The government machine: a revolutionary history of the computer

Economic History Review

, LVII, 4 (2004), pp. 772–806

©

Economic History Society 2004. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Blackwell Publishing Ltd.Oxford, UK and Malden, USAEHRThe Economic History Review0013-0117Economic History Society 20042004

LVII

4772806Book Reviews

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Book reviews

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GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND

November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Adrian Jobson, ed.,

English government in the thirteenth century

(Woodbridge: BoydellPress, 2004. Pp. xiii

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151. £45)

This essay collection might seem, at first sight, to be for the specialist only. Butthose who regularly mine the rich vein of royal administrative records—be theysocial, economic or political historians—need to be instructed, not only about whatsurvives but about how and why it does so. In particular, an understanding of thelimitations of the records, to contemporaries as well as to us, greatly increases theirpotential utility. This is one of the themes of the magisterial study of the adminis-tration of King John which heads the volume. In a fine piece of imaginativereconstruction, Nick Vincent takes us into a Plantagenet chancery that was ‘clearlyawash with scrap parchment’ (p. 44), reminding us of what we have lost as well aswhat remains. He refutes, among other things, the widely held view that the makingand preserving of English records was hugely in advance of those of the Capetiankings.

David Carpenter then skilfully takes the story of the chancery into its thirteenth-century heyday and beyond, examining the consequences, positive and negative,both for contemporaries and for historians, of the chancery going out of court. Butif the chancery was thriving in the mid-thirteenth century, the royal exchequer wasin a state of near collapse, due in part to the rise of the wardrobe. Nick Barratttakes us, equally skilfully, through the various stages of reform that were institutedduring the reign of Edward I against a background of finance that was inadequatein the context of what that bellicose king was trying to do. Barratt argues that bythe end of the reign the exchequer and wardrobe were functioning as ‘two inter-linked halves of an integrated financial system’ (p. 85) and that in consequence thesystem was not in the dire straits that historians have tended to suppose.

The remaining essays deal essentially with how particular aspects of the royaladministration impinged on the king’s subjects. Paul Brand provides a detailedconsideration of how the licensing system for alienations in mortmain actuallyfunctioned during the reign of Edward I. A complex, time-consuming, and expen-sive process, it was one largely benefiting the king. Brand offers a plausible, ifmundane, answer to the problem of why the Statute of Mortmain of 1279 wascouched in terms of total prohibition rather than the licensing which actuallyfollowed. It was to provide flexibility and to give the system teeth; sadly, it was nota trick played by the king on the lords, nor a weapon devised against the church.Anthony Musson turns to the administration of justice and provides a discussionof the ‘four knights’ system for the holding of assizes and gaol delivery. He showshow it interlocked with the general eyre and indicates how it related to local powerrelations and to other jurisdictions. He tackles, and largely refutes, some latethirteenth-century suggestions of widespread abuse within the system. LouiseWilkinson examines the careers of two remarkable women of the early thirteenth

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Prices given are those supplied by publishers with review copies.

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Economic History Society 2004

century, Nicholaa de la Haye and Ela, countess of Salisbury, sheriffs of Lincolnshireand Wiltshire respectively. She shows how, in their exceptional circumstances,‘traditions of lordship and status transcended gender in determining appointments’(p. 124). Finally, David Crook considers the complex relationship between thetenants of the manor and soke of Mansfield, the Crown, and the recipients of royalpatronage. In doing so, he puts the well-known case of the tenants of Brill inBuckinghamshire, in 1259, into a much wider context.

In introducing his volume, and providing an historiographical survey, Jobsonclaims, rightly, that these conference proceedings demonstrate that the study ofadministrative history is alive and well. What they also show is that administrativehistory operates, as it should, within a much broader framework than it did in thedays of T. F. Tout.

Cardiff University

November 2004

57

4Book Reviews


Philip M. Stell, trans.,

York bridgemasters’ accounts

(York: York Archaeological Trust,2003. Pp. 508. 1 map. £35)

To medieval urban communities, dependent for their livelihood upon trade, bridgeswere essential in order to ensure access to and from important markets. Yet, withinEngland, not all towns and cities reacted in the same way to this economic imper-ative. Among small towns, the financing of the construction and repair of bridgeswas largely a private enterprise, conducted by individual townspeople throughtestamentary provision. Within larger urban centres such as London and York, suchad hoc activity ran parallel to, but was increasingly overtaken by, a more corporateform of investment in urban property to support the bridges. In York, this was theresponsibility of four bridgemasters (two for each of the city’s main bridges), whowere annually elected civic officials accountable to the city’s ruling council. Theaccounts of the York bridgemasters survive, in a broken sequence, only from thefifteenth century (Ouse Bridge, 1400 to 1499, and Foss Bridge, 1406 to 1488).

Stell’s translation of all the extant York bridgemasters’ accounts provides animportant service to both economic and urban historians. The accounts show that,while the bridgemasters took seriously their duty to oversee the maintenance of thetwo bridges and the civic chapels which stood upon them, their main business layin the collection of rents from the leasing of land, houses, shops, and other tene-ments, the income from which made a significant contribution to the city’s finances.Like the accounts and rentals of the management of the London Bridge estate,edited for the London Record Society by Vanessa Harding and Laura Wright, theseaccounts contain a wealth of information on the wages of urban craftsmen employedby the bridgemasters to maintain the fabric of the bridges as well as the city’sextensive property portfolio. Meanwhile, the accounts also afford a glimpse of thestate of the property market in York over the course of the fifteenth century, whichcould provide the basis of a useful study of the fluctuating level of property rentswithin York and of the ways in which the city, as an institutional landlord, operatedin the face of growing economic pressures.

Stell’s edition is not without its shortcomings. In particular, the cursory intro-duction fails to set the accounts in their proper economic and institutional context.Nevertheless, there are compensations, comprising a list of all the known bridge-masters from 1357 to 1500, a transcription and translation of the bridgemasters’

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oath, a glossary of terms, a gazetteer of the city’s medieval street names, and anexcellent map of medieval York.

University of Durham

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November 2004

57

4Book Reviews


R. D. Connor and A. D. C. Simpson, ed. A. D. Morrison-Low,

Weights and measuresin Scotland: a European perspective

(Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland /Tuckwell Press, 2004. Pp. xxiv

+

842. 323 ills. £50)

The proper understanding of weights and measures in all types of economic historyis a crucial yet undervalued element of our understanding of past economies. It isalso a branch of history that can produce surprising and telling insights intoneglected areas of our subject. For these reasons the present work should bewelcomed by scholars. Based upon career-long dedication to historical metrology,the book is marked by a high degree of technical skill, much hard-gained knowledge,and an evident enthusiasm to communicate the subject to wider audiences. Hand-somely produced and lavishly illustrated with plates and figures, it is very goodvalue for money in today’s academic market.

As well as providing a history of Scottish weights and measures, the work includesan encyclopaedic inventory of surviving standards and more than 200 pages ofappendices detailing legislation and other matters. It should be considered anessential work of reference for university and public libraries. Perhaps the moststriking finding for quantitative historians (and therefore the best way of underliningits importance) will be the contention that an inadequate understanding of how thesystem of allowances for dry measures worked has led generations of historians tounderestimate the GDP of Scotland (and quite probably that of other parts ofEurope).

The European perspective adopted by the authors shows how weights and mea-sures can illuminate the evolving patterns of regional and international trade in thelong run. The first known attempts at formalizing the Scottish metrological system,David I’s Assize of Weights and Measures, dating from the twelfth century, gavemeasures strikingly in line with current English standards, reflecting then-dominantpatterns of trade. The conflicts of the late thirteenth century, however, meant thatthe bulk of Scottish overseas commerce shifted to trade with the Low Countriesand this was reflected in the adoption of different measures.

Despite the 1707 Act of Union, which called for uniformity of measures northand south of the border, national and regional peculiarities persisted. The quanti-fying zeal of the eighteenth-century agrarian reformers underestimated the scale ofthe barriers to uniformity and, ironically, added a few new problems. Soundlegislation in the form of the 1834 and 1835 Weights and Measures Acts, backedup by efficient administrators brought about sweeping changes, but was still notenough to end traditions built upon centuries of custom. The ‘metty of coal’ andthe ‘forpet’ of potatoes survived until well into the twentieth century and perhapsbeyond. Customary practices in the employment of different measures also madea difference: struck, heaped, shaken, or packed measures all affect the quantityinvolved.

Marc Bloch contended that weights and measures could illuminate importantissues of communal memory and identity. More recently Witold Kula has shownhow the same subject matter can provide insights into class and power relations in

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the marketplace. The field is now open for further exploration by social andeconomic historians supported by this impressive work.

University of Bristol

November 2004

57

4Book Reviews


Christine Peters,

Women in early modern Britain, 1450–1640

(Basingstoke: PalgraveMacmillan, 2004. Pp. v

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206. £16.99)

Peters provides an excellent introduction to recent research on women in earlymodern Britain and offers a critical assessment of many of the conclusions of thatresearch. Especially impressive is her engagement with the Scottish and Welshevidence, given the relatively recent development of women’s history in thosecountries. This has necessitated her undertaking much primary research herself. Adiscussion of marriage, kinship, and inheritance sets the context for chapters onwork and the household economy, disorderly women, witchcraft and fairy belief,and female piety and religious change.

Peters’ work strongly demonstrates the great diversity of women’s experience inBritain (defined as England, Scotland, and Wales) across regions and over time.She describes her book as a history of women in Britain, not a unified history of‘British women’ which she argues cannot be written. Indeed there were differenceswithin the modern political entities, between highlands and lowlands, town andcountryside. There were some constants such as images of women as weakeremotionally, physically, and intellectually than men, the acceptance of men asleaders of society and household, and women’s inferior legal position. However,the impact of these constants on women was influenced by economic, demographic,cultural, and religious factors.

Only a few of the many issues raised can be mentioned here. Peters questionsseveral recent interpretations by re-examining the evidence. Court evidence maygive a misleading impression of the extent of freedom to choose a marriage partner,or of women’s attraction to Catholicism. Discussing the relative strength of marriagealliances as bonds between feuding families in Highland society, Peters suggeststhat they were more effective than the alternatives. This complements recentresearch emphasizing the strong bond between Highland sons and their maternaluncles, although some Scottish historians may question Peters’ tendency elsewhereto ascribe responsibility to the clan system for other factors affecting Scottishwomen in general. Investigating the double standard for reputation suggested byrecent defamation studies, Peters, like Bernard Capp, concludes that sexual honestymattered for men as well as for women. She stresses the importance of distinguish-ing between single and married women when examining women’s economic posi-tion, and argues against simple models of decline or continuity. Investigatingexplanations for witchhunting, she points out the need to consider wider culturalattitudes such as the nature of fairy beliefs (recently examined by Lizanne Hend-erson and Ted Cowan for Scotland) and beliefs about the nature of malevolence inWales. On the Reformation’s impact on women, Peters argues that no simple answeris possible, given the differing characteristics of late medieval piety throughoutBritain.

In a short book some topics are bound to be omitted. There could have beensome discussion of crime in the chapter on disorderly women, and more consider-ation of the impact of European influences throughout. But the author is to be

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congratulated on providing an excellent synthesis which is certain to stimulatefurther research on women in early modern Britain.

University of Guelph

November 2004

57

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Jon Stobart,

The first industrial region: north-west England c.1700–60

(Manchester:Manchester University Press, 2004. Pp. xi

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259. 37 figs. 30 tabs. £49.99)

In the conclusion to this interesting and persuasive volume Stobart asserts that‘[m]any of the processes of modernisation occurring in Britain during the eigh-teenth century had both their causes and their consequence at the regional level’(p. 219). Not least among those processes, of course, was industrialization itselfand Stobart’s book represents a sustained and impressively researched argument insupport of the view that geography should move to centre stage in our understand-ing of it. While it is true that economic historians have long seen regional differenceas one of the key outcomes of industrialization, Stobart wishes us to see the regioninstead as an active force, one that itself shaped industrialization. He does not reallyaddress himself directly to the statement contained in his title. Instead, he focuseson north-west England in the decades immediately prior to the ‘classic’ industrialrevolution not as the first industrial region but rather as an exemplar of processesthat were to be repeated time and again elsewhere—a test-bed for his views on thecentrality of geography to industrial and economic development. On balance, hesucceeds in making his case.

