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Trevor A. Carmichael Passport to the Heart: Reflections on Canada-Caribbean Relations. Kingston: Ian Randle, 2001. Photographs, bibliography, index, 232 pp.; hardcover $28.95.

Triner effectively uses a number of measurement techniques, such as the Herfindahl index (to measure market concentration), convergence tests (for interest rates across regions as a national market develops), and regressions (to determine the sources of the demand and supply of banking services). She also traces the history of the “risk premium,” the difference between the interest rates on British bonds and those of the Brazilian government. The book is rich in its supporting apparatus of relevant bibliography and discursive footnotes. With this monograph, extensively documented with primary sources, Triner establishes the notion that a modern banking system emerged in Brazil in the years under examination, one that “intermediated resources between economic sectors and responded systematically to the competing forces affecting the supply and demand for credit and deposits” (p. 2). The Banco do Brasil, nevertheless, was not a central bank-that is, a government entity, as opposed to a commercial one, that could control the money supply and the interest rate while serving as a rediscount agency and lender of last resort to commercial banks. Economic historians generally credit the Superintendency of Currency and Credit (SUMOC), established in 1945, with being the country’s first central bank. This book contributes to a rising perception that the Old Republic was a critical period of state building in Brazilian history and was far from a continuation of the feckless regime known as the Empire. The republic advanced modern “stateness” in a country that had long languished in a regime of slavery undergirding a feeble, if highly centralized, polity. Perhaps there is some irony, if no logical contradiction, in the truth that “stateness” was strengthened not only at the level of the federal government but also at the level of the constituent states, even if rivalry between state and national governments sometimes resulted in inefficiencies and less-than-effective federal banking policies. Indeed, as with U.S. federalism, the states (at least the three dynamic southern states mentioned above) did experiment with social and economic intervention, and to some extent they set an example for the federal government to follow during the 1930s.