This is an excellent book. It tells a story that had not been told before, and indeed one which many would not have appreciated was there to be told. It draws on an impressive array of primary sources, as well as interviews with many of the key players involved. It is very well written, with the exception of the hyperbole of the opening paragraphs. John Vardalas displays a mastery of the technical details involved, as well as the social and political influences at work.

Reflecting on economists' distinguished record in allocating the economy's scarce military resources during the Second World War, Michael Bernstein writes: “It is one of the great ironies of this history that a discipline renowned for its systematic portrayals of the benefits of unfettered, competitive markets would first demonstrate its unique operability in the completely regulated and controlled economy of total war.” Not to let readers miss the point, Bernstein prefaces this remark by noting that it was “statism,” not “individualism” that had set the historical context in which “the high hopes … of generations of professionalizers could be realized” (p. 89).

Bankruptcy law is the bacteria of the market economy. When a company dies, bankruptcy law figures out how to break down what remains, bring the productive parts back to life, and dispose of the rest. Some consider the market economy a jungle; bankruptcy law simply helps clear the jungle floor.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, questions regarding which of America's economic regions will emerge as leader come to the fore. This regional economic leadership may arise when demographics and technology combine with conducive market policies to create unprecedented levels of prosperity. Nineteenth-century New England had these characteristics and created industrial prosperity. The twentieth century brought a westward shift in economic leadership to California and the American Pacific. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, policies friendly toward markets, demographics, and technology suggest an emerging thrust of economic development in the American South. Such an economic climate suggests that the economic lone star of Texas is on the rise. However, like New England's nineteenth- and California's twentieth-century economies, prosperity in the American South will come at an environmental cost. Texas's environment has already experienced some of these costs, as it now ranks first among states in toxic releases and tenth in hazardous-waste releases. Hence, the environmental condition of Texas will continue to be an active area of study among economists and environmental historians.

For more than 20 years, Martin Melosi has thoughtfully considered the environmental state of the American city. One year after publishing The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastruc ture in America from Colonial Times to the Present, Melosi issued this important retrospective of his work in urban environmental history. In a series of 11 previously published articles and book chapters that Melosi wrote over a 20-year span, Effluent America provides his environmental analogue to John Kenneth Galbraith's Affluent Society: economic development and prosperity comes with a price.

All historians tell stories. Some rely on explicit narrative; others, on the narrative implicit in their analytic framework. Professor Henry J. Perkinson prefers explicit narrative, and for good reason. At his best he is very good at it. His pocket examinations of Anglo-American political and economic history are often perceptive and always quite delightful. Overall his stories are of decline—the decline in our understanding of knowing after Plato, the decline in Anglo-American governance after Lincoln, the decline in the free market after Adam Smith, and the decline in moral behavior after Rousseau. Now, I have nothing against stories of decline. Still, there is something quite bothersome in Perkinson's narratives. My bother begins with his hero, Karl Popper, and his treatment of that hero. Popper understood that human reason is fallible, as Perkinson asserts, but more importantly, Popper attempted to define “science,” to demarcate it from other human activities. In so doing, Popper asserted that knowledge does not come from the identification of correct ideas either by confirmation through experience or experiment, or by relation to foundational principles. For him both are logically impossible. Rather knowledge comes from the falsification of a factual proposition logically deduced from a stated hypothesis.

During the past few decades a number of scholars have begun exploring a new range of questions regarding drugs and the drug trade. David Courtwright has been foremost in developing what might be understood as the “new history of drugs.” This slim volume is a tour de force of this approach, a sophisticated analysis of an extremely complex historical phenomenon. His simple and elegant style is suitable for the general reader, an undergraduate, or a specialist. Courtwright's study of the relationship between human beings, Western civilization, and our retinue of psychoactive substances is a penetrating overview of the global panorama during the past five centuries.

The goal of Christopher Freeman and Francisco Louçã's book As Time Goes By is to provide an overarching treatment of economic development in the United States and Europe since 1750 within the framework of the “long wave” tradition. A subsidiary goal, which occupies the first part of the book, and prepares the ground for the second, is to criticize macroeconometric and cliometric methodologies in economic history and to promote an approach based on the writings of Joseph Schumpeter and Nikolai Kondratiev.

