The agitation in mid-nineteenth-century Russia for the abolition of serfdom gave the first great stimulus to Russian scholarly interest in the history of the peasantry. The persistence of the land problem down to the Revolution and since then the Soviet preoccupation with the primary producer have kept alive this interest. As a result, a large number of studies of the agrarian history of their country, many of them works of high value, have been written by Russian scholars both before and since 1917. One of the most recent and most important contributions to the literature of this subject has been made by B. D. Grekov in his history of the peasantry from earliest times to the seventeenth century. Although its author remains carefully within the doctrinal limits imposed by the current standards of orthodoxy in Soviet historiography, his work is indispensable for the study not only of agrarian history but of all phases of early Russian history.

The Federal Tariff of 1901 marked the first of numerous interventions by the Australian government designed to stimulate the production of finished motor vehicles. It was unsuccessful, as was the “Tudor” Tariff of 1911, which imposed a specific duty on body imports; war conditions in 1917 led to an embargo on imports of motor vehicles. Thereafter, the government's need for revenue, which favored protectionist measures generally, in combination with a defense policy that deemed engine production to be of strategic importance, underpinned a series of government measures intended to promote local vehicle production. One effect of the “Green” Tariff in 1920, which afforded protection to manufacturing in general, was to attract American assemblers. By that time, the fierce and often clandestine clash of pressure groups representing special interests, within government, and within the motor industry (broadly defined to include local suppliers of components and equipment, from tires to electrical fittings), had become an important influence on policy. In several instances, the effects were both perverse and hilarious. A fragmented and inefficient industry operated within effective tariff protection, of which the principal beneficiaries were American multinationals. The “complete car project” of the 1930s was a failure, though it was revived under wartime conditions in the 1940s. With subsidies in mind, the government persuaded reluctant American and British producers to submit plans for full car manufacture, the first to do so being GM-H, the Australian subsidiary of General Motors (incorporating Holdens, the, long-established local body manufacturer).

At a time when serious questions in economic history are often delivered by publishers into the hands of either misinformed polemicists (such as Dinesh D'Souza in his remarkably misleading The Virtue of Prosperity: Finding Values in an Age of Techno–Affluence) or facile pundits (such as Jeffrey Madrick in his thoughtful yet under-researched The End of Affluence), it is a special pleasure to encounter Gordon Bjork's The Way It Worked and Why It Won't. Here is a work, skillfully rendered by the Lovelace Professor of Economics of Claremont McKenna College and the Drucker School of Management (Claremont Graduate School), that carefully assays the recent economic history of the United States with a view toward understanding the productivity slowdown that has obtained since the 1970s.

Ten years ago Maris Vinovskis published an influential essay that signaled a profound shift in Civil War scholarship.This dissertation was completed in September 1999 in the Department of History at the University of Minnesota under the direction of Russell R. Menard and Steven Ruggles. Financial support was provided by a fellowship from the University of Minnesota Graduate School. Although thousands of books and articles had been written about the military experiences of Civil War participants, Vinovskis contended that relatively little was known about their actual lives. Vinovskis called explicit attention to the demographic cost of the war and its continuing influence on the life course of the Civil War generation. An estimated 618,222 military deaths occurred during the war—roughly equal to the number of deaths suffered in all other American wars through the Korean War combined. The human cost of the Civil War becomes even more spectacular when one considers the rate of death. Nearly one in eight white men of military age died during the war, exceeding the rate of death in World War II by a factor of six, and the rate of death in the Vietnam War by a factor of 65.Vinovskis, “Have Social Historians.”