This thoroughly researched history of sugar in Qing China (1644–1911) was published at a fortuitous time. After nearly two decades of “China-centered” history, scholars are again situating China within a global context. In the early 1980s, when Sucheta Mazumdar began her research, many scholars were turning away from questions relating to China's contact with the outside world in order to concentrate on developments within China. Reacting against an established body of scholarship that portrayed late imperial China as technologically stagnant, isolated, and impervious to change, historians set out to document the myriad social, political, and economic transformations underway in China prior to the “Western impact” (Paul Cohen. Discovering History in China. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984). The new comparativists build upon these insights. With a wealth of local and regional histories to draw upon, they are now returning to the old question of why China failed to experience its own self-induced industrial revolution (See, for example, the recent exchange of views in the Journal of Asian Studies 61, no. 2 [May 2002]: 501–662). Published on the upstroke of this reinvigorated debate, this book combines “China-centered” and comparative approaches to analyze why China, “universally acknowledged to be one of the most developed economies up through the mid-eighteenth century, paused in this development in the nineteenth” (p. 10).

This charmingly old-fashioned little book was first published in Thai in 1984, and now appears in an elegant English translation. The two major intellectual influences that gave it birth are rather older, dating from the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s. The first developed from the intersection of the academic pre-eminence of varieties of Marxist thinking about the “Third World” and the struggles of anticolonial peasant-based revolutionaries and produced a high age of romanticism about the Southeast Asian village and the unfortunate victims who inhabited them. The origins of the second are more uncertain, but probably represent, paradoxically, a Thai appropriation of those Western social-science constructions of Thai cultural uniqueness which were especially popular in the 1950s and 1960s.

After a long decay, in the last decades of the nineteenth century the Mexican economy experienced a process of accelerated growth mainly associated with the export sector. As the latter developed and diversified, new opportunities for investment opened in agriculture, livestock rising, and mining. Starting in the 1890s, this process was also accompanied by an early phenomenon of import-substitution industrialization, which would continue to unfold until the Mexican Revolution broke out in 1910. Although industrial growth was “limited in scope and fraught with inefficiencies” (p. 187), it appears as an uncommon experience in an era dominated by export-led growth in Latin America and as one that has attracted less attention than it deserves in the historiography on Mexico. This is the subject of Edward Beatty's work.

Written by four leading economic historians of Indonesia from three continents, this book is an excellent account of the emergence of the Indonesian economy in the twentieth century from what was a cluster of disparate economic regions at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Using an innovative and, in the context of Indonesia, highly appropriate theme, the authors identify three fundamental forces that shaped the emergence of the Indonesian national economy: successive waves of globalization (and dislocation), state formation, and economic integration. The book is admirably successful in fulfilling its claim, not an easy task given the volume of literature that had to be mastered and put into perspective in order to comprehensively describe this process.

When I first arrived in Australia as a backpacker in the mid-1980s my job possibilities included negotiating a job as a governess on a remote station through an agency, and, when a café proprietor offered me a job, just a few minutes later finding myself alone in her house confronting a vast mound of laundry and other housework with no terms discussed and no prospect of lunch. I had applied to be a waitress but I felt like a slave. I did not know much about Australia or service jobs at that stage and neither of these positions stuck. I never worked in a bar although the Aussie barmaid might best illustrate the Australian stereotype of female service as Dianne Kirkby has shown in her recent work (Barmaids: A History of Women's Work in Pubs, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997). It is interesting to place such experiences in the context of Barry Higman's excellent new book. For all the male and macho impressions of the pioneering male conquering the alien landscape of the outback, in fact colonial Australia had a very high proportion of women in the workforce. Yet the concept of service somehow sits oddly with the egalitarianism of Australian culture.

Despite its somber title, The Deadly Truth is a very lively account of American disease history from prehistory to the present. So much research is summarized in this comparatively short book, that it becomes the best introduction to the subject currently available. The chapters are chronologically arranged; they focus on those diseases that have been leading causes of sickness or death over the last four centuries. Not surprisingly the epidemic and insect borne diseases receive the lion's share of attention; but the occupational diseases are given a chapter of their own. The chronic diseases, which dominate the twentieth century, are reviewed in chapter nine. The author's general conclusion is that although a certain amount of progress has undoubtedly occurred in the treatment and management of specific diseases, there will never be a “final victory” over disease and death. In the present context few would disagree.

In 1719, French commander Jean-Baptiste Benard, Sieur de la Harpe, together with nine men, ventured into the Prairie Plains, a region previously unvisited by Europeans, to establish trading alliances with the Plains Indians. His journey took him to what is now eastern Oklahoma, where his men spent ten days at an Indian village interacting with peoples of various tribes who later merged into the Wichita tribe. The village was the principal home of the Tawakoni, the most powerful of the Wichita-related tribes. In La Harpe's Post, George H. Odell documents the initial contact between La Harpe's party and these peoples, thereby potentially adding a crucial chapter to the history of the Plains Indians during the early eighteenth century. The information regarding the native population is considered the most significant consequence from this event. Odell takes much of his information from findings obtained during an excavation of the presumed site of the Tawakoni village. Odell ambitiously uses this information to write a reevaluation of the general history of the eastern Plains during this period. The technical aspects of the archeological research, such as the excavation data and statistical analyses, are located in 11 appendixes, as his book is intended for a wide audience.

The “problem” of South Carolina has long fascinated historians of the antebellum period, particularly political historians. Why were Palmetto State politicians always so fiery, confrontational, and eager to come to blows? Many fine scholars have attempted to answer such questions over the years, and, as a result, we know more about the politics of South Carolina than we do about the politics of any other state in the antebellum South.

