in modern economic history has been either to downplay the role of the state inthe onset of modern growth (see the work of Robert Allen, Nick Crafts, Joel Mokyr, andKen Pomeranz on the industrial revolution, for example) or to emphasize that the statefacilitated modern growth by getting out of the way and letting free markets operate (as inthe work of Douglass North). In this book, as the subtitle emphasizes, Magnusson seeks tostand against the triumph of this dull Anglo-Saxon orthodoxy, and to rehabilitate stateintervention as a key element in modern growth. Correctly, he points out, for example, thatthe US, the second great industrial power, industrialized under policies of strong protec-tion of domestic industry in the nineteenth century. Even Britain in the period of theindustrial revolution saw a significant increase in the size of government, mainly to fightwars, and this had a big effect on both industrial demand (to outfit navy ships), and on thecapital markets (through government debt). Belgium, the next industrializer after Britain,was aided in the 1820s by the interventionist policies of its king,Wilhelm I, who protecteddomestic industry from imports and supplied capital to it. Germany, he claims, did noteven have much of an experiment in 1830–70 in liberalism before the onset of fullinterventionist and protectionist policies in the late nineteenth century. France, which alsohad strong protectionist and interventionist policies, did not industrialize as rapidly.However, as Patrick O’Brien and Caglar Keyder showed in Economic growth in Britain andFrance, 1715–1914 (1978), French industrial productivity was actually high relative to thatof Britain in the nineteenth century, so that there is no sign that protectionism hurtindustry in this case.

This reviewer is sympathetic to Magnusson’s complaint that the free market is given toomuch credit by economists as a facilitator of growth, and that indeed economic growth wasassociated with a growing size and influence of government even in places such as Britain.Successful early industrializers such as the US and Germany were indeed often countriesthat were intervening actively in markets to promote favoured sectors (as also happenedlater in the case of Japan, and is now happening in China). However, this merely establishesthat Smithian free market policies were far less essential to growth than the reigningeconomic orthodoxy holds. The altogether different inference of the importance of stateintervention in facilitating growth made in the book is unpersuasive. In part this is becausethe author largely eschews the quantitative tools of modern economic history in favour ofa more traditional narrative and case study approach. There are descriptions of variousstate interventions and their assumed importance. While such methods can raise interest-ing hypotheses, they cannot show these hypotheses indeed hold. Magnusson thinks statepolicy essential to industrialization. The alternative argument that state policy was largelyunimportant, and instead growth occurred for other reasons, is just as compatible with thedata presented.With the methods he employs Magnusson can say nothing to disqualify thisalternative. Even if it is the case that the British government intervened much more inmarkets than the laissez-faire apostles will admit, that does not prove that laissez-fairewould be bad for growth. Indeed it does not even show that strict laissez-faire would notbe better for economic growth than various policies of government intervention. So in theend, by his choice of methods, Magnusson can offer only the most modest of claims aboutthe role of the state in economic growth.

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Reviewers normally do not comment on the value for money of texts, but in thesestraitened times for university library budgets it must be noted that £75 seems a rathersteep price for a slim volume of 183 pages. Further, with some judicious editing the fullcontent of Magnusson’s argument could have been delivered in a much shorter number ofpages. This volume is thus a Fiat priced like a Porsche.

gregory clarkUniversity of California Davis

Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz, The race between education and technology (Cam-bridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. vi + 488. 48 figs. 36 tabs.ISBN 9780674028678 Hbk. £25.95/$39.95)

The race between education and technology represents the culmination of decades of work onthe educational system and the supply of skilled labour in the US in the twentieth century.The book pulls together a tremendous amount of data, including new data from the early1900s. Goldin and Katz provide a detailed overview of the history of the US educationalsystem and the advantages of its egalitarianism relative to Europe. They identify anddemonstrate the effects of six virtues of US education, adding great value to the existingliterature: public funding, public provision, secular control, gender neutrality, open access,and a forgiving system. The compelling argument, that the early twentieth-century USideal of secondary general education (as opposed to specific or technical) for all meant thatthe US was well placed to take advantage of the increasing pace of technological innova-tion, mirrors existing theoretical work: ‘The twentieth century . . . was the century wheneducation became the dominant factor determining the wealth of nations and it was thecentury when America was the first to discover that notion’ (p. 34).

