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Book Review
| Nation, State and the Economy in History. Edited by ALICE TEICHOVA and HERBERT MATIS. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 450+ xvi pp. $75.00 (hardcover).
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This is a biggish book on a very big topic. Following a "Pre-Congress Conference" in Vienna in 1999, the chapters were presented at a session sponsored by the International Economic History Association at the International Congress of Historical Sciences in Oslo in 2000. The book is organized by countries. Part 1 has chapters on Britain, France, and Germany; two chapters on Norway and Sweden; and a chapter on Spain. Part 2 has an overview of Central and Eastern Europe, and chapters on Austria, Czechoslovakia, Serbia, and Russia. Part 3 has a survey of Sub-Saharan Africa, and chapters on Senegal and on Israel. Part 4 has a chapter on India and Pakistan, and chapters on China and on Japan. Part 5 has a chapter comparing Brazil and Mexico, another chapter on Brazil, and chapters on the United States and on Australia. |
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Despite the effort and resources devoted to the project, it is not clear what exactly the editors and contributors intended to accomplish, or who the intended audience is. The coverage is uneven, but there is no attempt to justify the odd mix of cases. The editors appear not to have exercised any control over the chapter authors aside possibly from a word limit (François Crouzet complains of lack of space, p. 55 n. 33). Topics and treatment vary widely and the time frames considered range from years or decades, through one or two centuries, up to near millennia. There are no connections among the chapters themselves, and none of the chapters considers systematically the elements mentioned by the editors as important in the development of the nation-state (p. 1)—the Enlightenment, Romanticism, emergence of a public sphere, decline of feudalism and religious belief, rise of civil society. |
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