The economy of early modern Europe has always posed a particular problem for the economic historian trying to grasp the big picture. Four centuries, give or take, separate the medieval from the industrial era—two systems that, rightly or wrongly, appear well defined and even understood. While most early modern historians find in such themes as absolutism, Renaissance, Enlightenment, and exploration convenient pegs on which to hang their particular story, those for whom the past is above all a story of economic development are not so fortunate. Indeed, one senses in the book under review an almost defensive desire to attract the interest of nonspecialist economic historians: we too have something important to say about the sources of economic growth. However, the swirls and eddies of activity, to say nothing of divergent experiences in smaller and larger regions and limited quantitative data, make it hard to pick out the strand of development that resulted in such clear economic differences between the Europe of Joan of Arc and that of Napoleon. Gutenberg, Newton, Galileo, and Columbus would seem as important, even to economic life, as Adam Smith, James Watt, François Quesnay, or Abraham Darby. Why is their influence so hard to trace? Early Modern Capitalism, then, tries to find that elusive thread.

This book is constructed around the unusual circumstance that between 1560 and 1620 approximately 1,000 people left the Castilian town of Brihuega (population ca. 4,000) and settled in a single transatlantic destination, the Mexican city of Puebla. While emigration from Spain was not unusual, the concentration of settlers from one origin at a single destination was apparently unique. This circumstance allows the author to compare the behavior of communities with a common background in two different settings. The results are both interesting and frustrating.

This book is a masterpiece. The author has marshaled a massive amount of information, and in the tradition of the best history writing she uses this to cast new light on our knowledge of eighteenth-century seamstresses and the society in which they lived. The meticulous detail is such that Clare Haru Crowston's work on this topic is unlikely to be superseded. Moreover, the book is beautifully produced. The illustrations educate. The dustcover alone is a delight.

First, it must be said that the publication of this and its two sister volumes on the urban history of Britain represents a magnificent achievement, for which all concerned—publisher, editors, and contributors—should be congratulated. Volume III covers the period during which Britain truly became urban. Even if all of its people were not living in towns by 1900, relatively few were directly engaged in agriculture and could be said to be part of a rural society in every sense. This is a social, economic, and environmental history of urban places which by 1950 must have encompassed, or at least severely impinged upon, the entire British population (82 percent of which lived in towns in 1951, according to Table 2.1). As the editor himself asks, What then is particular about the urban history of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries?

The study of British cities and towns has advanced enormously in recent years. Once largely confined to the analysis of the great Victorian Cities—work inspired by the brilliant leadership of the late H. J. Dyos at Leicester—research has now extended to encompass the early and late Middle Ages, the early modern period, and also most recently the twentieth century. Not just metropolitan and industrial centers are being investigated, but the whole spectrum of the urban system: regional capitals, the myriad of market towns, ports, and, beginning in the eighteenth century, the new leisure and service towns. If the old urban studies were largely engineered by historians and sociologists, the new history of British contribution is attracting a galaxy of contributions from archaeologists, cultural geographers, literary scholars, art historians, musicologists, and museologists. Testifying to some of the wealth and diversity is the recent Cambridge Urban History of Britain (edited by D. Palliser et al. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), which in three volumes and with 80 or so contributors covers the period from the fourth century to the Second World War.

Keith Snell and Paul Ell have written a superb and definitive study of the geography of religion in Britain circa 1851, relying upon a massive database constructed by them from the original returns of the 1851 census of religious worship, which the government undertook, for the first and only time, as part of its decennial population census. The religious census measured attendance at worship, not individual professions of faith; the returns were head-counts at morning, afternoon, and evening services on census Sunday, submitted by the presiding minister of each denomination. These returns, despite inevitable doubts about their reliability, have long been recognized by historians as an extremely valuable source. But until now they have not been analyzed comprehensively or with the aid of multivariate statistics. Not only do the authors describe the distribution of the strength of each denomination across the whole of England and Wales, using parish-, registration-district-, and county-level data; they are also able to address associated historiographical issues with a decisiveness that convincingly settles many an important debate.

Tamara Whited's carefully researched study of the conflicts over reforestation and changing land use in the alpine départments of Savoie and the Ariège represents a welcome addition to a growing, but still relatively undeveloped, literature on the history of the environment in modern France. While much of the work focusing on forests has tended to trace the evolution of state management practices, Whited examines local, grassroots responses to government policy, and the political, social, and ecological assumptions that were imbedded in struggles between the state and the French peasantry. Whited pays subtle attention to the ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in responses to environmental change at both the national and local levels. She shows, for example, that antagonisms between peasants and state officials were not always immutable. Peasants sometimes adopted the state's language to press their claims, and forest officials sometimes repudiated aspects of state policy. The breadth of this study—which spans a period from the seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries—reveals, in a larger sense, the changing and often conflicting ways in which the natural world was used, managed, and imagined in a specific historical context.

