Agricultural History Review, Volume 51 Part 2 (2003), p. 242

This is an exciting book by seven historians familiar with the history of Europe from the fifteenth to the middle of the nineteenth century. By covering the various forms of common property related to land in both upland and lowland England, the Netherlands, Flanders, France, Sweden, and western Germany, the authors do a real service to the academic community. They are bringing together information from a variety of archival sources combined with historical studies by the authors and others of a diversity of common property institutions in these regions during the above era. I do not know of another book like this. Any serious student of common property history simply must read this book.

What is outstanding is that the authors have met and discussed the terms they were going to be using and kept to the conventions they developed as closely as any group of authors I have read recently. For the simple descriptive veracity, this is extremely useful for all serious scholars in this field.

I was flattered that this distinguished group of historians took the design principles I outlined in Governing the commons seriously. I think they somewhat mistakenly thought you could describe a wide variety of common property institutions using the design principles. They found, as I have found earlier, that specific common property institutions do differ from one another. I was working at the level of individual common property institutions for specific resources. The authors point out that they notice that even in the same community the rules and the likelihood of conforming to the rules vary by specific resource.

It is my fondest hope that this group can now go on to a second or third enterprise whereby they identify specific institutional arrangements that they hopefully could trace across time. All of us interested in this field are frustrated with the difficulty of studying failures and why some systems succeed while others fail. Hopefully, they will be able to identify sufficient resource institutions or resources that collapse after some time so as to begin to get a good quantitative assessment of the difference in the successful versus failed systems. Throughout this book they give us very good descriptions of some of this kind of information, but hopefully in future work they could each pick a set of institutions about which there is data at an early period and assess when the system appears to have disappeared or entered a very difficult time.

This may well be an impossibility, but it would be certainly worthwhile to try even if they were only able history review to code eight to ten core variables for each of one hundred or so institutions.

I know I will be recommending this book to my graduate students in the future and I strongly urge readers of this journal to do likewise.