A book in honor of Jeffrey Williamson's career inevitably generates high expectations in the prospective readership since Williamson has, over the last decades, been one of the most influential economic historians, reaching an audience far beyond his specific field. In particular, he has played an important role in the evolution of a new approach to economic history that has come to be labelled the “New Comparative History”a label that therefore makes a fitting title for this festschrift.

In their introductory chapter to The New Comparative Economic History, the editors characterize this new approach by the belief that “economic processes can best be understood by systematically comparing experiences across time, regions and, above all, countries” (p. 1). The editors also rightly point out that this approach can be seen as an evolution from cliometrics, as the new approach broadens the scope from a mostly national to a predominantly international, comparative one while retaining much of the quantitative methodology characteristic of the work of cliometricians. The short but informative introduction also reveals the extent to which Williamson, through his personal research agenda, has been able to shape the debates in and directions taken by economic history. Although his contributions may have regularly attracted criticism, they have hardly ever failed to trigger debate and to open up new research agendas.

The New Comparative Economic History is comprised of fifteen separate papers, which are not organized in any particular order. The authors are American and European scholars, who essentially represent the leading figures in the field of comparative economic history. In line with the approach's tradition, the sample presented in this book proves amazingly broad and diverse, containing widely different topics and spanning several continents and centuries. Nevertheless, the main themes standing out are fairly representative of the debates and issues that have dominated the work of this community in the recent past.

The first main theme is the comparison of living standards and productivity within and especially across nations. No fewer than seven chapters are dedicated to the analysis of levels and trends in living standards and productivity. Robert Allen starts off this series of investigations by presenting the most encompassing assessment to date of how historical living standards in India compare to the ones in the Western world. In the subsequent chapter, Gregory Clark presents his latest explanation of why Britain had become an economic and political leader by the mid-nineteenth century. William Collins looks at wage convergence in the United States (chapter seven), and Leandro Prados de la Escosura provides, in chapter twelve, a sweeping overview of living standards in Latin America since 1850. George Boyer broadens the scope of the analysis of living standards by including factors of longevity, learning and leisure in his study of the Atlantic economy (chapter thirteen), while Cormac O'Grada does the same by looking at economic growth and the resulting welfare gains jointly (chapter fourteen). The final chapter of this compilation, “Euro-Productivity and Euro-Jobs since the 1960s,” which has been written by Gayle Allard and Peter Lindert, is a welcome contribution to the enduring debate about the relative efficacy of American versus continental European institutions.

The history of economic globalization is a second focal point in The New Comparative Economic History. With regard to this, there are two chapters that expand our knowledge on the integration of commodity markets. Giovanni Federico and Karl Gunnar Persson are arguably the first to take the study of historical grain market integration to a global level (chapter four). Sleyman zmucur and Sevket Pamuk, on the other hand, broaden the analysis of commodity markets by moving beyond the study of grain markets to include other commodities such as butter, honey, sugar, or olive oil (chapter three). Two other consecutive papers (chapters eight and nine) illuminate the history of globalization by looking at trade policies. In the first of the two, Kevin O'Rourke and Alan Taylor tackle the question of whether democracy promotes free trade. Thereafter, Timothy Hatton and Jeffrey Williamson address the connections between trade and immigration policies, which have been inversely correlated in most labor-scarce economies across almost two centuries. A novel and fascinating aspect of globalization is described in chapter five by Alan Olmstead and Paul Rhode. The authors look at the globalization of biological techniques, showing that this less prominent feature of globalization has actually played a major part in shaping the economic geography of the emerging international economy. As such, their findings provide a deeper understanding about a necessary condition for many of the macroeconomic developments described and analyzed in other chapters. Another aspect of globalization is covered by Leah Platt Boustan, who looks, in chapter eleven, at the factors driving the nineteenth century migration of Russian Jews to the United States.

Finally, two chapters deal with international financial markets, a third topic that has featured prominently within the New Comparative Economic History approach. The first one is “Breaking the Fetters: Why Did Countries Exit the Interwar Gold Standard” (chapter ten) by Holger Wolf and Tarik Yousef. The second contribution, “Other People's Money” by Richard Grossmann (chapter six), presents a long-running international analysis of the evolution of bank capital. To an audience witnessing a full-scale international financial crisis partly brought about by over-leveraged financial institutions, such a story could hardly be more newsworthy. Particularly intriguing in this respect is his finding that there has been no “systematic effect of government capital regulations on bank capital-to-asset ratios” (p. 160).

While not all the contributors have put equal effort into guaranteeing that their chapters are distinct from earlier publications of theirs, the papers presented in The New Comparative Economic History are generally of high quality and mostly offer new insights into broad and relevant issues. This is certainly not an example of one of those festschrifts that represent, above all, a nice social gesture to an eminent member of the community while failing to make any serious contribution to existing scholarship. On the contrary, this volume provides an intriguing tour of new findings on an extraordinarily diverse mix of issues ranging from intercontinental Jewish migration to Euro-productivity. It represents an excellent resource for anyone interested in comparative economic development, be they economists, historians or indeed policymakers. In so doing, this book is, at the same time, an ideal showcase for the New Comparative Economic History and indeed a worthy tribute to the most influential ambassador of this new approach to economic history.