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 The twenty-seventh Congress repealed the act almost as quickly as it had enacted it.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

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

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

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

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

Environmental history could be approached using the mental models of economists. The six essays in this volume eschew a disciplinary for an interdisciplinary approach and an ambition “to construct a comprehensive history of interaction between nature and culture” (p. 147).

There is no hoarier chestnut of financial history than the Tulip Mania, and hard on its heels are the stories of the infamous South Sea Bubble and the contemporaneous financial scheme of John Law. The first of these is part of the historical lexicon even of captains of industry and journalists, and has endured endless repetition, the tale usually based on Charles Mackay's highly embellished 1841 retelling (Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. London: R. Bentley). The speculative bubbles of 1720 are more complex and better researched phenomena, which accounts, perhaps, for their less frequent invocations by laymen. Scholars, on the other hand, do not hesitate to misinterpret these events.

The dust-jacket blurbs use “stunning,” “eloquent,” “wholly original,” and “first-rate” to describe the author and this work, and the praise is apt. Mike Davis examines the relationships among (a) late-nineteenth-century famines in much of what we now call the “Third World,” (b) the climatic effect known as ENSO (El Niño–Southern Oscillation), (c) Western imperialism, and (d) the twentieth-century gap between the wealthiest and poorest countries in the world. Davis teases out the causal linkages among them, painting a new picture of the elements that went into “the making of the Third World.” His thesis is that the late-nineteenth-century globe-spanning droughts in India, China, Africa, South America, and Southeast Asia were precipitated by El Niño, but they became massive famines—killing 30 to 50 million people—because of a London-centered international capitalism. The famines in turn provided imperialists with an opportunity for further territorial aggrandizement. The Third World thus resulted from a conjuncture of natural, political, and socioeconomic processes.

For years to come historians of economic thought, economic historians, and, most importantly, Adam Smith scholars will all be indebted to Professor Cheng-chung Lai for this unique contribution to our collective understanding of the spread of economic ideas. In the volume under review, Lai has assembled a very compelling set of writings that advance our understanding of the spread of Smith's ideas beyond the Anglophone world. This volume includes a variety of sources, some translated specifically for it, including original prefaces or forwards to several translations, a few now-classic essays on the spread of Smithian ideas, and a number of articles by contemporary Smith scholars. Collectively, these 29 essays provide a remarkable insight into the reception accorded Smith's ideas in ten nations.