The book presents a coherent framework with which to estimate the impact of growthin the supply of skilled labour relative to technological growth. Goldin and Katz have theambitious goal of first explaining the declining wage inequality in the US until the end ofthe 1970s, and subsequent increases in inequality.The model considers the relative supplyof skilled labour and the relative demand driven by technological innovations and inter-national trade. If the growth in educated/skilled workers is greater than growth in tech-nology, then the relative wages of skilled to unskilled labour fall.This is exactly what Goldinand Katz argue for the period 1900–80. If, however, the growth in skilled workers is lessthan the pace of technological growth, inequality rises as the relative wage of skilled tounskilled labour rises. This is what they argue has happened since 1980.

Three points are noteworthy in this book. First, Goldin and Katz argue that technologyhas consistently been skill-biased throughout the twentieth century. Hence, the morerecent increases in inequality are not the consequence of newer technologies being moreskill-biased than earlier in the century. Second, they argue that while increases in the rateof technological innovation since the 1980s raised the relative demand for skilled labour,the slowing of the supply of educated workers (starting in the 1980s) contributed toincreased inequality in that period. Third, Goldin and Katz estimate the effects of immi-gration on the relative supply of skilled to unskilled labour throughout the century and findthat educational attainment of the native-born was the dominant force in determiningoverall relative labour supplies.

There are some limitations to this analysis. First, Goldin and Katz are generally agnostictowards the drivers of technological change.They mention that education, both directly (inproduction) and indirectly (through research), contributes to economic growth, but theydo not go much beyond this statement. They also spend much more energy documentingchanges in supply than changes in technology, although the arguments for the skill bias oftechnological changes in the early twentieth century are convincing. It is a perpetualproblem in all research on technology that technology is inherently difficult to measure in

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any direct way. In that sense, the path taken by the authors is reasonable. In the lastchapter, the authors try to provide policy recommendations to continue growth in educa-tion in the US. This chapter is the least clearly supported and stands in sharp contrast tothe rigour of the rest of the book. Finally, the book is focused entirely on skill gainedthrough education and does not consider skill gained through work experience (anotherdifficult thing to measure).

Goldin and Katz attribute the increase in wage inequality since the 1980s to decreasinggrowth in university education and estimate that this factor can account for 59 per cent outof the 90 per cent annual increase in the university wage premium from 1980 to 2005(p. 315). However, the authors do not provide a clear explanation for this fall.They discusspossible contributing factors such as decreasing growth of high school graduation rates,decreasing university completion rates, poor quality of US K-12 education, and possiblecapital market imperfections limiting access to university for the poor. However, the lasttwo factors existed prior to the 1970s and the first two are symptoms rather than causes ofthe general stagnation in educational attainment in the US. Moreover, university atten-dance again picked up in the mid-1980s, and the authors gloss over the strong increases intechnological innovations in the second half of the 1990s. It would also be interesting tocompare these findings with data from developing countries where the skill premium wasalso increasing strongly over this period, one of the main pieces of evidence put forward bythose who argue that increases in the rate of technological change drive the increase in theskill premium.

Overall, Goldin and Katz have provided a great wealth of information and analysis.Theirbook is of great value to economists, historians, and educators.

michelle connollyDuke University

John Richard Edwards and Stephen P. Walker, eds., The Routledge companion to accountinghistory (London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Pp. xvii + 619. 2 figs. 11 tabs. ISBN9780415410946 Hbk. £125/$255)

Accounting history must have been one of the most dynamic branches of history in the last20 or 30 years, albeit one somewhat divorced from the mainstream discipline. It emergedas an identifiable sub-discipline nearly 40 years ago when the Academy of AccountingHistorians was formed in America in 1973, and it now boasts three specialist journals: thefirst published in the US in 1974, the second in the UK in 1990, and a third in Australiain 1996. However, accounting history is more a branch of accounting than it is a branchof history. Its practitioners’ articles are often accepted by the leading accountancy journals,by a long way outnumbering those taken by business or economic history journals. Sincethere are no departments of accounting history anywhere in the world, and very fewuniversity courses in accounting history, accounting historians rarely teach their subject.About two-thirds of the 37 contributors to this volume are qualified professional accoun-tants who, with one or two exceptions, all earn their living teaching accountancy, nothistory. It would be interesting to know why so many have migrated into history, andwhether comparable professions like law and medicine had a similar trajectory. Certainlymy guess would be that the older professions would struggle to put together such animpressive array of historical talent as have been assembled here by the editors.

