Higgs "Festschrift"

The University of Chicago Press has just released a volume edited by Price Fishback and entitled GOVERNMENT AND THE AMERICAN ECONOMY: A NEW HISTORY. It is based on papers first presented at a conference honoring Robert Higgs held in early 2004. I did not attend but was later asked to provide a chapter on "The Civil War and Reconstruction." The resulting volume covers the government's role in the American economy from the colonial period through the present. Although not a typical festschrift, it is still a fitting tribute to Higgs. The other authors appearing in the collection represent a veritable who’s who of economic historians of the United States, some of them his students. In addition to Higgs himself and Fishback, the contributors include Stan Engerman, Gary Libecap, John Joseph Wallis, Sumner J. La Croix, Robert Margo, Robert McGuire, Richard Sylla, Lee Alston, Joseph Ferrie, Mark Guglielmo, E. C. Pasour, Jr., Randal Rucker, and Werner Troesken, with a foreword from Nobel Laureate Doug North. Like any collection, the chapters vary in quality, scope, and ideology. Those of Higgs (on "The World Wars") and myself are the most consistently libertarian, while that of Sylla (on the financial system) is probably the most sympathetic to State intervention. Yet most of them share a pro-market, pro-property rights orientation, and they all repay reading.