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The Great Mirror of Folly: Finance, Culture, and the Crash of 1720, ed. William N. Goetzmann et al. New Haven: Yale, 2013. Pp. xiv + 346. $75.
We are told in the foreword that ''this is a book about a book,'' a massive and deliberate understatement. This is a very large and handsome book-quarto-size (12'' x 9'') on glossy paper with 265 illustrations-that studies the first Great Mirror, a ''stout folio'' published in 1720 in Amsterdam: ''bigger than its competitors, more lavishly illustrated.... It reached audiences across much of Europe-its texts and captions were translated into French, English, German, and (in some instances) Latin.'' The catalyst and subject matter of the eighteenth-century work were the nearly simultaneous economic crashes that had just hit Europe (the Mississippi Company in France, the South Sea Bubble in Britain, and ''a host of smaller joint-stock companies in various parts of Europe''). Of the sixteen essays in this collection, three approach the Mirror bibliographically; the others treat it in a historical (emphasizing the view of the financial world) or aesthetic context (discussing especially its numerous satiric prints).
This book's general appeal will lie, as the editors recognize, in a comparison of this early worldwide financial crisis with the Great Financial Crisis of 2008. The contributors follow the revisionist view of eighteenth-century bubbles advanced over the past few decades, namely that the negative impact of their bursting was overstated by contemporary and subsequent sources. It is tempting here to quote Harry Truman: ''It's a recession when your neighbor loses his job; it's a depression when you lose yours.'' Moreover, overstatement is a characteristic of political argument from which financial issues are never exempt. The consensus of the contributors is that the financial modernization that caused the crashes was a...