Between slavery and freedom

Economic History Review

, LVII, 3 (2004), pp. 581–605

©

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

3581605Book Reviews

BOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Book reviews

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GREAT BRITAIN and IRELAND

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


Tom Williamson,

Shaping medieval landscapes: settlement, society, environment

(Macclesfield: Windgather Press, 2003. Pp. x

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214. 59 figs. Pbk. £16.99)

It is over one hundred years since the first historians of their subject, HenrySeebohm and Paul Vinogradoff, began to study the history of settlement and explainthe main features characterizing different regions of the English countryside.Progress after the 1890s occurred in fits and starts, but interest was enlivened byHoskins’s book on the making of the English landscape in 1955, and research hasmade long strides since the 1980s on the basis of local studies. We now have twojournals,

Landscape History

and

Landscapes

.Williamson’s book gives us the finest possible introduction to the subject for

newcomers. It explains how the history of settlement was opened up in the 1890s,and examines the controversies that arose when attempting to explain the rationalityof Anglo-Saxon landscapes. Historians accepted the ancient distinction betweenchampion and woodland country, the first being village-centred, having large com-mon fields and common grazings, and being regulated by a watchful lord, and thewoodland landscape consisting of hamlets or scattered farms, having irregular fieldsand systems, and being characterized by desultory lordship and weak regulationthat allowed easy enclosure. Plainly such neat generalities overlooked a multitudeof subtleties and different combinations. Williamson embarks on a fine-grainedanalysis of the variant scenes found in one piece of countryside stretching from thechalk Chilterns through claylands to Leicester, eastward across the fenland to theNorfolk coast, southward through woodpasture country in Suffolk and Essex, andback through Hertfordshire. The several landscape types are examined for theirsettlement patterns, soils, climate, and population histories. Timewise, the authorexamines his landscapes briefly from prehistory through the Roman period, thenmore intently through three phases of Anglo-Saxon colonization, the coming of theNormans, and the subsequent spread of farming and people up to 1500. Williamsonexcels in the practical understanding of farming constraints. So he identifies soilscarefully, explains the seasonal routines of cultivation, the demands on people,animals, and tools that made it essential for all to be located in the right place atthe right time, and sheds much fresh light on the rationality lying behind differentusages.

Not everyone will accept all his arguments for some are quite original; he sees,for example, substantial differences in the handling of meadow by champion andby woodland farmers. But all his assertions are the result of sound research andlong reflection, and every large statement is supported by a wealth of pertinentmaps and photographs. Every generalization calls for comparable evidence fromother regions, joining scholars in fruitful debate. The most startling assertion of allmaintains that champion districts were the disaster areas from the point of view of

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Prices given are those supplied by publishers with review copies.

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Economic History Society 2004

agricultural efficiency—poor in the variety of their resources, inflexible in theirroutines, and obstructive of innovation. It challenges, but it will refresh discussionof entrenched assumptions. It is stirring stuff.

This reader missed any debate about the influence of lawyer-stewards in the latermiddle ages pushing lords towards a conformity in field systems; she thinks thiscrucial. Others will ask for more attention to be given to variant social structuresand inheritance practices: they could well prove to be roughly measurable in thelandscape. But such requests for more information reflect the strengths of thischallenging book. It will surely open a new phase in landscape history.

Hadlow, Kent

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


Anthony Quiney,

Town houses of medieval Britain

(New Haven and London: YaleUniversity Press, 2003. Pp. ix

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333. 364 pls. £35)

Much research has been done on medieval urban buildings, but it tends to bepublished in specialized and scattered essays and articles. There is an excellentchapter in Grenville’s

Medieval housing

, and some useful studies of individual towns,such as that by Schofield on London houses and the multi-authored volume on theChester rows. General interpretation has lagged behind more detailed work, and itis remarkable that Pantin’s essay of 1962–3 has few rivals as a synthesis on houseplans. We need, therefore, a comprehensive and full length book on the subject,and Quiney’s may have been intended to fill that gap. Its scope is admirablycomprehensive, dealing with England, Scotland, and Wales from the pre-Conquestperiod until the sixteenth century. It discusses buildings of every type, from housesof all shapes and sizes to bishops’ palaces, hospitals, and almshouses, thoughchurches and such structures as bridges are not included. The author draws mainlyon the evidence of surviving buildings, but also uses the results of excavation. Thebook begins with a general overview of urban history and topography, turns tomaterials and techniques of construction, and then devotes chapters to such themesas undercrofts, palaces, public buildings, various types of dwelling, and ends withScottish urban buildings, mainly of the sixteenth century. The illustrations aresuperb, with a succession of high quality photographs, many of them in colour,together with diagrams of house plans and elevations; it will be much used as asource for illustrated lectures. The price is amazingly modest in view of the excel-lence of its production.

One wonders, however, at its intended readership. It is certainly not the readersof this journal, as the author has little sympathy for economic history. He tells usat the beginning that in the middle ages religion was of primary importance: ‘craft,trade and finance were a secondary matter’ (

sic

). Not much attention is given tothe usual requirements of an academic work to define terms, and he is uncertainabout the meaning of such words as ‘town’, ‘urban’, and ‘borough’. Political events,such as the Norman Conquest and the accession of Henry II, are given prominencein explaining changes in towns. The writing tends to be anecdotal, and the authoris easily distracted from his theme. But this is not a coffee table book, as after thefirst hundred pages of generalization, we find ourselves immersed in the technical-ities of sole plates, sill beams, and common-rafter roofs, which will baffle most non-specialists. The architectural historians who understand this terminology will be

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frustrated because this is not an up-to-date account of their subject. References towork published after about 1990 are rather patchy, and the most important advancein knowledge in the whole subject, dendrochronology (dating of timbers by treerings), is mentioned in respect to individual buildings, but does not result in anyoverall assessment of the pattern of construction.

Readers in search of discussion of technical features such as jetties or undercrofts,or who wish to gather information and pictures of particular types of building suchas terraced houses or warehouses, will find in this book some material of value. Butif they wish to know how the study of buildings can contribute to our understandingof medieval towns, they will have to seek elsewhere.

University of Leicester

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


Edward Higgs,

The information state in England: the central collection of informationon citizens since 1500

(Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp.xii

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284. 4 tabs. £16.99)

This book, though relatively brief, covers a vast territory. Its author is frank aboutits necessary limitations. He has chosen to tackle both a long sweep of time andtopics of fundamental importance to many aspects of English history. He states hisconclusions boldly, prompted in part by dissatisfaction with some of the generali-zations made by non-historians, and especially sociologists, discussing the samegeneral question. He remarks, appositely, ‘A work flawed by its ambitions but whichstimulates discussion can be more productive than a perfect but limited study thatleads nowhere’ (p. viii). The result is both challenging and illuminating. It isunderpinned by Higgs’s exceptionally wide acquaintance with many of the docu-mentary sources of greatest relevance to his arguments, acquired both during hiswork as an historian and in an earlier incarnation as an archivist in the PublicRecord Office.

That the acquisition of information confers power on any organization is a truism.All bodies which exercise power also collect and use information both about theirmembers and about their rivals, but it has been a distinctive feature of the devel-opment of the state over the past two centuries that information collection hasbecome increasingly systematic and extensive, a tendency which began long beforethe advent of electronic data systems but which has developed rapidly with theirspread.

The bulk of the work is organized chronologically, and the book covers the wholeperiod from Tudor times to the present, but the five historical chapters are precededby a chapter entitled ‘Some models of state information gathering’ which consistsof a critical summary of the sociological writings on the subject from the laternineteenth century onwards. Higgs pays particular attention to the implications ofthe development of the concepts of

Gemeinschaft

and

Gesellschaft

and therefore tothe work of Tönnies, though the bulk of the discussion relates to relatively recentwriting on the subject—Giddens, Wright Mills, Foucault, Dandekar, Skocpol andMichael Mann.

Higgs places great emphasis on the importance of local government in the earlymodern period in the gathering and use of information, exploring the extent towhich this may have been a distinctive feature of England among contemporary

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European states. It enables him to exploit an instructive, perhaps overstatedparadox—that though the English state was greatly decentralized, nevertheless ‘insome ways, public surveillance in early modern England was more intense andwide-ranging than anything experienced in Western societies today’ (p. 32). He hasmuch to say about the nature of the power trade-off between local elites and thegovernment in London, attributing to it the remarkable ability of the state to imposewithout serious opposition a far greater tax burden on the English population thanrival, absolutist states were able to achieve elsewhere. In the concluding sentencesof his discussion of the early modern period he remarks that the key question inrelation to the nineteenth century is not why the state began to exercise greatersurveillance but why the surveillance was increasingly centralized.

