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In A monument to the country. Official statistics in Belgium, 1795-1870, Nele Bracke unravels why and how the Belgian state and its predecessors organized and developed an official statistical apparatus in order to collect numerical information. The study captures the underlying objectives and structures, as well as the methods to compile statistics. Nele Bracke investigates the meaning and significance of government statistics in the 19th-century State and society. In Belgium, early social scientists established an internationally renowned 'statistical system' designed to collect information about the country, the people and the society. This 'statistical system' was built around the 'Commission centrale de Statistique' (statistical committee) and the production of demographic, economic and agricultural censuses. In the first part of the book, the author analyzes the institutional history of the 'Commission centrale de Statistique' and its predecessors. In the second part of the book, she studies the censuses

This book treats the spectacular rise in life expectancy during the last three centuries. It is the first study to bring together both published and unpublished material about the history of the health of Belgian men and women and to analyze it critically. Isabelle Devos studies the mechanisms of the historic fall in the death rate in an original manner and answers the question why research on the causes of this decline has not progressed faster. While the discipline of historical demography orients the first part of her book, the discipline of historical epidemiology provides the perspective taken in the second part, in which the role of insects as spreaders of disease is explored. Essential in her study is the importance of local medical practitioners who already at the end of the Ancien Régime warned of the dangers present in the environment. Their 'ecological' thinking created a consciousness that was decisive for the further development of healthcare

A brief review of some recent European Union (EU) monetary & trade history (from the 1970 Treaty of Luxembourg to the recent Greek declarations), in which problems & successes of various kinds (eg, accession of new member states, the juste retour of the UK) have been matched by new methods of raising revenue. As tariffs & trade barriers disappeared throughout the EU, other revenues (external trade tariffs, VAT, etc) have increased in importance. Three milestones in recent EU economic history are former British Prime Minister Thatcher's disputes with the EU over trade & currency issues in the early 1980s, Maastricht, & the 1999 Council of Europe, in which current financing standards were agreed upon. 4 Tables. A. Siegel