Starting with an authoritative survey of the relevant literatures in both economichistory and economic and urban geography (a particularly useful primer for themore geographically illiterate among us), Stobart proceeds to lay out a wealth ofempirical material. He begins by establishing the urban hierarchy of the north west.Next, he maps on to this hierarchy two distinct (though interdependent) economies,one an ‘advanced organic’ economy and the other mineral based, and shows howthese two economies both emerged from and led to subtly different sub-regionalgeographies. Attention then shifts to the role of services, the vast majority of whichwere located in towns, in integrating sub- and extra-regional developments. Theseare the most exciting and insightful sections. Stobart argues powerfully for anunderstanding of regional specialization and regional interdependence as two sidesof the same coin, integrated through key functions and actors. As the author notes,there are pressing evidential and methodological challenges in exploring historicalspatial interactions—none the less the book suggests a rich vein of potential futureresearch in this direction.

However, the economic historian will rightly ask where, among all the detailedevidence of spatial patterns at both macro and micro levels, are the data that willallow us to link those patterns to economic growth. This is an important issue.More analysis of how spatial patterns were reflected in varying methods of busi-ness organization would also have been welcome. But to make this latter pointis really to demand from Stobart a book that he did not set out to write. Instead,he has provided a very solid foundation on which economic and business his-torians can and should build in their attempts to understand the process ofindustrialization.

Royal Holloway, University of London

November 2004

57

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Robin Pearson,

Insuring the industrial revolution: fire insurance in Great Britain, 1700–1850

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. 448. 17 figs. 52 tabs. £49.95)

This meticulously researched monograph places fire at the centre of British eco-nomic performance during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is awelcome contribution to a field of British insurance history that has retained theinterest of economic historians for decades. There is a splendid introductory chapteron the inter-dependence of fire insurance and industrialization. The volume is thendivided into two parts. In the first, Pearson adopts a chronological approach toanalysing the rapid growth of fire insurance in London and the provinces duringthe mid-eighteenth century, the spread of competition between national companies,their local agencies, and provincial newcomers, and the tense relationship betweenwar and insurance between 1782 and 1815. The second, more thematic, sectionfocuses upon building a profile of insurance company organization, marketingstrategies, cartel formation, underwriting practice, and capital investment between1700 and 1850. Pearson builds upon traditional academic interest in examininghow insurance companies reduced uncertainty and safeguarded property againstfire. Perhaps of greater relevance to economic historians is the way in which hedemonstrates how the industry helped to pioneer new forms of corporate organi-zation, which were adapted in other capital-rich industries, including the railways,during the nineteenth century.

Pearson answers those critics who see fire insurance as nothing more than amarginal subset of economic or financial history that is of interest only to thatmisunderstood breed of ‘new economic historians’. Although the work at timesfaces a serious risk of being drowned in a torrent of statistical formulas and tables(especially in chapter 5), the author’s aim to write a monograph that would makean important contribution to both economic and social history is partly fulfilled.Extending beyond a narrow cliometric approach, Pearson assesses the socialresponsibilities of the insurance industry. In particular, he examines the importantrole played by the early fire brigades, organized and funded by local fire offices after1666, in protecting the capital from the growing risk of fire in homes and inindustry. Chapter 2 contains an especially captivating section on fires in GeorgianLondon. Pearson is also interested in the enduring risk posed by fire to industrialsociety and, using a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses, he exam-ines the relationship between population size, the building cycle, and real sumsinsured as well as the number of recorded fires. He has carefully mined the recordsof the insurance offices, especially those of the Sun Alliance, to achieve this.

For all his lip service to social history, the author’s first priority lies in determiningthe extent to which the industrial revolution was actually insured against fire. Inthis he concludes that industry was partially insured and that there were clearlyidentifiable regional discrepancies in the spread of insurance. In order fully to realizehis aim to provide both an economic and a social history of insurance, Pearsonmight have made much more of ‘the culture of fire’, which undoubtedly contributedto the growth in risk aversion during the eighteenth century, and of changes insocial behaviour concerning fire during industrialization. Gaston Bachelard’s clas-sic,

The psychoanalysis of fire

(1938), would be an ideal starting point for this culturalinterpretation, but so too would the extensive North American literature on firesand urban industrial development.

Overall, this monograph, the result of over a decade’s research, makes a majorcontribution not only to insurance history, but also to British economic history and,

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in parts, to the social history of industrialization. With extensive footnotes contain-ing a mine of detailed comparative evidence, Pearson has produced a first-classstudy of an industry that underwent major structural and cultural changes between1700 and 1850. He has also demonstrated the undeniably central role played byfire in shaping the urban and industrial landscape, as well as the nation’s emergingcapital markets.

University of Edinburgh

November 2004

57

4Book Reviews


Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, eds.,

The Cambridge economic history of modernBritain, 3 volumes

. Vol. 1:

Industrialisation, 1700–1860

. Vol. 2:

Economic maturity,1860–1939

. Vol. 3:

Structural change and growth, 1939–2000

(Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2004. Vol. 1: Pp. xix

+

536. 34 figs. 74 tabs. Vol. 2:Pp. xix

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552. 41 figs. 91 tabs. Vol. 3: Pp. xix

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473. 60 figs. 68 tabs. £70 pervolume; pbk. £24.99 per volume)

The Cambridge economic history of modern Britain

has all the hallmarks of a maturetextbook. In contrast to the earlier volumes of

The economic history of Britain

(1981,1994), in relation to which this is in effect a third edition, the coverage has beenbroadened, the tone of some contributors has been tempered, thus making chaptersmuch more accessible, and much effort has been devoted to ensuring that themesare addressed in complementary ways in the whole collection. The editors haveincluded much more on sectoral development (Ville on transport and Burt on theextractive industries in volume 1; stimulating essays on services by Thomas involume 2 and Millward in volume 3; and much more on the financial sector—byQuinn in volume 1, Cottrell (1860–1914) and Ross (1914–39) in volume 2, andWatson in volume 3). They have done a little to redress the Anglocentric approachof earlier editions, with chapters on Scotland by Devine in volume 1 and Lee involume 2 and on regional development by Scott in volume 3. The ‘Irish question’,however, remains beyond the pale. The role of the household as a unit of productionand consumption during the phase of industrialization is addressed in stimulatingessays by Humphries and Berg and these themes are picked up for the period 1860–1939 by Baines and Woods. The role of education and human capital accumulationis now followed much more consistently, with essays by Mitch in volume 1, Broad-berry in volume 2, and O’Mahony in volume 3. In its range, this collection is muchmore satisfactory than either of its predecessors.

The editorial team is also to be congratulated for imposing greater consistencyof treatment across the three volumes. This is best seen in the three essays on livingstandards. Both Voth in volume 1 and Boyer in volume 2 examine a broad rangeof measures of living standards (income per head, real wages, height, life expect-ancy, infant mortality, and a range of civil and political rights) and weigh oftencontradictory and uncertain evidence with care and balance. Many of these vari-ables are less relevant to discussion of postwar living standards, but Johnson weavescomparative information on life expectancy and infant mortality into his judiciousdiscussion of the impact of the postwar welfare state on both the aggregate economyand the living standards of benefit recipients. Presentationally, the volumes havestandardized tables, which look fine in black and white, but the figures vary andare occasionally a mess.

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Also very noticeable in this collection is an increased methodological openness.The

Cambridge history

is no longer the rallying point for an aggressively quantitativeapproach to economic history. Many authors have referred to a far richer histori-ography than was common in the first two editions. From some authors, (Hudsonon industrial organization and structure in volume 1, for example) this was only tobe expected. From others, notably Harley’s essay on trade, mercantilism, andtechnology in volume 1, the effect has been to turn an excellent piece in the secondedition into a seminal survey in the third. There are absolutely outstanding contri-butions in each of the three volumes. Wrigley’s succinct survey of a lifetime’s workon demographic history could not be bettered and Voth’s careful weighing of theevidence on living standards is exemplary. Hatton’s chapter on the labour marketin volume 2 proposes an integrated framework to account for changes in inflationand unemployment from 1870 to the present. From volume 3, the discussion offiscal policy by Clark and Dilnot and the survey of industrial relations by Brownare authoritative and compelling.

What does this collection of essays say about the interpretation of three centuriesof British economic development? There is an emerging consensus that early Britishindustrialization proceeded slowly, without a dramatic industrial revolution, at ratesof growth and within a social and political context that left the bulk of the popu-lation with only modest gains in overall welfare. The cause probably lay in thecombined effect of advances in knowledge and technology and the weakeningimpact of the negative feedbacks that had caused previous growth spurts to fizzleout. The transition to the factory and large-scale business organization was, how-ever, but one response to the risks and uncertainties that characterized the businessenvironment of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; a pluralistic businessstructure resulted. Changes in family structure and roles were less dramatic thancommonly believed.

However, the consensus is rather less evident in the period after 1860. There isno real agreement on how to characterize performance before the First World War.Nicholas, with the daunting task of replacing Pollard’s magisterial contribution tothe

Cambridge History

, is rather pessimistic about the response of British industryto intensified foreign competition but Crafts echoes the earlier conclusions ofMcCloskey (and, indeed, Pollard) that Victorian Britain did not fail. Crafts andEichengreen argue that the interventionist policies of governments in the 1930sdistorted incentive structures to an extent that encouraged collusion and slowedthe pace of structural and organizational change until the liberalization of economicpolicy in the 1980s. This analysis is by no means accepted by all the contributorsto volumes 2 and 3, and they have good cause to question it; it attempts to analyserelative decline in the aggregate by growth-retarding patterns of behaviour inmanufacturing over a period (1913–37) when British manufacturing narrowed theproductivity gap both with Germany and with the United States (according toBroadberry’s well-known estimates of comparative labour productivity). Conse-quently, there remain very fundamental disagreements on how to characterize theperformance of the postwar economy, as is very evident in Kitson’s review of growthrates and in other contributions to volume 3. Overall, this is a much better showcasefor the discipline than the other two Cambridge collections combined.

University of Exeter

November 2004

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Jeremy Burchardt,

The allotment movement in England, 1793–1873

(Woodbridge:Boydell and Brewer, 2002. Pp. xii

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287. 1 fig. 25 tabs. £45)

It is surprising that there has been no full-length study of the allotment movementin England in the nineteenth century, given the potential importance of the produceof an allotment to the standard of living of rural working-class families, and thepolitical importance of allotments, especially in the later nineteenth century.Burchardt offers only a partial history of nineteenth-century allotments, designatingand covering the first and second allotment movements, dating these to the 1790sand 1800s and the 1830s to the 1850s respectively. The third allotment movement,dating from the upsurge in agricultural trade unionism in the 1870s, is beyond hisremit, and it is to be hoped that further work will be done based on the ‘voluminousprinted evidence’ (p. 2) that survives from the later nineteenth century.

The main focus of the book is the second allotment movement. Burchardt givesa clear account of the expansion of allotment provision in the aftermath of the‘Captain Swing’ disturbances, under the influence of the propaganda distributedby the Labourer’s Friend Society and under the auspices of local allotment societieswhose energetic activists made possible the spread of allotments. Burchardt is surelyright to associate voluntary allotment provision with the wider aims of the NewPoor Law, and to describe it as ‘an ambitious attempt to reshape the character ofthe labouring poor’ (p. 87). A chapter identifies allotment landlords and theirmotivations for letting allotments: it is argued that landowners were not motivatedprimarily by the returns available to them, but were seeking ‘social approval’(p. 126) within their communities and hoping to establish better social relationshipswith their tenants and employees. The significance of the spread of allotmentsduring and after a period of rural unrest is clear. The high demand for allotmentsamong agricultural labourers reflected the economic value of produce and the‘mental stimulus’ (p. 166) that allotments provided. These historical judgementsecho the views of observers in the later nineteenth century, who represented theallotment as a cultural resource. Burchardt reminds his readers how widespreadallotments were in rural England by the mid-nineteenth century: by 1873 therewas one for every three male agricultural labourers (p. 181). If we also considerthe importance of garden produce—something that Burchardt does onlyintermittently—it is certain that very many rural families were able to raise a largeproportion of their food needs from their own resources.

