In the great and complicated equation of modern Asian history, just how important was the variable of opium? This book argues, and in large measure demonstrates, that for China opium was a very large variable indeed. Opium lubricated Western penetration into Asia, especially for the British, and helped significantly to pay for the upkeep and administration of Western colonies there. It was the casus belli that opened imperial China's treaty ports and became the metaphor for the falling dynasty's weakness and disgrace. It was the cash crop that lifted millions of Chinese peasants to new prosperity, and that exposed them to heightened levels of scrutiny and harassment by the state. It was the revenue source indispensable to any number of China's secret societies, warlords, political movements, occupying armies, and “national” governments; as such, it was integral to the power struggles among them. By the early twentieth century, few significant elements of Chinese life were untouched by opium in one way or another.

When liberal politicians attacked the entrenched power and wealth of the Catholic Church—especially of monastic establishments and endowed chaplaincies—in many areas of Latin America beginning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they were playing out a drama that had already begun in Catholic Europe considerably earlier. In greater or lesser degree, in Peru, Mexico, and other countries these statesmen adduced as justification for the expropriation the idea that the supposedly “dead hand” of the Church had prevented the free circulation of wealth and therefore retarded economic development, a viewpoint that has long survived as conventional wisdom in the economic historiography of Latin America. As historians' research over the last two or three decades has shown, however, in a prebanking age the capital-owning institutions of the Church—and particularly its great urban convents—served a vital function in accumulating and investing capital which often supported productive forms of enterprise, especially in the countryside, in economies that were still overwhelmingly agricultural. This did not mean that conventual life itself was not primarily a religious expression, nor that surpluses generated in the secular economy were not expended in unprofitable ways, but rather that cultural practices and expectations intertwined in a complex double helix with economic life, each influencing the other. Kathryn Burns's informative and beautifully written book on the history of three convents (one founded in 1573, the other two at the beginning and end of the following century) in Cuzco, the former Inca capital in the Peruvian highlands, fits this revisionist trend well. Burns provides the most detailed and theoretically informed treatment yet of the relationship between ecclesiastical investment, the institutional and intimate life of the lending convents, and the local elites of the region, who sent their daughters to the convents, endowed the institutions with funds, and took loans from them at interest. All were bound together in what she calls a “spiritual economy.”

Malaysia is unusual even among Southeast Asia's highly open and (often) extremely rapidly growing economies. Beginning about 1905, and known as Malaya prior to independence from Britain in 1957, the country's prosperity was built on the world's greatest boom in any agricultural commodity—rubber. By 1929 Malaya's per capita income was substantially higher than Japan's. Although at independence still with so little manufacturing industry as to surprise even knowledgeable observers, Malaysia subsequently emerged as a showcase success among less developed countries. As such it figured prominently in W. W. Rostow's valedictory article in the New York Times on the Johnson administration. Through the last third of the century Malaysia continued to industrialize swiftly, with a combination of alternating export-oriented and import-substitution phases orchestrated through considerable, though not extreme, state intervention.

In the Western countries, Japanese technological development continues to be seen largely as an effort of imitation and refinement; but any foreign visitor who has operated a Japanese-style bath or observed the processes of small-scale mechanized rice farming will understand that, besides refining originally Western technologies, Japan has also developed its own modern, yet distinctively non-Western, technological tradition. The theoretical questions involved in “Japanese-style” technological modernity are nontrivial, as are the practical implications. For instance, in newly industrializing Asia Japanese technological practices are now frequently proving more efficient or culturally comfortable than Western ones. The present volume's goal of exploring the “relations between the economic and the cultural” (p. vii) is thus timely as well as theoretically important.

This volume, comprising papers given at a session of the International Economic History Congress in Madrid in 1998, positively invites uneven treatment, at least in a short review. Three of the four sections contain papers on industrialization, technology and institutional transfers, and the monetary history of East Asia and the Pacific Rim. It is not a discourtesy to say that these items are standard conference fare, some of them very interesting, others rather inconclusive, and the whole so diverse as to defy generalization. What lifts the collection above the routine is a piece by Jeffrey G. Williamson on “Globalization, Factor Prices and Living Standards in Asia Before 1940.” As the editors recognize in giving this essay the first section of the volume entirely to itself, it is so innovative and challenging as to dominate the book and hence to warrant concentrating on it here.

