| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Kevin H. O'Rourke and Jeffrey G. Williamson. Globalization and History: The Evolution of a Nineteenth-Century Atlantic Economy. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 1999. Pp. xii, 343. $45.00.

This is a book that needs to be read carefully and at different levels, in different ways, and for different purposes, because it exemplifies what is best and worst about the type of history written by economists. Among its best features is the attempt to provide precise answers to specific questions through the use of economic modeling and mathematical techiques. Where the questions are well framed and capable of being answered in this way, the results are reasonably robust and one can have confidence that the authors have done their work well. Conversely, where the questions stray beyond the economic field into the world of political history, and involve so many other variables than economic, it is not possible to reduce the debate to a simple cause-effect model that will provide a precise answer. Where this is the case, the results are not convincing and the work as a whole is devalued in consequence. Similarly, although it is refreshing to read a book in which the agenda for discussion is stated so firmly in the form of a series of questions of interest to present-day economists and policy makers, this does not make for a comprehensive or readable narrative that can be finished at one sitting. . . .

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