The book is based on a range of sources, including an impressive database ofallotment sites. It provides a stimulating introduction to a subject that remainsimperfectly understood. Burchardt believes that ‘nineteenth-century contemporar-ies understood better than twentieth-century historians the importance of allot-ments within the social structure’ (p. 184). This probably remains the case but thebook has made an impressive start to the task of redressing our ignorance.

University of Hull

November 2004

57

4Book Reviews


Nigel J. Tringham, ed.,

Victoria county history: A history of the county of Stafford

,Vol. IX:

Burton-on-Trent

(Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, for the Institute ofHistorical Research, 2003. Pp. xvii

+

240. 73 figs. £75)

This volume, the twelfth to appear in a planned 20-volume set of the history of thecounty of Stafford, covers the extensive medieval parish of Burton-upon-Trent.

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Administrative changes from the mid-nineteenth century then muddy the waters.In the course of a century Burton became a municipal borough in 1878, one of thesmallest county boroughs in England in 1901, and the dominant element on EastStaffordshire district council after 1974. The out townships of the medieval parish,Branston, Horninglow, Stretton, and Winshill, and Stapenhill, across the Trent inDerbyshire but added to the municipal borough in 1878, became Anglican parishesin the nineteenth century. Each developed and underwent further boundarychanges as Burton grew rapidly after 1850.

The account proceeds in the well-worn grooves of the

Victoria county history

’stemplate: a general history of Burton, detailed discussions of its population, com-munications, physical growth, economic history, government, religious estab-lishments, and social and cultural activities. The formula, given to excessivefragmentation of sub-topics, is then repeated for the five parishes in outer Burton.The main features of Burton’s history emerge clearly enough. The district possesseslittle pre-Roman or Roman history. In the medieval period the presence of Burton’smoderate-sized abbey was dominant, its lands passing to the Pagets after theDissolution. The small cloth-making centre of the Tudor period eventually emergedto modest prosperity in the eighteenth century with the improved navigation of theriver Trent in the 1710s and the formation of early turnpikes in the next twodecades. In Georgian London the well-to-do might well have sported a Burton felthat or drunk its famed bottled beers. But headlong growth came only with therailway after 1839. The town mushroomed. Its population grew from around 6,000in 1841 to 50,000 in 1901. Breweries large and small proliferated. Some enjoyedan extraordinary prosperity. Bass, Allsopp, and Worthington became householdnames (Burton’s water produced the perfect pale) but after 1900, as brewerieselsewhere successfully imitated its special features and the consumption of beerdeclined, the town atrophied. Only after the 1970s did Burton experience a modestrevival as new, light industries exploited the good road communications of theregion.

Some of this story is well covered here, especially sections on the abbey and thecult of St Modwen, on general administrative changes, and, above all, on thereligious revival in Victorian Burton. Somewhat improbably, this was spearheadedby its leading brewers each outdoing the other to provide more sumptuous Anglicanchurches and to endow them with (somewhat niggardly) incomes for theirincumbents. The Burton volume maintains the meticulous research and footnotingstandards of the

Victoria county history

, yet the descriptive, fact-piled-upon-factapproach and rigorous subdivision of topics, fail to capture the thrust of Burton’srapid, entirely beer-based growth after 1840. The Victorians, such as Alfred Barnardin his

Noted breweries of Great Britain and Ireland

(4 vols., 1889–91), managed todo so with their plethora of statistics, excess of superlatives, and generous linedrawings. Here, brewing in Burton merits eight pages, religion 33: an odd balance.The key developments in communications, and parliamentary representation, getshort shrift indeed. Historians will find the volume a useful reference, but theireconomic and business brethren will come away disappointed from its sections onbrewing and transport. Agricultural historians are not provided with an overviewof the big estates of the Pagets, and social historians will turn up little of depth onthe people of Burton in its glory days (the census enumerators’ books after 1851are not consulted).

University of East Anglia

. .

November 2004

57

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Clare Pettitt,

Patent inventions: intellectual property and the Victorian novel

(Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. ix

+

341. 6 figs. £55)

Despite its title, the intellectual property with which this book primarily deals iscopyright. As Pettitt rightly contends, however, the debates concerning it were neverentirely compartmentalized: analogies were regularly drawn between technical andliterary or artistic inventiveness, and questions were correspondingly raised aboutthe disparities between copyright and patent legislation. By recognizing this widercontext, she proposes to cast new light on the literary discussion of copyright: toexamine how nineteenth-century ‘novelists use their writing to work at imagininghow far it is ever possible to own a creative act’ (p. 23).

Historians of copyright will find much food for thought in Pettitt’s lucid exposi-tions of the novelists’ fictionalized relationships with their work and anxieties aboutits ownership. The book begins, unsurprisingly, with Mary Shelley’s

Frankenstein orthe modern Prometheus

(1818), interpreting it as a chronicle of the author’s (theinventor Frankenstein’s) pathological relationship with his intellectual property(‘the Creature’ who becomes ‘the Monster’): it is, Pettitt argues, ‘an uncompromis-ing critique of the Romantic construction of originality, emphasizing its asocialirresponsibility’ (p. 19). Dickens’s notorious outrage at the hard fate of inventors,poorly protected by the patent system—Old John in ‘A poor man’s tale of a patent’(1850) and Daniel Doyce in

Little Dorrit

(1855)—reflects his own sufferings at thehands of literary pirates.

Bleak House

(1852–3), Pettitt suggests, dramatizes moresubtly the problem at the heart of intellectual property law: ‘Where is the perfectcompromise between private ownership and public display that will guarantee boththe national utility of invention and its profitability to its author?’ (pp. 179–80).There follows a fascinating chapter on the particular perspective of female novelists(Gaskell and Eliot) who, until the enactment of the married women’s propertylegislation, were denied ownership of their intellectual property. The volume con-cludes with Hardy’s attempts to control his posthumous reputation, and someintriguing speculations on the implications of new psychological and scientificphenomena for the private ownership of ideas.

Historians of patents, on the other hand, will more likely be perplexed. Pettittilluminates the debate in the penny press during the 1830s and 1840s over theinequities of the patent system, and demonstrates how the Great Exhibition of 1851was instrumental in finally forcing patent reform on to the statute book in thefollowing year. This is fine as far as it goes, but it does not compare in historicalcomprehension with the wide lens of Dutton’s classic work on the early nineteenth-century patent system and its reform. It also threatens to introduce somemisconceptions, not least the repeated assertion that the 1852 act ‘strengthenedinternational protection for inventors’ (p. 26): there was no international agreementcovering patents until the Paris Convention of 1883. Furthermore, the 1852 actneither resolved the problem of financial access to patent protection for working-class inventors, nor did it quieten debate. In fact it provoked the ‘patent contro-versy’, which for two decades threatened the system with abolition. Economichistorians will balk at the notion that already by 1850 ‘industrial innovation hadnow become a largely corporate, and not individual, endeavour’ (p. 87). And, in aslightly more arcane matter of timing, a careful reading of my own work woulddemonstrate to the author that our positions are not as dissimilar as she insists: theimage of the heroic artisan-inventor was, I agree, a creation of the 1820s (promptedby Watt’s politically orchestrated elevation into the national pantheon). It is prema-

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ture, however, to retire him from the scene by mid-century and therefore unnec-essary for Pettitt to ‘back-date’ Dickens’s Old John and Daniel Doyce to the 1830s.

University of Bristol

November 2004

57

4Book Reviews


G. R. Searle,

A new England? Peace and war, 1886–1918

(Oxford: Clarendon Press,2004. Pp. xxii

+

952. 3 tabs. 26 ills. £30)

Searle’s narrative study of English history from the late nineteenth century until1918 is the latest volume to appear in ‘The new Oxford history of England’ underthe general editorship of J. M. Roberts. With an extremely generous word limitapplied to 34 years of English history, Searle’s study in synthesis achieves consid-erable depth and penetration, from its assessment of the condition of England in1886 (four chapters), through late Victorian and Edwardian England (five and fourchapters respectively), ‘Leisure, culture and science’ (three chapters) to the finalfour chapters devoted to the Great War and its consequences. This is grand narrativein the traditional sense of the term. The reader is reminded that the starting datedenotes the apogee of the Victorian era defined in terms of England’s status as animperial power of the first rank, whereas the terminal date, denoting ‘the end ofthe war to end all wars’, is redolent of a political culture and society forced to cometo terms with the fact that ‘things would never be the same again’. While Searle hasproduced a fine political narrative covering such burning issues as nationalism andnationality, home rule and unionism, and social welfare politics, readers of thisjournal are likely to be most interested in those chapters touching on themes ofsocial history. Thus, Chapter 6 deals with ‘the social question’ in the period 1886to 1899 with a focus on the notion of ‘conflict and stability’ in the context ofagricultural depression, industrial unrest, the acquisition of new ‘social knowledge’,and its impact on social policy. Chapter 11 provides a fine description and analysisof the Liberal welfare reforms after 1906, emphasizing the interplay between gen-uine social concern for the poorer members of society and political calculation.Chapter 14 comments on the rise of an embryonic ‘leisure society’ over the divideof 1900, facilitated by rising real incomes, reductions in working hours, bankholidays, and employer philanthropy in the form of works outings. Finally, Chapter16 is devoted to ‘science and learning’. Here, the main focus is on scientific andtechnological advance. Searle reminds the reader that ‘In few periods has technol-ogy so dramatically altered peoples’ lives as between 1886 and 1914’ (p. 615).Transport development was rapid and the period gave birth to the bulk generationof electricity, although its widespread domestic use had to await the interwar period.The ‘professionalization’ of science was also notable as advanced research methodsand applied science moved closer together. In this respect, a ‘scientific lobby’ madeits appearance prompted in part by invidious comparisons between British andGerman scientific and technological achievements.

The book concludes with a sequence of appendices ranging across key events,lists of Cabinets and general election results, and a full and up to date bibliography.This is a book which can be recommended, without qualification, as the definitiveguide to understanding processes of political and social change in the late nine-teenth and early twentieth centuries.

University of Lancaster

. .

2005

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Karen J. Bakker,

An uncooperative commodity: privatising water in England and Wales

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. xvii

+

224. 11 figs. 19 tabs. £47)

This book simultaneously covers several fields of interest to economic historians.It takes a general look at the history of water supply and provides an in-depth historyof water as a commodity. It interrogates the competing economic theories that havesought to address water supply and to shape policy. In particular, Bakker describesthe transition from ‘state hydraulic’ to ‘market environmentalist’ regulation inBritain, whereby the former was concerned primarily with social equity and main-tenance of supply, and the latter incorporated ideas of scarcity and conservation,in addition to a quest for value measures through simulated markets. In doing sothe author combines ideas from both economics and geography in a very informa-tive way.

The book’s context is, of course, changes in Britain and elsewhere since the 1980swhich simultaneously saw the endorsement of market economics and a heightenedconcern with the environment and sustainability—two major processes, arguablyin opposition to each other. Water was one of the last sectors to be privatized,reflecting the special, almost emotional, position it held (outranked only by thehealth service). It was privatized only after other sectors had proved that theunthinkable could be achieved. During the privatization process, related environ-mental concerns reached new heights. These ranged from general issues such asthe quality of water polluted by industry and modern farming methods, to the needto guard overall levels of supply given greater use and, perhaps, declining supplywith changing global weather patterns. With regard to privatization and subsequentdevelopments in the 1990s, Bakker makes several telling points. She notes that theterm ‘re-regulation’ is necessary in order to understand the ways in which theregime of regulation underwent significant expansion of state control as problemsemerged. The privatization regime evolved beyond its original architecture as mod-ification and reconfiguration became necessary to deal with emerging problems andchanging environmental ideas. It is here that Bakker brings her expertise in eco-nomic geography to bear, as she highlights the ways in which attempts to regulateBritish water spanned the gap between economic ideology and environmentalconstraints.

