Agriculture and the Great Depression: The Rural Crisis of the 1930s in Europe and the Americas.GérardBéaur and FrancescoChiapparino (Eds.), (Routledge, 2023. Pp. 294. ISBN 9780367615505. Hbk £100)

This detailed and interesting collection contains 12 chapters on the agricultural background and consequences of the Great Depression of 1929 in specific countries, an introduction on the main topics and issues, and two comparative articles.The introduction, 'Agriculture and the Big Crash', by Grard Baur and Francesco Chiapparino, explains that the book originated in two conferences of economists and historians analysing the 2008 economic crisis in relation to the Great Depression, in 2017 and 2018.These studies addressed several issues, including the relationships of the agricultural crises of the 1920s-30s to the Great Depression, global versus local crises, and different perspectives on the crises.To address these issues, the chapters in the book are grouped into three general categories: part 1, the crisis in long-term perspective; part 2, the mechanisms of the crisis; and part 3, the crisis and the policies.Part 1 begins with a comparative study by Ernst Langthaler, 'The Great Depression as Great Transformation?Global food regime crisis and (inter-)national transition pathways, 1925-1939'.This chapter compares major changes in agricultural systems and food regimes during the Great Depression in the United States, the USSR, and Nazi Germany.It shows how these very different countries all increased government roles in agriculture.It argues that these changes had the longterm effect of replacing the British-centred global food regime of the late nineteenth century to a U.S.-centred food regime after World War II.The second chapter in this part, 'Agricultural crisis in Spain (Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries)', by Vicente Pinilla, presents a long-term survey of Spain's agriculture from the backwardness and food crises of the early nineteenth century through the conflicts and crises of the interwar years to its modernization after World War II.It discusses the impact of industrialization and world trade on agriculture both in general terms and in Spain.It argues that the Great Depression had less effect on Spanish agriculture in the 1930s because Spain was still mostly agrarian and not fully tied into the world economy.Part 2 has six chapters on specific countries' experiences of the Great Depression.Paul Brassley's chapter 'The 1929 crisis from the perspective of a food-importing country-The United