A Financial History of Western Europe (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 293 Front and to Blum's career. Lacouture's biography will not dislodgeJoel Colton's comprehensive study, Léon Blum: Humanist in Politics, but as Lacouture was granted access to previously private papers, the new edition will further inspire Blum admirers and scholars. Lacouture's most recent work, Pierre Mendès-France, is not the best of his fine biographies, perhaps for the obvious reason that he was too close to his subject. He nevertheless presents a thorough picture of a very complex man. MendèsFrance was the youngest deputy to enter the Assemblée Nationale, one of the formulators of Blum's economic policy, and de Gaulle's Minister of the Economy during his provisional government, but the world knows him best as the man who risked his career to get France out of Indo-China. He eventually lost his wager on another colonial issue, Algeria. Mendès-France also enjoys the dubious distinction of being one of the few Frenchmen to prefer milk to wine. Even though his actual tenure as premier of the Fourth Republic lasted a very short time, the legacy of Mendèsism continues to grow. There are very few good English biographies of Mendès-France, and Lacouture's book is a welcome addition. A Financial History of Western Europe. By Charles P. Kindleberger. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984, Reviewed by Steven C. Soper, M.A. candidate, SAIS. An analysis of the history of European money and finance from the fifteenth century to the 1970s, this book is the first of its kind. It would be hard to imagine anyone better suited for the task than Charles P. Kindleberger, one ofAmerica's most prolific economic historians. He has written previously on the nineteenth and twentieth century French and British economies, as well as a classic account ofthe Depression and innumerable books on postwar economic affairs. His areas of expertise are combined and expanded here to produce an outstanding synthesis of West European financial history. The book invites perusal and consultation as much as straight reading and it contains a wide assortment of embellishments characteristic of a reference book: maps, chronologies, tables, and figures, as well as a very useful glossary and an extensive bibliography. Kindleberger dedicates almost equal space to Europe before and after World War I. The antediluvian half is divided into three parts under the broad headings of money, banking, and finance. The first part, covering the evolution of money from the discovery and use of metals in the fifteenth century to the belle époque of the gold standard before World War I, is naturally the most cursory of the three. The second part, "Banking," is neatly divided into chapters on each national or regional banking system as they developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. "Finance," the longest of the three parts, is split up very effectively into chapters on government finance, private finance, foreign investment, transfer cases, foreign lending, and financial crises. Europe since 1914, which makes up the second half of the book, is more familiar ground for the author and is treated in greater detail. The section of roughly one hundred pages on the interwar years is an outstanding synthesis of a subject that is of fundamental importance for economists and historians alike. Somewhat less ambitious is the final part on European finances since World War 294 SAIS REVIEW II, which concludes with a chapter on European financial integration, but it, too, is useful reading for students of banking and finance. Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relationsfrom Nixon to Reagan. By Raymond Garthoff. Washington, D.C: The Brookings Institution, 1985. Reviewed by Jonathan Haslam, Associate Professor of Soviet Studies, SAIS. It is difficult to conceive of a subject as controversial yet as important as the history of relations betwen the United States and the Soviet Union from Nixon to Reagan. The preponderant weight of orthodox analysis here in the United States tells us that détente was shipwrecked on the Angolan coastline as contingents of Cubans arrived in Soviet transports, or that it was "buried in the sands of the Ogaden." The purveyors of this orthodoxy hold the Russians responsible. If it was not Angola or...