An early chapter by the editors also highlights other characteristics of the sub-discipline.It is male and Anglo-American dominated, and almost entirely Anglophone in output. It alsohas, as a neophyte in the history world, what Walker calls ‘an introverted concern withpublication patterns’ (p. 15), with numerous studies simply counting articles or analysingtrends in its publications. Research tends to be presented in article rather than book form.Also, while there are those content to write traditional archive-based narrative history,

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perhaps most accounting historians self-consciously feel the need to apply some theory totheir writing. Indeed, in the past there has been something of a schism between thetraditionalist storytellers like Tom Tyson and the so-called new accounting or ‘critical’history of marxist historians like Rob Bryer, looking at accounting’s role in the rise ofcapitalism, or the post-modernist approach of Keith Hoskin and Richard Macve on the roleof cost accounting in the control of labour. Interestingly, the index to this book reveals thatFoucault gets 24 mentions; Marx 16; Chandler 13;Weber 6; neo-classical economics 3.

The editors have successfully gathered together in 28 chapters and 619 pages whatappear to be the leading exponents in a relatively comprehensive coverage of the surpris-ingly diverse topics that go under the banner of accounting history.The contributors wereasked to produce a literature survey on each subject and point in the direction of furtherresearch, and by and large they have carried out these tasks successfully. It is not possibleto go through or even name the topics and their authors here, but they include, forexample, the obvious treatments of accounting theory and practice, the professionalizationof accounting, cost accounting, and the history of the many accounting scandals. Eco-nomic and business historians might be particularly interested in the chapters on ‘Capi-talism’ including the well-known Sombart thesis of the role of double-entry bookkeepingin its rise, or the controversy which Sydney Pollard caused among accounting historians bythe dim view he took of management accounting in the industrial revolution period.

This is not to say that there are no problems, which are likely to occur where, withpresumably no refereeing procedure, once having invited the contributors the editors aremore or less stuck with what comes back. However, there are one or two general commentswhich might be laid at the door of the editors. While they state the book’s aim as also‘catching the attention and engaging with a wider audience’, many of the contributorsassume a level of knowledge probably not possessed by the average non-accountant. Jargonsuch as ‘standard costing/budgeting’ ‘charge and discharge accounting’, ‘conceptual frame-works’, ‘mark to market accounting’, or ‘ABC’ might have been given one-sentencedefinitions in the text or in a glossary. Also, while there are chapters on race, religion, andtaxation, there is no mention of accountants as business managers or consultants; theprofessional bodies get short shrift, while the chapter on regulation should at least havementioned the Sarbanes Oxley legislation. On the other hand, while the chapter onfinancial institutions gives a good summary of the controversies among economic histori-ans surrounding banks and the stock market, it contains no accounting history.

The most surprising inclusion is a post-modernist effort entitled ‘Emancipation’.Without feeling the need to define emancipation, or how anyone would know whether theyhad been emancipated or not, the writers seem to argue that accounting can both produceand hinder it since ‘Emancipation is more than the overthrow of a single force. A myriad(mutable) emancipatory interests, some marginalized and others repressed in acts assumedto be emancipatory, have to be aligned.We must reflexively acknowledge our situated selvesto avoid incompatible logical claims such as assuming that a pure emancipatory act mayemerge from a problematic context.This requires a cautious pragmatism and more modestepistemology and eschatology’ (pp. 486–7). So there you have it; there is more to account-ing history than first meets the eye.

derek matthewsCardiff Business School

Caroline A. Williams, ed., Bridging the early modern Atlantic world: people, products, andpractices on the move (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Pp. xiv + 261. 6 figs. ISBN 9780754666813Hbk. £55/$99.95)