Initially, he argues, the centre confined its activities largely to the making andpolicing of standards of information gathering: action remained largely local.Higgs’s exceptional knowledge of census operations informs an interesting discus-sion of the limitations inherent in an era when all analysis was manual, and he notesthe absence in England of any equivalent to the type of population registerscommon on the Continent. In the twentieth century there was further and moreradical change driven both by the advent of a ‘welfare state’ and by the exigenciesof war and universal mobilization. The idea of a formal national registration systemwas rejected at the end of the First World War on grounds of principle, but thegreatest obstacle to state expansion, he suggests, may well have been ‘the civilservants of the Treasury’, ever disturbed by the prospect of rising expenditure(p. 151). The pressure to accumulate and integrate information proved unceasingand irresistible, for example because of the institution of the National HealthService and the rapidly rising proportion of the population paying income tax. Thesystem in England remains less complete and all-pervasive than in many continentalcountries (there is a striking description of the situation in Norway: table 7.1,p. 176), but the trend is unmistakable.

Higgs summarizes the underlying thesis of the book in the final chapter as follows:‘The subsequent history of the English State can be seen not in terms of theexpansion of power and authority from a central point outwards but as a contractioninwards. The state ceased to be a set of processes involving elites across the wholesociety undertaking tasks on an unpaid, amateur basis. Instead, it became thepreserve of a centralised, salaried core of civil servants and party politicians’(p. 196). This is a striking piece of work, an extended essay rather than a mono-graph, full of pithy, even provoking, comments. The central themes would merit afar longer discussion than is possible in a brief review. It deserves to be very widelyread: those who do so will benefit greatly.

University of Cambridge

. .

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


Ben Coates,

The impact of the English civil war on the economy of London, 1642–1650

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xii

+

242. 5 tabs. 18 figs. £45)

It is generally accepted that London’s wealth and resources played a crucial role insecuring Parliament’s victory in the civil war. We know far less about the other sideof the equation: the impact of the war (or rather wars) on London’s economy.Coates’s scholarly monograph, based on his doctoral thesis, does much to fill that

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gap, drawing effectively on a wide range of sources, including the records of theLondon livery companies. Individual chapters explore issues such as the burden oftaxation, the raising of loans, and the impact of war on domestic and overseas tradeand manufacturing. His findings are important, challenging traditional thinking atseveral points. The level of direct taxes on London he calculates to be about£100,000 a year, significantly above prewar levels but not a heavy burden, and hepoints out that much of the money raised was spent locally, redistributing ratherthan extracting wealth. While indirect taxes, customs and excise, brought in more,much of the burden was probably passed on to the provincial merchants buyinggoods imported through London. And in some respects war served to stimulateeconomic activity, notably in the arms industry, though manufacturing overall wasclearly depressed.

Coates argues throughout that the wars were by no means a disaster for London,but he does not deny the problems they brought. Large sums were raised throughloans, some on the precarious security of ‘public faith’, and many citizens recoveredonly a fraction of what they had lent. The heaviest blows, however, came not fromtaxation or loans dishonoured but from the disruption of trade networks, bothdomestic and international, and the loss of business and consumer confidence atcritical periods. The king’s prohibition of commerce with London in 1643 cut offclothiers from their western suppliers, causing severe disruption. The dislocationof the coal trade from Newcastle brought serious hardship over the following twoyears, though food supplies, by contrast, remained stable. A second major blow fellin 1648–9, this time affecting overseas rather than domestic trade. Royalist, Irish,and Flemish privateers inflicted heavy losses on English commerce, exacerbated bythe revolt of the navy, massively increased Dutch competition following the peacewith Spain, and the severe harvest failures of the later 1640s. Overall Coates depictsan urban economy certainly damaged by the war but, for the most part, recoveringfairly quickly. This was, moreover, a very diverse economy, and at no point wereall strands threatened simultaneously.

This is an important book, and deserves a wide readership. Though the materialis sometimes dense, the central arguments emerge clearly, with summaries at theend of each chapter, and are generally persuasive. The major shortcomings lie inpresentation. There is little sign that the text has been either copy-edited or proof-read, and misprints and obvious errors of syntax and punctuation abound. Thecareful and apparently impeccable research underpinning this book surely deservedbetter.

University of Warwick

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane, eds.,

Women and urban life in eighteenth-centuryEngland

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. viii

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216. £45)

Sweet and Lane have put together a diverse and interesting collection of papersfrom the ‘On the town’ conference held at the University of Leicester in May 1999.This publication follows and complements a number of welcome editions to thefield of urban history. The authors together seek to address ‘the tendency in muchurban history to award a higher priority to those aspects of urban history whichwere predominantly masculine’. Women, they argue, feature as ‘the purveyors of

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culture and sociability, the recipients of poor relief or the victims of sexual exploi-tation’ (p. 1). In redress, the authors present eight papers on themes as varied ascivic life, shopping, business and entrepreneurship, charity, print culture, andpoetry.

Elaine Chalus’s paper on the ability of women to influence politics throws openthe debate about women’s civic contribution. Her research draws on the activitiesof one woman, Mrs Carnall, who attempted to influence local and national politicalopinion through what has become known as the Rag Plot. This, along with Sweet’sanalysis of civic life generally, suggests that some of the barriers which excludedwomen from participation were, at different times and in different places,permeable.

In particular, Denise Fowler’s paper on women as ‘keepers of the word’ sheds arefreshing and interesting light on their impact as educators, readers, writers, andcommunicators when put into the context of urban public life. Her approachrescues the importance of women’s activities in these areas from the periphery andreinstates the important impact and involvement women had through these activ-ities. The piece by Sylvia Pinches on women as objects and agents of charity inBirmingham presents a thorough, well-researched account. She draws togetherresearch on women as receivers and givers, to show the reader how central theseactivities made women to daily urban life and the struggle to survive.

For those readers familiar with recent research on women and business and onthe history of retailing, there are no new revelations. None the less, there is plentyof thought-provoking matter in the other papers. Readers less familiar with this areawill find in the papers by Christine Wiskin, and by Hannah Barker and KarenHarvey, on the urban businesswoman evidence of their involvement in urban publiclife. David Shuttleton’s paper on Mary Chandler, a tradeswoman who penned acivic poem, nicely illustrates this.

This is a very useful collection for students and scholars, firmly redefining womenin the urban picture. It frees them from the traditional opposition of upper-middleclass girl about town and ‘Hogarthian gin-soaked harridan’ to reveal a diverse urbanlandscape of influence and opportunity. It also moves beyond a metropolitan focus,although to draw too great a polarity of experiences of women here is to overstatethe case. Many large urban centres were in fact a collection of smaller units, eachwith its own version of public culture and borough customs. None the less, thesepapers provide a wealth of detail, creating the opportunity for future comparisonsto be made between urban centres varying in scale, demography, and economiccharacter.

Coopers Technology College, Chislehurst

.

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


Anthony Cooke,

Stanley: from Arkwright village to commuter suburb, 1784–2003

(Perth: Perth and Kinross Libraries, 2003. Pp. 160. 21 ills. £8.95)

Located on the river Tay seven miles north of Perth in central Scotland, the OldMill at Stanley is arguably the finest surviving example of an early Arkwright mill;opened in 1787, it is the oldest known example of the use of cast iron columnsthroughout a textile mill, a milestone in the development of iron framed buildings.Apart from two brief periods, a succession of firms produced cotton goods inStanley from 1784 until the mills closed in 1989; since then Historic Scotland and

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the Phoenix Trust have engaged in ‘imaginative conservation’, securing funding,buying the mill buildings, and ensuring their future as residences and as a place toillustrate the history of cotton manufacture and water power. The purpose of thisbook is to provide a context for the buildings by documenting the links betweenStanley and historically significant figures such as Richard Arkwright, David Dale,and Robert Owen, and by showing how Stanley illustrates important general his-torical themes. These include the global context of the Scottish cotton industry, theestablishment and survival of manufacture in a particular place, population move-ments, aristocratic patronage, and the creation of a community. It benefits fromthe author’s extensive research and teaching over the past 30 years on industrialhistory and on the history of the Stanley Mills in particular in the Department ofContinuing Education at the University of Dundee.

