If you like a contentious book, ranging across wide swathes of history, you will enjoy this one. Although Richard Lachmann kicks a few fairly dead horses along the way, he takes on enough lively speculations and conventional wisdom to make the trip worthwhile. His subject is the changes that occurred in Europe from the end of feudalism down to the dawn of the Enlightenment. Lachmann undertakes to explain how feudalism gave way to centralized states with landlord elites; why the autonomous urban centers of the Renaissance were eclipsed by national territorial states as the foci of wealth and power; why England and France surpassed Spain and the Netherlands as commercial and imperial powers; and why none of these changes can be attributed simply to a Weberian process of greater “rationalization” of social and political life.