Since Gunnar Adler-Karlsson in 1968 published the first attempt at a comprehensive study of the West's “economic warfare” against the Soviet Bloc (Western Economic Warfare, 1947–1967: A Case Study in Foreign Economic Policy. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell), there has been a thin but persistent stream of studies covering the same subject. Adler-Karlsson's title was exaggerated. His theme was one instrument of Western commercial policy, namely the embargo on exportation of so-called “strategic goods” to the Soviet Bloc and China. Because almost all documentation on this subject was still secret when he wrote, his approach was quantitative, relying on the measurement of differences in trend over twenty years between Western exports to the Eastern bloc and to other destinations. Unrefined though this approach was, it remains the one book on the subject which proceeds from trade statistics to policy. The opening of documentary sources has reversed that process. Diplomatic historians have used government records to show how wide were the differences, and sometimes the practices, among Western countries in implementing the embargoes. Their most salient theme has been the demonstration from written records that the decisions about which goods to embargo were genuinely collective and that, in particular, the influence of Britain as an intermediary was surprisingly important in shaping the form and overall impact of these policies. However unilateralist the American hegemon may now be, in the 1950s it was not so. The sustained growth of Europe's economic strength was vital to America's own security; trade embargoes which threatened that growth were not enforced. On the basis of this documentation political scientists have been able to formulate theories of commercial “warfare,” of which Michael Mastanduno's Economic Containment: CoCom and the Politics of East-West Trade (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992) has received the most acclaim.

Alan Macfarlane is a distinguished British social anthropologist, celebrated for giving that discipline an historical turn. He is the author of important books claiming that the English had become “individualist”—in familial matters as much as in economic life—in the late Middle Ages. This view had the mixed blessing of an endorsement by Sir Keith Joseph, the intellectual powerhouse of early Thatcherism, thereby making Macfarlane a decidedly controversial figure. The present book draws on these early views, but is very much the product of sustained interaction with the thought of the late Ernest Gellner (who spent most of the last years of his life at Cambridge chairing the department in which Macfarlane teaches). What we are offered in this book then is a summary of a particular line of argument, drawing on philosophy and anthropology, which speaks to the interests of economic historians in a slightly abstract but decidedly high-powered manner. The presupposition of the whole is stated in the title, albeit that the “riddle” is in fact twofold. One riddle is the blocking of sustained development: given human ingenuity and obvious early development, why was it that most agrarian civilizations eventually hit some sort of ceiling? The second conundrum then concerns the fundamental breakthrough to capitalist and industrial modernity.

This book is one in a series, “Themes in World History,” edited by Peter Stearns, who is also the author of two of the three volumes produced thus far, including this one. The series is designed to provide supplementary reading for undergraduate history students, and if this volume is any guide, the underlying assumption about the target audience is that it is barely literate. With a limited vocabulary and simplified sentence structure, Stearns introduces his putative charges to a new “ism”—consumerism—and proceeds to chart the emergence and development of this force from its western point of origin (“The discovery of significant consumerism, of the modern sort, in eighteenth-century Western Europe was a major historical find” [p. 15]) to the rest of the world and up to the present day.

In the early twenty-first century, the choice of monetary regime has again become a matter of political and economic debate. The European experiment in monetary union is being watched, with a mixture of hope and fear, by policymakers in the Americas, and most likely in Asia as well. Perhaps this explains the resurgence of interest in the battles over monetary regimes in the nineteenth century, when a world that had been more or less bimetallic for several centuries switched to the gold standard. Why did it happen? Why did it happen then? Was it a change for the better or not? What were the relative contributions of economic determinism, network externalities, and global capitalism? It is this “range of territory” (now I understand why this cliché is overused!) that Ted Wilson addresses, arguing—albeit in a multicausal framework—for the importance of network externalities, and suggesting that the gold standard occurred by default rather than design. Britain went on gold early and somewhat accidentally; Germany, France and the United States followed; aspiring borrowers on the periphery did not have much choice—if they wanted access to international capital markets—so they followed, too.

This collection of essays comparing the economic systems of the world's second- and fifth-largest economies raises some fascinating issues. Japan and Italy began their economic development at roughly the same time in the nineteenth century and, in important respects, from the same starting points; moreover, both economic systems have deviated considerably from the Anglo-American model of capitalism. The confrontation of the economic histories of the two nations raises a number of issues which have, up to now, been neglected or taken for granted. Each of the chapters focuses on a specific theme, including industrial organization, corporate governance, the labor market, the banking system, and, on a more micro-level, the silk industry. Many of the chapters are co-authored by economists from both countries, to ensure completeness of coverage and factual accuracy.