This is a festschrift honoring Gavin Wright; it consists of 16 diverse essays (chapters) written by 23 scholars. The contributors include Wright, his former students, colleagues, and friends. The quality of the essays is much higher than that of the typical festschrift, but it does suffer from the genre's usual lack of a distinct focus. The essays are wide-ranging, spanning in time from the early modern (Grantham on science) to the late twentieth century (Sutch on minimum wages, and Jones on teacher quality). Geographically, it is equally diverse going from India (Wolcott), Europe, America, and Australia (Carlson). Excluding Chapter One, which is an introductory chapter by Wright, the editors have partitioned the volume into three major divisions: 1) Evolutionary Processes; 2) Spatial and Comparative Analysis; and 3) Labor Markets. If divisions have to be made, they are adequate, although I would put my favorite paper, Olmstead's and Rhode's paper on Antebellum Southern development, in the evolutionary section, and, simultaneously, remove the paper by Whatley and Gillezeau (on slavery) from Evolutionary Processes, instead placing it in Labor Markets.

Space constraints do not allow a close examination, or even cursory study of all 16 contributions. Because I have somewhat more interest and knowledge of the evolutionary aspects of economic history, I devote more attention to the first section. I place (and comment upon) the Olmstead and Rhode paper here because it deals with the adaptation of how a different variety of the cotton plant impacted the Antebellum South. Here they summarize and extend their previous works on agricultural evolution and production in the slave South. They show that the adoption of the Mexican variety of cotton significantly increased agricultural productivity in the Antebellum South. Their papers (including the previously published) destroy the usual (implicit) assumption made that there was no change in the productivity of cotton seeds. When analyzing economic growth in the slave South, studies that fail to account for changing cotton varieties are misspecified; furthermore, they overstate the increase in productivity among the inputs that are examined. This paper deserves to be on reading lists because it illuminates the effects that changes in flora (and by extension fauna) can have on economic activities

The papers by Clay (natural resources) and Grantham (the systemization scientific activities) are excellent reviews of the current state of knowledge. They both weave a variety strands into an intelligible tapestry. The final paper in this section is Carlson's paper that compares governmental policies towards indigenous people in the United States and Australia. He writes that because the British classified Australia as unsettled (terra nullius) while the law in the United States regarded Aboriginal Americans as having some valid legal claims to the territories where they lived, there were very significant and interesting differences in the treatment and conditions between the two peoples. Carlson argues that Native Americans fared better than Australian Aborigines (although he does emphasize that neither had desirable or even justifiable treatment). Carlson does not ask the interesting question as to why the British classified Australia as unoccupied; I suggest that it is because the Australian Aborigines were suffering a massive die-off (from the introduction of Old World diseases) and reverting to hunting and gathering, and away from any relatively fixed settlements.

The section on spatial development has four papers (excluding the Olmstead and Rhode paper that I put in “evolution”). Three are on banking and finance, the other is on manufacturing. They are all good papers that leave unanswered puzzles. For example, the paper by Atack, Haines, and Margo suggests that a railroad network contributed to the growth in the absolute size of manufacturing firms: why? Where transportation is effective and cheap, many activities can be outsourced to smaller and more specialized (cost-effective) firms. The authors clearly recognize this (p. 175), so why did firms become larger, rather than smaller and dispersed as networks developed? I do not have an answer; still the question should be addressed. There are similar unasked questions in this section in the papers that reveal geographical differences that affected their economies. At least conceptually, these differences could have been arbitraged or eliminated by entrepreneurial activities seeking enhanced profits; why these activities did not occur should be examined.

Including the Whatley and Gillezeau paper on slavery (that I reassigned), the final section on “labor markets” has seven papers. The Whatley and Gillezeau paper is an outlier here and in the entire collection. It is almost exclusively an exercise in model building; the authors provide little or no empirical/historical content; this makes it unlike any of the other contributions. The remaining papers are in economic history; they are all provocative. Richard Sutch argues that increases in the minimum wage increased investments in human capital precisely because increasing minimum wages lowered the probability that teenagers could obtain employment. He uses a clever way of testing this hypothesis by looking at the acquisition of years of education by birth cohort, and the evidence does seem to support the hypothesis. The empirical foundations of the support for the hypothesis are illustrated in his Figure 15.4 (p. 399). It relates birth cohorts, the acquisition of years of high school education, and changes in minimum wages. Still, I am skeptical because the shaded areas in the figure (which depict times were changes in the minimum wages had their greatest effects) closely correspond to times of declining economic activity. To me this suggests that changes in the minimum wage are a leading indicator; politicians only raise the minimum wage when labor markets are frothy and ready to burst. Alternatively specified, minimum wage legislation is typically passed just before a downturn in economic activity. Regardless, this is a stimulating paper.

Carter's is another fine paper here. She uses the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 to examine the act's effects upon Chinese immigration and occupational choices. The passage of the act found the Chinese in America increasingly devoting themselves to entrepreneurial activities that were marginal to other ethnic groups. Thus we have the Chinese establishing laundries and restaurants. The beauty of this paper is that it is a detailed paper with a substantial empirical content that shows how competitive markets alleviate overt prejudice and institutional hostility, and how the discriminated group worked to subvert the barriers they faced. This study is a microcosm on the equilibrating effects of market adjustments to a shock.

The other papers in the labor section are interesting, but I have some difficulties with them. For example, the paper by Rosenbloom and Sundstrom do not reference any of the works by Jenny B. Wahl in their discussion of the changing labor markets in the United States and the impact of slavery upon them. Rosenbloom and Sundstrom are also extremely cautious in establishing any causal relationships between the rise of real wages and the prolonged spell of double-digit unemployment throughout the Great Depression. The hardships created by high real wages among the unemployed, and those not employed in the manufacturing sector (African Americans were disproportionately underrepresented in the manufacturing sector) were, in my opinion, directly attributable to wage policies. The paper by Levy and Temin on wage inequality focuses on individual worker incomes rather than family incomes; this is at least a debatable metric if we are measuring welfare; they should explain what their rationale was in focusing upon individual wages. A key point in their discussion on equality was the ratio of labor productivity economy-wide to annual earnings at the minimum wage (Figure 14.2, P. 365); the online source that Levy and Temin cited was not available when I tried to access it. My concern here was that at the end point (2008) of their figure, it appeared that minimum wage workers earned approximately 12 percent of economy-wide labor productivity. Full time minimum wage workers earned about $12,000 per year; I did a back of the envelope calculation and determined that the economy-wide labor productivity was pushing $100,000 per year. This seemed high, and there may be a simple explanation, but their source was unavailable; so much for the wonders of the internet.

This volume has an index but it leaves something to be desired. I tried to find out how many times QWERTY was mentioned, but it was not indexed. Some contributors felt obligated to profess their belief that QWERTY was a good example of path dependency; path dependency does exist (that is what history is) but you will have to count me as among the skeptics re QWERTY. Regardless, my criticisms are vastly overshadowed by this volume's merits; this is a good collection deserving library space. Wright can be justly proud of this volume; it is a worthy tribute to a worthy scholar.