Olivier de Maret, Of Migrants and Meanings. Italians and Their Food Business in Brussels, 1876-1914.

non-market institutions. Hovering behind this book’s exposé of the shortcomings of market economies is a usually implicit counterfactual claim that such a society, which he observes only in Medieval Europe as a brief interlude between feudal and market dominance, was a viable alternative, offering greater economic achievement, greater equity, and more justice, and that it should not be rejected as a malign environment of rent-seeking distributional coalitions, predatory power centers, and corporatist controls. It is usually unfair to complain that an author did not write a different book, but I believe Van Bavel’s critique of market economies can be persuasive only after we have a volume that substantially strengthens this great counterfactual claim.