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Capitalism in Context: Essays on Economic Development and Cultural Change in Honor of R. M. Hartwell. Edited by John A. James and Mark Thomas . Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 1994. x + 355 pp. Tables, charts, notes, index, and bibliography. $31.00. ISBN 0-226-39198-1.
Max Hartwell, to whose considerable honor these essays are dedicated, once lamented that an article he thought well of had been too much neglected because of "the obscurity of its place of publication, embedded in a Festschrift" (Hartwell, ed., The Causes of the Industrial Revolution in England [1967], 30). His lamentation becomes a caution for a reviewer of Hartwell's own festschrift for neither he nor I would want any of these fine studies, written as a gift to him on his retirement, to be buried in obscurity. Not only do they all share a close relationship to many aspects of Hartwell's own publications but each, in its own right, has something to engage the historian of business.
All of the essays develop as a theme the insights that economics and history jointly offer our understanding of the progress of peoples. Eric Jones, for instance, examines patterns of economic growth over time and space and decides that the propensity for...