Deregulation of banking in the United States during the past two decades is beginning to make American banking resemble that of other advanced countries. Banks are now free to operate nationwide branch systems, to combine commercial banking with investment banking and securities brokerage, and to offer insurance and other products previously restricted or prohibited. A generation ago banks could do none of these things. In this meaty collection of six essays (three with co-authors) previously published in different places during the 1990s, Charles Calomiris asks and provides answers to a number of questions concerning U.S. banking history and bank regulation. How and why did American banking become so uniquely different from banking in other countries? Why was the U.S. banking system more prone than those of other countries to banking panics and other types of financial disturbance? What were the effects of these differences on financial and economic efficiency? Why did a banking system so greatly regulated for more than a century by state and federal authorities become so greatly deregulated at the end of the twentieth century? Will there be still more deregulation as a new century begins? In the years ahead, how competitive will U.S. banks be in the increasingly global financial markets?

Since the middle of the 1980s George Borjas has made significant contributions to our understanding of the economics of immigration to the United States. This book synthesizes those contributions, makes them accessible to an audience of nonspecialists, and is likely to shape the debate over the nation's future immigration policy. Borjas explicitly ties his previous work on the changing skill composition of immigrants, the costs and benefits of immigration, and the long-run patterns of immigration assimilation to specific recommendations for lawmakers. He finds that the changing mix of source countries since the 1960s has led to the arrival of less-skilled immigrants who have adversely impacted less-skilled native workers, that the net benefits of immigration are small, and that the disadvantages suffered by immigrants last through several generations of their offspring. He advocates a “point” system that would admit a larger fraction of more highly-skilled workers, and a reduction in the overall number of immigrants to 500,000 per year, 33 percent fewer than were admitted in the 1980s and 1990s.

This volume contributes to a large literature on job stability and job security by offering a set of closely related papers that attempt to measure recent trends in the United States. Most earlier literature found little change in job stability and job security during the 1980s, seeming to contradict public and media perceptions of a sharp decline in both. The present volume traces its origins to a conference at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in fall 1996, at which conflicting evidence on trends in the early 1990s was presented. A follow-up conference sponsored by the Russell Sage Foundation encouraged the authors to update their findings through the mid-1990s and to reconcile differences across data sets and methodologies. After review by anonymous referees, 12 papers were collected in this volume. All of them are written by distinguished authors who have contributed previously to this literature.

This volume appears during the commemoration of the centennial of the landmark discovery of oil near Beaumont, Texas. The consequential volume of production, a sequence of nearby finds, and the creation of Gulf and Texaco from Spindletop antecedents all make the event noteworthy even after the original site has subsided into a swamp.

This interesting study fits into the growing literature of community studies that seek to expand our knowledge of the Civil War beyond the battlefield and the lives of generals. It looks at that conflict in an understudied region, Western North Carolina, which local myth holds was a Unionist stronghold. As in most local lore, there is a grain of truth but more than an ounce of outright inaccuracy. John Inscoe has explored the role of slavery in Western North Carolina (WNC) in a very fine previous book, Mountain Masters: Slavery and the Sectional Crisis in Western North Carolina (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989). He and his coauthor continue the debunking of local legend here in this finely nuanced study of the communities of the mountain regions of North Carolina.

In the 1905 case Lochner v. New York, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a maximum-hours rule was a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. At first glance a rule limiting work hours for New York City bakers might appear to have little to do with the African American former slaves that the Fourteenth Amendment was designed to protect. However, in Only One Place of Redress David Bernstein argues that Lochner was very relevant to the former slaves and that the courts' subsequent rejection of its doctrine caused African Americans significant economic harm.

“Not only were the histories of the ‘Negro in America’ and railroading inseparable,” says Eric Arnesen in his superb study of African Americans and the railroad industry, but “so too was the history of railroading predicated upon racial divisions of labor” (p. 5). These two fine studies describe both the central role of African Americans in America's railroads and the place of racial discrimination in rail employment. More, they show how railroad labor struggles were the proving ground for the larger struggles for civil rights and racial equality.

Episodes of labor-saving technological change and rural–urban migration have become universal patterns of economic development the world over. Donald Holley, in The Second Great Emancipation, sets out to tell the story of the last great episode of such change in the United States, when the cotton harvest was mechanized following World War II. The last major crop to make the transition from hand production, cotton was extraordinarily labor-intensive, especially the harvest. In 1945 millions of workers hand picked almost every boll of American cotton, but by 1970 farmers gathered their crop with John Deere and International Harvester mechanical cotton pickers. Folks, mainly blacks, who had for generations performed one of the most backbreaking forms of stoop labor, moved to northern and western cities. As Holley tells it, the First Great Emancipation occurred when President Lincoln freed the slaves and the Second Great Emancipation when the mechanical cotton harvester freed laborers from the drudgery of the cotton harvest, poverty, and Jim Crow discrimination, and southern producers from inefficient production methods and farm sizes. It is a really big and important story of profound technological and demographic changes with spillover effects into civil rights, racial economic equality, and politics. These events, for example, transformed race from a southern regional to a national issue.

