Shu Guang Zhang is a leader among those revealing Chinese perspectives on international affairs, as found in both Chinese-language publications and in hitherto unused archival materials. He and several other China-born scholars working in the United States—most notably Jian Chen, Qiang Zhai, Simei Qing, and Xiaoyuan Liu—have performed an enormous service to analysts all over the world by uncovering, translating, and incorporating into their work these vital documents. For this book Zhang has also used American, British, and Soviet sources, but to less striking effect.

The release of the first paperback edition of Cotton City 16 years after its initial publication provides an opportunity to reflect on Harriet Amos's approach to explaining antebellum Mobile's growth. At least eight reviews, including those in major historical journals, appeared following publication; thus, this review will not repeat their general coverage. In brief, Amos argued Mobile's dependence on the cotton trade tied it to external centers of capital in New York, London, and Liverpool; and northern, and to a lesser extent English, business people who moved to Mobile to participate directly or indirectly in the cotton trade became city leaders. This link to the cotton trade pervaded much of urban life Amos details in discussing immigration, labor, city government, social services, railroad development, and the secession crisis.

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.

Sara Wermiel's carefully crafted and informative The Fireproof Building explores the evolution of structural fire protection in the United States from its origins in the late eighteenth century through the nineteenth century with special emphasis on its role in the development of skyscrapers. Without the specialized technological developments described by the author, large public buildings, which are the centerpieces of most contemporary cities, would be impossible. Although many scholars have examined the engineering of tall buildings and their historic conquest of height in the modern city, Wermeil provides a compelling argument for the broad significance of fire-resistant methods in the development of the twentieth-century urban landscape.

The “agent” is almost as emblematic of Australasian farming as akubra hats, water tanks, and windmills. The agent was an employee of “stock and station” firms, who provided farmers with a range of purchased inputs and other goods and services, and assisted with the marketing of their products. As the name implies, they originated in the mid-nineteenth century to serve the needs of pioneer sheep “stations.” The firms later expanded their activities, partly in response to the farms themselves becoming multiproduct enterprises (combining wool with meat, wheat, and other grain crops), and partly to pursue full-line diversification. Having established a network of contacts with farmers through local agents in relation to the wool trade, a distribution system was in place to reap economies of scale or scope by catering to farmers' other needs such as finance, machinery, management advice, the sale or purchase of land and livestock, travel services, etc.

In a very readable and thought-provoking treatise, Susan Hoffman explores the history of U.S. commercial banks, savings and loans associations, and credit unions in the context of the political structure forming and directing the behavior of these institutions. “Banks do, in large measure, what policy makers have designed them to do,” she contends (p. x).

“Why did the American labor movement decline so drastically in the 1920s?” (p. 1). Youngsoo Bae seeks to understand the transformation of the American labor movement by following the path of the men's garment industry union, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW), from its origins as a progressive industrial union to an “AFL-type business union” (p. 2) by the end of the 1920s.

Family relationships were not immune to the complexities of settler life that are a consistent theme in much of the literature on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America. Gloria L. Main's work uses patterns of family growth and their influence on land acquisition to explain the English settlement of New England. Her methodology brings together research from several distinct disciplines and uses an in-depth analysis of the history, placing Main's work in the same category as that of noted authors John Demos (A Little Commonwealth: Family Life in Plymouth Colony. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Kenneth Lockridge (A New England Town: The First Hundred Years, Dedham, Massachusetts, 1636–1736. New York: Norton, 1985). Main incorporates a complex and broad range of disciplines including economics, history, psychology, anthropology, and sociology and applies them to the historical issue of settlement. To support her thesis Main uses diaries of settlers and later generations for a primary-source account of events as well as analysis. Overall, Main presents her ideas in a clear, concise manner and avoids the nit picking that can occur between and within disciplines.

The transformation of the northern countryside during the first half of the nineteenth century is one of the central themes of American rural history, and it has formed the basis of many excellent studies by economic and social historians. Martin Bruegel's Farm, Shop, Landing, is the latest addition to this literature, and it is a valuable one. Bruegel extends our perspective beyond New England to New York's Hudson River Valley, and he demonstrates a theoretical sophistication and an eye for the telling details that give a familiar story fresh nuance and texture as well as a scope and sweep that transcend the local.

