This is a potentially huge topic, but the subtitle of Martin Daunton's book gives a strong pointer to the main focus, which is the author's interest in government policy with respect to taxation, transfers, and social security along with the role of the City in Britain's economic development. It is a weighty collection of previously published work, with the broad theme of viewing the Victorian state not simply as a proponent of laissez-faire but rather as “dismantling protectionism and chartered monopolies, creating a sense of balance in the economy and politics so that the state was not favouring one group over another through tax breaks or privileges, and then making sure that new forms of transfer payment did not emerge through the creation of new monopolies in the supply of utilities or through the impact of pollution which imposed costs on some members of society as others prospered” (4). There are twelve chapters, starting with an introduction and followed by part 1, on taxation; part 2, on gentlemanly capitalism and the City; and part 3, on social security and the rise of the welfare state. Five of the chapters were initially refereed articles published in assorted journals—Past and Present, Business History, Historical Research, and Housing Studies—in 1988–90. Daunton, who holds a chair in economic history at Cambridge, is a past president of the Royal Historical Society, and one of the book's chapters is a presidential address he delivered, first published in the society's Transactions for 2006. The rest are chapters from several books edited, variously, by Cannadine, Winch and O’Brien, Colls and Rodger, Daunton and Hilton, and Nehring and Schui in the period 2001–7. There has been some editing and tidying up but, apart from the introduction, each chapter is largely a reproduction of the original piece as it first appeared in print.

The argument will be of interest to all kinds of professional historians, many of whom will find it useful to have Daunton's thoughts collected here, notwithstanding some overlap with his book on nineteenth-century taxation. The precise implications of his thesis perhaps need spelling out more if we are to devise a proper test. Britain did not have the riots and revolutions of 1789–1848 of Continental Europe; this plus the strong fiscal base seems to be the main supporting evidence. Is it necessary to invoke moral arguments about links between consumers and suppliers of services like gas and water when simple antimonopoly explanations will do? Competition, for and in the field, was promoted in the early nineteenth century, but when, by midcentury, that seemed to have failed, more comprehensive dividend and price ceilings were introduced. Where Daunton scores well is in dealing with very nitty-gritty, unglamorous issues such as social insurance, income tax, friendly associations, and the law on public utilities that tell us a lot about how British society worked at ground level. It benefits from some comparisons with France's tax system, the USA's life insurance and building and loan associations, and Germany's insurance funds. Indeed, one hopes that this international dimension is a torch that young historians will take up.

Daunton is critical of Rubenstein, Wiener, and several other contributors to the gentlemanly capitalism debate, but the critique can be pushed much further. Much of the debate is focused on a very narrow view of the fortunes of the manufacturing industry and the distaste of Britain's elite for active involvement. Yet it is clear from research on manufacturing productivity that British performance relative to the USA and Germany has not changed in nearly two hundred years (as briefly noted on 178) and that the main explanation of differential economic growth since 1870 lies in the declining share of agriculture in these other two countries and their better performance in services. The one exception in the service sector, and one that would reinforce some of Daunton's discussion of firms and family in the City is financial services, in which the social networking that pervaded our elite City was just as important as the technological developments in communications and office equipment that the USA and Germany developed more successfully.

There are many possible themes involved in the relationship between the state and the market, and Daunton provides us with one that he hopes will capture the inherent characteristics of the Victorian state. There is nothing here about the regulation of industry for safety or child labor, attitudes to science and engineering, or the stance toward the arrival of the railways or the size and impact of the public health programs. For example, why did the British government (and, for that matter, the U.S. federal government) not get involved in the planning and ownership of railways as Continental European governments did in the nineteenth century? How should we account for the variety, across towns, in the role and effectiveness of regulation and municipal ownership of utilities? It is not clear how far Daunton's thesis can account for these experiences. In part, this reflects a growing division of labor between those economic historians who come from history and politics and those with some economics background who tend to devote more effort to quantitative assessments. There are no data tables in this book and no explanations of the performance of the Victorian economy nor of the state's role in that performance. The divide seems to be widening in that practically all the authors (European and American) of the Cambridge Economic History of Britain (and also of the forthcoming Cambridge Economic History of Europe) now seem to be from the economics line. On the other hand, they are not writing the general histories, where surely they have a lot to contribute and where Daunton's work, lucid and persuasive as always, provides an important, valuable bridge.

The publishing work on this book is technically very good in that the typeface is homogenous throughout, with none of the patchy mélanges one sometimes finds in collections of reproduced articles. I do wish, however, that there had been a bibliography either at the end of the book or at the end of each chapter. As it stands, we are left with the system whereby one finds abbreviated references some fifteen pages into a chapter, which leads to infuriating searches back in the chapter for the first, full, reference to a cited work. Who invented that torture for researchers?