This paper re-examines the changing structure of Canadian agriculture over the period between Confederation and the beginning of the “wheat boom.” A pattern of changes is found that differs in some respects from the long-received accounts. The shift from wheat to mixed farming was accomplished by an earlier date than is usually supposed, and domestic demand is due more emphasis, relative to export demand, than it is usually given.

Adolf Hitler's position in the economic life of his days has been the object of ardent discussions from his early beginnings down to the present time. The Marxist and leftist view which sees in the Führer one of the most outstanding servants of German monopoly capitalism has been contested not only by Hitler's own followers but, to an even greater extent, by the spokesmen and legal representatives of the German industrial circles, who wished to disclaim any responsibility for the disastrous events of that period. A scientific investigation of this problem is the more imperative, since die preponderant role played by socioeconomic factors in the rise of the Führer is quite obvious. A leader of an insignificant little group who distinguished himself from the many antiproletarian dictator candidates of his time mainly by his qualities as a demagogue, rooted in his neurotic reaction to the experience of social decline, Hitler in 1923 suffered a complete political fiasco, because his following was too small. While times of full employment and economic boom were unfavorable for his party, his movement benefited greatly from periods of depression, such as die one that followed the stabilization of the mark in 1923, and especially from the big depression after 1929. This depression not only caused the ruined masses of the German middle class to follow a leader who knew how to fight his social decline by donning a field-grey uniform but it also made some big German producers more eager than before to listen to a man who seemed to be conquering a disaster that had been caused, to a large extent, by their own rationalization policy.

It is impossible to summarize and critique this book adequately in a short review. Its author is a leading historian of economic thought, skilled in many disciplines, imaginative and penetrating in analysis, and possessed of knowledge, brilliance, and pixie-like cynicism. His More Heat than Light (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989) traced the origins of twentieth-century economics to a mimicking of nineteenth-century physics and mathematics in order to achieve the status of “science.” This book traces the social construction of high theory in economics during World War II and the Cold War to the influence of John von Neumann's general theory of automata and the military funding of basic economic science. Like his earlier book, this is history of economics on a massively ambitious scale—a theory of the entire postwar period.

Constantine J. Spiliotes makes a substantial new contribution to the literature on presidential decision making. Spiliotes seeks to bring together two largely separate literatures: presidential studies and rational choice theory. This is a formidable task: Economists and rational-choice political scientists typically view traditional presidential studies as excessively anecdotal for the purpose of establishing generally applicable theories, and presidential-studies scholars typically view rational-choice models as excessively abstract and parsimonious for the purpose of understanding the complexities of the presidency.

The 1990s, particularly the last half of the decade, presented a special challenge to the conventional wisdom. Few would have asserted that unemployment could be pushed much below (or possibly even to) 5.5 or 6.0 percent without an unacceptable acceleration in the rate of price inflation. This consensus came from the acceptance of the Phillips curve and the NAIRU (nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment), and so ingrained was this orthodoxy that most policymakers accepted it. Is the NAIRU dead?

The Russell Sage Foundation and the Century Foundation believed that the 1990s required a closer examination to see what we could learn from this seemingly unusual period. They asked Robert Solow and Alan Krueger to assemble the set of topics and authors that resulted in this volume. The book is divided into four parts.

The existing literature on the economy of medieval England views the practice of convertible husbandry as a more efficient alternative to regular common fields. The article challenges this view by measuring the productivities of the systems, which are found to be approximately equivalent. In interpreting this finding, it is suggested that edaphic conditions and wrongful managerial practices account for the poor performance of convertible husbandry during the Middle Ages, whereas the greater productivity achieved by the system in the early modern period is attributed to the introduction of fodder legumes, such as clover, which were absent in previous centuries.

As Tirthankar Roy explains in his preface, this book “aims to be no more than an updated and shorter version of the Cambridge Economic History of India, Vol. II” (henceforth CEHI), one that will provide an accessible textbook on the economic history of colonial India for the compulsory course in the subject in most Indian universities. In this task he has been successful. Instead of ploughing through the detailed chapters of the otherwise indispensable CEHI, students—and their teachers—now have a useful educational aid which summarizes the latest research by economic historians of India.

This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of the expansion of mass schooling and the long-term legacy of educational institutions. Based on a new provincial-level dataset for Italy in the period 1861–1911, we argue that different models of schooling provision adopted by the different pre-unification polities influenced primary-education organizations across macro-regions up to WWI. As a result, school access and the capability to generate literacy given current rates of enrollment differed substantially, with the Northern regions aiming to increase schooling for all, while the Center and the South implemented a more elitist model.

This book is a translation of the first volume of a trilogy entitled History of the Development of Chinese Capitalism published between 1985 and 1993 by a team of researchers at the Institute of Economics of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. It focuses on the emergence of what Chinese historians have called “embryonic capitalism” (often translated more literally as “the sprouts of capitalism”) prior to the Opium War (1840–1842), which in Chinese historiography marks the beginning of China's modern era. The authors utilize an explicitly Marxian analysis to distinguish embryonic capitalism as a distinct phase of economic development. Many Western scholars have begun to define the period 1500–1800 as China's early modern era, finding in the emergence of free labor markets, regional specialization in agriculture and handicraft production, rural market integration, the growing autonomy of merchant groups, and increased foreign trade patterns of socioeconomic change comparable to contemporary developments in Europe. The authors of this study, in contrast, distance themselves from the hypothesis, once prevalent among Chinese historians, that China during this period was developing a capitalist economy along lines similar to Europe. Yet at the same time they challenge the tendency to view the late imperial economy as homeostatic, a characterization that gained considerable currency among Chinese historians during the 1980s, most notably in the “super-stability” hypothesis advanced by Jin Guantao and Liu Qingfeng in their 1983 book Prosperity and Crisis: The Super-Stable Structure of China's Feudal Society (Changsha: Renmin chubanshe). The introduction by Chris Bramall and Peter Nolan provides non-specialists with a useful guide to the historiographical background of this book and its methodological approach; but their review of alternative interpretations of the late imperial Chinese economy, which only considers scholarship published up to the mid-1980s, is outdated.