This volume arises from a Colston Research Society symposium held at the Universityof Bristol in September 2005. Its 10 essays offer specialized research findings on the

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movement of people, commodities, and ideas in the Atlantic world between 1500 andc.1830. Unlike most similar volumes, the book does not concentrate on a particularnational sector of the Atlantic world. Instead, it includes studies that offer transnationalcomparisons and contrasts between the four continents that bordered on the Atlantic.The essays make a case for further interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work on whatmight be termed Atlantic cosmopolitanism. The specialized topics covered are the con-sumption of codfish in sixteenth-century France; the fortunes of English merchants inearly sixteenth-century Seville; Sephardic Jews in the English West Indies; the status ofTupi Indians in Dutch Brazil; seventeenth-century Scots venturers in Rotterdam andDarien, Panama; contacts between the Hueda and European slave traders in the Bightof Benin; female agency and religious practice in seventeenth-century Portuguese com-munities on the Upper Guinea Coast; and travellers in the Iberian Atlantic worlds in theeighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The editor’s introduction offers a useful précisof the individual chapters, and argues for further studies based on the interculturalpenetration of European empires in the Atlantic world by the various people who cametogether in that transnational space.

As a group of essays, characteristics familiar to all edited volumes are apparent: whilewritten conscientiously and clearly, contributions appear to have been left entirely toindividual authors with only loose connections among the essays; the methodologicalapproaches are varied; and there is little cross-referencing between chapters.Two essays onScots ventures illustrate the latter point. Douglas Catterall’s contribution on the 300–400Scots who settled in Rotterdam between 1630 and 1660 shows how they adopted a Britishimperial infrastructure for their own purposes in a non-British setting. He also charts thecontribution of these Scots to colonial projects in Virginia and the West Indies. MarkHorton’s discussion of the pioneer Scots colony in Darien deploys archaeological evidenceto show that the positioning of fortifications there contributed to the demise of thatventure.These chapters are insightful and well researched, but neither the authors nor theeditor bring together these minor ventures to offer conclusions about the role of the Scotsoverseas diaspora in the seventeenth century.

The least convincing contribution is Laurier Turgeon’s analysis of French codconsumption—the only chapter, despite the book’s subtitle, that deals directly with prod-ucts.This essay is spoilt by banal sentences such as ‘what is eaten is incorporated into thebody and becomes an integral and material part of the self ’ (p. 35). The author suggeststhat ‘codfish was sought after and widely consumed because it satisfied a French longingfor space and a desire to consume the New land’ (p. 45). A more convincing explanationwould surely lie in the demand for non-meat products in a predominantly Catholic countryduring Lent in particular and the comparative prices of other sources of protein. Turgeonraises this line of interpretation only to dismiss it—incorrectly, in my opinion.There is noattempt to compare and contrast French cod consumption with the taste for saltedbacalhau in Portugal. Such a comparison would have served the book’s transnational remit.

More convincing essays in the book show how groups of people negotiated and adaptedto inter-cultural contact in the Atlantic world with others of diverse age, race, status, andbackground. Thus, Kenneth Kelly shows that the Hueda people exercised considerableagency over the physical creation of European trading lodges at Savi, in the Bight of Benin,where archaeological evidence indicates that they ‘manipulated the European presence totheir distinct advantage’ (p. 170). Mark Meuwese argues that, thoughTupi Indians and theDutch were allies in the struggle against the Iberian powers in South America, the Tupithought the alliance was a meeting of equals whereas the Dutch considered the Indians asculturally and politically inferior. Why were Africans in the Bight of Benin able to dictatethe terms of the European presence more successfully than native people were able tochallenge European officials and settlers in Brazil? The book does not answer this questioneven though consideration of this and other comparative issues would have broadened its

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academic appeal. As it stands, the strength of the volume lies in its discrete researchconclusions rather than in broader transnational similarities and differences.

kenneth morganBrunel University

Jonathan Hart, Empires and colonies (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2008.Pp. ix + 387. ISBN 9780745626147 Hbk. £55/€77; ISBN 9780745626147 Pbk.£18.99/$27.95)

Hart’s Empires and colonies offers a broad overview of the European seaborne empires fromearly Portuguese and Spanish oceanic probings in the fifteenth century to the collapse ofthe main remaining European colonial systems at the end of the twentieth. Along the way,indeed, Hart ranges more widely still, with allusions to the general configuration of globalgeopolitics across the centuries, to the rise and fall of land-based empires like the Russian,Ottoman, and short-lived Nazi ones, and even to the sources of human cruelty and theprospects for a kindlier future world.