Robert S. Weise, of the history department at Eastern Kentucky University, has provided a counterbalance to the standard emphasis upon outsiders' exploitation of the mineral resource of Appalachian Kentucky. Focusing on the aspirations of residents in Floyd County, he traces the economic development from pre–Civil War agricultural localism to the corporate mining structure of the twentieth century. His account rests upon creative use of census returns and county court files of land deeds, tax records, mortgage books, and case documents, personalized by reference to business correspondence of Walter Scott Harkins, Prestonburg lawyer, banker, and regional promoter, as found in the manuscript collection of the University of Kentucky library. The volume provides 28 statistical tables of agricultural, population, tax assessment, and mortgage data; 52 pages of footnotes; and 19 pages of bibliography—the last compilation offering much more than is directly applicable to his narrative, but useful as an excellent survey of recent interpretive literature on Appalachia and the New South.

Eighteenth-century America poses a puzzle: why were there no successful commercial banks before the Revolution, and why did they appear soon after? Economic historians have blamed British policy for the lack of Colonial banks. The British limited Colonial development and therefore there was little need for banks. Laws, such as the Currency Acts, may have prevented commercial banks in the Colonies. Banks emerged soon after the Revolution because British rule ended, freeing the United States to establish its own institutional framework and monetary system.

In recent years James S. Olson has become the historical profession's leading producer of historical dictionaries. Beginning with his volume on the New Deal in1985, he has gone on to produce similar reference works for the 1920s, 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, for the ethno-history of China, Africa, and the Indians of Central and South America, and for such diverse topics as U.S. economic history, European imperialism, and the British and Spanish empires. The work under review is the latest addition to this reference shelf and like its companion volumes should be a useful tool in all types of academic libraries, from high school up. Like the others, it is geared to provide quick, concise, sound, and clearly written references to the details of a particular body of historical experience. In it one can consult some 479 short, alphabetically arranged, Olson-authored essays, ranging in length from four lines (“Black Tuesday”) to three pages (“Roosevelt, Franklin Delano”), and take from them the essential facts about and historical significance of the people, events, laws, agencies, products, and other topics deemed worthy of inclusion. In addition, cross-references are marked by asterisks within the essays; each essay is followed by at least one “suggested reading”; and appended at the end are a list of acronyms, a useful chronology, a brief but good general bibliography, and a well-constructed index.

After World War II, national homebuilding patterns changed decisively. Massive demand for housing existed after 16 years of depression and war. Postwar changes in housing finance and construction met that demand. Federal agencies guaranteed mortgages on 40 to 50 percent of all homes built in the 1950s. By 1970 half of all single-family home mortgages in the United States were federally underwritten. Builders flourished as down payments declined. They bought tracts of hundreds or thousands of acres and used new modular mass-production techniques to construct large residential subdivisions. One-quarter of the 60 million housing units of 1960 were built in the 1950s. Home owners surged from 40 to almost 70 percent of total households. America became a society where suburban home ownership was a key badge of “middle class” status.

Collections of essays, even those organized around a common general theme, do not always cohere. That, emphatically, is not the case with respect to the essays in Transforming New Orleans and Its Environs: Centuries of Change, which originated in a 1998 conference on the impact of human settlement and activity on the Lower Mississippi Valley. The volume's 12 essays and the accompanying introduction by the editor, Craig Colten, together make an integrated and valuable contribution to the fields of environmental history, economic history, and historical geography.

Irish-Americans, by which we mean immigrants to the United States from Ireland, the descendants of those people, and perhaps some who found it convenient to assume an Irish identity even without any Irish ancestry, have a large and rich historiography. Like most mature historiographies this literature now has its models, its orthodoxies, and its gadflies. Many recent useful contributions to this literature have taken one of two approaches. One is to set the Irish in a comparative perspective, and think about how Irish-Americans differed from other overseas Irish groups; how Ireland differed from other relatively poor European economies in the nineteenth century; and how the Irish in the United States differed from other “ethnic” groups in the country. Studies taking this comparative approach have accomplished a great deal in undermining old myths and have at the same time sharpened the aspects of the Irish-American experience that were distinctive and require further study. Another approach has been to choose a particular Irish-American community and to study that community in as much detail as possible. This tactic has been especially effective in understanding how particular locations or circumstances affected Irish-American communities and has helped scholars of this group to be more careful about generalizations.