Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe. By Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Pp. xxii, 351. $51.50

Proving again their mastery of both detail and synthesis, Barbara and Stanley Stein have done a masterful job of compression, packing into one mid-size book material that could easily have filled two. Silver, Trade, and War is more than a discussion of the role of silver in the evolution of the Spanish Empire: it addresses the role of Spain and America in the making of Early Modern Europe. The first half of the book outlines the emergence and consolidation of the system of political authority and silver flows that linked America, Spain, and the rest of Europe by 1700. The second half explores the efforts (and ultimate failure) of early and mid-eighteenth-century Spanish economist–bureaucrats to purge Spain of the its entrenched patterns of immobility, dependency, and self-interest.