The book’s opening section provides a useful and concise survey of the long-termdevelopment of public interest in water provision. Perhaps more detail on the earlyconflict between private water companies and the municipal movement—an earlierclash between environment and economics, even if of a different order—would havegiven the book an interesting symmetry. This is not the first time water has beenout of step as an ‘uncooperative commodity’. One of the major nineteenth-centurypolitical economic conflicts took place around the issue of water supply. Municipalsocialism was arguably founded upon this issue, when politicians such as JosephChamberlain sought to challenge the primacy of the market and secure their placein history through the establishment of monumental water supply systems. Water,the very ‘means of life or death’ was far too important a commodity to be left tothe whims of ‘commercial’ forces. For them environment meant cholera, typhoid,and infant diarrhoea, as well as general cleanliness, but there was still a dichotomyto be resolved between broader social issues and economic laws.

The second part of the book begins with the turning point for privatization—the Yorkshire drought of 1995, seen by many as an indictment of the failures ofprivatization. This is followed by an intensive discussion of the case of Yorkshire

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Water—perhaps unavoidable given the high profile of failure in this region, resultingat one time in the company’s pleading to be taken back into public or mutualownership. Emerging from this process is the idea that water needs a harsh regu-latory regime—again a signal that it is a special category. What was envisaged bysome as a transitionary phase of regulation, eventually to wither away, has insteadneeded to be progressively reinforced. This leads the author into a survey of thestructures of regulation in the 1980s and the difficulties faced in establishing ideasof value and profit. Bakker traces the ascendancy of ideas of efficiency and managedscarcity over rival criteria. The concluding sections of the book deal with a summaryof post-privatization developments, characterized as contradictory and difficult (notleast in the problem of ascribing accurate charges without metering).

Overall this is a very welcome examination of the water industry and its pecu-liarities. There is a good long-term survey of the structure of the industry throughits successive phases before privatization, including the corporatization and nation-alization of the postwar period. The real strength lies in Bakker’s attempt to linkhistory, economics, geography, and environment in charting the contours of theindustry and its future.

University of Wales, Aberystwyth

2005Book Reviews


Jon Agar,

The government machine: a revolutionary history of the computer

(CambridgeMass: MIT Press, 2003. Pp. vii

+

554. Figs. £32.25)

This stimulating study in the MIT history of computing series traces the mechani-zation of British government from the seventeenth century to the early twenty-first.It is a vast and sprawling book and is impossible to summarize within a short review.Agar argues that the growth of government has depended on, and been promptedby, the ability of the state to collect, process and analyse information on economicand social conditions. He identifies the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms as criticalfor professionalizing the bureaucracy, with generalist ‘gentlemen’ responsible forthe interpretation of the data collected by ‘mechanical’ clerks. This ‘governmentmachine’ has also accommodated ‘expert movements’ that have persuaded govern-ment to collect new forms of information and thereby nudged policy into newdirections. There were limits to this process, however. One concerned the potentialof the state to threaten the individual, and has limited the maintenance of central-ized national registers during peacetime. The second has been the sheer volume ofinformation, which threatened to overwhelm the clerical resources of the Britishbureaucracy and was handled in the late nineteenth century by highly sub-dividedclerical labour. After the First World War, this ‘system’ was stretched to the limits.

The answer lay in mechanization, directed by a new ‘expert movement’, specialistsin administrative systems, who were championed by Treasury officials wanting toregain their hold over the swollen bureaucracy after 1920. The most successful partsof this book chart the rise, beginning in the 1920s, of the Treasury Organizationand Methods branch, promoting feminization and mechanization between the warsand computerization from the mid-1950s to process the volume of informationrequired by the modern state. Agar argues with some force that the Treasury’s deepcommitment to cap bureaucratic costs combined with a mercantilist industrial policyfavouring domestic computer producers to place the public sector at the leadingedge of office automation. Twentieth-century economic historians have emphasized

786

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the sheer size of the public sector as critical in determining the state’s potential foreffective policy. This argument should now be recast to make command overinformation at least as important as command over resources.

Agar is as much concerned with the metaphorical as with the empirical dimensionand argues that the computer is a machine ‘made’ by government rather than, say,by military needs of cryptanalysis, command and control. The case rests on theidea that both the civil service and the stored-programme computer are general-purpose ‘machines’ governed by a code. However, the comparison always seemsstrained, especially as Agar’s model of bureaucracy pivots on the activities of ‘expertmovements’ that have no obvious parallel in computer architecture. The bookneeded tighter editorial control (Agar cannot resist any opportunity to digress fromhis central themes), a firmer grounding in the historiography of twentieth centurypolicy (the idea of the ‘dead hand of the Treasury’, which Agar claims to haveundermined, has itself been dead for a quarter of a century) and better proof-reading, but is nonetheless required reading for those interested in twentieth-century policy.

University of Exeter

November 2004

57

4Book Reviews


Mike Huggins,

Horseracing and the British, 1919–39

(Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 2003. Pp. 230. 13 tabs. £49.99; pbk. £16.99)

Authoritative and well-researched books on twentieth-century horseracing are rareitems. It is therefore good to see Huggins turn his attention from nineteenth-century racing to a volume on the interwar years, until recently a much-neglectedperiod in the history of British sport and leisure. According to the author, this wasa time when the ‘sport of kings’ was integral to our culture and enjoyed by allsections of society. Yet spectatorship beyond the major events of the Derby, GrandNational, and St Leger was limited. Participation rates were even lower: unlikefootball, cricket, and other major sports, fans seldom have the chance to play thisgame, an opportunity restricted to a small group of jockeys, wealthy owners, andimpecunious stable lads. Why, then, was it apparently so popular? Horseracing andgambling had always maintained a symbiotic relationship and Huggins devotes twochapters to the importance of a betting culture. Drawing on evidence gathered bythe 1923 Commons Select Committee on Betting Duty and the 1932/3 RoyalCommission on Lotteries and Betting, he suggests that a traditional emphasis onworking-class betting has overshadowed the significance of a middle-class bettingmarket based on credit bookmakers. At the same time, he points to a growth in thepopularity of sweepstakes and the declining influence of the anti-gambling lobbyin an increasingly secular society. Modest betting on horses, greyhounds, or via thefootball pools was a source of pleasure for all classes.

The culture of racing, the world of racecourse and stable, and the roles of racingpersonnel—breeders, owners, trainers, and jockeys—form a major part of this book.Among other things, the research suggests that women were present in ever greaternumbers at the course and in the betting ring. Although there were some prominentfemale owners and breeders in the first half of the century, together with a few whotrained racehorses and suffered the indignity of passing off their success as that ofmale underlings, it is hard to make a convincing case for female empowermentin the sport. No female trainers were officially sanctioned during the following

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30 years and a further decade elapsed before women jockeys were allowed to competeagainst men or become members of the sport’s governing body, the Jockey Club.

The chapter on horseracing and the media highlights the greatest contrastbetween the interwar years and the present. At that time, public awareness of racingwas significantly higher. Jockeys Steve Donoghue and Gordon Richards were house-hold names, two of the sporting superstars of their age. Important races werecovered in the Pathe News items at cinemas, the 1931 Derby was one of the earliesttelevision outside broadcasts, and popular films featured racing themes. Hugginsuses a wealth of material to portray a sport deeply embedded in British culture inthe interwar years. Its subsequent demise demands further research.

University of Stirling November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Andrew Taylor, The NUM and British politics, 1: 1944–1968 (Aldershot: Ashgate,2003. Pp. xii + 269. £45)

This addition to the Studies in labour history series is the first of a projected twovolumes examining the political role of the National Union of Mineworkers fromits formation in 1944 to the eventual privatization of the coal industry in 1995. Theauthor acknowledges that his approach is ‘unambiguously institutional’, concen-trating mainly on the NUM, the National Coal Board, and the government of theday, but justifies this on the grounds that ‘institutions encapsulate the processeswhereby . . . interests are aggregated into behaviour’ (p. vii). One overarchingtheme of this volume is that the period it covers witnessed a developing coherenceamong the regionally differentiated body of British miners, a coherence essentiallyorchestrated at national, rather than regional or local levels. Although the authoracknowledges the drift of revisionist scholarship against heroic proletarian stereo-types in histories of British coal mining, he feels that the NUM was concerned toarticulate a strongly collective identity that often accorded its members a vanguard-ist role.

The structure of the book is predominantly chronological. Chapter 1, ‘Creatingthe new order’, examines the transformation of the Mineworkers’ Federation ofGreat Britain into the more consciously centralized NUM and looks at the buildingof wartime consensus behind the miners’ long-term goal of nationalization. Chapter2, ‘Inclusion or integration?’, assesses the impact of the early stages of the ColdWar on the NUM’s politics and considers how the strategic importance of the coalindustry ensured that the union was carefully courted by the Attlee governments.Chapter 3, ‘The politics of state capitalism’, looks at the nature of the nationaliza-tion settlement, asking whether it represented a significant shift in industrial rela-tions. All in all, by the early 1950s the state, the NCB, and the NUM had createda modus vivendi that incoming Conservative administrations decided not to disturb,as is demonstrated in chapter 4, ‘Conservatives and the NUM’. Yet the Tories wereconcerned to reduce Britain’s dependence on coal and, as discussed in chapter 5,‘The politics of industrial decline’, began to shift fuel consumption in favour of oil.By the late 1950s the NUM was revising (downwards) its sense of its own politicalimportance, and increasingly cooperated in the industry’s rationalization. Hopesthat an incoming Labour administration might herald a bright new future for theindustry were to be disappointed, and chapter 6, ‘The miners and Mr Wilson’s newBritain’, concentrates on the NUM’s response to the pit closure programme of the

788 BOOK REVIEWS

© Economic History Society 2004

mid-1960s. Overall Taylor argues that, notwithstanding its apparent industrial mus-cle and self-conscious (self-appointed?) role as the cutting edge of the labourmovement, the NUM was progressively excluded from decision-making processesand structures under nationalization, and increasingly found itself operating in areactive and defensive mode. It was included in the postwar political settlement,but was never at its centre. This carefully researched and clearly written volumemakes an important contribution to our understanding both of nationalized indus-tries and of the trade union movement, and represents a complementary alternativeto Ashworth’s official history of the coal industry as a starting point for scholarsand students.

University of Wales, Swansea November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Mark W. Bufton, Britain’s productivity problem, 1948–1990 (Basingstoke: Palgrave,2004. Pp. xiv + 245. 13 tabs. 9 figs. £50)

The bulk of the material in this volume covers the period from the 1940s to theend of the 1960s, with only limited attention being paid to the issues as theydeveloped during the 1970s and 1980s. The focus is on initiatives that attemptedin some way to improve the productivity of British manufacturing industry andon the activities of managers and employers, trade unionists and government inrelation to these. The strongest chapters are those based most firmly on archivalresearch. Elsewhere the extensive use of existing work as the basis for discussion,drawing on the theoretical frameworks of Calmfors and Driffill and of Eichengreen,is less convincing. Relatively little space is actually devoted to analysing productivitylevels and assessing the impact (or otherwise) of these initiatives. The coverage takesus beyond those programmes most frequently associated with efforts to improveproductivity (those of the Anglo-American Council on Productivity, the BritishProductivity Council, and the European Productivity Agency) to encompass abroader definition of the productivity drive. This includes the work of the Donovancommission, the National Board for Prices and Incomes, and the National Eco-nomic Development Council. Extensive comparisons are made with the experiencesof Britain’s major industrial competitors.

The final sentence of the volume reads, ‘Though Britain may be the world’s oldestindustrial economy it sill (sic) provides much work for economic historians yet’(p. 187). While many readers of this journal may agree fully with the sentimentsbeing expressed, they will also be concerned to ensure that the fruits of this workare more adequately served by the publishing industry than this study appears tohave been, for the example given above is far from isolated. Indeed it seems possiblethat this book has been published untainted by the attentions of either a copy editoror a proof reader. How else can we explain the conclusion of Chapter 5, ‘Govern-ment and the productivity drive’ with the sentence ‘But if one woman Castle didnot change the framework of British industrial relations to try and improve Britisheconomic performance then another surely did, Margaret Thatcher, however herattempt at trade union behavioural reform was not to be achieved in one fell swoop,as Castle had sought, but more by an incremental approach’ (p. 119), or the mixtureof £ and $ signs in a table a few pages earlier (table 5.1, pp. 115–16)?

