This book examines the links between a culture of modernity and inflation on the basis of literary works, films, cartoons, and photographs (all taken from Hans Ostwald's Sittengeschichte der Inflation [Berlin: Neufeld & Henius, 1931], or “Moral History of the Inflation”). Bernd Wittig's point of departure is the suggestion by Elias Canetti in Masse und Macht (Düsseldorf: Claassen, 1960) that there was a link between the depreciation of money and the degradation of personal and social identity, and that the Weimar Republic's experience of inflation in a significant way prepared the path for National Socialism and genocide. People grew accustomed to enormous but personally meaningless figures (millions, billions) and developed a brutal indifference. According to Canetti, “An inflation cancels out distinctions between men which had seemed eternal and brings together in the same inflation crowd people who would scarcely have nodded to each other in the street.” Wittig then brings this perspective to bear in a detailed analysis of a short novella by Thomas Mann, films by Fritz Lang (Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler) and G. W. Pabst (Freudlose Gasse). These are familiar works, and Wittig adds little in the way of new analysis. Nor does he give any rigorous quantitative evaluation to his striking claims, for instance that prostitution increases in the course of inflations. He gives figures for prostitution in Berlin in 1910, and tells us that the number of women charged with illegal prostitution in Vienna rose from 1918 to 1920, and that more of them had venereal diseases.

This book engaged my attention in a way that few textbooks do, and if I have some critical things to say, these do not detract from my overall view that the book is a carefully considered and well-executed account of its subject. The subtitle accurately describes the book as being about “English Economy and Society, 1700–1850.” It is not, however, a conventional textbook treatment. The idea of the Industrial Revolution as great transformation, and any attempt to specify carefully what was transformed and how, is deliberately downplayed by the authors, who repeatedly refer to the view of contemporaries that “something was happening,” and sometimes seem as uncertain as those contemporaries as to what it was.

The borrowing crisis of 1856–1881 was a crucial episode in late Ottoman history; by focusing on its course, Christopher Clay has performed a real service for generalists and Ottoman specialists alike. In its 11 fact-packed chapters, plus introduction and conclusion, the book is mainly a study in the history of financial diplomacy. It seeks to trace the unfolding relations between Western and Central European bankers and the Ottoman state in era from the Crimean War through the 1870s bankruptcy, the subsequent Decree of Muharrem, and the formation of Ottoman Public Debt Administration in 1881. Its lengthy treatment of the negotiations over the loans contracted by the Ottoman state on the road to bankruptcy fill a longstanding gap in our knowledge. Between 1903 and 1929, in the decades surrounding the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, as it was taking on huge international debt, a number of important works traced its finances and its international debt obligations. But thereafter, until the late 1990s, very little was written on the subject despite an explosion of scholarship on Ottoman economic history in general.

Aside from a few articles and chapters in books, there has been no comprehensive history of Japan's informal empire in the three northeast provinces of China (called Manchuria) between 1904 and 1932. That void no longer exists. Y. T. Matsusaka's brilliant account explains how Japan's expansionist aims meant that its leaders and elites could never consider withdrawing from Manchuria.

Not only have the small island states of Melanesia undergone a process of rapid social and economic change over the past few decades, from largely subsistence-based, small-scale societies to at least partially globalized nation-states, but in recent years several seem to have been heading towards the status of “collapsed states.” Since its first coup in 1987, Fiji has been stumbling through a series of crises fueled by ethnic differences between indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians—and, increasingly, amongst indigenous Fijians themselves. Papua New Guinea, whose national airline promotes the country to tourists as “the land of the unexpected,” has similarly staggered from crisis to crisis with, amongst other things, tensions between civilian authorities and the armed forces, and the recent killing of students by police in demonstrations against globalization. The Solomon Islands have been riven by conflicts related to ethnic divisions and migration by non-Guadalcanal people to the national capital, Honiara, precipitating a virtual collapse of the state. And West Papua, in the wake of President Suharto's demise, has seen its nationalist aspirations raised and then dashed by Jakarta with renewed military repression. Apart from New Caledonia, which is enjoying a period of relative tranquility after the turbulence of the 1980s and early 1990s, only Vanuatu seems to be achieving a reasonable degree of social and economic progress, and even in Vanuatu there have been signs of political instability, including an instance of intervention in politics by the police mobile force.

“Rural crisis” is a concept with which anyone who has lived through the summer of 2001 in Britain is only too familiar; the parallels between the rhetoric employed daily in the media here, and that surrounding the undoubtedly much more severe crisis that hit Japanese farm households in the 1930s, are a reminder that periodic agricultural instability remains an as-yet unsolved problem in industrial economies. Nonetheless, Kerry Smith's study of the impact of the Great Depression on rural Japan, which interweaves accounts of the national-level policymaking process with a case study of one village, locates Japan's rural crisis within the specific process of economic and political change that generated both the wartime political economy and significant features of the postwar institutional structure. In this, he reflects the ongoing work of a number of Japanese scholars who are seeking to locate the grass-roots-level continuities between the immediate prewar and wartime periods and the postwar era of reform and growth. However, his wide-ranging study is the first in English to trace in such detail, through the experiences of an individual village and its inhabitants, the impact of and responses to the depression in rural Japan.

