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within the decaying wood of the academic hierarchy. It seems much more likely that the polemical bias is indeed unconscious and usually unintended, a by-product of the need for sharp conclusions plus the desensitizing effect of quantitative work. The more scientific the methods used by scholars, the Iess sensitive they may become to the irreducibly subjective and ethically-coloured standards they use to interpret their results. Quantitative scholarship is therefore more likely to carry a cargo of ideological implication while sincerely claiming the neutrality of pure positivist factuality. The unconscious perceptual biases which William Dray argued were present in all traditional scholarly interpretations are thus embedded beneath the confident surface of our recent neo-positivist style.

One should close on a positive, though not positivist, note. No work that goes beyond compilation of data can escape bias, and the great strengths of Decker’s work make it perhaps the single most valuable book on nineteenth-century San Francisco and one of the most useful on the inner structure of the emerging modern metropolis.

York University, Toronto FRED MATTHEWS

J. ROGERS HOLLINGSWORTH and ELLEN JANE HOLLINGSWORTH, Dimensions irt Urban History, Historical and Social Perspectives on Middle-size American Cities (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1979. Pp. viii 3 184. $1930)

As often happens, the title of a volume is considerably more grandiose and general than the contents. Dimensions in Urban History is not really a book, but a collection of four essays on municipal politics in small American cities during the period between 1870 and 1900. The decision to place the essays together in this format was unfortunate, since the attempts by the authors to link quite different approaches to the topic distorts rather than clarifies their findings.

The first essay, ‘Types of American cities’, is essentially a review of the voluminous literature on community power structure. The authors dig up a truly impressive list of studies, but their own efforts to impose order upon this material are less successful. After toying with some arcane sociological terminology, they define three types of cities: autocratic, oligarchic and polyarchic. In effect they have simply added an intermediate category to the old “pluralist”/“elite” debate, although they also elaborate the conditions and characteristics of each of these power structures. This contribution provides the theoretical basis of the papers that follow.

The next approach consists of three case studies of Wisconsin towns: Eau Claire, Jonesville and Green Bay. The authors combine summaries of the geography, economic history and changing social structure of the three towns with descriptions of the organiza- tion, behaviour and policies of their municipal governments. Almost inevitably the results are impressionistic and superficial, but none the less revealing in the complications which they superimpose on the original model. In Eau Claire, a lumber town, the transition from oligarchy to polyarchy is confused by social cross-currents not considered in the original typology: the influence of state politics and the national economy mingle with boosterism, populism and temperance, and local catastrophes of fire and flood. In Jonesville and Green Bay the process of transformation to polyarchy is less dramatic, a significant cause (or effect?) being the rapid expansion of municipal services, hence an enlarged municipal bureaucracy and a more dispersed power structure.

The case study approach stands in direct contrast to the third essay, a cross-sectional regression analysis of 154 cities at the turn of the century. Because the variables are clearly defined and the hypotheses rigorously tested, this is the most useful essay in the volume, despite a suspicion that much of the material has already been published elsewhere. The model attempts to explain variations in municipal policy. The problem is that quantitative information is available for only two aspects of municipal government-elections and budgets-during this period. Measures of electoral behaviour include voter participation

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rates, the presence of partisan slates, the turnover of elected officials and the degree of competition for major offices. Public policy is measured by expenditures for five major categories of municipal government activity. Neither group of variables is linked with the theme of community power introduced in the first chapter. Instead this model derives from a different literature, that on the determinants of public policy, which has not been previously acknowledged in the volume.

Within these limitations the results are conclusive. None of the electoral variables (with one minor regional exception) was relevant in determining municipal expenditures. Socio-economic measures-chiefly the level of personal or family income-seem to have been far more significant, with some variations due to the nature of the city’s economic base. This is nice, straightforward analysis; valuable first, because it shows the potential for historical comparative analysis of municipal policy; and second, because it emphasizes the similarity in the response of municipal governments of all political stripes and struc- tures to income and technological change. So much for the power of the ballot box. The essay serves as a useful reminder that lengthy case studies of the innovation of a new waterworks or street railway in a given town are very much examples of a larger process of technological diffusion.

The fourth essay, by contrast, is almost fraudulent. It ignores the association between municipal income and level of expenditure identified earlier in the book and attempts to build a typology based on these two dimensions. And then, without evidence, the Hollingsworths attempt to interpret the cluster of middle income, middle expenditure cities as oligarchic, referring back to the typology proposed in the first essay.

And there they leave us. The four essays have approached the topic of municipal government in the late nineteenth century from quite different contexts of literature, concept and analysis, but the significance of these differences seems to have passed them by. The authors seem to have failed to consider three important points: first, there is little use in introducing the notion of community power structure unless one attempts to de- fine it and can show how it worked. This in turn suggests a need for a smaller, but more intensively measured sample, so that an explicit linkage between the power structure and policy variables can be developed and tested. Second, during the late nineteenth century the variation in political behaviour over time may have been much greater than the variation in space. Third, we know relatively little about the patterns and processes of diffusion of change in municipal institutions and activities. Only when the predominant processes are identified will we be able to identify the leaders and laggards among cities and to speculate upon the causes.

University of Toronto JAMES W. SIMMONS

CAROL M. JUDD and ARTHUR J. RAY (Eds), Old Trails and New Directions: Papers of the Third North American Fur Trade Conference (Toronto, Buffalo and London: University of Toronto Press, 1980. Pp. viii + 337. $30+0)

The third North American Fur Trade Conference, held in Winnipeg in 1978, took place in an intellectual environment considerably different in several respects from that of its predecessor which met in the same city eight years earlier. Midway between the con- ferences, the archives of the Hudson’s Bay Company were moved from Beaver House, London, to the Provincial Archives of Manitoba. This shift, as all users of the Archives can attest, involved far more than a change in venue. The transition from the tiny room at Beaver House to the spacious modern facilities in Winnipeg provided a great stimulus to scholarship on the fur trade. At the same time, fur trade studies were being affected by new perspectives arising from changes in society generally. Subjects previously neglected or ignored were engaging the attention of scholars-the role of women, particularly Indians and mixed blood, and calculations of the ethnic and national origins of non-commissioned servants of the Hudson’s Bay Company, a class which