Over three-quarters of the book is devoted to the background, establishment,and early years of the mills until 1823; later chapters about the workforce andcommunity also draw heavily on this earlier period. Cooke begins with a chapterreviewing Scottish agricultural improvement in the eighteenth century andanother on the role of the Scottish cotton industry in the industrial revolution,before turning to the foundation of Stanley. He points out that Stanley developednot in isolation, but as part of a well-established textile industry in the Perthregion, utilizing the abundant water power and centring on linen and cottonmanufacture plus associated bleachfields, dyeworks, and printworks. Stanley waspart of the estates of the Duke of Atholl, and like other landowners, the fourthduke took the initiative in 1784, making contact with Richard Arkwright andadvancing £2,000 to the company to build the village. The duke’s factor designedthe tunnel that brought water to drive the mill wheels and laid out the villagewhich housed a workforce of 350 by 1795. In addition to the duke’s involvement,access to markets via the port of Perth, local expertise in textile production, andthe low cost of local labour contributed to the establishment of cotton manufac-ture at Stanley. Importing cotton-spinning technology from England was essen-tial, and Cooke examines in detail the involvement of Arkwright, who hadestablished his waterframe for cotton spinning at Cromford in 1771 and wasfighting a court battle over patents in the mid-1780s. Arkwright was one of theoriginal partners in the company, due in part to his links with another partner,George Dempster, a local Perth banker and MP who helped to secure his knight-hood. Arkwright, Dempster, and David Dale were partners both at Stanley and atNew Lanark. Dale’s son-in-law Robert Owen kept an eye on Stanley for Dale.Owen’s extensive correspondence with the manager survives, giving a rare view ofthe day-to-day running of cotton mills and showing Owen to be hard-headed andpractical, keeping tight control on raw material supplies and stocks of finishedproducts. The author includes much fascinating detail about marketing and creditnetworks and especially about the controversy between the manager and the DaleTrustees which led to the manager’s dismissal and the sale of Stanley in 1823.Subsequent owners invested large amounts in the mill before the American CivilWar and afterwards adapted production to ‘niche’ markets, particularly cottonbelting for factory machinery. This ability to adapt was responsible for the survivalof textile production at Stanley up to 1989. Among the strengths of the book arethe author’s comparisons of Stanley with cotton manufacture in New Lanark,Glasgow, and Lancashire.

This is not a community study in the sense familiar to social historians orsociologists, and much more could be written about the later mill and village as

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the village reached a peak population of nearly 2,000 in 1841, then fell to half thatnumber by 1881, and declined further in the twentieth century. The use of theHarvard style of references breaks up the flow of the text, detail occasionallyoverwhelms the wider structure, and several chapters end abruptly without conclu-sions. Nevertheless, the Perth and Kinross Libraries should be congratulated forpublishing at an accessible price such a carefully researched and historiographicallyinformed account, including a useful bibliography and index.

University of Glasgow

.

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


John Hassan,

The seaside, health and the environment in England and Wales since 1800

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. 318. Ills. £47.50)

Between 1920 and 1970, the coastline of England and Wales was a significanteconomic sector with coastal tourism buoyant. Seaside resorts invested heavily inhotels, residential accommodation, and related infrastructures such as swimmingpools, car parking, and sewage disposal schemes. Between £3 million and £4million a year was spent on improving seafront facilities in the 1930s, and theboom continued after the Second World War: Eastbourne alone had more than200,000 deck chairs for its beach and promenade in the 1950s. The tradition ofthe English seaside holiday has its origins in the eighteenth century, but wasdeveloped and fostered through a variety of ploys, from the health-giving qualitiesof ozone and salt water to opportunities for nature study, and scope for suchholiday pastimes as sunbathing, boating, dancing, attending orchestral concerts,walking, and more recently windsurfing and snorkelling. Hassan’s admirable studyof the rise and decline of coastal tourism since 1800 sets this story within thewider context of environmental history—of the exploitation and despoliation of thecoastline, and of efforts since the 1970s to control and to limit the damage tounique coastal environments brought about by the quest for fulfilment, enjoyment,and profit.

Although the focus of this book is on the shores of England and Wales, a numberof themes link it into the wider history of Britain’s urban economy since 1800.Much of the analysis concerns the problem of pollution—specifically, of sewagedisposal—a critical environmental issue for towns dependent for prosperity on thesupposedly health-giving properties of their geographical situation. Initially man-ageable, in theory and practice, by relegation to the sea, the problem of sewagereached crisis proportions with the enormous and unenvisioned expansion ofhuman coastal populations in the twentieth century. Population growth as a factorin environmental crisis thus constitutes a significant theme. The despoliation thatfollows on the human desire to engage directly with beautiful natural environmentsis another. Much of England’s coastline has disappeared under bungalows andholiday chalets: by 1963 one-third of the total was considered spoilt beyondredemption. The intricate web of urban politics and local finances provides a thirdtheme of wider relevance. Central government avoided intervention in local affairseven in the national interest; town councils were reluctant to spend big money onenvironmentally beneficial projects, particularly if their efforts would be compro-mised by the inactivity of neighbouring districts. Another important theme is thetransformation in social values after 1970 which, Hassan argues, brought a greater

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willingness to look beyond narrow monetary values when assessing the worth ofenvironmental improvement projects.

Hassan has read widely and carefully in the relevant secondary, as well as primary,literature. His standpoints on specific questions are thoughtfully elaborated, hisacknowledgement of other scholarship generous. This book offers more than amodern history of the seaside; it is also a guide to the current bibliography, and tothe issues central to the economic history of environments other than the coast ofEngland and Wales.

University College London

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


Alexis Weedon,

Victorian publishing: the economics of book production for a massmarket, 1836–1916

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. xvi

+

212. 22 figs. 3 pls. 36 tabs.£40)

The most significant change in the production of the written word, after Gutenberg,was the industrialization of printing and its associated processes in the middle ofthe nineteenth century. Steam-powered presses, machine-made paper, and stereo-typing enabled British publishers to make a profit while producing cheaper productsfor ever-larger markets, at home and overseas. As with the first printing revolution,quantifying the change is far more difficult than stating its existence. Simon Eliotwas a pioneer in this effort, basing his estimates of the growth of the British booktrade in the nineteenth century on sources such as the governmental returns onpaper production, and the number of new titles published each year. There wereobvious flaws in such estimates, but they appeared to be the best readily availablefigures.

The core of

Victorian publishing

is the book production cost database, in whichWeedon has accumulated data about print runs, production costs, retail prices, andagreements with authors, relating to thousands of individual titles. Based on thearchives of 10 publishers and four printers, the scale is sufficient to allow her tomake some significant generalizations about the British book trade. Her figures foraverage print runs in each decade and her detailed pricing data help to refine Eliot’smodels of book trade growth. From mid-century onwards, the development of themass market becomes less straightforward, and there will clearly be an interestingstory to be told about the late 1850s and 1860s.

Weedon is able to show that, although output increased during the second halfof the nineteenth century, the total value of the book trade remained static untilthe twentieth century; and she has data to assess the relative roles of the costs ofpaper, labour, and machining in enabling publishers to survive with decreasingprofit margins. She uses her price data to analyse publishers’ strategies for differentsubject areas, revealing not merely the higher average price of literary fiction, butalso the difference in typical prices between school reading books and scienceor Greek textbooks. Weedon also considers the international role of British pub-lishers, in terms of the value of export, and in regard to the political, religious, andcommercial implications of British textbooks being routinely used in colonialschools.

The strongest chapters are those which are focused on explaining the patternsand trends discernible from the database. The other chapters are less coherent

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although Chapter 1 will be useful reading for anyone about to encounter publishers’archives and account books for the first time. Weedon offers a great deal of impor-tant statistical information in this book, but there is much more work to be doneusing the database. Historians of publishing are now able to ask questions that wecould not previously hope to answer.

National University of Ireland, Galway

2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Andrew Rosen,

The transformation of British life, 1950–2000: a social history

(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003. Pp. xi

+

211. 14 figs. 19 tabs.£42.50; pbk. £9.99)

Britain, according to Rosen, was a very different place in 2000 from what it hadbeen in 1950. Changes in patterns of employment, education, housing, transport,diet, and religious practice meant that the very nature of life in Britain ‘altered sogreatly as to have been transformed’ (p. ix). Though the notion that British societyin this period was transformed is nothing new (having been explored by, amongothers, Arthur Marwick in

British society since 1945

), this book’s novelty lies partlyin its topical rather than chronological approach. This enables Rosen to delineatethemes and make linkages between seemingly disparate developments. He notesthat standards of living and quality of life rose over the last 50 years of the twentiethcentury, while at the same time support for orthodox institutions such as themonarchy and marriage declined. This, he asserts, facilitated the emergence of amore diverse society, one in which previously marginalized groups such as womenand ethnic minorities could come to play a greater role. Changes in the provisionof education, in particular the expansion of universities, were, according to Rosen,indicative of this process: women outnumbered men in higher education from the1990s and proportionally more individuals from ethnic minority groups attendeduniversity than whites.

