Northern Spain Between the Iberian and the Atlantic Worlds: Trade and Regional Specialisation, 1550–1650

Peasants, Productivity, and Profit in the Open Fields of England: A Study of Economic and Social Development

New World Order: The Emergence of an International Monetary System, 1850 to 1913

The Economics of Cotton Harvest Mechanization in the United States, 1920–1970

Shattered Rails, Ruined Credit: Financial Fragility and Railroad Operations in the Great Depression

Real Estate Values and the Location of Economic Activity: A Case Study of the Urban Form of Cleveland, 1915–1980

Comments on Grafe, Karakacili, and Meissner

Tractors, Trains, and Trolleys: Comments on Grove, Schiffman, and Smith

This volume consists of papers presented at a 1996 conference. Its professed remit, to contribute an internationally and chronologically wide-ranging discussion on the nature of urban decline across Europe from Roman to Reformation times, raises high expectations. And the book does indeed embrace many parts of Europe and includes some extremely useful regional overviews. Especially notable are Roger White's summary reinterpretation of possible archaeological continuities into post-Roman times at the Roman city-site at Wroxeter in England; a valuable discussion of the changing fortunes of the civitas capitals of late antique Gaul by S. T. Loseby; an illuminating tour d'horizon of the cities of the central Danube region between 100 and 1600 provided by Peter Csendes; and, in the most distinguished essay of the volume, an original and deeply considered discussion of the interconnections between decolonization and urban change in Ireland between 1300 and 1550 by its leading medieval urban historian, Howard Clarke.

This book reproduces, in expanded form, 19 papers presented at a conference held in Venice in 1996 on the subject of silk in Italy from the Middle Ages through the seventeenth century. The conference brought together a diverse group of scholars who addressed a broad range of topics: from technology to folklore, to the use of silk fabrics as markers of status, to the role of various social groups in the growth of the silk industry, and, above all, to the rise of the silk industry as a leading component of the Italian economy. All the papers are the work of distinguished specialists in their respective fields of expertise, and they all embody fresh evidence culled from archival or archeological sources. Students of economic history will be especially interested in the 12 contributions that approach the subject from an economic perspective, and it is on these that this review will focus, however briefly.

For a decade, thanks to the works of Heinz Schilling (Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1991) and Andrew Pettegree (Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism. Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), we have known about the extensive network of poor relief that characterized Emden during the second half of the sixteenth century, a time when the town's importance for Reformed Protestant refugees from the Netherlands proved so paramount. This book, however, provides the first detailed analysis of how this wide-ranging system of social welfare came into existence and how it operated. Timothy Fehler starts his story before the Reformation, with a survey of late-medieval charity in Emden, before dealing with the system poor relief that was introduced in the period immediately after the city was officially reformed in 1529. This was clearly a Reformation from the top, introduced by Count Enno II along Lutheran lines and managed by Lutheran preachers imported from Bremen. Despite confiscating most goods and income belonging to the Catholic Church, and despite providing general instructions for the financing of a system of poor relief in East Frisia and Emden in his Protestant Church Ordinance of 1529, Count Enno did not provide any funds for the poor from his secularization of church properties; nor did he introduce a common chest, normally a significant part of Lutheran social reforms. It was simply left to lay parish officials, as supervisors of the poor, to collect from their fellow citizens what they considered necessary. Not surprisingly, many of the medieval Catholic institutions (such as the Franciscans) and a number of confraternities (such as the St. Clement's Shippers Brotherhood) continued to play a significant part in providing relief for the city's poor for decades after the Reformation.

Historians of the Discoveries and of medieval Iberia have long anticipated this study of Henry the Navigator. The result has been well worth the wait. Peter Russell is universally acknowledged as one of the foremost scholars on late medieval Portugal. This gracefully written work is a major achievement reflecting a lifetime of historical inquiry; that he is now eighty-two makes this exceptional work even more remarkable. In the English-speaking world, Henry of Avis (1394–1460) is easily the most recognizable figure in Portuguese history. High-school and college texts laud Henry and his “school of Sagres” as the indispensable force behind Western exploration of the South Atlantic prior to the rounding of the Cape of Good Hope and Columbus's landfall. Perhaps Russell's most useful contribution for general readers is that, by demolishing the various myths surrounding Henry, he may finally hasten their exit from future textbooks.

SESSION 1: PLENARY THE FEDERAL RESERVE AND THE FINANCIAL MARKETS

SESSION 2A: THE CULTURAL FRAMEWORK FOR MARKETS

SESSION 2B: CRISES IN HISTORY

SESSION 2C: EARLY U.S. FINANCIAL EVOLUTION

SESSION 3A: THE BIG PICTURE 1

SESSION 3B: MEDIEVAL AFFAIRS

SESSION 3C: THE GOLD STANDARD

SESSION 4A: THE GREAT DEPRESSION

SESSION 4B: MACRO HISTORY

SESSION 4C: COLONIAL EXPERIENCES

SESSION 5A: THE BIG PICTURE 2

SESSION 5B: THE ROLE OF EQUITY MARKETS

SESSION 5C: FINANCE AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

SESSION 6: PLENARY BUBBLE, BUBBLE, TOIL, AND TROUBLE?: THE ROLE OF FUNDAMENTALS IN FINANCIAL MARKETS

SESSION 7A: THE ROLE OF BANKING SYSTEMS

SESSION 7B: THE TEXTILE INDUSTRY

SESSION 8A: FINANCE IN COLONIAL BRITISH NORTH AMERICA

SESSION 8B: THE CHANGING ASPECTS OF LAND IN THE UNITED STATES

The volume collects the revised proceedings of a conference held in 1994 to discuss Robert Brenner's views on the “transition from feudalism to capitalism” in the Low Coun-tries c.1350–1550, a topic that was largely ignored by the original “Brenner debate” published in Past and Present between 1976 and 1982. The 1994 papers are topped and tailed by a substantial editorial introduction and by additional essays by the editors, Jan de Vries, and Brenner himself.

