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Peter Alexis Gourevitch examines the impact upon the trade policies and political coalitions of four countries of the Great Depression of 1873–1896, during which Germany and France adopted high tariffs on both agricultural and industrial products, Great Britain maintained its historic policy of free trade, and the United States protected industry but not agriculture. In attempting to explain this pattern of response, Gourevitch compares four alternative hypotheses: economic explanations, emphasizing domestic societal interests; political system explanations, focusing on domestic statist variables; international system explanations, combining international political and economic factors; and economic ideology explanations. Domestic societal interests supplemented by a concern with state structures, he concludes, provide the most persuasive account of these four cases. Gourevitch not only gives a detailed and informative history of the trade policies of the four great economic powers of the late nineteenth century, he also provides a useful test of several of the main approaches in international political economy.

For social scientists who enjoy comparisons, happiness is finding a force or event which affects a number of societies at the same time. Like test-tube solutions that respond differently to the same reagent, these societies reveal their characters in divergent responses to the same stimulus. One such phenomenon is the present worldwide inflation/depression. An earlier one was the Great Depression of 1873–-1896. Technological breakthroughs in agriculture (the reaper, sower, fertilizers, drainage tiles, and new forms of wheat) and in …