Historians of early America are considering legal institutions in new and refreshing ways. The Many Legalities of Early America, a volume of 15 essays edited by Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann, is an excellent model for those seeking to integrate recent trends in the study of race and gender within the context of the law. The editors recognize that legal history has existed outside of the mainstream of American colonial history for a long time, in large part because scholars in the field were more committed to “detail than to worldview” (p. 9), a trend that has left the study of law in the hands of “internalists” for far too long. The efforts of Tomlins and Mann to present research in legal history within the broad trends of colonial history are quite revealing, and economic historians will find a number of essays pertinent to their interests.

The subtitle of this important book captures the author's key theme very well: the African origins of rice cultivation in the Americas. According to Carney, for a variety of reasons—racism, most notably—many contemporary observers and most scholars over the centuries have overlooked or willfully denied the fact that the origins of rice production in the Americas lay in Africa rather than in Asia or Europe. The unsurprising concomitant of this argument about origins is that Africans and African Americans were primarily responsible both for the introduction of rice seed to the Americas and for the transfer and diffusion of an “indigenous knowledge system” pertaining to the cultivation and processing of the cereal (p. 2). This knowledge system, once expropriated from Africans and African Americans and appropriated by Europeans and Euro-Americans, created the basis for great wealth in parts of the New World, particularly in South Carolina and Georgia. The larger implication of this argument—hardly surprising in light of the foregoing—is that until recently Western scholars, in promoting the view that Africans and African Americans contributed nothing to risiculture in the New World except their labor, have supported and legitimized the imperial project through an egregious case of cultural dispossession and expropriation.

Early-nineteenth-century master house builders were not just craftsmen, they were surveyors, architects, financial managers, employers, and contractors. They typically went through an apprenticeship, but they also might have attended night school to hone their drafting and drawing skills. Journeyman work typically followed for at least a few years (paid either by the piece or by day, depending on the job and time of year), although a carpenter's first “independent” project could follow closely on the heels of an apprenticeship. The timing depended on the individual's own risk taking, as well as the ability to raise sufficient capital either to build speculatively or fulfill a custom home order. According to Donna Rilling, “the route to craft autonomy … lay in advance building of brick row houses” (p. 67).

For some time now historians have engaged in an ongoing debate concerning the nature of the early American economy. Some contend that from the outset, producers were motivated by private gain, responded to commercial opportunities, and were driven by an entrepreneurial spirit. Another school emphasizes the limited extent of the markets, the importance of “community” concerns, and the existence of local trade and labor systems based on social relationships and cultural expectations that inhibited the free play of market forces. Ultimately, the market system prevailed and the questions for economic historians become when and how this transition occurred.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

Race on the Line explores a fascinating topic—the impact that technology has on race and gender relations within a firm. Green ambitiously evaluates the impact of labor-saving technologies on employees within AT&T during the period 1880 to 1980. The topic is explored through a thorough examination of archival material. She demonstrates a strong command of the material and has clearly summarized a massive amount of primary material.

As more and more historians take the linguistic turn and abandon facts and figures for fashion and fiction, it is more than a little refreshing to encounter the work of someone such as Charles Jacobson. In Ties That Bind, Jacobson explores the history of the economic and political dilemmas surrounding urban public utilities, particularly water, electricity, and cable television. Unlike many historians, Jacobson has actually taken the time to learn, master, and ultimately integrate into his text the relevant economic literature.

This book grew out of a June 1998 conference sponsored by the Georgia Institute of Technology's Center for the Study of Southern Industrialization. With the premise that the first wave of Southern industrialization comprising mature natural-resource-based industries stumbled in the period between the two world wars, the conference focused on the “second wave” beginning in the 1940s, during which the region underwent a more diversified, more thorough, and more lasting transformation. The call for papers solicited contributions from “historians, sociologists, geographers, urban or rural studies researchers, and public policy analysts.” Individual contributions could be firm-, industry-, or locationspecific, but the conference aimed for insights into broader economic processes.

At the turn of the twentieth century, successive waves of innovation began to redefine the fields of media and communication: the telegraph (invented in the middle of the nineteenth century and commonplace by the early twentieth), “wireless telegraphy,” AM radio, FM radio, and monochrome and then color television. Set against this backdrop of steady technological advance, the breakthroughs of recent years—the Internet and mobile telephony for example—are not really such breakthroughs after all, but merely the latest rounds of a patiently unfolding cycle.

This diverse collection of essays had their foundation in a 1997 conference hosted by the Center of the American West at the University of Colorado, Boulder. This event brought together a range of academics, National Park Service (NPS) employees, commercial interests, and local residents to examine the forces shaping western tourism, both past and present. Subsequently those revised papers, selected for inclusion in this volume, were combined with commissioned essays and some pieces that had already been published to offer an interdisciplinary selection that is thought-provoking for historians and westerners alike. For historians the collection has significance beyond the regional debate about how western history should be written and appreciated. It points to new and potential developments for economic, business, and social historians, some of whom will need to put on new spectacles and adopt new techniques of analysis if they are to examine this important industry.