Martin Daunton is one of the most distinguished economic historians of the past half century, and this set of studies, most written by former students, reflects the depth and range of his contribution. Daunton has made interventions on many the most important issues in economic history, such as the relationship between the taxation system and systemic growth, and the provision of basic goods, like housing, to the general population. This volume touches on all of these issues, and many more. In fact, it very much works as an introduction to the matters of concern to historians interested in economic behavior, as understood in the widest sense.

Many of the essays in the volume stand as independent studies that illustrate the explanatory power of economic history. Adrian Leonard's essay on marine insurance during the Napoleonic Wars, for instance, explains how the marine insurance market articulated Britain's commercial and military goals. Obviously the provision of marine insurance was vital if British merchants were to continue to accept the risk of trading while their goods and the ships they moved in were subject to enemy capture. What Leonard explains is how the Bubble Act of 1720, which had restricted the provision of insurance by companies to the Royal Exchange Assurance and London Assurance, forced the individuals and syndicates who underwrote marine insurance to find ways other than setting up limited companies to manage risk. They did so by holding their capital in government debts that could be quickly liquidated. By participating in significant numbers in the market for government debt, the underwriters contributed to the naval strategy that sustained their profitability.

Adrian Williamson's essay on Conservative tax policy is a tour de force of contrarian argument. Williamson argues that the period between 1978 and 1988 does not represent a discontinuity, or an abandonment of postwar consensus by the Conservative Party. His key observation is that taxation remained roughly 40 percent of GDP; the state did not shrink, but what did change was the incidence of taxation, largely from the rich to the poor. Regressive taxation went up, as the return from VAT doubled from 8 percent to 16 percent, while marginal income tax rates fell from 75 percent to 45 percent. Williamson argues this was consistent not only with Conservative views that had always embraced the provision of public goods but also with thought that inequality drove wealth creation. Implicitly he argues that there had not been a postwar consensus, merely a tactical defeat for the Conservatives, who could not find a social alliance willing to support their particular mix of a strong state and social inequality.

Three essays on the history of money in the middle of the volume are particularly interesting, as they parallel contemporary debates around the euro, international financial transactions, and the future of the city of London as a financial center. Sean Eddie's chapter argues that the budgetary rules created in Prussia in the 1820s, to sustain creditor confidence without broadening political agency, constrained the ability of the state to provide public goods in the distress of the 1840s and contributed directly to the 1848 revolutions. The same concern for money, politics, and sovereignty animates Sabine Schneider's study of the Reichsmark in the early years of German unification. The Reichsmark was a feature of Anglo-German competition and was calibrated to replace sterling as the reserve currency. German political economists argued that as long as London capital financed German industrial expansion, then Germany, and in particular the Hamburg trade, would be vulnerable to externally generated credit crises. The institution of the Reichsmark, pegged against the gold standard, was a crucial part of a general strategy to replace London as the center of finance and to intrude German capital as development funds worldwide. This strategy did not work. While German capital became important in particular regions, like the Middle East, and important commercial banks such as Deutsche Bank and Kleinworth were created as part of this strategy, the German discount rate remained consistently 0.5 percent higher than London, so Germany never became an important provider of trade or development finance. Seung Woo Kim takes up similar issues set a century later, but from a very different perspective. He offers an innovative perspective on the emergence of the eurodollar market in London as an episode of collective learning. His work echoes some of the themes of the earlier essays. For instance, the condition of possibility for the eurodollar market was the Federal Reserve's Regulation Q, which limited the interest that could be offered on domestic deposits. London could compete to sustain its position in international finance in the late 1950s and early 1960s by offering higher rates. This echoes the unforeseen consequence of the Prussian fiscal rules. Kim goes beyond institutionalism by showing how the practices around eurodollar trading eroded the Bretton Woods consensus against speculation and hot money. The Bank of England used its position as a regulator to create a new norm that thought risk was best managed through the judgment of bankers rather than through regulatory mechanisms. Kim argues that “legitimisation of the Eurodollar market embodied the shift in cultural assumptions on short-term capital movements, and paved the way for the globalisation of finance in the late twentieth century” (p. 146). These complex and subtle readings of the interaction of politics and the economy illustrate how important fine-grained historical studies are in understanding the mechanisms and institutions that populate the contemporary economic domain.