Declining undergraduate enrollments in economic history (though one hopes not declining interest) has its counterpart in diminished return to writing general-purpose textbooks in the subject and correspondingly diminished supply. The appearance of a one-volume work by the eminent Swedish economic historian and founder of the European Review of Economic History thus promises to fill a pressing need for a new synthesis incorporating the research and theoretical insights of the past half century. That the need is imperfectly satisfied by the present work testifies to the difficulty of the task.

The book opens with a sensible account of the medieval recovery as a period of market reconstruction, followed by a truly excellent discussion of the Malthusian model as a device for understanding preindustrial economies. Because the underlying secondary literature for this period is largely narrative, this section comes closest to what one normally conceives as “history.” The subsequent chapters are, by contrast, more in nature of surveys of recent literature. Chapter 4 is given over to the (doubtful) contributions of growth accounting and highly aggregative exercises in interpreting population and price data from the early modern period that have consumed the energies of the past generation of economist-historians. Chapter 5 supplies a critical look at the neo-institutionalist proposition that property rights are virtually all that matters for explaining differences in economic performance by providing a brief exposition of the underlying theory and some historical examples of it in operation. Subsequent chapters are in much the same vein, dealing with the nature of knowledge as public good, the usefulness of money as an alternative to barter, comparative advantage, imperfect competition, the sequence of monetary regimes, and the rise of the welfare state. One of the difficulties with this topical approach is that treatment of individual examples is necessarily broad brush, to the point of deformation.

One's objection to this textbook, however, is that in attempting to show students in economics why history matters, it fails to demonstrate “how” it mattered. A textbook in economic history is not the same as a textbook in chemistry or microeconomics. It must also tell “how we got here from there.” Professor Persson focuses instead on the “lessons” of economic history, which in effect gives students the moral of the story without actually telling it. That focus reflects a presumption that the critical ingredient explaining historically documented variations in economic performance was the degree of market-generated economic efficiency. It is by no means evident that the historical record bears out this presumption. One can only assume that the focus on markets and efficiency reflects a desire to show economists why economic history matters. But what matters for theoretical economists is not necessarily what should matter for economic historians, which is not whether a particular theorem derived from the logic of individual optimization is true or false, but how it operated (or failed to operate) in a particular time and particular place. Economists have essentially one explicandum: welfare as generally measured by real per capita GDP; economic historians have several: welfare, to be sure, but also organizational forms, the evolution of social and economic mobility, the evolution of the spatial distribution of economic opportunity, and the evolution of income distribution. Although these are related to welfare, they possess independent histories and movements in time that are legitimate objects of historical enquiry by persons trained in the logic of economics.

Economic history is harder than conventional economics. It should therefore come as no surprise that writing an introductory text in economic is a more daunting enterprise than writing a first-year Principles of Economics. By reducing historical events to examples covered by general rules, the present textbook attempts to make economic history as easy as standard economics. But if the rules are really all that matters, it is not obvious what history can add to our understanding of economic phenomena. A serious textbook in economic history remains to be written. In its absence, the present work, graced by an excellent bibliography, can serve as a serviceable starting point for students embarking upon study of the economic past.