I would not usually consider it appropriate to stress typographical errors soextensively in a book review. In this case, however, they significantly hinder com-

BOOK REVIEWS 789


prehension of the arguments being presented, making this a very difficult book toread. This is a shame because these errors overshadow the efforts Bufton has madeto assemble a range of material on his topic, to analyse it in the light of the existingliterature, and to measure it against more theoretical work on productivity andeconomic performance.

University of Leicester . November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Hugh Pemberton, Policy learning and British governance in the 1960s (Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. ix + 264. £50)

Pemberton has produced an interesting, thoughtful, and well-researched work. Thevolume, divided into seven chapters, looks at the quest for faster economic growthprimarily in the early to mid-1960s when Britain’s opinion formers had come toconclude that Britain was falling behind its industrial competitors. The main the-oretical framework is that provided by the work of Peter Hall: his notions of first,second, and third order learning and policy change. Pemberton shows that duringthe late 1950s there was mounting opinion that Britain needed to grow faster andthere emerged a growth advocacy network in which the role of journalists wasparticularly important, that then filtered into Whitehall and led to what Pembertoncalls the ‘Great Reappraisal’ of 1960–1.

Three chapters examine industrial training, incomes policies, and taxation inturn. Industrial training was seen as an important part of an improvement in thesupply side of the economy and Pemberton examines the developments that led upto the 1964 Industrial Training Act. The incomes policies of the early 1960s, unlikethose of the 1970s, are seen as recognition by the Macmillan and Wilson adminis-trations that if greater growth was to be achieved then wage moderation in line withproductivity growth had to occur. The chapter on taxation looks at Kaldor’s Selec-tive Employment Tax, the introduction of Capital Gains Tax, and the general reformof the tax structure in order to promote company re-investment. The role of adviserssuch as Kaldor and their penetrating influence on policy outcomes is interesting.Pemberton identifies and analyses the policy networks involved and asserts thatalthough third order learning occurred (in other words there was a conceptualparadigm shift) third order change did not: there was no revolutionary change inpolicy.

It will be unsurprising to economic historians of modern Britain that the frag-mented and decentralized nature of labour and employer organizations impededthe development of durable agreements between labour, the government, andcapital on wage, price, and dividend restraint. The fragmentation of these institu-tions also stymied developments in industrial training and taxation reform for fastergrowth. What will be novel is the claim that Westminster was also fragmented andthat the idea of a strong and centralized Westminster administration that couldchange policy is misplaced. Pemberton sees the failure to implement radical policychange in the 1960s as the product of the prevailing governance structure and notthe governments of that period per se. But the responsibility for implementingchange must in the end rest with the governments concerned. The successfulimplementation of the Thatcherite revolution was secured largely through the brutedetermination of her leadership.

Exeter University .


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David Card, Richard Blundell, and Richard B. Freeman, eds., Seeking a premiereconomy: the economic effects of British economic reforms, 1980–2000 (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. x + 510. 109 figs. 111 tabs. £66.50)

In the 1980s strong claims were made in predictable quarters that the Thatchergovernment’s neo-liberal economic reform programme had brought about a renais-sance of the British economy—indeed, an end to a century of economic decline.However, with record levels of unemployment, a cyclically highly unstable macro-economy, and the failure to develop a credible macro-policy framework, culminat-ing with the debacle of Britain’s eviction from the ERM in 1992, these strong claimswere much more difficult to sustain in the first half of the 1990s. In part, of course,a scientific assessment was handicapped by the dissonance between the known factsof macro performance (better than the 1970s on trend in some respects but muchmore unstable) and the more difficult to measure effects of the market-enhancingreforms of labour and product markets. The latter, while probably producing fewpositive economic benefits in the short term, had much greater potential for themedium to longer term. Moreover, in the absence of an unequivocal counterfactualof what would have happened without these reforms, we could not definitely judgetheir macroeconomic impact. Microeconomic policy simulations and assessmentshad not yet attained their current capabilities. That the incoming New Labourgovernment in 1997 continued with these reforms, albeit with important changeswith respect to policy instruments and distributional impacts, and managed tosustain and deepen the credibility and reputation of the post-ERM macroeconomicframework, now provides the greater space and time in which to make such anassessment. This explicitly addresses two questions: whether relative decline hasbeen reversed and whether Britain now has a premier league economy which wouldimprove living standards for all of its citizens.

Those who are familiar with Card and Freeman’s 2002 NBER working paper,‘What have two decades of economic reforms delivered?’, will have been awaitingthis volume, the product of a major project involving British and North Americaneconomists associated with the CEP, IFS, and NBER. Somewhat reworked, andnow with the third editor as contributor, this forms the introduction to this volumewhich, with an NBER imprimatur, instantly becomes the standard work. Theeditors’ substantial introduction not only surveys the field but lays down themethodology upon which the rest of the volume—a series of microeconomic casestudies of those reforms most likely to affect productivity, employment, and incomeinequality—is constructed. The analysis begins with a policy narrative which hastwo important conclusions. First, despite the fact that in the pre-reform periodBritain had a highly regulated economy with a large nationalized sector, an extensivewelfare state, and exceptionally obstreperous labour-management relations, whenjudged against indices of economic freedom (rather than New Right rhetoric)Britain was actually only a middle-ranking OECD economy. Second, after twodecades of market-enhancing reforms Britain was now exceptionally market-friendly, so much so that it ranked higher than the US on some indicators.

The editors then proceed to a macro survey and thence to a growth accountingexercise. With a focus on GDP per caput (per employee and per worker-hour) theyreaffirm that relative decline has indeed abated, with some catch-up on Britain’smajor European competitors, but not on the US. It is shown that, relative to Franceand Germany, work effort (higher employment and higher hours) explains some ofthat catch-up in GDP per caput. With growth accounting tools they are also able

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to demonstrate that two of the standard macro explanations for progress in pro-ductivity relative to OECD-Europe (structural shifts out of agriculture and capitalper employee) are not significant and that the third (labour quality) is insufficientto explain the magnitude of the post-1979 British improvement. Growth is thusnot fully accounted for with potential explanations obviously the reforms. Theseeither lowered barriers to productivity growth or generated one-time increases inproductivity, and, in particular, some reforms increased work effort throughimproved incentives. The decline in union power and increase in inequality associ-ated with the labour market reforms form another obvious candidate. But thecharacteristics of sectoral employment change (deindustrialization, manufacturinghaving the highest union density) and the fact that real wage growth continued inthe 1980s and 1990s in the UK as it did not in the US, suggest that it was notdeclining wages that underpinned improved performance.

With the macro performance of the economy dominating employment patterns,and with the swing from a negative to a positive contribution pre- and post-1992,the impact of the micro reforms cannot be readily assessed, not even from microdata. Hitherto this has created a methodological impasse of sorts, but Card and hisco-authors attempt to break free from this constraint by utilizing an economicfreedom index, available for the OECD since 1970, using the regression coefficientsfor all countries to estimate how much UK reforms affected UK outcomes. Whilethis allows for fixed effects before and after reform, they acknowledge that it doesnot isolate the effects of reforms in the UK per se. None the less, they contend, theresults are sufficiently robust and are consistent with the broader story to merit casestudies where more specific pre- and post-reform outcomes can be determined forpersons, firms, and sectors affected. Of course, this approach cannot capture thecumulative contribution of the reforms through nonlinear synergies and externali-ties for the aggregate economy, a point they acknowledge.

It is impossible here to discuss the micro case studies in the detail they deserve.They range from privatization and other product market reforms through the mainlabour market measures where impacts might most be expected, in all amountingto 10 substantial chapters. In sum, they support a broadly positive contribution forthe majority of the reforms, though more for employment than for productivity,and at the cost of a rise in inequality. However, and in an important contrast to theUS economy where real wages have stagnated since the 1970s for the bottom threequintiles of the income distribution, in Britain real wages rose and growing absolutepoverty was avoided. Relative poverty, of course, did rise and the overall incomedistribution of the two countries converged until and after New Labour took power.Some of the conclusions of these studies are not new. For example, on privatizationwe know that the greatest productivity gains came before denationalization aspreparations were made for public flotation. We know also, from a series of IFSstudies over two decades, that the reform of the UK welfare system to increasebenefits to those in work rather than those unemployed has not had the sorts ofeffects on labour supply brought about by such measures in the US. Its failure inthis respect was caused by the interrelatedness of UK welfare programmes. Thevalue of the case studies, however, lies in the whole as much as in the parts, anddepends particularly upon the consistency of approach towards microeconomicpolicy appraisal.

Overall, a positive economic case is made here for market-enhancing reforms,though the editors are careful to remain neutral on whether the distributional trade-off was worth it and attentive to the fact that some countries (the Netherlands

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and Ireland) managed to improve their performance since OPEC II without desert-ing EU-style big government, while another economy (New Zealand) pursuedsuch policies but with negative economic (and social) results, at least in themedium term. In Britain the reforms seemed to have worked, in the sense that aftera long period of relative decline, UK economic policy is now widely cited as anexemplar of good practice. But after two decades of reform the UK productivitygap is still such that Card and his co-authors cannot award Britain premiereconomy status.

University of Bristol November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Jack Williams, Entertaining the nation: a social history of British television (Stroud:Sutton, 2004. Pp. vii + 280. 5 tabs. £20)

Williams, better known as a distinguished historian of English cricket, has sethimself the daunting task of examining ‘the social and cultural significance oftelevision in Britain’ from its inception to the present. He presents us with aninformative but surprisingly bloodless account of television’s role in British life inthe second half of the twentieth century and first years of the twenty-first. Afterintroductory chapters that identify key areas of recent and current research intelevision history, and assess the extent and implications of television watching inpeople’s lives, the book addresses in successive chapters the relationship betweentelevision and the economy, politics, radio and the press, gender and sex, ethnic-ity, the arts, and sport over the past 50 years. Williams interprets this briefwith considerable if sometimes dislocating breadth. The chapter ‘Television andthe economy’, for instance, ranges in subject matter from the financial turnoverof television companies, to the television retaining market, to attitudes to con-sumerism in television programmes, while ‘Television, gender and sex’ movesfrom statistics of female employment in the television industry to examples of gayand lesbian programming to the impact of television on sexual behaviour. Thetext is heavy on statistical data, and name-checks a wide range of televisionprogrammes.

As Williams states early on, ‘in many ways we cannot be sure of what impact, ifany, television has had’, and for the most part he is content to offer possibilities:the text is peppered with ‘maybe’, ‘possibly’, ‘may well have’. However, this reluc-tance to enter into debate can be frustrating and leaves some interesting questionsunresolved (in a discussion of women on television, for instance, we are told thatAbsolutely fabulous was ‘regarded as a major advance in female comedy’, but not bywhom, why, or whether the author himself agrees). It also leads to some starklyself-evident observations such as ‘Possibly films based on television series weremade in the hope that television celebrity would boost box-office receipts’.

The principal problem is the book’s misleading title. This is not really a socialhistory of British television in any narrative sense; rather, it presents an inventoryof television’s place in British life in various contexts and at various times over thepast half-century. The approach is wide ranging, and the condensing of so muchfactual detail is certainly useful, and often telling. But the discussion too rarelyconveys the sense of television as a medium of communication: the tensions andcontradictions between popular and public service broadcasting; the role of broad-cast technology in shaping what has been broadcast; what made some programmes

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so enormously popular, or others (perhaps less watched) so influential; how, indeed,television has entertained the nation.

University of Wales, Aberystwyth November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

GENERAL

André Steiner, Von Plan zu Plan. Eine Wirtschaftsgeschichte der DDR (Munich:Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2004. Pp. 275. 13 tabs SFr 35.20; €19.90)

It is always a pleasure to see an expert in a field stepping back and distilling extensiveempirical and historiographical knowledge into a short, accessible overview of thesubject. Steiner’s little economic history of the German Democratic Republic(GDR) is just that. The author is well known for his definitive history of the GDR’sexperiments with its system of economic planning in the 1960s and for work onconsumption in the GDR. Here he packs into a mere 226 pages of text a masterfultreatment of recent research findings on all aspects of the GDR’s economy and itsdevelopment from 1945 to 1990. His excellent writing style makes it seem evenshorter, and he rounds out the picture with a very useful bibliographic essay, shortbiographies of key actors, and some graphs.

