The aim of this book is to analyze cooperative businesses and provide an overview of their role in market economies since their origins in the mid-nineteenth century. This is a challenging task because of the variety of forms cooperatives take in different parts of the world, and of the multitude of sectors in which the enterprise form is used. According to the editors, the book is particularly timely because of the global economic crisis that started in 2008, and because cooperatives weathered the crisis better than other enterprises (p. 1). The basic idea of the book is very good: to review theoretical predictions on cooperatives with historical data. The book brings together historians and economists; potentially, the exchange between these two groups of scholars can be fruitful.

The book is divided into an introduction and two sections. The first section is intended to provide a global overview; the second section focuses on selected core issues in historical perspective. The introduction and the two first chapters are broad and sometimes overlapping reviews of the cooperative movement—the first chapter, by Ann Hoyt and Tito Menzani, on a geographical basis and the second chapter, by Vera Zamagni, on a sectoral basis. As such, they serve a purpose especially for the reader who is less familiar with cooperatives. A weakness in some of the early chapters, though, is that they contain several small mistakes that could have been avoided by more careful editing or cross-checking.

The real meat of the book is in the more specialized chapters, some of which are true gems. Espen Ekberg provides a historical analysis on the economic performance and organizational structure in consumer cooperatives, which is among the best articles I have seen on the subject. Ian MacPherson explains the history of the cooperative (International Cooperative Association) principles in a way that was eye-opening to this reader. Fabio Chaddad and Michael Cook provide an exciting analysis on the interplay between the legal development and the organizational structure of agricultural cooperatives in the United States. Virginie Pérotin gives a thorough overview on the economic performance of worker cooperatives.

I identify three areas in which the book could have been improved. The first is that already on the first page and thereafter repeatedly (especially in Zamagni’s chapter), it is mentioned that cooperatives have been more resilient during the crisis. However, at the time of writing of this review (early 2015), we know that several alleged successes of cooperative movement have in fact experienced considerable hardship. This applies to the British Co-operative Group (whose “revival” is hailed in several chapters), parts of Mondragon, and parts of the European cooperative banking sector. The book draws from conference presentations from the fall of 2010 (only two years after Lehman bankruptcy) and was published in 2012, so it can be argued that little of this was known at the time. However, especially for a group of historians, it should be clear that two or three years is clearly an insufficient time to analyze the impacts of any major disruption. Therefore, more modest claims about the crisis would have served the book better.

My second criticism deals with the choice of “core issues” in the second section. There are two chapters covering consumer cooperatives, with considerable overlap, but no chapter dealing on financial cooperatives, which arguably is the most important form of cooperation economically. Financial cooperatives are discussed briefly in Chapter 2 and occasionally mentioned in other parts of the book, but surely they should have warranted a chapter of their own. Financial cooperatives have experienced one of the most dramatic metamorphoses of all types of cooperatives, starting from small village-based organizations and evolving into large networks of banks, which sometimes have equal standing with the largest shareholder banks (both in good and bad, as the LIBOR scandal shows). In terms of network structure, there are many similar challenges to those discussed in the chapter by Ekberg. In many ways, it would have been interesting and illuminating to contrast their structure and evolution to that of consumer cooperatives.

Third, though not unusual for edited collections of articles, the different parts of the book do not quite form a coherent whole. Peter Kramper’s chapter on the failures of cooperatives could have been a model for the whole book. His chapter starts with a clear presentation of various theoretical hypotheses, and he then reviews the empirical evidence (in his case, three different cases) carefully examining these predictions. Kramper skillfully chooses cases in which sufficient time has elapsed that the trend can be discerned clearly. This same structure applies to some of the other chapters (notably, Chaddad and Cook’s and Ekberg’s), but many of the chapters remain relatively isolated.

In sum, this book has a place in the literature of both cooperatives and business history. It deals with an often neglected form of enterprise. The idea of combining theoretical and historical analysis and advancing collaboration between historians and economists is a good one, even though the practical execution of this idea falls somewhat short of its potential.