Each of the 13 essays in this volume considers an aspect of female participation in the paid or unpaid labor force of the antebellum American south. The work of ordinary women is the theme that unites the essays, work the editors in their introduction note was often unacknowledged due to prevailing and evolving attitudes about women's proper work and the role of the male head of household as the family breadwinner. The essays vary widely in their scope, but share a search for ingenious sources of information, a search necessitated by the invisibility of women in official and more conventional sources. The topics range from Native American female makers and sellers of baskets to antebellum female iron manufacturing workers, from coastal Savannah slave women participants in produce markets to western Virginia businesswomen, from Richmond prostitutes to New Orleans nuns.

In this well written book, Mark Barringer provides an interesting and detailed history of commercial enterprises in Yellowstone National Park. The book has great value to scholars concerned with the management of public lands, the roles that interest groups (park employees, concessioners, tourists, and environmentalists) have played in the history of Yellowstone, and the difficulties in designing contracts for the private provision of goods and services on public lands.

As its title suggests, the focus of this work is on the process and context of railroad innovation rather than its economic causes and consequences. The book reflects a wide reading in both primary and relevant secondary sources and the author's extensive use of the corporate records of the Pennsylvania and Burlington railroads.

To comprehend how republican Victorians in the Gilded Age became liberal moderns in the Progressive Era we must grasp the tensions between gender and class in shaping identity. Thomas Winter in Making Men, Making Class aids in our understanding of this fundamental shift by providing a study of the middle-class men who ran the Young Men's Christian Association (YMCA). YMCA secretaries, Winter argues, attempted “to transcend class lines and unite men on the basis of manhood [which] ultimately led them to articulate new definitions of manhood structured by class difference” (p. 7). Making Men is the story of YMCA leaders' desire to quell working-class radicalism by promoting an idea of manhood rooted in hard work, loyalty to employers, and Christian fellowship.

Susan McMaster has provided a short and accessible overview of the history of the telecommunications (telephone, until very recently) industry from the beginning (1875) through the year 2000. Those looking for an introduction to the development of the industry will find the book quite readable. Those, however, looking for a review of the extant business-history and economic-history literature on the industry will not find it here, nor will they find a good roadmap on where to look for more information.

The objective of this book by Karen Merrill is to use the history of public land policy to better understand the political history of the American West since 1870 and the recurring tensions between government, ranchers, and environmentalists. Although the book is aimed primarily at political historians, it is a useful reference for economic historians interested in property rights and land-use regulations.

Charles Perrow is interested in big organizations and how they shape communities, the distribution of wealth, power and income, and working lives. Today, organizations with over 500 employees employ more than half the working population in the United States. There were no such organizations in 1800. Referring to William Roy (Socializing Capital: The Rise of Large Industrial Corporations in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997) and Naomi Lamoreaux (The Great Merger Movement in American Business, 1895–1904. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985) Perrow argues that corporate capitalism was entrenched in five short years (1898–1903) during which more than half the book value of all manufacturing capital was incorporated. The firms were made giant by consolidating the assets of several firms in the same industry.

In this enjoyable work, Kenneth Lipartito and Carol Peters share with us the story of John Elliot Tappan, a Minneapolis lawyer who brought financial innovation to the American heartland. In an era before mutual funds, money market accounts, and in many locations safe diversified savings banks, Tappan saw the need for a safe, small denomination, financial instrument for middle-class savers. The result was Investors Syndicate and its “face-value” certificate, a combination of zero-coupon bond and term life insurance that savers of modest means could purchase in small installments. By providing the small investor with a safe means of saving a small amount each month, Investors Syndicate (latter IDS and American Express Financial Advisors) would grow into one of the nations financial behemoths. Along the way, Tappan and his company would overcome financial panic, depression, war, epidemic, and corrupt postal inspectors (the federal regulators of the day).

Joshua Rosenbloom provides a superb study of the operations of the U.S. labor market between the Civil War and World War I. The book weaves fascinating descriptions of the various ways in which employers and workers established connections together with clear summaries of an extensive amount of background quantitative work. Although the analysis is firmly grounded on a series of more technical statistical studies, most of the book does not emphasize econometrics. Instead, the findings are effectively summarized using graphs, simple means and telling anecdotes that illustrate the experiences of many workers. The book is beautifully written and can be used by economists, historians, and both graduate and undergraduate students to obtain a clearer understanding of how markets work.

Gene Smiley provides here a narrative overview of the causes and consequences of the Great Depression. The book is intended for a general audience, and evidences a solid command of the range of literature devoted to this remarkable period. The text lacks footnotes or references, but concludes with a comprehensive annotated bibliography covering the major sources from which he has drawn. Although Smiley's approach is relatively nontechnical, readers may nevertheless not be able fully to appreciate its nuances without at least an elementary course in microeconomics and an intermediate level course in macroeconomics. Thus it may be most suitable as supplementary reading in economic history courses.

In this book, Jeff Singleton provides a detailed history of relief programs prior to and during the Great Depression. He also assesses the obstacles to welfare reform since the 1930s, and he generally argues for more reliance on social insurance and public employment as alternatives to means-tested welfare programs. The book will be of interest to scholars seeking to understand the details and evolution of relief institutions before and during the New Deal, as well as to those interested in the historical origins of modern policy.

Christopher Armstrong's book is concerned with a topic of remarkable timeliness following the wave of financial scandals—Enron et al.—which shook the American economy in 2002. The timing of the book could not have been better as it deals with crucial issues: information asymmetries, investor protection against manipulations of information, scope and type of regulation needed to insure “full, true, plain disclosure,” and the behavior and ethics of brokers, promoters, and other insiders. The fact that it covers Ontario in the four decades since World War II shows that the issues are perennial and never likely to be outmoded.