Scholars from all of the major and many of the minor European countries have contributed an unusually coherent set of essays to this book, which is the product of a session at the 2006 International Economic History Congress in Helsinki. The chapters cover the Continent from Sweden to Turkey and Poland to Portugal, omitting only the former Soviet Union. Broad context and a summary of the conclusions are presented in a set of introductory chapters.

In their introduction, the editors raise the questions that they have posed to the contributors, summarize the findings of each chapter, and briefly derive some overall conclusions. The two issues that they want their authors to ponder—and the contributors do stick close to them—are the differences in agricultural productivity between continental countries and the relationship between productivity and per capita income. Their conclusions are that farmers responded to markets and that the speed of agricultural growth depended on exogenous opportunities or their lack that the nonagricultural world provided, not on attitudes. Most of the book's authors agree with the current economic history consensus that farmers should be considered as rational maximizers, not the traditional peasants of earlier scholarship. As Giovanni Federico puts in his chapter on Italy, “Italian farmers showed a remarkable capability of innovating, provided that the new techniques were suited to the environment and factor endowment” (p. 245).

After the introduction, the next three chapters provide “The Context” for the main body of the book. Alan L. Olmstead and Paul W. Rhode discuss “Conceptual Issues,” Gema Aparicio, Vicente Pinilla, and Raúl Serrano, “Europe and International Trade,” and Stephen Broadberry, “Agriculture and Structural Change: Lessons from the U.K. Experience.”

Olmstead and Rhode dispute several accepted conclusions of agricultural history. They do not believe that agricultural growth needs to precede industrial growth everywhere: trade could provide the resources needed by industry. Biological (land-saving) innovations were not always European and mechanical (labor-saving) innovations American. For the latter, they doubt the validity of threshold models, which hold that only farms of a certain size could afford mechanization. There were ways around this constraint through sharing or hiring.

Aparicio, Pinilla, and Serrano present trade statistics since 1870 by types of commodities and regions. They find that until 1939 agricultural trade grew as fast as total trade, but then slowed down. Europe's place in this trade was central at the start of the twentieth century, but then fell to mid-century. Afterwards, it rose again as the developed countries adopted policies to encourage agriculture while less developed nations did not.

Broadberry's analysis of the British experience also begins with data on long-term trends. He compares the labor productivity of the United Kingdom in all sectors of the economy with that of the United States and Germany from 1870 to 1990, finding that British productivity was surpassed by the United States as early as the 1890s, but not by Germany until much later and never in agriculture. Structural change, that is shifts of labor from agriculture to industry and then to services, accounted for much of the growth of labor productivity. In all Europe, the author finds a “strong negative relationship between the level of GDP per capita and the percentage of the working population in agriculture” (p. 89).

Part II, “Country Studies,” forms the heart of the book. In what has become a familiar approach in European collaborative projects, twelve scholars, most natives of the country they study, contribute chapters on the performance of their nations. For the countries that developed earlier—the Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, France, and Italy—the studies cover 1870–1939; for the latecomers—

Poland, Hungary, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Turkey—they continue to 1973, or in the case of Turkey, 2000. The first group exhibits common patterns while the other countries are more idiosyncratic.

Agriculture in the early developers underwent substantial growth from the nineteenth century to 1914, contributing positively to overall economic performance. Growth slowed between the mid-seventies and the mid-nineties, especially in France and Italy, but the difficulties brought about by the influx of overseas grain were overcome, and the shift to animal products was beneficial. Agricultural performance deteriorated between the wars, especially during the depression. By 1939 agriculture was a less important sector of the economy and played a much diminished role in overall development, justifying the termination date, though that means omitting discussion of postwar growth and the impact of the Common Market/European Union.

The countries that developed later followed the same tendencies of growth to 1914 and then stagnation between the wars, but with unique features. Poland's individuality was the recurrent boundary changes, as the various territories went from being advanced regions of backward nations or backward regions of advanced ones to part of an independent state. Hungary suffered from its dual structure—a mix of enormous estates and small holdings—that led to longer than usual stagnation. Spanish agriculture operated in an arid climate with large amount of uncultivated land. Nevertheless, it followed the general European trajectory: modernization until the 1930s (The outbreak of the Civil War in 1936 was the turning point), then stagnation until the postwar period. Greek farmers benefited from exporting currants and then tobacco and from emigration, which raised labor productivity even in the absence of any innovation. Turkey remained poorer than the rest of Europe, and its agricultural labor force was still 35 percent of the total as late as 2000.

Anyone who wants a concise overview of European agricultural development in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century will find this volume a valuable resource. Each chapter can be read on its own, or they can be read together for general European patterns. Bibliographies direct the reader to more complete information, often produced by the authors themselves. Conclusions are supported by data on output, factors of production, and sometimes various measures of productivity. In an ideal world, the panel would have created a uniform data set for the twelve countries, permitting more extensive comparative analyses like those performed by Broadberry and several other authors. Lacking the resources that such a project would require, the organizers/editors and contributors have produced an outstanding work which puts all economic and agricultural historians in their debt.