The Marxists had it right all along, they just got tripped up by their materialism. Early modern capitalism opened vast new worlds, particularly in the arts and sciences, only the traffic went both ways. Creative agents invented new markets and pushed commerce in directions that favored enterprises immensely cosmopolitan and innovative, often solely for the sake of beauty and display. Commerce offered a context but the nobility, and not an imagined bourgeoisie, had the edge when it came to exploiting the market for objets. Paintings could be traded for property, land, and houses. Princes could sponsor natural philosophers, and the fluidity in values meant that good investors, like good practitioners of the arts and sciences, took an interest in all aspects of learning. The interrelatedness of the representational arts and natural philosophy stands as one of the central themes in this tightly integrated collection of essays. We now have a vast historiography telling us that we should no longer teach early modern science without reference to the art of the time, and vice-versa. The point is beautifully illustrated by an exhibition recently held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (spring 2002) on the art of Pieter Saenredam. Working in Utrecht in the 1630s, he used geometry to regularize and make precise the angles and corners found in the exquisite paintings he made of the city's churches. He knew as much about geometry as he did about chiaroscuro. At precisely the same moment, an hour or two away by barge, Descartes in Leiden put the final touches on his Discourse on Method (1637). In effect he explained to the world why precision and clarity of thought made possible the kind of beauty that Saenredam's paintings would come to embody.

To review a work which cites one's name in both acknowledgments and text is probably imprudent and quite possibly unethical. On the other hand, a rigorous self-denying ordinance would have drastic implications for the viability of academic book reviewing. Further justification for proceeding in the present instance is that Professor O'Day's references to my own work are not wholly one-sided, either praise or criticism. The following assessment of her latest book will seek to adopt an equally balanced—if not “professional”—approach.

2002 ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION MEETINGS

2003 ECONOMIC HISTORY ASSOCIATION MEETINGS 19–21 SEPTEMBER 2003

ECONOMIC HISTORY SOCIETY ANNUAL CONFERENCE CALL FOR ACADEMIC PAPERS

EHA SESSIONS AT THE ALLIED SOCIAL SCIENCES ASSOCIATION ANNUAL MEETING

Michael Turner, John Beckett, and Bethanie Afton have assembled a data set based on a large number of English farm records (in the form of account books, wage/labor books, and memoranda books). Some of the fruits of this effort appeared previously in Turner, Beckett, and Afton's Agricultural Rent in England, 1690–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). This new book employs a subset of 979 of these farm records to cast new light on some important aspects of English farm production in the period 1700 to 1914. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the book comprises five substantive chapters. Chapter 2 discusses the records as a source; chapter 3 considers some aspects of farming practice (notably cropping patterns and fertilizer use); chapter 4 presents new estimates of wheat yields; chapter 5 presents new estimates of barley and oat yields; and chapter 6 presents new evidence on livestock weights. The most important findings of the book are that the overall growth in wheat, barley, and oat yields was much lower than is commonly thought, and that the main period of yield growth occurred between the 1820s and 1850s. The authors argue on this basis that the Agricultural Revolution can be fixed firmly in the period 1800 to 1850. The great strength of the book is that the data on which it is based are almost entirely new. For that reason, it is a very welcome contribution to our stock of knowledge, and both the authors and their funding body (the Leverhulme Foundation) are to be congratulated.

Ever since David Landes's seminal work on the French family firm and the interplay of culture and economics, French business history has wrestled with the question of French particularism and the role of family enterprise in determining business outcomes. For well over a quarter of a century, historians have challenged or qualified Landes's arguments, first by pointing to successful family enterprises in France or elsewhere, second by reassessing French economic performance in modern times, and third by identifying other factors to explain slower growth in macro or micro terms. Robert J. Smith's thought-provoking study of Bouchayer et Viallet, a medium-sized French firm that rose and fell on family leadership and culture, squarely confronts, once again, the issue of family influence on business success and failure. Combining access to family papers with an astute appraisal of personality and context, Smith has produced a first-rate inquiry into the dynamics of family business firms. Mindful of the fact that family firms still account for a predominant part of GNP, but that few family firms continue as such for more than several generations, Smith asks how family control and values contributed to the success of Bouchayer et Viallet yet also braked growth at a middling level and ultimately undermined the continuity of the company. Intended as a case study in the trajectory of family enterprise, Smith weaves together business, family, and cultural history in exemplary ways that will benefit practitioners of all three fields and that demonstrate the value of the first approach for studying and writing the second and the third.

This volume is a collection of nineteen essays, seventeen of which summarize the economic history of the individual autonomous regions established in Spain as part of the transition to democratic government that began in 1975. The last two essays are valiant efforts to synthesize some of the information in the first seventeen. The first of the concluding essays discusses the persistence of pre-nineteenth-century structures in Spain during the nineteenth century. The second examines the relationship of the various autonomous regions within Spain to the European Union.