In this well-written book, Michael J. Webber makes a substantial contribution to the literature on the political economy of the New Deal. The book's topic, campaign finance in the 1936 presidential election, should generate broad interest among social scientists who seek to understand the New Deal. Because the 1936 election demonstrated such remarkable support for the New Dealers, a careful study of who gave financial support to whom in that election can provide insight into the nature of the New Deal coalition and the major policy changes that it brought.

In this new addition to the Greenwood Guides to Historic Events of the Twentieth Century, Robert Himmelberg does a masterful job of creating the kind of teaching and reference tool that the series aims to provide. Following the prescribed format, he moves from a chronology and narrative overview of, topical essays on, and evaluative conclusions about the Great Depression and New Deal to sections containing biographical profiles and primary documents, a glossary of selected terms, a photo essay, and an annotated bibliography. In doing so, he draws upon an extensive knowledge and sophisticated understanding of the subject, its historiography, and what is involved in teaching it. And the result is a remarkably full realization of what series guidelines have called for, namely a reliable and readable book illuminating a “defining” historical event, up to date in its evidence and analysis, and so constructed as to serve both as a work of reference and a history in its own right. The book should be particularly useful for secondary-school- and college-student research, as preparatory reading for classroom discussions, and as a ready reference and introductory guide in public and academic libraries and on instructors' bookshelves.

This is more than a nice book. This is a relentlessly nice, positive, and upbeat book about Americans in the Great Depression. However “depressing” the Depression was economically, McGovern's aim is to show that “we have not paid them [Depression-era Americans] the attention they deserve. We have overlooked their diverse strengths, poise, creative adaptability, and, above all, their triumphant retention of positive values and commitments despite the beleaguering and enervating powers of the Depression” (p. 267). The larger question that frames the book is why, when the economic Depression in America was more severe than in many other countries, did America not experience the same social turmoil and political instability as did much of Europe, for example, fascism in Germany and Spain. “[A]s the punch line in the old political gag declared, the best America could come up with in these momentous times was Huey Long. Not only was America free from effective threats by extremist leaders, the society, considering the times, was surprisingly tranquil; … Alone in its class, the American ship of state and its crew moved in the main with a kind of classic calm through the Depression's dangerous shoals and turbulent waters” (p. 267).

Much More Than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball Since 1921 is the second of two books, the first published in 1994, by Robert F. Burk, Professor of History at Muskingum College, dealing with labor relations, broadly defined, in major-league baseball. Burk has drawn upon extensive primary and secondary sources concerning baseball, and provides readers interested in understanding the economics, history, and economic history of this rather unusual and exciting labor market with much useful information and analysis. Burk provides very useful information on salaries in the minor leagues and describes the changing ethnic composition of the industry's labor force. He also provides material on the history of the minor leagues and of the Negro leagues.

Margaret Walsh has spent 15 years researching and writing articles on the long-distance bus industry in the United States. This book presents the results of this labor. Walsh shows that the history of the long-distance bus industry is one of thousands of small enterprises begun because of limited capital requirements and demand for the service. She documents the growth of two major interstate firms, the difficulties of the Great Depression and the Second World War, the onset of federal regulation, the continuing problems of the last half century brought on by the continuing rise of the automobile and the building of the interstate highway system, the growth of air travel, and the important role played by women.

Are economic development and political democracy compatible? If so, how? Richard Franklin Bensel's latest book answers the first question affirmatively but suggests that compatibility is not inevitable. Most of the book addresses the second question by explaining how the United States accomplished the compatibility feat over the last quarter of the nineteenth century. This rich, intricate analysis demands attention by those interested in the politics and economics of U.S. development.

Taken together, these three short monographs tell a portion of the story of how the Canadian federal civil service embraced and applied Keynesian ideas during the Second World War. Parts of the tale have been told elsewhere and with considerably more finesse; others have been generally overlooked and receive their first full explanation here in the work of Enid Barnett. Unfortunately, important components of the application of Keynesian ideas in the Canadian context are missing entirely from these volumes, and thus the series as a whole is incomplete and offers only a partial introduction to the complexities of wartime finance and reconstruction planning.