One reason why this book can be both complete and concise is that the narrativeis structured around a single thesis: that the poor economic performance of theGDR resulted from its economic system. True, the country (which, after the warbut prior to coming into existence in 1949 was the Soviet Zone of occupation)experienced extraordinary difficulties when it was formed. Reparations and disman-tling, ‘sovietizing’ the means of production, and seizure of scientific and engineeringtalent and information made the per caput burden of the occupation much heavierin the future GDR than in the western zones. Nevertheless, Steiner argues thatthese difficult starting conditions could have been overcome in the longer term.What made that impossible, he contends, was Soviet-style economic planning.

There were two fundamental problems with the GDR’s planning system: insuf-ficient information (since prices no longer bore any relation to supply and demand)and insufficient incentives. But, one might ask, how did the planning system andthe country that ran it last for so long with such fatal flaws?

Steiner makes the important point that the planning system in the GDR wasnot implemented immediately: in the early postwar years, Stalin and the Sovietswere still unclear about what the future of Germany should be, so the systememerged between 1948 and 1953. Thereafter, there were many attempts to tinkerwith aspects of it, but these were only minor. Like Jeffrey Kopstein, Steiner arguesthat the uprising in response to the introduction of higher economic norms inJune 1953 constrained the regime’s freedom of manoeuvre with regard to eco-nomic policy, and the nightmare was still haunting discussions of policy optionsin 1989.

But this still does not explain how the system lasted so long. Steiner produces aseries of explanations: the GDR regime wavered between long-term investment andshort-term consumption, but generally came down on the side of the latter to tryto curry support; the Soviets supported the regime economically and militarily aspart of their wider foreign policy; and the West Germans poured convertible cur-rency into the GDR for years, certainly not out of any expectation of economic

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gain. Thus, ‘an economic history of the GDR’ is, at its root, a profoundly politicalstory.

University of Glasgow November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Robert C. Allen, Farm to factory: a reinterpretation of the Soviet industrial revolution(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. Pp. xv + 302. 36 figs. 36 tabs.£29.95)

Allen offers a robust and thought-provoking defence of the Soviet economic system.The argument rests in part upon a sceptical assessment of the results and prospectsof tsarist development. It also derives from a relatively jaundiced view of the NewEconomic Policy. Finally it reflects a broadly positive appraisal of the Stalinisteconomic transformation between 1928 and 1941. Allen reminds his readers thatthe collapse of the Soviet state should not predispose us to conclude that theeconomic system was failure-ridden. Throughout his book he demonstrates thatgenuine insights are to be gained by thinking about Soviet economic performancein comparative perspective and in formulating counterfactual questions. In Allen’sview, contextualizing Russia as ‘non-European’ enables us to appreciate its eco-nomic achievements vis-à-vis counterparts in South America, sub-Saharan Africa,and South Asia.

In reinterpreting the tsarist economy, Allen regards growth as a ‘one-off resourceboom’, reflecting the rise in wheat prices in the generation before the First WorldWar. He discounts the prospects for sustained industrial growth, given restrictiveconditions imposed on private enterprise. Overall he finds little evidence of struc-tural change in agriculture or industry. Next he questions the prospects for sus-tained growth under NEP, which encouraged self-interest on the part of enterprisesand failed to address issues of mass unemployment, particularly in the rural sector.According to Allen, planned socialism and not NEP-style capitalism offered thebest possibility of improved access to health care and education. In an importantcorrective to conventional post-Soviet wisdom, he follows G. A. Feldman in arguingthat coordinated planning laid the foundations for mass consumption as well asinvestment, once the production possibility frontier had been extended by mobiliz-ing surplus labour. One particularly controversial element in Allen’s book is hissuggestion that Stalinist industrialization was associated with an increase in aggreg-ate household consumption. Less controversial is his finding that the state financedinvestment through the rising receipts from the turnover tax on foodstuffs, and thatcollectivization supported industrialization by forcing peasants off the land. Hefinds room for sensible and contextualized comments on Soviet social history,particularly the fertility transition and opportunities during the 1930s for upwardsocial mobility. In a more attenuated final section Allen argues that Soviet leadersmade significant policy errors, lacking the imagination to invest in new industries.

This stimulating monograph is a fine addition to the Princeton Economic Historyof the Western World. Appearing almost simultaneously with Paul Gregory’s over-view of Stalinist political economy, and Nicholas Spulber’s account of Russianeconomic transitions, this suggests that the historical study of the Soviet economyis flourishing.

University of Manchester


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Akira Kudo, Matthias Kipping, and Harm Schröter, eds., German and Japanesebusiness in the boom years: transforming American management and technology models(London and New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xi + 290. 4 figs. 24 tabs. £70)

Although the subject of Americanization has been debated and analysed for manyyears and by a host of academics, it is clear that little consensus has emerged onwhat to most is a highly controversial topic. The three editors of this volume havecertainly contributed extensively to the debate, utilizing their extensive researchexperience to illuminate the issues effectively and imaginatively. To help them todevelop the theme further, they have also recruited a highly credible team offirst-class scholars, including some of the leading German and Japanese businesshistorians who have already published work of significance on a number ofcorporations.

The volume starts with a comprehensive introduction written by the three edi-tors. This amply sets the scene for what is to come in the case-study chapters,because far from peddling the limited line that American ideas were influential inboth Germany and Japan, they are more concerned with the extent to whichGerman and Japanese business adapted American ideas to local circumstances.This is a highly useful extension to the debate, given the limitations associated withthe simplistic statement that American ideas and techniques were influential. Inarguing that German business proved to be much more open than Japanese busi-ness to American ideas, this prepares the ground for an effective comparative story.They also provide a brief history of the process of Americanization, identifying fourwaves over the period 1870 to 1970. It is important to stress, however, that thisbook is primarily concerned with the third (1945–50) and fourth (1950s and1960s) waves.

A collection of 12 essays follow, and will serve the needs of those who teach inrelated areas. The chapters are loosely grouped in pairs, covering a reasonably widerange of sectors and issues. The first pair (Kipping; Satoshi Sasaki) is concernedwith how American ideas infiltrated the two economies, providing general insightsinto the process of assimilation. This is followed by chapters that look at automo-biles (Christian Kleinschmidt; Hirofumi Ueda), the electrical industry (WilfriedFeldenkirchen; Shin Hasegawa), rayon and rubber (Christian Kleinschmidt;Tsuneo Suzuki), consumer chemicals (Susanne Hilger; Kudo and Motoi Ihara),and distribution and retailing (Schröter; Mika Takaoka and Takeo Kikkawa).Although varying in length and detail, each essay amply illuminates the central ideaslaid out in the introduction and justifies the rationale behind the book. Clearly, asthese essays demonstrate, Americanization was by no means a simple matter ofblindly copying ideas; it was more about how these ideas could be adapted toindigenous requirements and institutions.

Having supported the book’s rationale, it might be useful to finish by questioningsome aspects of the structure and coverage. In particular, after surveying thecontents of each chapter, the editors’ introduction provides some concludingthoughts on what the essays tell us about the process of Americanization. This seemsa curious place for such an analysis. Why not provide a conclusion to the book thatallows the reader to survey the empirical material garnered in the 12 case-studychapters? Second, it seems to be a mistake to start the book by writing about the1990s debate over the extent of global convergence, but then focus entirely on theperiod between 1945 and the 1970s. These curiosities spoil the impact of what isa highly useful collection of essays that have undoubtedly extended our understand-

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ing of an issue that will continue to generate debate among academics, managers,and policy-makers. Given the growing interest among business historians in con-tributing to contemporary debates, it is also to be hoped that the editors will attemptanother volume that covers more recent decades.

University of Central Lancashire . November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

F. M. Scherer, Quarter notes and bank notes: the economics of music composition in theeighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004.Pp. 264. 27 figs. 7 tabs. £22.95)

This book explores how music composition, once the work of court and churchappointees, became mainly a freelance activity. It investigates data on 646 Westerncomposers born between 1650 and 1850 who are highly esteemed in the USnowadays (as proxied by their entry’s length in Schwann’s 1996 catalogue), re-analyses quantitative bits and pieces of existing studies, and surveys a wide varietyof anecdotes from the secondary literature on 50 composers in the dataset’s upperquintile. After a rather general review of the political, social, and economic envi-ronment, the book discusses music composition as a profession, investigates com-posers’ backgrounds, aspirations, and economic rewards, the geography of composer‘supply and demand’, the role of transport costs, and, finally, music publishing andcopyright, including financial case studies of Beethoven and Schumann.

The transition towards freelance activity was a gradual process, coinciding withthe demise of the feudal system, and the evidence for the hypothesis that thenoble courts produced most now-esteemed composers is mixed at best: free citiesand territories with few courts did quite well compared with Germany. The bookalso finds very little correlation between a composer’s wealth and current esteem,and shows that freelance composers tended to be more ‘productive’. Schwann’slists only recordings available in the US in 1996. Furthermore, 13 per cent oforiginal entries was discarded because of sparse biographical information in theNew Grove dictionary of music, and fewer than half of all known Italian operacomposers born between 1650 and 1850 are in the dataset. This bias towards thetaste of the 1990s American consumer could have been more fully emphasizedand explored.

Unfortunately, quality differences between specific works are not measured.Using proxies such as number of performances, ratings by experts or sales numberswould enable a better comparison of composers, careers, and compositions. Galen-son’s Painting between the lines, for example, estimating quality from auction prices,found that Impressionists painted their major works late in life, while the oppositewas true of American Expressionists. Quality differences are all that matters in thisbusiness, and measuring their sizes could change the findings of this study. Thebook also dives rather quickly into tabulations and regression analysis, sidesteppingsome conceptual issues, such as whether taste is absolute and how it can bemeasured. Including perspectives such as those found in Bourdieu’s Distinction:critique sociale du jugement could have made the work less descriptive and given itmore conceptual depth. Likewise, the ‘economics of superstars’ is mentioned, butthe consequences not entirely thought through. If these 646 composers divide intoa few superstars and many follow-ons then hardly anything can be concluded fromthe sample as a whole—not to speak of then-famous-now-forgotten composers. The

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literature on the economics and the history of the professions, such as Reader’sProfessional men, might also have been discussed, and used to tackle the questionwhy 98 per cent of the sample is male. Likewise, a more game-theoretical approachcould have allowed for endogeneity of the number of composers per territory (thenumber in one country may depend upon those elsewhere), especially since com-positions are quasi-public goods. The emphasis on financial motivations andrewards could also have been more nuanced: authors such as Tyler Cowen andRichard Caves stress that artists maximize wealth and/or ‘fame’, and hence bothfactors need to be taken into account.

The book deserves merit for bringing together a wide variety of literature,although it is not entirely complete (Ehrlich’s The piano: a history, for example, isquoted at length, his highly relevant The music profession in Britain since the eighteenthcentury not at all); for examining a comparatively neglected issue within economichistory; and, finally, for contributing a new dataset to the subject. If read alongsideother works, it is certainly useful for those interested in the economics and historyof musical composition, in the creative industries, or in the economic history of theprofessions at large.

University of Essex November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Mark Thornton and Robert B. Ekelund Jr., Tariffs, blockades, and inflation: theeconomics of the Civil War (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2004. Pp. xxix+ 124. 7 figs. 11 tabs. $65; pbk. $19.95)

Few scholarly fields are as well ploughed as the American Civil War, and yet booksand papers continue to appear year after year, many of them merely rehashing orrepackaging familiar themes. This slender monograph is somewhat different. It isboth good and original. Unfortunately, as Samuel Johnson is said to have writtenabout a manuscript he had just read, ‘the part that is good is not original and thepart that is original is not good’. Things might have been otherwise, for the authorsare talented economists who raise a number of interesting points before sacrificingexplanation on the altar of ideology.