Liquidity, Contagion, and the Founding of the Federal Reserve System, By JON MOEN, University of Mississippi, and ELLIS TALLMAN, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta

Central Banking Policy in Eastern Europe: Experience from the Interwar Years, By KIRSTEN WANDSCHNEIDER, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Thank God for a Ship, By MICHAEL WEISEL, North Carolina State University

Social history isn't what it used to be. Over the last several decades, the old concern with the macro and the social, inspired by Marxism and the Annales school, has gradually given way to a focus on the micro and the cultural. When contemporary historians study the social, they usually do so at the micro level, focusing on particular cities or villages. And when they turn their attention to the macro level, they generally view it through a cultural lens, which throws language and symbols into relief. In principle there is nothing wrong with this, of course. Political fashions and intellectual preoccupations are bound to change, and historical research is bound to follow. In this particular case, though, the shift in perspective has sometimes resulted in a narrowing of perspective as well, as the old concerns of social history have fallen by the wayside. Class, state, revolution: these are important subjects which are not much studied today, at least not by historians. Gone, indeed, are the days of Christopher Hill and Perry Anderson!

Originating in a 1998 seminar in Cambridge, England, the historical essays in this volume explore the connections between the economy, marriage, and demographic change in the rural populations of eight northwestern European countries. Only one of the essays (Richard Smith's, on England) reaches as far back as the medieval era, and one (Theo Engelen's, on European nuptiality) deals primarily with the twentieth century. The other essays concern the period 1600–1900, and the bulk of these employ data from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The editors describe the collection as “[presenting] the current state of research on the European Marriage Pattern” (p. 13), that is, on the distinctive pattern—relatively high ages at first marriage, relatively high proportions of the population not marrying—attributed to northwestern Europe in John Hajnal's seminal 1965 essay (“European Marriage Patterns in Historical Perspective.” In Population in History, edited by David Glass and D. E. C. Eversley, 101–43. Chicago: Aldine.). Hajnal's research hypothesized the pattern, but did not concern itself with the reasons for its existence; by contrast, the present essays seek to describe and interrelate the geographic and temporal variants of the basic pattern, and the long-term changes in the economic contexts in which they appeared. On the whole, these essays perform their task admirably: the editors should be thanked for holding their team together as well as they have, and for producing a volume that does not have the patchwork quality of many conference-based collections.

This book has an important message. Conventional wisdom has it that nationalized industries were a particularly inefficient part of the British economy in the three decades or so after the Second World War. Chrisafis Iordanoglou has produced an extremely thorough demolition of this notion, at least in so far as it relates to productivity performance. His conclusion, after several hundred pages of detailed statistical analysis, is that the record of the nationalized sector (largely transport, communications, and fuel) over the period 1954–1979 was better than that of British manufacturing, which was largely private, and the comparable infrastructure industries in the United States.

IN MEMORIAM RICHARD B. SHERIDAN

2001 ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION MEETINGS

2002 ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION MEETING 11–13 OCTOBER 2002

CALL FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS ECONOMIC HISTORY SOCIETY ANNUAL CONFERENCE

ERRATUM

This book's central message is summed up in the following sentence, which appears about midway through it: “The transformation of reproductive patterns was part of a massive shift in the nature of social relations because social change was experienced by thinking people who reflected on it and changed their behavior with regard to it” (p. 243). The statement epitomizes both the book's flaccid prose and its lack of intellectual rigor. According to its author, the birth of modernization in the west was marked by the establishment of a “western” demographic pattern based on the economic viability of the nuclear family and the unusual length of time between puberty and marriage. But since everything social is connected to everything else, explaining this demographic change—if indeed it happened, a question we cannot yet answer on the basis of current knowledge—seems to require explaining everything else as well. Some intimation of this sort seems to have tempted David Levine to take the reader on a ramble through the vast literature on the medieval economy and society that has accumulated since the rebirth of medieval studies in the 1930s. It is a temptation devoutly to be resisted.

Alan Booth has produced a textbook for (British) first-year undergraduates, the traditional structure of which belies its passionate motivation. It was “written in a mood of growing disenchantment with the level of debate on recent British economic performance” (p. ix). Although such a perspective ensures that the writing is often challenging and never dull, it is not clear that it is the best way to write a core textbook. The aim may have been to produce a first-year-level version of Sidney Pollard's classic Development of the British Economy, 1914–1990 (4th ed., London: E. Arnold, 1992), but at times it comes closer in tone to his Wasting of the British Economy (London: Croom Helm, 1982).

For many years now, the multinational research team of Philip Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-Laurent Rosenthal (HPR) have been presenting tantalizing bits of their research into the notarial archives of Paris, while diligently collecting further data from the overwhelming mass of material stored in the Archives Nationales. At long last, this volume brings together the initial results of their collective labors in a provocative and well-written book. The material and the interpretations given it are important both for French history and for financial history. It will generate not only controversy, but also further research, in which the authors are already engaged.