A distinguished panel of analysts examines particular areas of U.S.-Soviet cooperation: crisis communications , trade, science, agriculture, environment protection, space and medicine. The authors analyze agreements that the United States and the Soviet Union have revolved in their mutual interest, agreements that all too often are overlooked in an atmosphere clouded by hostility and mutual distrust. What, they ask, has been the history of these agreements? Have they succeeded or failed? How might they best be sustained and enlarged?

Without minimizing the enormous dangers of ongoing strategic military competition, the contributors attempt to determine which sectors of U.S.-Soviet relations have yielded the most significant mutual benefits. They raise questions about where U.S. policy has gone wrong, where it has been effective, and how safe we are in forecasting the continuation of those cooperative relationships.

The results of a decade-long research study by the author, in The Undevelopment of Capitalism Rebecca Jean Emigh argues that the expansion of the Florentine economic market in the fifteenth century helped to undo the development of markets of other economies, especially the rural economy of Tuscany, paradoxically slowing down the economic development of northern Italy overall.  This "undeveloping" process, as Emigh calls it, produced an advanced economy at the time of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, but created the conditions whereby much of this area of Europe delayed its full development into industrial capitalism by many ages, so that full-scale industrialization happened in other places first, leaving northern Italy behind.

As a lucid explanation of capitalism that turns back the clock even further on its birth, The Undevelopment of Capitalism makes a significant contribution to the studies of capitalism, historical sociology, and theories of markets as economic and cultural institutions.