Given their book’s title, it is not surprising that the heart of Thornton andEkelund’s study consists of three chapters: one on the tariff question, giving par-ticular attention to the antebellum period, followed by chapters on the economicimpact of the Union naval blockade, and on inflation (and fiscal policy moregenerally) during the war. It should be noted, however, that the authors lead offwith an odd introduction which is one part primer on basic economic principlesand one part brief for a libertarian/public-choice approach. They end the book,again oddly, with a tendentiously anti-governmental chapter (one of whose sub-headings reads ‘Lincoln and the First New Deal’) on the consequences of the warfor American political economy. This is followed by an extremely incomplete bib-liographic essay, which is more or less an advertisement for the libertarian andpublic-choice literature on economic questions relating to the Civil War.

In their chapters on the tariff, the blockade, and inflation, the authors make anumber of provocative—and potentially important—points, but their scholarship iscontinually marred, at least in this reviewer’s opinion, by extravagant claims for,and special pleading on behalf of, their preferred ideology. For example, theyproperly call attention to the importance of the tariff question in the antebellum

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period, and in particular its redistributional effects as a result of effective ‘rent-seeking’ behaviour by protectionists, but then go on to downplay the importanceof the slavery question. They make some very astute points about both the Unionnaval blockade and the Confederate cotton embargo, but shoot themselves in thefoot by claiming that ‘the most important battlefield of the war was at sea’ (p. 30).They demonstrate how different strategies of public finance can lead (and have led)to different consequences during periods of wartime and draw attention to severalinteresting ironies relating to the ways in which the Union and the CSA chose tofinance their war efforts. But they also include a lengthy, largely extraneous, dis-cussion—in essence a summary of Jeffrey Hummel’s work—on why the First andSecond Banks of the US were so evil and why the less regulated era of ‘free banking’in America (1836–60) was purportedly so stable. Here, as elsewhere in Tariffs,blockades, and inflation, Thornton and Ekelund are more concerned with advocacythan with proportionality, much less with historical accuracy. All in all, a little morescholarship and a little less partisanship would have made for a more substantiveand substantial work.

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill . November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Andrew Dawson, Lives of the Philadelphia engineers: capital, class, and revolution,1830–1890 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xii + 302. 20 ills. £52.50)

Focusing on the proprietors of factories making heavy machinery, Dawson arguesthat these Philadelphia engineer/capitalists led a revolution in free labour ideology,a revolution that propelled the Republican Party to power, brought on the CivilWar to free labour, and plunged skilled workers into the trap of capitalist exploita-tion. To sustain his marxist interpretation Dawson condemns as wrong-headed orirrelevant the interpretive frameworks of the flexible specialization school (Sabel,Piore, Zeitlin, Scranton, and Brown), labour historians (Gutman, Philip Foner),and social/political historians (Eric Foner, Laurie). In this interpretive housedemolition Dawson is a somewhat reckless advocate for an important goal: tounderstand America’s industrial-proprietor class as political actors shaping theircity, the country, and the century.

Readers can make their own judgments on Dawson’s thesis that these engineer/proprietors were revolutionaries. But bold interpretive stances must ultimately reston facts, not ideology, and this account is often reckless on factual matters. A central‘fact’ is Dawson’s assertion that Philadelphia machine-making firms were inefficientand unable ‘to match British levels of productivity’ (p. 72). This claim is founda-tional to his entire interpretive framework, ostensibly explaining the machine-builders’ support for the high-tariff Republicans. But the inefficiency claim presentsthree problems. First, he provides no proof of it and second, some availableevidence suggests that it is demonstrably wrong. For example, Dawson alleges thatthe Sellers tool company was too inefficient to sell abroad in any quantity (p. 27).But to take a single example, Sellers sold 39 per cent of its patented bolt threadingmachines abroad (in all, the firm sold 216 units overseas and 415 to domesticbuyers in the period from 1855 to 1871. The source of these data appears in note3 of my history of the Sellers firm, published in Industrial Archaeology, vol. 2, 2,1999). The third problem with the inefficiency thesis is that it presumes that price(the proxy for efficiency) was the key element in the trade terms in capital goods.

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Thus Dawson all but ignores the other competitive factors delineated in the litera-ture on flexible specialization: technical qualities, design consultations, deliverydates, credit arrangements, and customer support.

A number of factual errors mar the book. To elucidate the Philadelphia contextfor the machine builders, the text refers frequently to appendix 1 listing ‘leadingmachine building cities in the United States’ (pp. 264–5). Dawson uses this tableto assert leadership for Philadelphia in the machine-building sector to 1870 fol-lowed by a crisis after 1873. But his table apparently omits iron ships and marineengines, key Philadelphia strengths (as noted in the text though not in the appen-dix). Inadequate notes make it difficult to tell exactly what the appendix counts.Among other factual errors, Baldwin Locomotive had 32 to 39 per cent of USoutput, not 25 to 30 per cent (p. 29); William Sellers did not acquire the Edgemooror Midvale firms ‘to secure supplies of good quality iron and steel’ (p. 32); the AsaWhitney who advocated an American transcontinental railroad had no connectionwith Baldwin Locomotive (p. 118); J. Edgar Thomson was not an ironmaster(p. 128); the Sellers tool company was not ‘in serious difficulty’ in 1878–9 (p. 234).

Too often Dawson uses a kind of factual sleight of hand to further his interpretiveframework. For example, he asserts that William Sellers supported FrederickTaylor’s rationalizing efforts at Midvale because Sellers wanted ‘to find the bestways to make machines’ (p. 226), seeking ‘potential benefits to his own [tool]business’ (p. 237). These are mere assertions, unsupported by the vast literature onTaylor. A reader new to the subject might be Misled further: Midvale madelocomotive tyres (in essence steel hoops), not complex machines, and the Sellerscompany never adopted Taylorist methods. In another example Dawson describesa kind of hegemonic ‘uniform system’ of production at Baldwin Locomotive(pp. 60–1), a portrait that suits his conviction that proprietors never looked beyonda reflexive desire to deskill and exploit labour. But Baldwin also made locomotivesto a profusion of designs (316 different models in 1890 alone), with custom designsproliferating after 1900. These facts do not suit the book’s purposes so they gounnoted. More broadly, a weak portrayal of technological issues repeatedly under-mines this account.

Dawson began this project in the early 1980s, in the high tide of Chandlerianbusiness history. In the past 20 years a rich literature on flexible specialization hasopened many minds to the range of technological capacities, market dynamics, firmstrategies, and labour skills that propelled American industrialization. The presentvolume appears to be so ideologically blinkered that it ignores or disputes that bodyof scholarship, but never builds upon it.

University of Virginia . November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

John M. Hobson, The Eastern origins of Western civilisation (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004. Pp. xv + 376. 9 tabs. 1 map. £45; pbk. £17.99)

In the past decade or so, there has been a renewed interest in global history withcomparisons between different civilizations. Hobson’s book is an addition to thisliterature that attempts to yield a better and broader understanding of the economichistory of Eurasia in the past millennium. Its main feature is the author’s demar-cation in the field of world/global history between those ‘pro-West’ and those ‘pro-Rest’ who fiercely attack views that portray Western Europe as always superior in

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growth and development. In this context, the title gives away what is to be arguedin the book.

The volume involves two major undertakings: first to evaluate just how advancedthe East (in its broadest sense, including the Middle East, North Africa, the FarEast, South and Southeast Asia) was ahead of Western Europe until circa 1800,and second to establish multiple causal links between the wonders of the East andWestern modernity. Such undertakings are not new. One can cite Joseph Needham’sScience and civilisation in China (1954–99), Eric L. Jones’s Growth recurring (1988),Jack Goody’s The East in the West (1996), and André Gunder Frank’s ReOrient(1998), to name but a few. What is new, however, is the author’s persistent anduncompromising attitude towards Eurocentrism and his radical re-interpretation ofwhat has been taken for granted in the literature of European history, especially interms of the Greco-Roman origins of Western civilization.

In a nutshell, Hobson sees indigenous growth and development in the East asthe single most important endogenous variable in the formation and success ofWest European civilization. He goes further to suggest that the late rise of the Westdepended almost entirely on its free-riding on the East (and the Americas). Thecomparative advantage of Hobson’s work (if such a Eurocentric term can still beused) lies in the author’s apparent fluency in the ‘West versus Rest’ debate and hisexhaustive trail of secondary data as the empirical evidence.

Despite the elaborate re-mapping of the ‘intimate’ East-West relationship, thebook still leaves one fundamental issue open: ‘Why and how did Western Europenot mirror its Eastern donor (in ideas, technology, institutions, market shares andproduction factors) to move convergently towards the East and evolve into anotherEast?’. Or, ‘Given the alleged millennium-long supremacy of the East over WesternEurope, why and how did growth and development in the East not reach a similarlevel by 1800 as the West did thereafter in a mere century?’. The author indicatescertain factors (or institutions, in the terminology of Douglass North) conduciveto growth, factors that were not uniquely Christian or European. These weremilitary feudalism (as in Tokugawa Japan) and the mercantilistic-developmentalfiscal state (as, after 1945, in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea).Nevertheless, Hobson resorts to the mutation of the European mind-set in theform of Christian racism to separate the West from the rest. At this point theargument becomes Weberian Protestant-teleological fused with Marxian Western-triumphalistic. The book is also marred by repetition and irrelevance, especially oninputs from the Americas and the cultural deviation within Europe. Moreover, somekey concepts such as ‘wealth’, ‘power’, ‘capitalism’, ‘industrialization,’, and ‘global-ization’ remain ill defined. Nevertheless, Hobson’s book will provide students ofworld/global history with important source material, as well as controversial ideas,for years to come.

London School of Economics & Political Science . November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Om Prakash, Bullion for goods: European and Indian merchants in the Indian Oceantrade, 1500–1800 (New Delhi: Manohar, 2004. Pp. 426. Rs 850)

Prakash has enjoyed a long and distinguished career as a historian of trade in theIndian Ocean region during the early modern period. He has written several bookson the Dutch East India Company and in 1998 his European commercial enterprise

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in pre-colonial India was published as part of the New Cambridge History of India(volume II.5). In recent years he has also generated a prolific output of articles,chapters, lectures, and conference papers, and these have now been collectedtogether and published in this volume. Economic historians of India, the IndianOcean, and the European East India companies will welcome this because thevolume not only contains 27 items drawn from a range of books and journals, butit also has a coherence that is sometimes lacking in such collections. The itemswere originally published between 1964 and 2002, but most appeared after 1985and thus represent the author’s mature reflections on the place of the IndianOcean in the wider early modern world economy. The collection is permeated byanalyses of the consequences arising from the opening up of the all-sea route toIndia by the Portuguese at the end of the fifteenth century. The essays explorethree main themes: eight chapters investigate the varying effects of different formsof European enterprise on the trading patterns and structures of the region; fivechapters examine the response of indigenous merchants to the arrival of Europeanmerchants; eight chapters assess the impact of inflows of bullion derived fromSouth America.

There is much to learn from the detailed arguments that are firmly based uponarchival research—Prakash is a master of Dutch commercial records—but three keypoints emerge from the volume as a whole. First, the author stresses the importanceof the Indian Ocean region in the emerging international economy and he dismissesthe arguments of those who have been inclined to see India as little more than aperiphery of a European world economy. Second, he argues that Indian merchantsdid not become passive in the face of European domination of the region. Theiractivities were certainly altered, and in some ways constrained, but many were ableto ‘hold their own’ (p. 52). Finally, Prakash demonstrates in several of his casestudies that a European trade with Asia based primarily upon the exchange ofbullion for goods had many beneficial effects for local economies, notably in Bengal.Inevitably there is some repetition of material across the chapters but, overall, thevolume is very strong testimony to Prakash’s major contribution to this importantfield of study.

University of Leicester . . November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Marcel van der Linden, Transnational labour history: explorations (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2003. Pp. xiv + 226. 9 figs. 17 tabs. £47.50)

Van der Linden is a leading labour historian who works as a researcher atAmsterdam’s International Institute of Social History (IISH). This fine volume, amodel of clarity and concision, reflects the IISH’s decision in the 1990s to broadenits focus from European labour issues to include transnational influences andperspectives. The introductory chapter sketches the evolution of labour historiog-raphy over several decades, from an approach born of the history-of-ideas schoolin the founding years to an emphasis in the late twentieth century on structure andcontextualization. More recent developments include the emergence of narrativesof women’s history and ethnic history, the dissolving of disciplinary divisions, andthe realization that labour history cannot be contained artificially within nationalboundaries. This cross-border approach is at the heart of van der Linden’s book,which explores structural dimensions of the global workers’ movement.

