This is an excellent book. It tells a story that had not been told before, and indeed one which many would not have appreciated was there to be told. It draws on an impressive array of primary sources, as well as interviews with many of the key players involved. It is very well written, with the exception of the hyperbole of the opening paragraphs. John Vardalas displays a mastery of the technical details involved, as well as the social and political influences at work.

Cotton holds much meaning for economic historians; it brings to mind the industrial revolutions of Europe and Japan, as well as the economic and social fabric of the American South both before and after the Civil War. Yet nothing so weighty as social transformation is entertained in this book; instead the authors chronicle the transformation of cotton from crop to “brand”—with its own logo—as cotton's share of the raw-fiber market recovered from a long decline. Timothy Curtis Jacobson and George David Smith's work is a study of how organizations moved the U.S. cotton industry from supply to demand management and coordinated the stages of production in a setting in which incentives did not favor vertical integration. That story in itself has interest as a case study in marketing and industrial organization. Its hero is “Cotton Incorporated,” formed in 1971 to promote marketing, support research and development, provide technical support for fiber users worldwide, and organize elements in a coherent fashion.

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.

Reflecting on economists' distinguished record in allocating the economy's scarce military resources during the Second World War, Michael Bernstein writes: “It is one of the great ironies of this history that a discipline renowned for its systematic portrayals of the benefits of unfettered, competitive markets would first demonstrate its unique operability in the completely regulated and controlled economy of total war.” Not to let readers miss the point, Bernstein prefaces this remark by noting that it was “statism,” not “individualism” that had set the historical context in which “the high hopes … of generations of professionalizers could be realized” (p. 89).

Political scientist Ruth O'Brien's Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace grapples with the difficult issue of American policy toward dis-abled workers. In doing so, O'Brien presents a detailed and complex history that covers the evolution of disability policy and law over the course of the twentieth century. Crippled Justice displays a sophisticated understanding of a variety of relevant disciplines: political science and public policy, the histories of the behavioral and medical sciences, and political history and law. O'Brien's central theme is the struggle to change the nation's disability policies. She ably documents the shift from a traditional view that saw the disabled as maladjusted individuals in need of rehabilitation to the contemporary notion, urged by disabled rights activists among others, that the disabled need no rehabilitation, but instead that society needs to adapt the workplace to their needs.

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.

Bankruptcy law is the bacteria of the market economy. When a company dies, bankruptcy law figures out how to break down what remains, bring the productive parts back to life, and dispose of the rest. Some consider the market economy a jungle; bankruptcy law simply helps clear the jungle floor.

By the mid-1980s, the city of Detroit had become an icon in U.S. urban history. Many saw it as the most extreme example of what went wrong in Northern industrial cities in the late twentieth century. The sequence of events is well known: the rapid influx of African American migrants from the South, combative reaction from the white community, civil unrest culminating in the 1967 riot, white flight, the loss of manufacturing jobs, and the development of a desperately poor, socially alienated, primarily black underclass. Other cities experienced similar events, but Detroit's descent was certainly among the most dramatic.

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.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, questions regarding which of America's economic regions will emerge as leader come to the fore. This regional economic leadership may arise when demographics and technology combine with conducive market policies to create unprecedented levels of prosperity. Nineteenth-century New England had these characteristics and created industrial prosperity. The twentieth century brought a westward shift in economic leadership to California and the American Pacific. At the dawn of the twenty-first century, policies friendly toward markets, demographics, and technology suggest an emerging thrust of economic development in the American South. Such an economic climate suggests that the economic lone star of Texas is on the rise. However, like New England's nineteenth- and California's twentieth-century economies, prosperity in the American South will come at an environmental cost. Texas's environment has already experienced some of these costs, as it now ranks first among states in toxic releases and tenth in hazardous-waste releases. Hence, the environmental condition of Texas will continue to be an active area of study among economists and environmental historians.

Little mentioned in the huge literature on rising wage inequality in the United States is the distinction between permanent and transitory differences across individuals. Transitory differences can perhaps be cushioned by borrowing and saving, but permanent differences cannot, so we should care whether the large increase in measured inequality represents transitory or permanent components. Unfortunately, permanent and transitory components of wages cannot be separated using the cross-sectional data employed by most researchers.

For more than 20 years, Martin Melosi has thoughtfully considered the environmental state of the American city. One year after publishing The Sanitary City: Urban Infrastruc ture in America from Colonial Times to the Present, Melosi issued this important retrospective of his work in urban environmental history. In a series of 11 previously published articles and book chapters that Melosi wrote over a 20-year span, Effluent America provides his environmental analogue to John Kenneth Galbraith's Affluent Society: economic development and prosperity comes with a price.

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.

The 1990s, particularly the last half of the decade, presented a special challenge to the conventional wisdom. Few would have asserted that unemployment could be pushed much below (or possibly even to) 5.5 or 6.0 percent without an unacceptable acceleration in the rate of price inflation. This consensus came from the acceptance of the Phillips curve and the NAIRU (nonaccelerating inflation rate of unemployment), and so ingrained was this orthodoxy that most policymakers accepted it. Is the NAIRU dead?

The Russell Sage Foundation and the Century Foundation believed that the 1990s required a closer examination to see what we could learn from this seemingly unusual period. They asked Robert Solow and Alan Krueger to assemble the set of topics and authors that resulted in this volume. The book is divided into four parts.

“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.”

All historians tell stories. Some rely on explicit narrative; others, on the narrative implicit in their analytic framework. Professor Henry J. Perkinson prefers explicit narrative, and for good reason. At his best he is very good at it. His pocket examinations of Anglo-American political and economic history are often perceptive and always quite delightful. Overall his stories are of decline—the decline in our understanding of knowing after Plato, the decline in Anglo-American governance after Lincoln, the decline in the free market after Adam Smith, and the decline in moral behavior after Rousseau. Now, I have nothing against stories of decline. Still, there is something quite bothersome in Perkinson's narratives. My bother begins with his hero, Karl Popper, and his treatment of that hero. Popper understood that human reason is fallible, as Perkinson asserts, but more importantly, Popper attempted to define “science,” to demarcate it from other human activities. In so doing, Popper asserted that knowledge does not come from the identification of correct ideas either by confirmation through experience or experiment, or by relation to foundational principles. For him both are logically impossible. Rather knowledge comes from the falsification of a factual proposition logically deduced from a stated hypothesis.

Constantine J. Spiliotes makes a substantial new contribution to the literature on presidential decision making. Spiliotes seeks to bring together two largely separate literatures: presidential studies and rational choice theory. This is a formidable task: Economists and rational-choice political scientists typically view traditional presidential studies as excessively anecdotal for the purpose of establishing generally applicable theories, and presidential-studies scholars typically view rational-choice models as excessively abstract and parsimonious for the purpose of understanding the complexities of the presidency.

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.

During the past few decades a number of scholars have begun exploring a new range of questions regarding drugs and the drug trade. David Courtwright has been foremost in developing what might be understood as the “new history of drugs.” This slim volume is a tour de force of this approach, a sophisticated analysis of an extremely complex historical phenomenon. His simple and elegant style is suitable for the general reader, an undergraduate, or a specialist. Courtwright's study of the relationship between human beings, Western civilization, and our retinue of psychoactive substances is a penetrating overview of the global panorama during the past five centuries.