This delightful, highly readable book—entirely suitable for undergraduate teaching and for interested nonprofessionals (my mother loved it)—presents almost nothing new in the way of research, and indeed relatively few “facts” with which historians of Latin America are not already familiar; but it pulls together bits and pieces from various secondary works and travel accounts in such a fresh and exciting way that a book-length treatment is amply justified. Bauer takes very seriously, and uses systematically, material that most of us are likely to insert almost haphazardly into our lectures in order to spice up the presentation of dry statistics and abstract models of change: how people ate (not just their basic foods but also their cooking methods and equipment, and some pretty funky dietary practices), the ways they built and decorated their homes, the clothes and others items of self-ornamentation they chose or were allowed to wear—in short, the things they acquired. Using changes over time in patterns of consumption of these ordinary goods, he retells the story of Latin America (with a strong emphasis on Mexico, Peru, and Chile) from before the conquest to the present day. He divides the story into six chapters, covering pre-Columbian goods, “contact” goods (i.e., the immediate postconquest period), “civilizing” goods (the remainder of the colonial period, some 250 years), “modernizing” goods (the long nineteenth century, up to about 1920), “developing goods” (from the 1920s to the 1970s), and, finally, “global” goods (the 1980s to the present).

“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.

Wang Gungwu's 1997 Edwin O. Reischauer Lectures, now published as The Chinese Overseas, traces the experience of the overseas Chinese in the last millennium. By the sixteenth century migration overseas had become a steady current, and in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, promoted by economic opportunities abroad and politics at home, it became a flood. Whereas the earlier migrants consisted primarily of traders settling abroad, the migrants of the nineteenth century included many manual laborers, and by the twentieth century many were middle-class political and economic exiles. Despite the change in composition, these emigrants retained their Chinese identity.

These three volumes bring together a set of very useful essays on Latin American economic growth since the late nineteenth century. The first volume focuses on the so-called “export age,” the period 1870–1930. The second (a reprint of a volume originally published in 1984) focuses on the impact of the Great Depression and the process of recovery throughout the 1930s. The third focuses on state-led industrialization from the 1940s to the early 1990s. The essays in these volumes are, with few exceptions, organized around national histories. Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, and Mexico receive particular attention. Some of the volumes also include essays on Bolivia, Peru, Venezuela, and Central America. The goal of the volumes is not to provide a synthesis of the literature on each country, running the gamut of economic sectors and the institutions that governed their growth, but to focus on a set of themes related to the industrial development of each country.

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.

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.

I had not realized that “the subject of economic history is in a condition of self-induced crisis” (p. 7) until I read the Farnie–Abe introduction to this book. If economic historians are still capable of producing good quality work as interesting as the essays in this book, then the crisis can hardly be of serious proportions.

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.

This is an interesting study of institutions and labor relations in Brazil's most important industrial region during a period of impressive industrial growth and productivity improvement. The book's strengths derive from archival research on the internal workings of labor relations at the firm and industry-wide levels. Paying attention to the details of the work-place environment, Colistete argues that labor-training schemes, the organization of work, and factory environments each influenced industrial productivity in São Paulo during the postwar years.

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).

Art historians have produced some of the most interesting historical works on China, bringing to the study of the past an immediacy of insight that can elude the historian who works only with texts. Ginger Hsü has provided such an insight into eighteenth-century Yangchow [Yangzhou], a city renowned at the time for its wealth, beauty, and cultural productivity, and now frequently cited as the exemplary site of social change in Ch'ing China. Although Yangchow is as closely associated with painting in China as are Venice and Florence in Europe, Hsü's is the first monograph-length study of Yangchow painting to have been published in English.

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).

Readers may remember some of the ironies of the 1980s debate—largely an American debate—about Japan and industrial policy, the outlines of which are recounted by Takeo Kikkawa and Takashi Hikino in Policies for Competitiveness. On the one hand were the institutional economists, who believed that government industrial policies could be good for growth, and that Japan was a clear illustration of the fact. Institutionalists were themselves divided into those who drew the conclusion that stagnant America could use a strong dose of industrial policy itself, and those (who became known as Japan-bashers and level-playing-fielders) for whom Japan's industrial policies were simply an unfair, quasi-communist arrangement for taking market share away from virtuous Americans who truly believed in freedom. On the other hand were the Chicago true believers, who knew from first principles that interference with market forces was always bad, and so attributed Japan's success to the dynamism generated by brisk market competition. That argument, since it seemed to be not on price but on quality that American industry was losing market share, rather left them in the unpatriotic position of suggesting that America was intrinsically unable to compete.

What a difference a decade makes. The Japanese economy has been locked in recession for so long, and everyone is so gloomy about its prospects, that it is hard to imagine that at one time serious commentators spoke of a Pax Nipponica in the offing. Now unemployment is officially (and optimistically) estimated at 5 percent, corporate bankruptcies are soaring, the stock market is roughly 75 percent below its all-time high, and the financial system is on life support. Japan now leads the world in public debt as a percentage of GDP, while the Iron Triangle of government, business, and the conservative Liberal Democratic Party that oversaw the vaunted “miracle” era of growth in the 1950s and 1960s is discredited and unraveling. The Japanese employment system is also fading as firms trim their workforces, renege on implicit guarantees of lifetime employment, and shun seniority-based wages in favor of merit- and skill-related compensation. In short, Japan is in a period of wrenching transformation, in which its most popular politician, Prime Minister Koizumi Junichiro, routinely admonishes audiences with his decidedly unpandering slogan, “No pain, no gain.” This blunt message is a reminder that the verities of postwar Japan are rapidly fading. The new mantra of restructuring and deregulation heralds a new era of uncertainty and insecurity in which most people expect things to get much worse.

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.