Both the sheer range and ambition of this work, and much in Hart’s previous career,hold out great promise. With a background initially in literary studies, he has written twobooks on early colonial cultural representations of the New World, and more recently theboldly transdisciplinary Contesting empires: opposition, promotion and slavery (2005), as wellas being a widely published poet. His web pages describe his research interests as being in‘Comparative history; cultural history; comparative Canadian and American studies; legalfictions and history; renaissance studies; the Atlantic world; relation between history andliterature; visual representations of the NewWorld etc.; drama; poetry; literary and culturaltheory; colonialism and postcolonialism’.This is as catholic and indeed polymathic a listingas one could imagine. A study of comparative colonial history which could bring all thatfully to bear on its subject would be exciting indeed.

It must be said, however, that Empires and colonies gravely disappoints the expectationsthus raised. In a field which has, pleasingly, recently again become fairly crowded withcomparative and conceptual studies of empire—some, like Hart’s, focusing on the westernEuropean seaborne systems, some embracing also other imperial systems—there is notenough to make this book stand out from that swelling crowd. It is true, as Hart suggestsin his preface, that combining economic, political, and military history with emphases andperspectives derived from the ‘cultural turn’ poses a great challenge to which rather fewhistorians can rise successfully. True, too, that a ‘focus on alternative voices, religion andhuman rights’ which can ‘juxtapose the personal and cultural with the impersonal andlarger economic forces that underpin military and economic power’ (pp. vii–viii) mightoffer fresh perspectives on empire. Yet a host of historians, cultural critics, historicalanthropologists and geographers, and others have for some time now been attempting justthat in many different ways and contexts.This book’s relative dearth of reference to recentscholarship in many relevant fields—especially when set against Hart’s sometimes surpris-ing reliance on some very old works of varying quality—is here a significant handicap. Itseems strikingly inadequate to refer, as he does, vaguely and rather dismissively at onepoint to ‘a vast field of postmodern, postcolonial and other recent theories’ on which he has‘refrained from creating a vast list’ (p. 301) in his endnotes; while elsewhere ‘vast lists’ ofpotentially relevant works are offered, as for instance on decolonization.These lists some-times seem almost haphazard in their mingling of old and new, academic and polemical,and of research monographs with synthesizing overviews.

The earlier chapters, addressing colonial expansion from the fifteenth to eighteenthcenturies, mainly in the Americas, are the strongest. Here Hart has a surer command of hismaterial, and offers both a clearer and a more reliable overview, than when dealing with the

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more recent past. His sections on the ‘high imperialism’ of the era 1830–1914, on ensuingEuropean crisis and breakdown, the ends of empires and their aftermaths, are by contrastoften loosely constructed, apparently uncertain in their focus (often drifting from a specificattention to overseas empires to very broad, indeed sweeping, claims about world historyin general), and occasionally questionable in their empirical claims. At worst, Hart alter-nates between a breathless narrative of events (in which sometimes sheer over-compressionmay induce a confusing or unreliable impression of their sequence) with broad declarationsabout their causes or significance, which may strike the unsympathetic reader as merelycommonplace, hortatory, or sententious. There is also a disconcerting amount of repeti-tion, including that of frankly clichéd quotations from Dickens about ‘the best of times’ andfrom Wordsworth about man’s inhumanity. More rigorous editing, especially of the laterchapters, might surely have moderated some of these tendencies, and healed or at leastcamouflaged the more severe flaws in this admirably ambitious but notably uneven book.

stephen howeUniversity of Bristol

Bernard Finn and Daqing Yang, eds., Communications under the seas: the evolving cablenetwork and its implications (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009. Pp. lvii + 303. 2 illus.5 maps. ISBN 9780262012867 Hbk. £24.95/$40)

