In his most enlightening paper on Federal Reserve policy in 1920–1921 Elmus Wicker's statement on the Bank of England's policies is not strictly in accord with the facts.

The English system of no legal reserve requirements imparted a greater degree of flexibility to the monetary authorities and allowed a greater economy in the use of the gold reserve. The entire gold reserve was available in emergencies to safeguard the pound.

On this occasion it seems wise to take a leaf from Wassily W. Leontief's book as President of the American Economic Association. He discussed a problem of his organization. His presidential address was a plea for economists to limit their creation of models, especially those difficult of empirical testing, and to test some of those susceptible of verification. My remarks will also deal with a problem, one in the Economic History Association, how it came about, and what we might do about it.

Currency Crises is a collection of papers by leading thinkers on the subject, all presented at a 1998 NBER conference. Paul Krugman edits the volume and asks aloud what the reader can only silently wonder: Why is yet another conference on such a well-established research field necessary? The answer, according to Krugman, is that “despite two decades of research on the causes and consequences of such crises, important issues are either unresolved or require a fresh look in the face of new experience” (p. 2). This is made immediately clear in the pages that follow. The volume contains applications of new models to old crises, as well as new ways of thinking about recent episodes. It also treats different types of currency crises, including not only those that can and do occur in industrial countries (usually because of policy inconsistencies), but also the breed of animal that rears its head in emerging markets.

This article examines barriers that impeded the accumulation of land by African Americans in the postbellum South with a new data set of real estate transactions from 1880 Tennessee. We find that rates of purchase by African Americans differed little between plantation and non-plantation regions. We also find that parcels sold in plantation regions were relatively small, suggesting that African American accumulation of land was not hindered by plantation owners refusing to subdivide their properties. Additionally, we find blacks paid more than whites per acre of quality-constant land, although literacy at least partially mitigated the racial price discrimination.

Ann Capling's book deals with Australia's role in the design of the global trade system, from the post-1945 negotiations over the (aborted) International Trade Organization (ITO), up to the 1999 meetings of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in Seattle. She draws primarily on Australian sources, such as memoranda, reminiscences, and interviews with Australian participants in the negotiation process. The story has not been told before in such detail, and the book will become a standard work on how Australia conducted its international economic diplomacy during the second half of the twentieth century.

This is an ambitious, stimulating, and well-written book. Haim Ofek is concerned with the origin of the human propensity “to truck, barter, and exchange,” as Adam Smith put it. The author notes that while many animals engage in forms of nepotistic exchange (behavior that can be accounted for by the Hamilton kin-selection mechanism), humans are the only species to engage systematically in exchange with nonkin conspecifics. Rather than viewing these behaviors as cultural artifacts reflective of generations of development after the onset of the Neolithic revolution, Ofek seeks to situate their origin much earlier, in the two-million-year Pleistocene era; indeed, he views exchange, in conjunction with climactic stabilization, as a sufficient condition for—the cause, rather than a consequence of—the Neolithic revolution.