John Clarke, an historical geographer at Carleton University, has provided us with a magnificently detailed and exquisitely researched look at the disposition of land in the first 80 years of one county of Upper Canada. Essex County, most readily identified as the westernmost part of southern Ontario, south and southeast of Detroit, was the earliest settled of the counties of Ontario, yet among the last to have settlement completed. At the time of the creation of the colony of Upper Canada (1791) there was a pre-existing French community, augmented by Loyalists, many of whom had been in the fur trade or had taken up arms for Britain against revolutionary America. Nevertheless, the county was slow to have most of its land taken up. Clarke has exhaustively worked through the land records from the initial patenting of Crown land up to the middle of the nineteenth century. For very few districts of North America do we have such a thorough examination of land holding and land transactions.

Improving our understanding of the economic past ultimately rests on refreshing the stock of economic facts. The present volume contributes new observations of crop yields and cropping systems in Northern France, the Low Countries, and England, quarried from documentary deposits laid down during the half-millennium preceding the Industrial Revolution. Because yields and crop rotations are strongly affected by local factors, the fruits of this enterprise resist easy summary. Even so, a few broad patterns suggest themselves. The first is the absence of any movement in the upper tail of the distribution of cereal yields that might indicate a fundamental revolution in agricultural technology before the nineteenth century; the true revolution in crop yields dates to the massive application of commercial fertilizers in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. The second is the persistence of wide spatial variation in yields. The data do not permit the computation of national mean yields, but the general impression is one of slow movement, especially after 1650 when yields commenced a gradual and unbroken rise into the nineteenth century. The last general impression is one of a U-shaped time path in the highest yields, which declined for varying lengths of time after the Black Death before recovering in the sixteenth, and in some cases the eighteenth century. If this pattern continues to show up in the data, it should be granted the status of a stylized fact to be explained.

In this wonderful book, Niall Ferguson takes us back to the origins of marketable national debt at the end of the seventeenth century in Europe, deftly laying out the conditions for its success. These comprise what he calls “the square of power,” which reduces to a parliament (for credible tax backing of the debt), a tax bureaucracy (for collecting the taxes needed to service the debt), a central bank (for maintaining the market value of the debt), and, of course, the national debt itself (for fighting and winning wars). Ferguson then demonstrates the effectiveness of the power emanating from this base, by showing how it won wars for its possessors over the past three centuries. So effective is this combination of institutions, achieved first by Britain in the eighteenth century and then perfected by the United States in the twentieth, that it could have been used even more effectively in winning wars, past and present. Far from imperial “overstretch,” as argued by Paul Kennedy, Ferguson argues that both Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States today suffer from self-inflicted problems of imperial “understretch.” His conclusion will generate a lot of attention, as intended, but his critics will have their work cut out for them.

Economic historians usually have to explain to their economist colleagues the difference between economic history, which focuses on facts, and history of economic thought, which focuses on ideas. Our colleagues in finance departments, typically fascinated by episodes in financial history treated by economic historians, are bound to be disappointed in the lack of attention given to the development of ideas in finance by historians of economic thought. Geoffrey Poitras, a professor of finance at Simon Fraser University, makes a valiant effort to remedy these oversights in his collection of vignettes that highlight the sophistication of financial instruments and analysts of financial markets well before the time of Adam Smith. Starting in 1478 with the publication of the Treviso Arithmetic, a typical textbook of commercial arithmetic for Italian merchants, and ending with brief snippets from the Wealth of Nations, Poitras treats the reader to a fascinating potpourri of excerpts from various manuals, brief biographies of pioneers in financial analysis, and historical discursions on foreign-exchange and stock markets.

This short book does not deal solely with bimetallism, in contrast with what one would expect from the title. Based on a collection of previously published papers, in actuality the essay revolves around two themes. First, it examines why, over the very long run (between 1200 and 1800), specie standards—based on gold, silver, or both—failed to provide a nominal anchor. Second, it argues that bimetallism was an inescapable stage on the road of monetary progress—a road leading to the glittering (if short-lived) gold standard.

“This book is about laissez-faire when it was new,” says Emma Rothschild at the outset of a provocative series of intertwined essays dealing with the relationship between the emerging economic science and the moral and political aims of the Enlightenment. The book is dedicated to Amartya Sen, whose influence can be seen in several places: for in-stance in the third chapter (“Commerce and the State”), which compares Turgot's, Condorcet's, and Smith's views on famines, and more generally in Rothschild's insistence that political economy cannot and should not be separated from ethics and politics. Rothschild's basic argument is that Smith and Condorcet proposed a comprehensive view of human life. The differences between the two are less important than their common allegiance to a “liberal plan of equality, liberty and justice.”

In this monumental work, Vernon Ruttan has shared with us 30 years of study and research on the economics of technological change. The book covers an enormous literature, and each of its fourteen chapters has a bibliography as long as that of many full books. Oxford University Press has taken the unusual step of providing an author index, which I estimate contains at least 1,500 names, including a substantial subset of the membership of the Economic History Association. The book purports to cover the enormous literature on the economics of technology produced in the past fifty years. It succeeds admirably. While the author's own interests and predilections inevitably bias the coverage, and while some areas are not treated quite as thoroughly as others, the author's encyclopedic knowledge and his fair and informed treatment of the many confused and confusing contributions to an endlessly fascinating but somewhat incoherent and inconsistent literature make this book indispensable as a source and handbook. It seems a fair prediction that this book will be more often consulted than read cover-to-cover, with some chapters assigned to advanced undergraduates. But it is hard to think of many readers of this JOURNAL who will be able to afford not to have this book on their office bookshelf, next to their copies of the classics by A.P. Usher, Thomas P. Hughes, and David Landes.

Julian Simon made fundamental contributions to the literature on population economics between the mid-1970s and his premature death in 1998. His ideas were controversial, often extremely so. Even more than Esther Boserup, Simon became practically a cult figure, symbolizing the argument that population growth has propitious effects on economic growth. He repeated this argument in paper after paper, and book after book, contradicting the doomsayers and the neo-Malthusians. He emphasized the obvious, but frequently glossed-over, fact that human capital has to be embodied in human beings; thus the more people born, the more human capital there will be, and the higher will be the probability of significant new knowledge being created, the more scientists there will be, and the faster will be the pace of technological change. Simply put: people are “the primary causal variable” (p. 15) in economic growth.

This book, written for the most part by established authorities in their respective fields, deals with aspects of abolition and its consequences in the Americas, India, and Africa. Writers on the Americas contribute to the ongoing debate over the meaning of freedom by investigating how slaves in the Caribbean and the United States defined freedom, and what the limitations of free status proved to be. The centerpiece of these articles, which also deal with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the British Caribbean, is Carolyn Fick's comprehensive study of emancipation in Haiti. It traces the formulation and gradual implementation (1791–1830s) of the ex-slaves' concept of freedom: to command their own labor, to work their own land, and to sell their own surplus (p. 21). This concept was shared by ex-plantation slaves throughout the British Caribbean, and after 1838 it was realized wherever land was available. But Toussaint L'ouverture (and, in varying degrees, his successors) gave priority to regenerating plantation-based export surpluses to finance and defend the newly established state—and this required enforced gang labor. Curtailment of freedom improved productivity, but in the teeth of popular resistance, laborers bargaining as slaves had done to improve their terms of work, and at the price of creating an unbridgeable gap between the laborers and the state (p. 23). But in the longer run, “the internal logic of revolution from below … triumphed”: Haiti became a peasant-based society (p. 35).