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The volume opens with a penetrating study of the First International, analysedas the organizational expression of the transition from pre-national to nationallabour movements in Europe and North America. The approach followed sets thepattern for the rest of the volume. The decline of old-style labour internationalismis attributed to three developments: the consolidation of trade unions on a nationalbasis, the late nineteenth-century economic slowdown, and the working classes’accelerated incorporation into nation-states. The book goes on to explain thestructural grounds for the further ‘nationalization’ of European labour in the latenineteenth century, the rise and fall of revolutionary syndicalism in the earlytwentieth century, the variable success of communist parties after the First WorldWar, and working-class transnationalism in North America and globally. It con-cludes with studies on the interaction of trade unions and social movements inEurope since the late 1960s, issues in labour-history methodology, Eurocentricpitfalls in labour studies, and aspects of the relationship between liberal and socialistviews on working-class emancipation.

Van der Linden concedes two main failings: a disproportionate regard for insti-tutions as against cultural and other practices, and a Eurocentric approach thattranslates badly to Asia, Africa, and Latin America. One might add to his list aninsufficient regard for the racism directed against colonial workers in the whitemetropolis. Marx’s view of Asian migrants as a ‘backward rabble’ set the scene fortheir exclusion by the Second International from the realm of labour solidarity, towhich they were seen as an impediment rather than as possible recruits. Lenin’scommitment to mobilizing oppressed ethnic and colonial groups represented aprofound break with the politics of the white-skinned Second International. Hisstrategic turn to alliances with ethnic minorities was a reason for communist successafter 1917 that van der Linden neglects to mention in his discussion of this issue.Communists took to the new strategy with gusto, given their parties’ deep roots inethnic minorities. In this respect, they were a continuation of the new migrantnation of the Wobblies, described by van der Linden as the workers’ party leastprone to racist views.

Cardiff University November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Marc Flandreau, Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich, and Harold James, eds., Internationalfinancial history in the twentieth century: system and anarchy (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press for the German Historical Institute, 2003. Pp. x + 278. Figs. Tabs.£60)

This collection of papers from a conference in 1998 is something of a mixed bag,despite a title that suggests greater unity. For a start, not all the essays spend muchtime in the twentieth century. Flandreau and Wilkins deal with the last decades ofthe ‘long nineteenth century’, focusing on the gold standard period of 1880–1914.Abelhauser’s contribution produces a good deal of interesting material about thepolitical economy of West German defence modernization and relations betweenWashington, Paris, and Bonn in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but seems not tohave much to do with what is supposed to be the main theme. Tanner’s discussionof the neutral powers and Bretton Woods is really an analysis of Switzerland andthe IMF. The introduction by Flandreau and James contains an interesting discus-

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sion of how countries adopted the gold standard in order to further nationaleconomic development but their attempt to explain what is meant by ‘system andanarchy’ in the international economy is rather sketchy.

The final product lacks coordination and is somewhat disjointed, yet there issome very good work here. Wilkins produces a fascinating discussion of the roleplayed by direct investment in the great international capital flows of the goldstandard era. There is a scholarly treatment of Bretton Woods by Skidelsky, showingthat its only achievement was to paper over the cracks between two very differentBritish and American views of how the post-1945 international economy should beorganized. Kindleberger and Ostrander produce a robust defence of the WestGerman currency reform against revisionists who argue that the economy wouldhave recovered anyway, as well as against neo-liberals who have distorted what reallyhappened in order to suit their own political agenda. Mouré provides an enlight-ening discussion of France’s determination to hang on to gold in the late 1920sand 1930s, even if this meant a hoarding policy that disrupted international eco-nomic relations. He argues that the strategy was born out of anxiety concerning theimpact of currency devaluation and inflation on domestic politics. It might havebeen modified if Britain and the United States had both genuinely attempted tomake Germany pay more reparations than were delivered and had offered somehelp for French reconstruction.

In the introduction Flandreau and James remark that the most controversialcontribution at the conference was Pauly’s ‘The new adjustment agenda in historicalperspective’. The essay makes the point that developed nations have not applied,and do not apply, to themselves the economic medicine they prescribe for devel-oping countries. This seems a reasonable observation given the experience of ThirdWorld nations at the hands of the IMF since the 1980s. But Jacques Polak, a one-time executive director of the Fund, was upset. Perhaps he was influenced byinstitutional loyalty and sympathy for liberal economics. Historians are generallyfree of such ideological baggage. However Schuker’s article on the collapse of thegold standard is an exception. It contains interesting material on Germany’s deter-mination to repudiate Versailles during the 1920s. But the whole effort is spoiled,amongst other things, by the ludicrous assertion that Britain abandoned gold in1931 thanks to a ‘workers’ ramp’, and by the (unsupported) conviction that theBank of England voluntarily devalued the pound. Schuker has a reputation foriconoclasm but this is just bad history, showing more respect for neo-liberal theorythan for evidence. It is not typical of what is generally a scholarly if diversecollection.

Cardiff University November 2004574Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Timothy W. Guinnane, William A. Sundstrom, and Warren C. Whatley, eds.,History matters: essays on economic growth, technology, and demographic change(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. xvi + 510. 29 tabs. 28 ills.$65)

In the current fashion, the title of this collection does not refer to the fact that itis a Festschrift for Paul David, though that is what it is. He is one of the select feweconomic historians who will be honoured by a Festschrift from both sides of the

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Atlantic, with another shortly to appear under the imprint of Edward Elgar Pub-lishers. This is fully merited by his dual career, primarily in Stanford and Oxford,and omnipresent influence. I have to own up to being a paid-up member of his fanclub, having had Paul as one of the supervisors of my own doctoral thesis, havingtaught a course on American economic history jointly with him, and having bene-fited ever since from his mentorship in research and career progression. One of thestriking aspects of this collection, running to 510 pages and 17 chapters, with nearlyevery chapter acknowledging the key influence of Paul David, is how much of hiscelebrated work is not referred to at all or at any length in these pages. The wholefield of the ‘new economics of science’ which he formulated, the threshold modelof diffusion which he first articulated, the role of learning by doing and of factorbiases in economic growth, are some of the examples that spring to mind. Whileno doubt the forthcoming cisatlantic collection will remedy some of these gaps, thefact that the portion of his work represented here should prove so fertile is morethan sufficient justification for the present Festschrift.

The editors have chosen to present the 17 chapters by dividing them into threeparts: history matters (pertaining to path dependency), context matters (historicaldescription), and factual matters (measurement). This does not work very well. Itsplits apart topics that appear to be closely related, such as demography or tele-communications, and it is no surprise that the chapters within each part do notconfine themselves to any such classification. Anyone planning to read the bookright through would be advised to do so by his or her own ordering of the material.More importantly, the book has a relatively easy job in arguing that ‘history mat-ters’; its chapters also demonstrate that ‘time matters’, ‘space matters’, and so on.The editors’ introduction struggles with the rationale for Paul David’s position on‘history matters’ as against the incumbent views of neoclassical economic theory,a proposition that is taken up in Reder’s chapter on the same subject. Since Redercomes to the question by presuming the validity of the neoclassical model and thenasking whether path dependency and associated factors are sufficient to overturnit (an assessment familiar to readers of Thomas Kuhn on scientific paradigms), hispaper has little hope of making a balanced judgment. Although the editors do notclarify the controversy much further, what persuades me is that the reductionistcomparative statics of the neoclassical model cannot take account of feedbackeffects in any adequate way. ‘Maximization subject to constraints’ overlooks thecommon historical outcome of changing the constraints rather than achievingmaximization. Paul David’s work on the mechanization of agriculture in latenineteenth-century England demonstrated such factors at work although his earlierrejection of Alan Olmstead’s critique of the seminal paper on midwestern reapingmight be seen as defending the neoclassical stance. The chapter by Lim, thoughweak in its discussion of more recent developments in Korean industrial policy,even suggests to me that path reversibility is a possible outcome.

The papers are of an intellectual calibre to match the scholar to whom they areimplicitly dedicated, but vary considerably in accessibility. Some of the betterknown co-authors of Paul David are most guilty of offending on this score. PeterTemin’s chapter revisiting the pricing systems practised by AT&T in US telecom-munications is a case in point. In the demography field, Warren Sanderson’s paperon cohort parity analysis is likewise strictly for practitioners with substantial insideknowledge of the field. Trend Olsen’s paper on the location of multinational enter-prises owns up to having nothing to do with ‘history matters’, and should not havebeen included here. Against these, there are many unexpected bonuses in reading

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the 17 chapters. Space prevents balanced discussion, but mention should be madeof the contributions of Puffert on railway track gauges, of Rhode on postwarCalifornian growth, of Carter, Ransom, and Sutch on American fertility decline,and especially of Rothwell on Chinese nuclear power (which provides a logicalframework for determining ‘optimal’ diversity). Since most will read the book bydipping into the chapters, they can be assured that the time spent in doing so willbe much rewarded. Paul David’s sumptuous career and his pervasive impact havebeen well served.

University of Sussex . . 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

P. J. Cain, Hobson and imperialism: radicalism, New Liberalism, and finance, 1887–1938 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. ix + 320. £45)

John Atkinson Hobson is remembered almost solely for his 1902 work, Imperialism.In this highly readable and informative book, Cain sets out to remedy this by puttingImperialism in the context of Hobson’s other works in order to track the evolutionthroughout his life of Hobson’s attitudes and thoughts towards empire, finance,and international trade.

Hobson was profoundly influenced by liberal assumptions relating to the impor-tance of character and moral community, where people worked for the commongood rather than solely for the pursuit of wealth. An early work of 1889 introducedhis ideas on oversaving and its corollary, underconsumption. These ideas weredeveloped more fully after his intellectual shift to New Liberalism between 1892and 1896, when he made the link between the ‘maldistribution’ of income andwealth and the oversaving of unearned income by the rentier class.

Hobson subsequently attempted to link this idea into a more general thesisabout the changes required to produce a qualitatively rich society. As he becamemore critical of empire in the late 1890s, viewing it as the key threat to democ-racy, he attempted to fuse his arguments about oversaving/underconsumptionwith anti-imperialism, arguing that overseas expansion was being undertaken forthe benefit of financiers pushing for new markets in which to invest the capitalthey had saved.

Though his views evolved further, Hobson was never able to bridge the gapbetween this radical tradition (in which overseas expansion was viewed as part ofan aristocratic design to gain further power) and the Cobdenite one which sawexpansion and free trade as a means of spreading peaceful international cooperationand prosperity.

Hobson’s ideas about empire were astonishingly schizophrenic, and this is amajor problem for Cain throughout, though he deals with it head on. Partialexplanations can be found in the need for Hobson to juggle the different radicaltraditions, and in his rabid campaigning against Chamberlain’s tariff reform cam-paign, which led him into overzealous argument. Cain is good on the contradictionsand inconsistencies in Hobson’s arguments though, at times so much evidence isproduced as to Hobson’s ability to support opposing ideas simultaneously that itbecomes difficult to maintain a focus on the thread of his conceptual development,or to distinguish whether there is a thread at all. Throughout, however, Cain steersa sure and clear course.

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It is a measure of Cain’s success that I would have liked to know more aboutHobson the man and, perhaps more pertinently, about the contribution of the non-economic aspects of his thought (for example, his essentially racist belief that whitesettler colonies were natural and right) to Hobson’s overall thesis.

Hobson’s place in imperial and economic historiography rests on his articulationof the links between finance, power elites, and international expansion, and hisenduring influence is evident in the work of writers as far apart as Lenin andGallagher and Robinson, and particularly in the dominant discourse of imperialhistory over the past decade—gentlemanly capitalism. More widely, as Cain pointsout all too briefly in the final footnote, many of the issues that Hobson raised remainkey to debates about the current state and development of the world economy andglobalization. It is some measure of Hobson’s relevance that a century after thepublication of his best work, concerns about the overweening influence of bigbusiness, the collusion of finance and governments, and the exploitation of ThirdWorld labour still exercise liberal opinion.

University of Cambridge

The government machine: a revolutionary history of the computer

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