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Golden Fetters: The Gold Standard and the Great Depression, 1919-1939. By Barry Eichengreen--New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. xix + 448 pp. Illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. $39.00. ISBN 0-19-5064313-3.
Reviewed by Lawrence H. Officer
I agree with Robert J. Samuelson (Nezosweek, 30 Sept. 1991) that Barry Eichengreen's Golden Fetters, a history of the interaction between the gold standard and macroeconomic stability in the interwar period, is "a brilliant new book." The volume is large, with almost 450 pages, 13 chapters, 37 tables, 61 figures, and 17 contemporary cartoons. Fortunately, the introductory chapter is an excellent summary of the entire volume. Eichengreen has done the nearly impossible. He writes successfully both for "the elusive general reader" (p. xiii) and for the specialist historian. Anyone who reads The Wall Streetloumal should be abie to understand and appreciate his book.
So Golden Fetters is at once a "people's history," written at te level of the intelligent layperson, and a work for the economic historian. For the general reader, Eichengreen explains economic theories well and employs no mathematics or econometrics. For the specialist, the argument is very well documented, with copious footnotes providing details and referring to the scholarly literature. The bibliography is comprehensive, with over twenty-five pages of references in small print. It is doubtful that Eichengreen omits any important source, at least in the English-langue literature. (It...