This book seeks to fill a void in the literature on globalization in the late nineteenth century. Assembling new evidence on wages and prices, and population movements, for a host of Southern European, North African, Middle Eastern countries, and Mediterranean islands, the author asks two main questions: Did the Mediterranean basin also exhibit the general patterns of price integration and real wage convergence others have adduced for the Atlantic and Pacific economies? And if so, was integration slow or rapid—and why?

The contours of this Mediterranean are unmistakably Williamsonian and decidedly not Braudelian. The structure and methodology of the book are familiar which has the advantage of facilitating comparisons across time and space. Typically, Caruana Galizia begins with the transport revolution as the driver of globalization, which, again typically, is pinned down by the law of one price. The attention to transport costs, the collapse in which was pretty much uniform across the region, is at the expense of fixed costs which varied across and within countries, a point I return to later. After a brief historical context, the author then examines in separate chapters the determinants of emigration, the integration of labor markets, the relationship between emigration and real wage growth in source and destination countries and, finally, real wage inequality within and between countries. The appendix describes the sources and methods used in construction of the wage and price series.

The findings are measured and sufficiently nuanced. Initially, emigration was postponed until the late nineteenth century since industrialization was delayed and low real wages acted as a constraint on emigration. Information about the New World was costly. In Malta, the absence of a written language raised the difficulty of acquiring news about foreign destinations. As elsewhere, emigration increased as the region's real wage divergence with the New World widened. To be sure, flows to the New World were never large in absolute terms, at least from the perspective of the destination country. Nonetheless, movements across the Mediterranean basin—a feature the author compares to twenty-first century movements—were not trivial. By the end of the century, some 25 percent of Malta's population lived outside the country, mainly elsewhere in the Mediterranean and in the United Kingdom. Movements of this size created an inevitable backlash. In Syria, the Ottomans were concerned about the effect of emigration on tax revenues, the mirror image of attempts in the New World to restrict immigration.

Was trade a substitute for population movements? The region was mostly free of trade impediments, an outcome, in part, of colonial linkages. In general, the empirical findings are in support of Heckscher-Ohlin. In isolated parts of the Mediterranean, real wages stagnated compared to regions that were more open. Consider the effect of low tariffs on labor-abundant, land-scarce Malta. The colony experienced a term of trade boom, which peaked during the grain invasion. The flipside to this engagement with open-economy forces was a long period of deindustrialization before 1914.

In the final chapter, Caruana Galizia seeks to reconcile the mixed scorecard of globalization. The Arab world appears to be much more integrated into the world economy than commonly believed. Yet despite considerable emigration, Middle Eastern and North African countries in this region comprised too small a part of the Mediterranean, the incentive to emigrate in the large countries, Spain and Italy being far less. I found this chapter the most compelling because the author moves away from a composite picture of the region, which is heavily weighted by big countries, giving more attention to particular histories and trajectories.

Herein lies the trouble with this type of one-size-fits-all exercise. To begin, alternative models of integration are not broached, a result, I suppose, of the close correspondence the author observes between the Mediterranean region and the Boyer-Hatton-O'Rourke-Williamson Atlantic economy. This finding is itself unsurprising because of the overlap in countries. More fundamentally, the usual assumption in these types of exercises is that countries are fully integrated domestically, as if they were a single dot in space. We can read a country's comparative advantage from its international port activity. But countries consist of different regions, too, which face positive costs to trade among themselves. There exists local institutions impeding the mobility of labor and capital, let alone determining the ownership of these factors and land. Put differently, the operation of international forces is mediated by local histories. We only get a glimpse of this part of the story.

I would suspect that the author recognizes these drawbacks. But by bringing neglected areas of North Africa and Middle East into the orbit of late nineteenth-century globalization, I would also suspect that the author has set for himself, and others, an important and ample research agenda that will be pursued.