Rosen contends that, in ridding itself of restrictive orthodoxies, Britain hasbecome more comfortable with embracing a variety of influences: from within, fromEurope, and from North America. This argument is neatly encapsulated in astimulating chapter on changes in British architecture. Eclecticism in the style oflate twentieth-century buildings, for Rosen, reflects the diversity of modern Britishlife. Yet, diversity does not necessarily equate with equality. Not everyone benefitedfrom the rise in standards of living: between 1979 and 1994/5 disposable incomefor the UK population as a whole rose by 42 per cent, whereas for the bottom 10per cent of the population disposable income fell by 8 per cent (p. 30). Moreover,ethnic minorities and women continued to be under-represented in the upperechelons of business and political life.

Although Rosen is sensitive to these discrepancies, his account sometimes under-plays their significance. By asking ‘Who would disagree that British life has becomemuch less hide-bound than it was in 1950? Not many thoughtful women, surely,nor many homosexuals’ (pp. 7–8), Rosen ignores the subtle and nuanced ways inwhich the lives of many within British society continued to be restricted. Thisreflects a more general lack of depth in the analysis of some key developments.Rosen is much better at showing how things changed, through an excellent use ofstatistics, than at explaining why. Nevertheless, his book remains a solid introduc-tion to the profound changes in British life in the late twentieth century. It is

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accessible, clear, and concise, and will be useful for students of the period, as wellas all those trying to make sense of contemporary Britain.

University of Birmingham

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


GENERAL

Olivia Remie Constable,

Housing the stranger in the Mediterranean world: lodging,trade, and travel in late antiquity and the middle ages

(Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2004. Pp. xii

+

427. 12 ills. 4 maps. £45)

This valuable and insightful study traces the history of a particular term—the Greek

pandocheion

, Arabic

funduq

, and western medieval

fondaco

and its variants—fromthe Roman period through to the early sixteenth century. At the same time itpursues the evolution of the institutions which the term described, showing bothhow these derived from a common set of social and economic facilities in theRoman

pandocheion

, a general hostel for all travellers and merchants, and how theyevolved into a much broader range of distinct establishments with private and publicmercantile functions, state fiscal attributes, semi-diplomatic and ambassadorialaspects, and the role of simple hotels or hostelries. The book follows a broadlychronological framework, although the themes which bring out each of these varieddevelopments are woven into this framework to produce a rich, easily followed, andinformative presentation and analysis of the evidence. Beginning with a generalsurvey of the

pandocheion

as a ‘cross-cultural institution in late antiquity’, the bookexamines in the first chapter the role and appearance of such institutions in the lateRoman and early Byzantine periods, and proceeds in Chapter 2 to a discussion ofthe transition from Byzantine to early and middle Islamic forms, as evidenced inthe appearance and spread of the term

funduq

. Such establishments are shown tobe not simply hostels for travellers and merchants with appropriate facilities (forthe storage of goods, for example, and the provision of transport) but also—indifferent measure according to period and circumstances—foci for both social-communal and charitable activities and functions. The changing role of the

funduqs

which housed western merchants from the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and inparticular the greater degree of local supervision over their occupants and activitiesexercised by local Islamic authorities, is the subject of the next chapter and leadsin turn to the analysis of the

fondaco

as the major institution regulating westerntrade and commerce in Islamic cities. Comparable institutions, albeit under differ-ent names—such as

loggia

—evolved in parallel in western commercial centres andports, and in Chapters 5 and 6 the author follows the evolution of the

fondaco

andrelated establishments throughout the Christian Mediterranean. Chapter 7 dealswith the transformations in the role and physical structure of the

funduq

in Islamiccities as changing patterns of commercial space, political oversight and intervention,and international and local trade stimulated the development of a range of newinstitutions which better answered the needs of the times; and the next chaptertakes up the story of the continued evolution of the western

fondaco

and its centralrole as a point of contact between the two political, economic, and cultural spheresof Islam and Christianity, through what is referred to as the

fondaco

system. Thefinal chapter surveys the multiple shifts in meaning of the term in its western

592

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©


contexts, and shows how far the terms

funduq

and its equivalents, on the one hand,and

fondaco

, on the other, had diverged as a result of western commercial expansionafter the eleventh and especially the twelfth century. In summary, this is a readable,scholarly, and well-researched book which neatly synthesizes a very wide range ofsource materials and offers significant new insights into the ways in which thewestern Christian and Islamic worlds interacted through commerce, politics, andcultural exchange over a period of almost a thousand years.

University of Birmingham

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


Mark Potter,

Corps and clienteles: public finance and political change in France, 1688–1715

(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Pp. x

+

217. 8 figs. 21 tabs. £45)

Potter’s study rests on a regional comparison between the financial source materialemanating from the activity of the estates of Burgundy and the much less interest-ing, and scarcer, documentary evidence from Normandy in the period of LouisXIV’s later wars. The result shows some of the weaknesses of the doctoral disser-tation worked into book form. The source material for an analysis of subordinatecredit structures in the two provinces is heavily skewed towards the Burgundiancase. A total of 583 examples, compared with 61 for Upper Normandy.

Potter argues the case for a ‘“learning curve” in which kings and their ministersacted to avoid the political costs that their predecessors faced as they attempted tofinance war’ (p. 189). He contends that a fundamental change took place in thelater years of Louis XIV’s reign in ‘how the crown targeted the elite for financialsupport’. ‘Whereas Richelieu and Mazarin took negotiating stances that threatenedto undermine universally the very claims to privileged status enjoyed by membersof the elite, Louis XIV shored up the private hold over both offices and privilegesand then targeted specific groups to intermediate finances’ (p. 190). The difficultyhere is that Potter focuses on the period from 1689 to 1715 (‘not only the

formative

but the only truly

expansive

period of intermediation by privileged corps’: p. 14)and provides no detailed analysis of the earlier period, instead resting on assump-tions drawn from secondary sources.

In reality, Potter’s evidence leads less towards innovation than towards substan-tiating the well-known argument that the venal office-holding corps ‘were not aswell positioned to intermediate finances for the crown with the same degree ofindependence as the Estates of Burgundy’ (p. 180). Whereas ‘every last

livre

com-mitted by the Estates’ to repurchase unwanted fiscal expedients was transferred tothe crown, in the case of a sample of

traités

only a quarter of the reduced amountsrequired from Upper Normandy had been paid by 1713 (pp. 119, 120). As Potterpoints out, the venal office-holders depended upon the crown’s timely payment of

gages

merely to pay the interest on their debts, while the estates were able to ‘protectthe integrity of mortgaged revenues even when confronted by a crown ready toredirect them’ (pp. 179, 180). There is some solid material in this study, but certainslips have not been corrected: most noticeably, graph 4.1 at p. 105 which has neithervalues nor dates on the axes.

University of Leicester

2004

LVII

3Book Reviews


BOOK REVIEWS

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©


Brenda Collins and Philip Ollerenshaw, eds.,

The European linen industry in historicalperspective

(Pasold studies in textile history, 13) (Oxford: Oxford University Press,2003. Pp. xxv

+ 334. 1 map. 16 ills. 10 figs. 20 tabs. £55)

This collection of essays is one of the results of a conference, ‘Linen in Europe’,held in 1998 at the Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum. The individual studiesand the editors’ introduction provide a survey and cover specific aspects of thedevelopment of linen manufacture and the linen industry in north-western Europeand Pennsylvania chiefly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Several arti-cles, including the introductory chapter, extend the volume’s coverage, both region-ally and chronologically, to the middle ages and the twentieth century.

The articles are quite diverse, and only a few of the general aspects can behighlighted here. European linen manufacture from the sixteenth century to theearly nineteenth century is an industry ideally suited to analysis in the frameworkof the theories of proto-industrialization. The comparative approaches used inindividual contributions introduce new arguments and conclusions with referenceto the long-observed diversity in the development of linen production in differentEuropean regions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and of its generaldecline. Case studies refer to demand and markets for linen goods by dealing withthe American overseas market and consumption patterns in England in the seven-teenth and eighteenth centuries.

The introduction surveys the English-language literature on the development oflinen production in Europe since the middle ages in the context of the debate onproto-industrialization and addresses some major issues that have been importanttopics of discussion. Among these are the differences in production and marketingorganization and the widespread crisis of the linen industry and linen textile regionsin the first half of the nineteenth century. The de-industrialization of many linenregions and the long failure to modernize production is one of the reasons why thissector has played such a prominent role in theories of proto-industrialization (cf.pp. 22–4). Explaining the failure of the transition to industrialization proper hasbeen a major challenge for some time, and received considerable attention in thevolume by Kriedte, Medick, and Schlumbohm and also in early surveys of thedebate, such as the one by Clarkson (1985).

