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Dressing Modern Frenchwomen: Marketing Haute Couture, 1919–1939. By Mary Lynn Stewart. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008. xvii + 305 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. Cloth, $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-801-88803-8

The authors’ attention to central bank relations is not balanced, however, by close scrutiny of the central bank’s role in Belgium itself. The wartime behavior of Belgian private banks and businesses is barely covered, as the authors focus on the documents they retrieved from the archives of the national bank. They fully chronicle the discussions that took place, both within the central bank and with the politicians in London who were responsible for monetary policy, but their strict adherence to the course of events does not allow a sustained topical focus, nor does it offer an occasion to assess the coherence and results of central bank policy. Readers must piece the evidence together for themselves, as the authors themselves acknowledge in the book’s fi nal pages, where they describe their achievement as one of “set[ing] out the building blocks that have been uncovered in research . . . leav[ing] the reader to make the fi nal assessment” (p. 453). The wealth of evidence they provide is supported with little argument or analysis. Nor do they refl ect comparatively on the data they have collected or engage in historiographical discussion in order to assess how their account of the Belgian experience relates to broader questions of Nazi economic policies, Allied relations, and management of the central bank. However, as the evidence they have uncovered on these questions is so rich, and as much of it is new, they have succeeded in updating our current knowledge of central banking during World War II. The tantalizing glimpses they provide of the Belgian economy during the war and their coverage of how Belgian business and labor adapted to the Nazi war economy opens up opportunities for further research.