This interesting collection of 12 essays is the published fruit of a two-day symposium inApril 2002 sponsored by the Dibner Institute for the History of Science andTechnology inCambridge, Massachusetts. Its main concern is with the use of undersea cables since the1850s for point-to-point communication, predominantly telegraphic and not broadcast.The contributions are organized into three main sections. The first on the technologicaldevelopment of submarine cable communication has contributions by Finn, JonathanWinkler, and Jeff Hecht and provides a stimulating and informed discussion of the periodfrom the 1850s to the present. The contributors (Jorma Ahvenainen, Robert Boyce, KurtJacobsen, and Pascal Griset) to the second section of the book, on managing the networks,examine the interactions between governments and private companies in the process ofestablishing a viable communications network with global reach, while the third section(with papers by Daniel Headrick, David Nickles, andYang) analyses the influence of cablesand cable companies on government activities.The book concludes with a chapter by PeterHugill on the geopolitical implications of communication under the seas.

The principal theme of the book is the sheer persistent survival of the submarine cablefrom its beginnings in the 1850s as a length of solid copper wire to its current form as afibre optic cable.This was despite, but also arguably partly because of, the development ofsuch rival forms of communication as shortwave radio and satellites. Central to its survivalhas been technological development, but this development has often been spurred bycompetitive threat from newer technologies.The early development of the industry was theresult of a mix of happy coincidence and scientific intelligence.The happy coincidence wasthat steam ships for laying cable and gutta-percha for insulating it became available atroughly the same time. The insulating properties of gutta-percha, a gum from a tree inMalaysia, were determined by Werner Siemens in 1846 and by Michael Faraday in 1848,although in warmer seas, where insects bored into the gutta-percha, copper or brasssheathings were used from 1879. Steam ships were vital for laying cable in a straight lineat a constant speed, something which sail was unable to do, although sailing ships weresometimes used to carry the many tons of coiled cable.

Prominent among the scientists contributing to the technological development of theindustry wasWilliamThomson, later Lord Kelvin. Not only didThomson calculate how topick broken cable off the ocean floor, but crucially his mirror galvanometer and later

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siphon recorder provided essential improved and permanent records of received commu-nications.Thomson’s inventions based on the principle of threads attached to a moving coilwere to form the basis of future developments in receiver technology. Indeed, the industryseems to have engaged in fundamental technical research only when forced to do so. In itsearly days the industry paid little attention to research and development, and some of themost important breakthroughs spun out of military research during world wars. One suchwas the military development of more reliable vacuum tubes during the SecondWorldWarwhich provided the basis for repeaters and transatlantic telephone cables. The first cableTAT-1 in 1956 supplied 48 times the best message rate of the fastest prewar cable, orroughly six times the total capacity of all prewar cable. It was followed numerically byTAT-2 (1959),TAT-3 (1963), and TAT-4 (1965), and so on until TAT-8 in 1988. Cruciallythis rate of development was too fast to allow satellites to overwhelm cable. By 1988 thenext class of cables had arrived to meet the satellite challenge, and fibre optic cables nowreplaced the coaxial cables of the previous 30 years. That technological developmentshould have been at one and the same time so crucial to the industry’s ability to survivecompetition and yet only seriously undertaken by the industry when faced by competition,points to the protection enjoyed by an industry able to exploit its sunk costs, influencewithin government, and strategic importance.

This is a well-written and stimulating collection of essays which is suitable for under-graduate reading lists while also containing much to interest academic researchers.That itis no more than the sum of its parts reflects the strength of the individual contributions andthe fact that many potential themes remain embedded in those chapters. It might havebeen interesting to have asked an economist and a scientist to read the papers and for eachto have written a short reflective commentary.Yet this want is itself reflective of the worthand interest of this book which could happily be bought both for the university library andfor the private study.

martin chickUniversity of Edinburgh

Steven G. Medema, The hesitant hand: taming self-interest in the history of economic ideas(Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009. Pp. xiii + 230. 1 tab. ISBN9780691122960 Hbk. £24.95/$35)

This is an interesting and well-written book. Its theme is the elaboration and developmentof the notion of an invisible hand as first postulated by Adam Smith, and as amended, inthe first instance, by J. S. Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and Arthur Pigou, through their doctrineof externalities. More recently, analysis of the role of government by the Chicago school(especially by Ronald Coase) and by public choice economists whose contributions owemuch to nineteenth-century European debates on the topic in Germany and Italy, areexamined as part of this story. All of these perspectives are said, in one way or another, tohave contributed to the taming of Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ concept and to transforming itto the ‘hesitant hand’ of the title of this book.