Some of the answers can be found in individual contributions to this volume.Gray discusses the development and the diverse experience of linen productionin Ireland, Scotland, and Flanders in a critical period by evaluating differentapproaches to ‘proto-industrial growth’, and adopts Pfister’s model of wage andproductivity relationships (pp. 166–7). She reviews in detail the evidence for thesystem first suggested by Mendels and outlined, in theoretical terms. By MedickGray identifies one of the crucial differences by pointing out that in Ireland theproduction of the raw material was not separated from the production of yarn, butthe two activities were separated in Flanders because of regional specialization andin Scotland because the raw material was imported from Europe. This variation inpractice between the locations determined differences in production organizationand wage development. Critically, her interpretation supports earlier suggestionsthat the Irish linen sector grew ‘by underdevelopment’ and was locked into a cheaplabour spiral (p. 184).

The contribution of DuPlessis offers important insights into the structure of theoverseas market often neglected by the supply-centred studies from a European

594 BOOK REVIEWS

© Economic History Society 2004

perspective. Lemire reconstructs the decisive shifts of consumer demand inEngland before 1800. She points to a long-term increase in the cost of linenproduction beginning before the middle of the eighteenth century, which wastriggered by supply-side shocks and one of whose consequences was a shift inLancashire textile production. In the period after 1750, wars in Europe contributedto a series of persistent supply shocks for flax and yarn and these seemed to haveinfluenced the long-term relative differences in price between linen and cottongoods. This would also mean that the continental blockade and the failure ofcontinental linen production to modernize represented only a final step in a processof structural change.

The book also includes a useful glossary of terms related to linen textile produc-tion. It represents an interesting contribution and provides an overview of researchdebates as well as new comparative perspectives on linen production and the marketfor linen textiles.

University of Vienna 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Johann Peter Murmann, Knowledge and competitive advantage: the co-evolution offirms, technology, and national institutions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2004, Pp. xxi + 294. Figs. Tabs. £45; US$60)

While searching for a method to synthesize quinine from coal tar, William HenryPerkin accidentally discovered the first synthetic dye at the Royal College of Chem-istry in 1856, thereby launching a whole new British industry. The British dyeproducers, however, were unable to defend their first-mover advantages and soonlost ground to German chemical firms whose share in the global synthetic dyemarket climbed continuously to reach 85 per cent on the eve of the First WorldWar. In his brilliant attempt to explain the reasons for this change in industrialleadership. Murmann sets new standards for the historical analysis of the dynamicsof international competition.

A careful re-examination of the empirical findings about the performance ofNorth American, British, and German synthetic dye producers from 1856 to 1914at the level of national industries and of individual firms underpins Murmann’sinterpretation of the dynamics of international competition. He sees this as acomplex co-evolutionary process of institutions, technologies, and firms in whichsmall variations in the initial national environment can lead to huge differences inthe long-term development of industries between countries. In Murmann’s viewthe main reason for the meteoric rise of the German synthetic dye industry was thefortunate combination of a relative abundance of organic chemists and the absenceof a national patent law that led to a much higher number of firm entries than inthe North American or British markets where the entry barriers were substantialbecause of patent monopolies and the scarcity of specific human capital. Theinitially high number of German dye producers resulted in fierce price competitionin which only those firms survived that were able to cut costs considerably. Thewinners of this selection process then used their increasing profits to build upindustrial laboratories in which, for the first time in economic history, researchteams searched systematically for economically useful innovations. The steadilygrowing German synthetic dye producers not only accelerated the evolution of thesynthetic dye technology but also succeeded in shaping their institutional environ-

BOOK REVIEWS 595


ment by lobbying for a favourable German patent law and for the strengthening oforganic chemistry in the public education system. These institutional changesincreased the competitiveness of the German firms in a self re-inforcing process.In contrast, their North American and British competitors lacked both the eco-nomic power and the personal links to scientists and politicians to improve theirhome market institutions in a similar way.

Murmann’s sophisticated co-evolutionary theory of industrial leadership consid-erably increases our understanding of the dynamics of international competition.One puzzle, however, remains. According to Murmann, who here relies on an earlywork of Fritz Redlich (1914), the German synthetic dye producers profited bothfrom the absence of a German patent law before 1877 and from its existence in thefollowing decades. More work has to be done to solve this patent paradox thatimplies that a working patent law hinders industries in their infancy but fostersthem when they have matured.

University of Hohenheim 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Leandro Prados de la Escosura, El progreso económico de España, 1850–2000 (Bilbao:Fundacion BBVA, 2003. Pp. 760. 147 tabs. 54 figs. Includes CD-rom. No pricegiven.) Albert Carreras and Xavier Tafunell. Historia económica de la España con-temporanea (Barcelona: Critica, 2004. Pp. xii + 535. Figs. Tabs. €23.50)

Until very recently, a dearth of reliable statistical data on the Spanish economymade it well-nigh impossible to compare the experiences of Spain with those of itsmore advanced neighbours. Moreover, as Prados informs us in the introductionto his magisterial volume on Spanish economic statistics, covering the period1850–2000, there was precious little agreement among his fellow economic histo-rians on such key topics as the impact on the Spanish economy of the Cuban Warof 1895–8, the interwar depression, or the Spanish Civil War of 1936–9. For morethan a decade, Prados circulated provisional estimates among his colleagues insearch of critical comments. And there were many detractors, including themajority of agricultural historians who believed his figures for nineteenth-centuryagricultural output to be far too optimistic. Before the likes of Prados and Car-reras began their investigations in the 1980s, economic historians had to make dowith the rough-and-ready calculations of the state-sponsored Consejo deEconómia Nacional (CEN), which pioneered national income accounting southof the Pyrenees in the mid-1950s, together with later revisions of their findings by,among others, the economists working on Spain’s 1972 Development Plan, JulioAlcaide of the Bank of Spain, and the agronomist Manuel Naredo who was con-vinced that the CEN had seriously underestimated Spain’s economic progressprior to 1936.

In his new book, containing nearly 500 pages of statistical data, Prados distin-guishes three main phases of economic growth during the past century and a half.From 1850 to 1950, he calculated, Spain witnessed slow but continuous long-termgrowth, with per caput GDP increasing by 0.71 per cent per year. Between 1950and 1974 (Spain’s ‘golden age’), per caput GDP rose by an unparalleled 5.23 percent—seven times the rate for the previous century—before declining to 2.71 percent per annum in the period 1975–2000. Over the 150 years as a whole, the annual

596 BOOK REVIEWS


rate of growth, in per caput terms, was a respectable 1.96 per cent. In other words,those economic historians who insist on contrasting Spain’s ‘failure’ in the nine-teenth century with twentieth-century ‘success’ have got it badly wrong. Within thebigger picture, Prados detects a succession of periods of intense growth, followedby clear evidence of deceleration. Indeed, it is the extent and magnitude of thesephases of slowing down that explain why Spain today lags behind the rest ofWestern Europe and the United States. Between 1850 and 1883, when the Spanisheconomy was opened up, economic growth was significantly faster than for theperiod 1883–1920, itself marked by tariff protection, exclusion from the goldstandard, and incipient economic nationalism. The pronounced rise in per caputGDP from 1920 to 1929—no thanks to the ‘oligopolization of the Spanish econ-omy’ under the Primo de Rivera dictatorship—in turn gave way to a sharp drop in1929–52, due to the world slump (whose impact was felt less intensely in Spainthan elsewhere), the political and social climate of the Second Republic, and themistaken autarkic policies of early Francoism. Finally, despite Spain’s disappointingeconomic performance between 1974 and 1986, high rates of per caput growthduring the second half of the past century finally permitted the country to startclosing the gap on its competitors.

Carreras and Tafunell, in their beautifully written economic history of contem-porary Spain, focus on the twin topics of economic growth and incomplete con-vergence. Aimed at the general public, and without a single footnote, these authorsadopt an essentially chronological approach. Spain is presented as a peripheralnation, remote from the heart of Europe, with the Pyrenees acting as a barrier tointernational trade. The Iberian nation, they tell us, was blessed with an abundanceof sunshine, which lately has proved highly advantageous for the burgeoning touristsector. By contrast, it was a clear disadvantage for a large part of peninsularagriculture, itself the perennial victim of inadequate levels of rainfall. Although wellendowed with supplies of minerals, not least lead, iron, mercury, and copper,important during the first stage of industrialization, the country’s industrial devel-opment was held back by a lack of high-grade domestic coal. Carreras and Tafunellcalculate that per caput GDP rose by 0.9 per cent in the period 1850–1913, by 2.0per cent between 1913 and 1929, and by 5.3 per cent (very similar to Prados’sfigures) from 1950 to 1975. Spain’s twentieth-century economic growth is por-trayed as ‘strongly discontinuous’, compared with ‘slow but continuous growth’from the middle of the nineteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War.In particular, 1930–50 constituted nothing short of a disaster, during which a ‘lostgeneration’ of Spaniards were forced to make enormous sacrifices. Overall, theyargue, 1800–1950 witnessed ‘the consummation of Spanish economic backward-ness’, largely explained by the fact that northern Europe grew more rapidly. For itspart, the second half of the twentieth century was characterized by a so far unful-filled effort at convergence. A theme of the book is that the entire economic historyof contemporary Spain is best seen from the perspective of the difficulties that thenation encountered in its attempt to overcome the state of relative economicbackwardness and its inability to achieve this.

