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Against the Profit Motive: The Salary Revolution in American Government, 1780–1940 . By Parrillo Nicholas R.. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. 2013. Pp. xi, 568. $125.00, hardcover; $55.00, paper.

and modification of institutions prevented opportunism: “The histories of Bruges, Antwerp, and Amsterdam, cities that for a very long time stood at the top of the urban hierarchy, offer compelling evidence that the ongoing process of institutional adaptation reduced transactions costs” (p. 207). In other words, mercantile behavior conformed largely to institutional prescripts. Unfortunately, he offers little analysis of those court documents and merchant correspondence that reveal the quotidian calculation of interests or negotiation of agreements. My research on bankruptcy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, demonstrates beyond any doubt that opportunism, far from ever being deterred, remained the daily fare of market life, influenced but not determined by prevalent institutions. Traders of all sorts and stripes obeyed or violated the dictates of institutions, whether privateor public-order, according to their own interests and with surprising impunity. Finally, the fascination with institutions has much to do with their purported connection to questions of economic development and comparative advantage. “The West grew rich,” so the institutional explanation, because of its early resort to open-access, public-order institutions, whether state-based (North) or corporative (Greif). Gelderblom wants to make a similar, albeit more modest argument about leading commercial cities. The issues turns on two related, but separate, questions: Do institutions create commercial markets; do institutions effectively determine commercial behaviors? The answers to both await more directed research and analysis. Institutions alone cannot explain why certain cities succeeded, while others failed. Certainly, economic policies and innovations that stabilized markets and promoted exchange played a distinct role. Given the option, merchants prefer to trade where the costs of doing business are lower. The option is not always given, however. Other factors, such as geographic advantage, material constraint, resource distribution, and industrial organization also contribute to commercial decisions. Merchants do not simply exercise their “footloose” option. Rather, they hedge their bets and consider their opportunities. To understand why cities and economies rise and fall, scholars need to think of opportunism as widespread, normal rather than aberrant. They need to recall Hirschman as well as North, consider the interests as well as the institutions. Gelderblom’s book is a step, but only a step, in this direction.