Friedrich A. Hayek is generally regarded as the principal intellectual architect of the revival of classical liberalism, as the most effective critic of socialist doctrines, and as one of the preeminent social philosophers of the twentieth century. His life (1899–1992) witnessed all the dramatic episodes of this eventful century, including the eventual collapse of the communist empire. His publications spanned the decades from the early 1920s to the late 1980s, and extended far beyond his original field—economics—into law, politics, philosophy, psychology, and evolutionary theory.

In this carefully researched book, Monica Chojnacka stresses the independence of working women in early modern Venice. Accepting the premise that, in general, the wives, sisters, and daughters of the nobility led highly restricted lives throughout this period, she argues that both economic forces and the formation of new charitable institutions benefited popolane (non-elite women) by providing them with forms of sociability, community, and agency that were denied their social superiors.

Karl Marx put the relations of town and country at the core of the processes by which capitalism arose in Europe: division of labor, commercialization, formation of the bourgeois class, changing (power) relations of production, the whole lot. Today too, the student of emergent capitalism must focus on that nexus, even though to do so is to wrestle with some of the most enduring puzzles, as well as the complexities and varieties, of Europe's early modern age. The collection edited by S. R. Epstein adds to our knowledge of how these urban–rural relations evolved over much of Europe, though it will certainly not resolve the puzzles, nor lay bare the mechanisms, of the run-up to industrialization and sustained economic growth. More disappointing is the lack of comparative perspective, despite the editor's dutiful call for more of it.

Stephen Epstein is one of a growing group of scholars who are proposing a new interpretation of slavery in medieval and early modern Europe. The subject itself is not new. In the case of Italy, over the past century a few scholars have studied Italian slavery in local or regional studies, and it was the subject of a major work by Charles Verlinden (L'Esclavage dans l'Europe médiévale, vol. 2: Italie – olonies italiennes du Levant – Levant latin – Empire byzantine. Ghent: Rijsuniversiteit te Gent, 1977) and featured prominently in general surveys by Jacques Heers (Esclaves et domestiques au moyen âge dans le monde mediterranean. Paris: Fayard, 1981) and the present reviewer (Slavery from Roman Times to the Early Transatlantic Trade. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985). Nevertheless, the historical profession has tended to ignore post-Roman slavery in the Mediterranean world, or to consider it either an attenuated relic from classical times or as a shadowy prelude to the great expansion of slavery in the colonial Americas. The numbers and percentages of slaves in Italy never approached those of true slave societies, in which more than 30 percent of the population was unfree. Common conclusions heretofore have been that slavery was not too important in the Italian economy, because most slaves were domestics; that slaves were not treated too harshly, because most lived in the households of their owners; and that slavery died out without leaving much of a trace in modern Italian society.

To some it may come as a surprise that the Netherlands have a nineteenth-century economic and social history. This book therefore certainly fills a gap: it summarizes adequately the debates and results of Dutch historical research over the last decades. Michael Wintle's thorough knowledge of Dutch historiography enables him to make these results available to an international readership. Especially for those interested in why European countries developed along different paths, this book will be a gold mine. Its aim is more ambitious than simply to summarize, though. Wintle tries to demonstrate that the most important features of twentieth-century Dutch society had their roots in the “long” nineteenth century. After a transition period a set of characteristics of Dutch society were established, characteristics that would dominate Dutch history through most of the twentieth century.

This book is the most recent contribution to the somewhat arcane subfield of “Monnet Studies.” Research for it was undertaken in the mid-1990s, at about the time when the two big biographies of “l'Inspirateur” by Francois Duchene and Eric Roussel appeared, but apparently competed before the publication of the next landmark in the literature, the anthology edited by G. Bossuat and A. Wilkens (Jean Monnet, l'Europe, et les chemins de la paix. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1998). Since in a number of important cases the individual articles written for the latter delve much deeper into the topics that Fransen covers in this short book, The Supranational Politics of Jean Monnet is unfortunately already rather dated.

Jane Whittle's fine book makes a distinctive contribution in a number of ways. First of all, it is a detailed account of the land market of a single manor—Hevingham Bishops, in Norfolk—supplemented by a study of the surviving records of a number of other adjacent manors, which spans the normal divide between the later middle ages and the sixteenth century. Secondly, it is a study of labor and employment in Norfolk, notably in the early and mid-sixteenth century. Thirdly, it is a formidable and well-researched critique of Robert Brenner's thesis. As one might expect of a book based on a doctoral thesis, much of the exposition is detailed, sometimes over-detailed, but the less-committed will find that it is a virtue of the book that it contains good summaries of the evidence presented and the case argued. Despite the apparent narrowness of the book, based largely on a single manor and certainly a single county, this is not a work to be overlooked. It is an impressive and mature debut, which will serve to bring one of the most able of the younger generation of early modern economic and social historians to a wider readership.

Historians, and especially medievalists, love to show how many primary sources they have read over their many years in the archives. The outcome of this painstaking excavation is often a heavily footnoted, barely digestible book. On the other hand, economists who like to be pseudo historians in their spare time often propose brilliant theories but have never so much as glanced through a primary source. Stephan R. Epstein's book is a fortunate combination of economic analysis mixed with serious archival research, a pleasure for both the economist and the historian.