These two major works together reflect recent important advances made in thediscipline of economic history south of the Pyrenees. Prados’s invaluable collectionof economic statistics, covering the period since 1850, will surely satisfy his modestambition to bring about a more rigorous debate on Spain’s long-term economicprogress. Carreras and Tafunell’s first-rate textbook, meanwhile, offers the general

BOOK REVIEWS 597


reader numerous fascinating insights into the mixed fortunes of the Spanish econ-omy in the contemporary period.

University of Manchester 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Hubert Bonin, Yannick Lung, and Steven Tolliday, eds., Ford, 1903–2003: theEuropean history (Paris: P. L. A. G. E., 2003. 2 vols. Pp. 610; 629. 22 figs. 314 ills.106 tabs. €150)

In recent years, several articles on aspects of Ford’s operations in Europe haveappeared in journals and books in various languages, but no single work has coveredthe whole subject. This book fills a gap in the history of Ford’s first century bybringing together the contributions of 28 scholars.

The chapters have been grouped together coherently to reveal a complex corpo-rate history, relating to central themes in economic and business history, such asglobalization, technology transfer, convergence and divergence in production sys-tems, multinational development of corporations, and development and diffusionof corporate culture. The first volume focuses on cross-national issues. Threechapters (by M. Wilkins, S. Tolliday, and G. Bordenave) address the developmentof Ford’s multinational structures and the evolution of Ford in Europe. Two others(by M. Freyssenet and P. Fridenson) deal with Ford and the development ofproductive models. Walter Kaiser analyses Ford’s R&D strategies, and ThomasFetzer examines industrial relations across Ford’s European branches. Three furtherchapters look at strategic issues: Bernard Jullien examines the development ofFord’s distribution network, Bonin investigates the development of Ford’s brandimage, and Lung examines Ford’s merger and acquisition strategies. In addition,Elizabeth Adkins analyses the development of the Ford archives, and Bonin inves-tigates the interaction between Ford, its German subsidiary, and the Nazi regimeduring the Second World War by analysing new evidence recently disclosed bythe company. The second volume includes essays on the development of Ford’snational branches in Europe, covering Great Britain, Germany, France, theNetherlands, Scandinavia, Spain, Italy, Turkey, and Russia.

Collectively, the two volumes shed light on important issues such as why Fordwas more successful in some European countries than in others, and why thecompany pursued different strategies in different countries. By revealing the mech-anisms of interaction between multinationals and the host countries on the onehand, and between a firm’s branches in different countries on the other, the workilluminates how those mechanisms shape the strategies of multinationals and ulti-mately affect their growth. This seems to be this project’s most important contri-bution to the historical knowledge both of Ford Europe and of the European carindustry as a whole.

The growth of Ford as a multinational organization is obviously connected withthe issue of developing productive models within the economic and social settingsshaping the environment in which each specific firm evolved. This is one of thecentral themes in the current debate on the car industry. In this respect, Freyssenetmakes an important distinction between the generic category of ‘Fordism’, whicherroneously includes Taylorism and Sloanism, and a more precise definition of the‘Fordian’ production setting. This aimed to sacrifice flexibility in production in the

598 BOOK REVIEWS


quest for cycle time minimization under the assumption of stability in demandgrowth and egalitarian distribution of income, while Sloanism’s objective was toexpand product flexibility, and Taylorism aimed to optimize the production processas a whole rather than just the time cycle. Such a distinction is important in thecontext of determining whether Ford Europe deployed the ‘Fordian’ model orinstead developed hybrids. The contributions on Ford national branches confirmthe view that the assumptions underpinning the Fordian model were rarely consis-tent with the economic and social settings of the different areas in which the firmoperated. Hence, the implementation of models of mass production within thedifferent Ford branches was never ‘standardized’, and neither was the way in whichcompetitors adopted and adapted the Ford production model.

Accordingly, the book shows the complexity of production planning and controlfor multinational firms, where externalities (including import legislation, weak-nesses and strengths in the supply chain, shifts in interest rates, and labour legis-lation) as well as internal power struggles led to a geographical distribution ofproduction facilities that could not be explained simply by an operations manage-ment logic. In this sense, the case of Ford Europe is relevant to analysing andexplaining why the European industry built up overcapacity in the past and how itis currently trying to deal with the problem. In this respect, it is important to pointout that Bordenave explains the decline of Ford Europe in the early twenty-firstcentury as a consequence of the general downturn in trading conditions within theEuropean Union as well as of the difficulties that Ford faced in positioning itsproduct in a distinctive way in each of the market segments. None the less, thebook as a whole makes it easy for the reader to deduce that the reasons for Ford’sdecline go beyond the internal organizational and marketing weaknesses of thecompany, and the external lack of opportunities induced by the business cycle. Likeall other European manufacturers, Ford appears to be constrained in its strategiesby a number of factors preventing the company from rationalizing production anddealing effectively with overcapacity. Ford’s failed attempt to merge with Fiat,examined by both Lung and Volpato, is just one example of how difficult it is forthe European car industry as a whole to rationalize its structure. Had the mergerbeen successful, the recent history of Ford (and, probably, of the whole Europeancar industry as well) would have been different.

In any case, by analysing production strategies as well as mergers and acquisi-tions, the book offers background material that should appeal to those interestedin investigating and explaining the financial performance of Ford both diachroni-cally and synchronically. The need for such analysis has been underlined by therecent wave of studies on the response of operations to the increasing need forexpanding shareholder value.

The distinctive characteristic of the whole project is that by addressing specificissues in the history of Ford’s European operations, the work refers to a number of‘big themes in social science’ and indeed to a wide range of current issues in theanalysis of the car industry. However, it is left to the reader to interpret how theFord Europe case study relates to a range of more general issues in economic andbusiness history, and the work would have profited if each individual chapter hadbeen linked more explicitly to those themes.

Despite these shortcomings, the volumes offer many answers to interesting ques-tions, and new questions on many interesting issues in a number of disciplineswithin the social sciences. This makes the work both interesting and enjoyable fora wide audience ranging from economic and business historians to experts in

BOOK REVIEWS 599


strategic and operations management and, of course, it is also an important workof reference for those researching and writing on the car industry.

Queen Mary, University of London 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Paul R. Gregory and Valery Lazarev, eds., The economics of forced labour: the SovietGulag (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2003. Pp. xi + 212. Figs. Tab. Pbk. £15)

The systematic use of forced labour in the Soviet Union began in 1926 andeventually spawned a vast system of prisons, camps, psychiatric hospitals, andspecial laboratories—the Gulag, which at its peak in the early 1950s had a prisonpopulation of 2.5 million. Within months of Stalin’s death in 1953, however, thispopulation had fallen by about 60 per cent as a result of an amnesty. Although theGulag continued to exist until the fall of the Soviet Union, it is the period from thelate 1920s until the early 1950s that is the focus of this volume. Gulag prisonerswere used to expand both infrastructure and output, particularly in remote regionswhich had plentiful natural resources but where the harsh conditions discouragedfree labour. The geographical remoteness and climatic harshness of these regionsalso made it more difficult for prisoners to escape and so reduced the costs ofrunning the Gulag. Gulag labour came to account for about 2 per cent of the totallabour force of the Soviet Union but it was far more significant in certain indus-tries, such as construction (where it accounted for 20 per cent), mining, andlumber.

Notable accounts of life in the Gulag include the work of Alexander Solzhenitsyn,especially the three volumes of The Gulag archipelago, but this book is one of thefirst to provide a scholarly account, by both Western and Russian scholars, usingarchive material that has become available since the demise of the Soviet Union. Itopens with a chapter by Gregory that provides a good introduction to the economicsof the Gulag, and concludes with a piece by Lazarev drawing together the variouslessons of the book. In between are three chapters that provide a broad overviewof the history of the Gulag in this period and five that focus on particular areas andaspects of the system. The latter include two chapters on Norillag, a camp innorthern Siberia which at its peak had a population of almost 100,000; two chapterson the Gulag in Karelia, the region bordering Finland, one of which discusses theWhite Sea-Baltic Canal, which was the first major infrastructure project undertakenby the Gulag; and a chapter on Dalstroi, a penal agency in the north east of theSoviet Union, sandwiched between the Pacific and Arctic Oceans, which was thelargest entity in the Gulag.