The argument proceeds through seven chapters together with a brief epilogue andprologue. Chapter 1 comments on the creation of the invisible hand by Smith, mentioninghis few predecessors on the subject, largely drawn from France. Chapter 2 examines theevolution of market failure theory and the harnessing of self-interest. It is largely devotedto the views of Mill and Sidgwick, the key authors in this area. Chapter 3 looks at ArthurMarshall, Pigou, and their followers—who converted competition’s inability to achievespecific social objectives into the alternative watchword, ‘Let the State be up anddoing!’—in further ‘marginalizing the market’. Chapter 4 reviews the marginalist expla-nations of government functions as analysed by nineteenth-century Italians, Germans, and

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Austrians, and, most strikingly, by KnutWicksell. Chapter 5 discusses the challenge to thistradition thrown up through Coase’s very influential work, particularly on the implicationsof social cost. Chapter 6 examines a second strand in the marginalizing of governmentthrough public choice analysis, a development originating from the Italian/Wickselliantradition examined in chapter 4. Chapter 7 discusses the ‘Coase theorem’ that costlessbargaining will ensure efficient resolution of externality problems, and the evolution of lawand economics as the Chicago’s school’s response to the Pigovian treatment of the‘invisible hand’. Within 200 tightly-argued pages, Medema thereby sketches elegantly thefascinating saga of how the ‘invisible hand’, like so many economic constructs, lost itsgenerality and became at best a somewhat ‘hesitant hand’. What this implies for GeorgeStigler’s famous 1976 remark, made on the occasion of the bicentenary of the Wealth ofNations, that Smith is alive and well and living at the University of Chicago, is notcompletely clear to me. Space prevents detailed discussion of the ins and outs of thisargument. It does, however, permit attention to be drawn to a major highlight, and someminor omissions, in this fascinating book.

For me, one of these highlights is undoubtedly Medema’s insightful dichotomizing ofPigou into the author of Wealth and welfare (Economics of welfare from 1920) who is a keyplayer in the main developments of this story, and the quite different Pigou who in early1935 gave six lectures at London University on current issues, described and published byhim as Economics in practice. Lecture V on ‘State action and laissez-faire’ is of specialrelevance to developing the qualities of this variant of Pigou ‘the welfare economist’,because as Pigou (1935, p. 109, his italics) himself indicated, it may ‘have been snappier tocall it State Action versus Laisser-faire’.This dichotomy in Pigou’s work also emphasizes forme how much we need a truly comprehensive study of the evolution of Pigou’s economics,a task unfortunately not easily accomplished, given its magnitude and complexity.

This leaves room only for noting two small omissions. In chapter 1 (notably p. 31, n. 25)I was rather surprised to see no mention of Turgot, who in the context of his ‘Eloge deGournay’ (1759) referred to the importance of ‘laissez-nous faire’, there attributing thephrase to François Le Gendre. Turgot himself is of course strongly associated withadvocating reforms for reducing state intervention in economic activity, more specificallyin advocating internal free trade in grain, the right to charge interest on loans, and abolitionof compulsory state trade marking of manufactured products. In the nineteenth century,Turgot was hailed frequently as the ‘free trader’ and economic liberal par excellence, whopreached the maxim that the less government there is, the more progress there is ineconomic life. Another minor omission, if that is the right word in this context, is thelimited space devoted (pp. 192–4) to the development of ‘imperialist’ implications ofRobbins’s 1934 definition of economics, as one of its various ‘unintended consequences’.This is an excellent book on an important topic, the history of which is fascinating.

peter groenewegenUniversity of Sydney

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A lost frontier revealed: regional separation in the east midlands – By Alan Fox