This book examines the role of international trade in the economic development of the southern Netherlands (modern Belgium) in the latter half of the eighteenth century. As one of the small states of Europe, the southern Netherlands was unable to participate directly in colonial commerce or adopt the most aggressive mercantilist policies. This predicament prompts the central question in Coenen's study: To what extent did international trade serve as an engine of economic development? Since this question has bedeviled studies of European nations that did have colonies, the southern Netherlands brings a degree of useful simplification to the debate. A related goal of Coenen is to assess the impact that Hapsburg policy had on economic development. The stakes are all the higher in that Belgium was one of the earliest industrializers on continental Europe; an implicit reference to economic change in the early nineteenth century guides her study.

In the 1750s the Hapsburg Empire began to reform the customs administration of the Austrian Netherlands. Officials compiled an impressive array of annual customs statistics between 1759 and 1791, tracking the flow of some 3,000 commodities across the state's borders. These records supply Coenen's source for the overwhelming majority of the book's 93 graphs. She was not able to study all those goods, however. Instead she created a basket of 272 commodities for which price data was also available. These goods accounted for well over half of all trade by volume and probably represented the lion's share in terms of value and importance. They include all the major textiles, colonial goods, and bulk commodities. This dataset is available online and may be accessed by request.

Coenen also constructed a database of 3,475 petitions to the customs administration, which include information about the socio-occupational status of the petitioner (e.g., merchants, manufactures, consumers) as well as the nature of their request (tax exemptions, the imposition of tariffs against rivals, etc.). The petition data enable Coenen to evaluate the relationship between economic development and state policy.

The book has three parts. Part 1 treats the theoretical and historical background, laying out recent debates about international commerce and scholarship on the southern Netherlands. Part 2 offers an assessment of the state's balance of trade, while emphasizing that the trade balance does not reveal much about the development of individual sectors. It is that task to which the third and longest section of the book turns. This part examines in detail the course of five sectors: trade in salt, textiles, colonial commodities, coal, and grain. A final section of the book examines the transit trade, which the Hapsburg regime cultivated aggressively but with only moderate success.

Coenen's principal conclusion is that the southern Netherlands achieved an impressive degree of import substitution for several key goods. The imports of manufactured products declined over the period, while exports of such goods remained stable. On the other hand, imports of industrial raw materials increased substantially: The inference is that such raw materials were used to satisfy an increasingly productive and diversified internal economy. State policy tended to promote this movement toward import-substitution by favoring manufacturing over mercantile interests; but all told, the government was more vacillating than steadfast, suggesting that fundamental market forces rather than political economy lay at the heart of the transformation. Her evidence lends support to Jan De Vrie's thesis about the industrious revolution; and in general to those scholars who would minimize the impact of international trade on European economic development, at least in some parts of the continent. Trade mattered in terms of access to commodities, but neither commercial mediation (as exemplified by the Dutch or the English entrepôts) nor export-led growth were the only paths to development. Import-substitution and internal commercialization were a viable alternative.

Like any good book, this one raises as many questions as it answers. Much of the process of import substitution remains something of a black box. It ought to be examined not only through aggregate trade data, but also through firm-level data that can shed light on the supply chains, market organization, and consumer behavior that made import-substitution feasible; in short, it would be nice to know more about the microeconomic landscape in which firms operated. In addition, Coenen uses her petition data to chart the evolution of government policy, but a more fine-grained study of the petitioning process might have revealed a more dynamic picture of political economy. Her tendency to treat “the government” as a unitary actor rather than a nexus of competing interests sets her up for viewing policy as vacillating and weak. A more ground-level approach might reveal the connections between economic actors, the market environment, and the political channels by which they sought to influence economic life.

But these are tasks that can await another research project. Coenen is wise to turn to smaller countries like the Southern Netherlands to consider the problem of economic development as a European phenomenon, one not confined to the largest economies or more aggressive states of early modern Europe. Her book brings a wealth of new data to bear on old questions and makes an important contribution to our knowledge of commercial development on the eve of industrialization.