The harshness of the system, in terms of the loss of freedom, malnutrition, andloss of life, is not ignored, but the key issue is the relative importance of the politicaland the economic: the tension between the need of the Soviet system for politicalpunishment and ‘re-education’ and the potential economic exploitation of thehuman resources of the Gulag. For example, in Chapter 6 David Nordlanderexplicitly asks whether the ‘pace and scale of arrests’ were ‘shaped by industrialgoals’, or were ‘merely a function of political interests’ (p. 105). In the case ofDalstroi, he argues that economic motives dominated initially, to the extent thatthe arrest, trial, and conviction of specialist engineers was the result of the agency’sneed for such technicians, but that with the purges of the late 1930s political factorscame to the fore. Elsewhere, Khlevnyuk argues that the White Sea-Baltic Canal was

600 BOOK REVIEWS


a waste of resources (although Morukov believes that it had some strategic benefits),Tikhonov asserts that ‘a consistent theme throughout the Gulag archives is that theGulag system cost more than it produced’ (p. 72), and Lazarev feels that one ofthe main economic problems was the short-run view taken by Gulag accountingwhich meant that a ‘large part of the fixed cost of coercion fell below the Gulag’sradar screen’ (p. 194). Furthermore, the role of incentives within the system cannotbe ignored; for example, by the early 1950s Gulag labour was receiving wages, atabout 15 per cent of the level of workers in comparable civilian employment, witha productivity which was only about 50 per cent of theirs.

Overall this volume is well balanced in terms of chapters that provide breadthand those that provide depth and, given its relatively short length, would make anexcellent introduction for students to the Gulag and its associated issues.

London School of Economics and Political Science 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Paul R. Gregory, The political economy of Stalinism: evidence from the Soviet secretarchives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xi + 308. 19 figs. 28tabs. £65; pbk £21.99)

Paul Gregory takes the reader inside government ministries and Party offices inorder to establish how the Soviet command economy functioned. His main findingis that the system relied upon a hierarchy of dictators, each of whom was well versedin the arts of coercion. This hierarchy or ‘nested dictatorship’, and not the person-alities of the dictators themselves, determined the operation of the system. At theapex stood the Politburo and Gosplan, which took strategic decisions relating toinvestment, foreign exchange, and grain procurements, while inflicting often arbi-trary and impossible tasks on their subordinates. Beneath the principals stoodthousands of petty dictators who sought to preserve their own difficult position byopportunistic behaviour (wheeling and dealing) and by cajoling their underlings inturn. Much of this story will be familiar to readers of the classic studies of Sovietmanagers by Joseph Berliner and David Granick, who relied upon interviews withSoviet émigrés after the Second World War. Gregory goes a stage further by exam-ining the behaviour of key people at the heart of the decision-making process. Hedraws upon his own archival research and the research of Russian historians suchas Oleg Khlevniuk. He peppers his argument with some graphic excerpts fromStalin’s personal correspondence with Molotov, Kaganovich, and Ordzhonikidze.

Chronologically, the book concentrates on the 1930s and 1940s and thus on theorigins and maturation of the command economy. Thematically, it is divided intochapters dealing in turn with the origins and application of coercive mechanismsfor extracting surplus, principles of governance, investment and wages, strategicdecision-making, industry and enterprise planning, and fiscal and monetary policy.Gregory provides telling detail of Stalin’s readiness to use force to secure grain fromthe peasantry in pursuit of accumulation, but confirms that there was no net transferof resources from the agricultural to the non-agricultural sector. He reaffirms thecentralization and personalization of power, the neutralization of the Politburo, andthe emasculation of the Party congress. In an illuminating chapter on the investmentcycle, he demonstrates Stalin’s preoccupation with ‘provisioning the workers’ inorder to secure work effort, as in 1933 and 1937. A chapter on the control figuresaptly characterizes the various plans as ‘indecipherable’. The Stalin who emerges

BOOK REVIEWS 601


from these pages is someone who understood economics, who was obsessed withminutiae which the system itself ensured would invariably reach his desk, and whosecontrolling devices were literally bread and circuses.

It is hard not to agree with Gregory’s conclusion that the system ultimatelyproduced sclerosis. Why, then, did it survive for 60 years, often with a modestcomplement of planners and an abacus apiece? In a relatively brief aside, Gregoryspeculates that officials utilized off-the-record information of various kinds to makedecisions. Here, as in other areas, there is scope for further research. Meanwhile,Gregory has blazed an exciting trail. All students of Soviet economic history willbenefit from reading this book.

University of Manchester 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Roderick A. McDonald, ed., Between slavery and freedom: Special magistrate JohnAnderson’s journal of St Vincent during the apprenticeship (Mona: University of theWest Indies Press, 2001. Pp. viii + 309. Ills. Maps. US$30)

The stipendiary magistrates, who served in the colonies experiencing the ‘appren-ticeship’ system by which slavery was abolished in the British empire, producedsome of the most useful primary source material for scholars of that period.McDonald’s edition of the journal of John Anderson, a stipendiary magistrate inthe eastern Caribbean island of St Vincent from 1836 until his early death in 1839,joins Woodville Marshall’s edition of the journal of stipendiary magistrate JohnColthurst (The Colthurst journal (1977)) in making these sources easily accessibleto students and researchers.

Anderson, a Scottish lawyer, was among those magistrates who gained a reputa-tion as being sympathetic to the planters. While subscribing to the by-then-standardview that slavery was an outdated system in need of abolition, his journal revealshim as hostile and condescending to the formerly enslaved population and to StVincent’s free population of colour. Much of the writing is conventional, includingAnderson’s attacks on the immorality of Vincentian women, his complaints aboutthe inferiority of the Caribbean food and climate, and his presentation of blackpeople as simple, lazy, and dishonest. While interesting in its elaboration of thesestereotypes, the journal is more significant in the occasional insights it gives us intothe operation of the criminal justice system, and in particular into Vincentiancultural politics.

Although it covers the period from Anderson’s departure for St Vincent in late1835 until May 1838, the text is not a record of daily events. Anderson employsoccasional dates as headings, but the main body of the text consists of observationson Vincentian nature, culture, and society, alongside occasional insertions of officialand other documents, including a couple of very interesting notes addressed toAnderson by Afro-Vincentians. These documents are pasted in, not transcribed.The result is a curious hybrid: part scrapbook for personal reference, part colonialtravel narrative produced for publication. Anderson made extensive revisions to hisjournal, entitling it ‘A magistrate’s recollections, or St Vincent, in 1836’, and self-consciously referred to Mrs A. Carmichael’s Domestic manners . . . of the West Indies(1833) and other travel writings about the area. Like so many colonial travellers,he arrived in the colony believing that he already knew what he would find, thenmeasured his observations against his preconceptions.

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McDonald’s thoroughly researched introduction and footnotes, quoting exten-sively from Anderson’s reports to the governor on his duties as magistrate, provideimportant historical and historiographical context. Some readers may be frustratedthat, despite his meticulousness in tracking down the sources of obscure quotations,McDonald attempts little analysis of the journal as a piece of writing. Still, hisarchival research, including his important discussion of Anderson’s conflictualrelationship with the Colonial Office, will provide a foundation for future studiesof Anderson’s activity and writing. Anderson’s journal is likely to be much used byhistorians of the period.

University of Newcastle upon Tyne 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Sarah Babb, Managing Mexico: economists from nationalism to neoliberalism (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. xv + 295. 7 figs. Pbk. £12.95)

This book explores the development of the economics profession in twentieth-century Mexico, with a particular focus on the ascendancy eventually achieved thereby neoliberal free-market doctrine. Academic economics first became establishedduring the 1930s at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM).Most graduates were destined for state bureaucratic employment, serving theregime that had emerged from the revolution of 1910–20 under the dominantpolitical party, later called the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). UNAMeconomics had a strongly marxist flavour, so in the 1940s businessmen set up theInstituto Tecnológico de México (later the Instituto Technológico Autónomo deMéxico; ITAM) as a privately funded alternative. However, during the 1950s andearly 1960s, the heyday of rapid Mexican economic growth through ‘stabilizingdevelopment’, the two institutions shared a broadly Keynesian consensus. The PRImoderated its radical stance; business accepted the benefits of state activism. Thenattitudes polarized once again, following the 1968 Tlatelolco student massacre andthe ruling party’s attempts at reaffirming its populist revolutionary tradition byeasing fiscal discipline. Student militants forced the UNAM economics departmentleftward, a trend which the authorities indulged with extra funding and greateracademic freedom. Yet links between the school and state employment were eroded.Credential inflation made a postgraduate degree, preferably foreign, a requisite forappointment as a public sector economist. Those ministries most committed to theexpansionary agenda often favoured recruits with a doctorate from Cambridge,England, where Keynesianism was passing through its terminal, incontinent phase.Meanwhile, the more conservative central bank, in temporary eclipse, cultivatedties with ITAM, which had reshaped its economics teaching along North Americanlines, to emphasize mathematics-based theory courses. Many ITAM alumni beganto go on bank scholarships to postgraduate study at US universities, in particularChicago and MIT, providing a conduit by which neoclassical monetarism couldreach Mexico.

Babb’s account of this sequence up to the early 1980s is well documented andconvincing; her remarks on Mexico since the 1982 debt crisis seem less completelypersuasive. Certain facts are clear enough: the central bank regained influence, US-trained neoliberal technocrats displaced UNAM and Cambridge graduates from allkey economic appointments, and the country gave up radical populism, pursuing

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free-market reform more vigorously than any other major Latin American republicexcept Pinochet’s Chile. Babb notes that the revolution in policy and personnelcame partly as a response to the accumulated burden of foreign debt. Those witha North American background obviously had the best chance of reassuring the IMFand ‘Washington’ creditor opinion. However, she suggests further that the US-styleprofessionalization of economics gave the discipline real authority within thenational ruling elite. This may be so, but her argument here relies heavily onconjecture, because high-level Mexican politics remains opaque. Few of the 50named individuals (p. 277) interviewed by Babb have held a top-rank official post,and her five anonymous sources do not seem any better placed. Perhaps the keypoint is that continuing single party rule in Mexico during the 1980s and 1990s letthe government act decisively and pursue rigorous stabilization measures, a contrastto the common Latin American experience. This perspective could make the tech-nocrats more instruments than prime movers of change. Also, concern for thestability of its southern neighbour persuaded the US to offer Mexico special reformincentives, through relatively generous debt relief terms and through export oppor-tunities under NAFTA. Judging the importance of these possible influences wouldrequire close familiarity with the PRI’s innermost circles, something that is beyondthe reach of an academic researcher.

University of Edinburgh . . 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Frans van Poppel, Michel Oris, and James Lee, eds., The road to independence:leaving home in western and eastern societies, 16th–20th centuries (Bern: Peter Lang,2004. Pp. vi + 450. Figs. Tabs. £42)

Nearly everyone leaves home at some stage in their youth, but the timing of themove and the underlying reasons vary according to the circumstances of eachindividual. Debates among demographic historians have stimulated interest in thetopic since the 1970s. In particular, John Hajnal has highlighted the peculiar featureof household formation systems in north-western Europe during the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries, whereby before marriage young people often circulatedbetween households as servants. David Reher added a further refinement, bycontrasting the weak family systems of northern Europe, where young adults lefthome relatively early, with the strong family ties of the Mediterranean, where thedefinitive departure normally came only with marriage and a steady job. However,historians have been aware that such broad generalizations mask many geographicaland historical variations. This book is the outcome of a conference on ‘The leaversand the stayers in the household in EurAsian society’, which aimed to flesh out thepicture by studying long-term developments in the process of leaving home inculturally different localities. The book covers seven European countries, the UnitedStates, and Japan, although the case studies focus mainly on local communitiesrather than on national patterns. Underpinning all the contributions are four issues:the influence of dominant household formation rules, the impact of economic orfamily crises, the possibility that families followed a strategy taking into account theages, gender, and rank order of their children, and variations attributable to socio-economic or ethnic differences within a society.

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The great strength of the work is the rigorous methodology adopted by all of thecontributors, with exemplary discussion of the sources and methods used, as wellas the findings. The researchers make full use of qualitative as well as quantitativesources, drawing in some cases from autobiographies, diaries, and oral testimony,as well as from such material as census registers, civil registration documents, andnotarial archives. Many of the historians will be familiar to readers of this journalfrom their earlier work using the same source material, as in the cases of Mary JoMaynes using workers’ autobiographies from France and Germany, Colin Pooleyand Jean Turnbull adapting data on migration in Britain, and the late TamaraHareven with her family histories from the Amoskeag mills. The collection bringsout a number of economic and cultural influences on the transition to adulthood.Its first section assembles studies of leaving home in nuclear family societies,featuring England and Wales, Scania (in Sweden), the Belgian Ardennes, andVenice. The second section provides a useful contrast by considering examples fromstem family societies, in the Pyrenees, Tuscany, and north-eastern Japan. Finally,there is a section devoted to the motivation behind leaving home, based on French,US, British, and Dutch case studies. A number of themes emerge, including thetendency in the past for females to leave home earlier than males, the temporaryperiods living away from home that often preceded the definitive move, the ten-dency for the young to leave early following the remarriage of a parent, and theexistence of cultural environments which made some children willing to sacrificetheir marriage prospects in the interests of other family members. All make clearthat, until well into the twentieth century, the interests and preferences of parentsweighed heavily on young people when they were considering jobs and marriageprospects.

This book is undoubtedly a work for specialists in such fields as the history ofthe family, of young people, and of migration. It manages to broaden the horizonsof its topic, provides a wealth of examples for others to draw upon, and is helpfulwith bibliographic references. The editors have managed to impose coherence tothe whole work by setting a helpful agenda for the contributors. However, giventheir aim of illuminating the historical background of current patterns in thetransition to adulthood for the benefit of ‘scholars, social scientists, policymakersand the general public’, the editors might usefully have done more to synthesizethe findings of their conference. The publisher might also have helped some of thenon-native speakers with their English prose style—though it must be said that theimage of children helping their parents ‘to read peas and beans’ (p. 415) is a pleasingone.

University of Nottingham 2004LVII3Book ReviewsBOOK REVIEWSBOOK REVIEWS

Aad Blok and Greg Downey, eds., Uncovering labour in information revolutions, 1750–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. 261. Pbk. £15.95)

There is no shortage of histories of information ‘revolutions’. But, as the editors ofthis supplement to the International Review of Social History explain, much of thisliterature is internalist, focused on technology and corporations, and tends towardstechnological boosterism. Almost all of the recent hyperbolic accounts of the riseof the World Wide Web make their point. The editors argue that, in contrast, the

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impact of information technologies on labour has been neglected. While thismay be true of the post-1945 period, it is not generally so. For example, thereare numerous labour histories of the Victorian office, and the labour componentof telegraph systems has been as extensively studied as the technology and thecorporations.

In fact, only three of the eight chronologically arranged essays in this volume dealwith the period before the Second World War. The first essay describes clericalworkers in eighteenth-century German insurance; the second considers labourdisputes in the early nineteenth-century Indian telegraph. Both are useful interna-tional additions to the existing literature. An essay by Aristotle Tympas describesthe use of human calculating agencies in electrical network planning in the 1930s;this contribution adds to what is now a significant ‘when computers were human’strand of the literature.

Two papers deal with the phenomenon of containerization in the shippingindustry. This subject is fascinating because it is an IT-enabled innovation, ratherthan IT per se, and this helps the reader to avoid being distracted by the tech-nology. Like the impact of supermarket barcodes, that of containerization onsociety has been immense, if largely invisible. Bernard Dubbeld describes theimpact of containerization in Durban in the 1970s and 1980s, and Helen Samp-son and Bin Wu write about developments in Rotterdam over a somewhat longerperiod.

Labour history of the earlier periods tends to portray workers as anonymousdrudges in industrialized offices, rather like their counterparts in factories or textilemills. When we think of modern call centres, the portrayal is perhaps apt. But, asNathan Ensmerger writes in his essay, ‘Computer boys’, this is not how computerprogrammers saw themselves. He describes the evolution of programmers andsoftware engineers in the 1950s and 1960s: ‘Neither laborers nor professionals,they defy traditional categorizations’; their ranks included ‘both high-school drop-outs and ex-Ph.D. physicists’ (p. 154). In the next essay, Chris Benner takes us toSilicon Valley and the formation of IT guilds and cooperatives in the 1990s: newinstitutions on an old model for computer professionals in uncertain times. In thishigh-tech world, employees change their jobs every two or three years, and updatetheir skills as often; their allegiance is to their fellow artisans, not to their employ-ers. Benner argues that Silicon Valley is the crucible of this transformation inemployment and therefore the ideal location for the study of evolving workingpractices.

In the final essay, Hector Postigo looks at the role, in on-line networks, ofvolunteers—those selfless individuals who moderate chat rooms and newsgroupsfor no monetary reward, except free or discounted access to the service. This mightseem a curious definition of ‘labour’, but the difference between a volunteer and apaid charity worker is just a matter of degree. Both are trading their labour for lessthan market value to fulfil non-monetary personal goals.

The slight randomness of this collection, inevitable in an edited volume, isbrought into coherence by an agenda-setting introduction by Blok and a livelysumming up and setting out of a future research agenda by Downey, whoreflects engagingly on his personal history as an information worker. One smallcavil: there is no index. Surely that is what information workers are supposedto do?

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Documents

Between slavery and freedom