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Published by EH.NET (April 2004)
Harold James, _Europe Reborn: A History, 1914-2000_. Harlow, UK:
Pearson-Longman, 2003. xiv + 492 pp. £13.59 (paperback), ISBN:
0-582-21533-1.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Joel Mokyr, Departments of Economics and History,
Northwestern University.
The cultural bend that has affected academic historians in the past two
decades has produced an odd situation that some might even call a
"contradiction." While an increasing number of academic historians espouse
distinctly left-wing causes and devote their research to one permutation or
another of class, gender, and race, sprinkling their text with quotes from
radical continental philosophers, they seem to know and care less and less
about economic history -- what Marx would call the material conditions of
life. To this reviewer, at least, this state of affairs is not an
equilibrium. Sooner or later post-modernist historians will be forced to
face skeptical graduate students wondering whether such matters as
influenza epidemics or the Great Depression are really devoid of factual
bases worth discussing and indistinguishable from fiction.
In this brilliantly-written and richly-informed general-audience text,
Harold James shows us what an amazing tale can be told about the turbulent
and dramatic years between 1914 and 2000 by an economically informed
historian who sees facts for what they are and not as socially constructed
representations of agents driven by their libido. The book, inevitably,
covers a lot of ground that will be familiar to professionals who teach
this material. Yet throughout the book James displays an enviable
combination of factual knowledge that is both deep and broad and an
economic intuition and social understanding that makes him look in corners
others have missed. James is no economic determinist, but he understands
politics and power as much as he understands taxation, innovation, and
international finance.
The ground covered by James is all of Europe, and history in all its
aspects. To say that 430 pages are hardly enough to cover this topic would
be an understatement. Yet James covers the 1990s with as much panache as he
does the years before World War I. The narrative advances at a breakneck
speed, but here and there he meanders about a bit and gets into details
that many readers may not be familiar with, such as in his discussion of
the career of German Central Banker and Economics Minister Hjalmar
Schacht, or his summary of how the European Common market coordinated
product quality standards in its famous Cassis de Dijon case. James
relishes in little ironies: the foreign minister of Luxembourg telling the
formerly Yugoslav republics that "they were too small for
self-determination" (p. 413). But this book is not only about politics and
economics. In a little two-page reflection on the impact of chemicals on
youth culture, James discusses how the pill and LSD changed youth culture,
citing British poet Philip Larkin as claiming that "sexual intercourse
began in 1963" (p. 308). Indeed.
This is not a very quantitative book; the statistical appendix promised on
the cover blurb turns out to be one little table of population figures, and
there are few figures and graphs. Nor is it, strictly speaking, an
analytical book; there is no single thesis or theme that dominates the
narrative. Nor does it bask in free-market triumphalism or gloat in the
demise of Communism. Instead, the book is full of little insights and
pieces of wisdom that attest to a career of wide reading and informed
reflection. Some of those are quite personal and might be controversial in
some corners: was Poland in the 1980s really "an equivalent of Spain in
the 1930's" (p. 302)? Was De Gaulle's vision of France in 1962 really
"creakily out of date" (p. 249)? Was Ireland in the 1930s really a society
held together "in part by backwardness and in part by the hated memory of
... British domination" (p. 127)? In most instances, however, this book is
enlightening. In explaining the persistence of the Great Depression, for
instance, James points not only to the Gold Standard but also to something
he calls "fiscal rectitude," a felicitous term he illustrates by Ramsay
MacDonald waving banknotes and warning that their fate would be like the
German Mark during the hyperinflation if unorthodox remedies were applied
(p. 120). His assessments of key personalities, from Hitler to Milosevic,
may not please everyone, but James realizes that at some junctures
individual personalities played a pivotal part.
The result, inevitably, is not a balanced narrative. James is particularly
good discussing the seams of history, the short but dramatic episodes in
which powerful nations underwent a "phase transition" such as Russia in
1917, Germany in 1933 and the Communist world in 1989. He has no patience,
for instance, with military history: his account of World War I does not
mention Jutland, Gallipoli or the war in the Middle East. His account of
World War II finds the space to report that Hitler was reading Carlyle's
_Frederick the Great_ but not to mention Rommel or Guderian. Some
countries, including some close to the heart of this reviewer (such as the
Netherlands) get short shrift or nary a mention. The economic history in
the book is of a particular kind: James knows banking and international
finance, he understands economic policy but he has no interest in the
relationship between human capital formation and technological progress,
or in the institutional factors that brought about long-term per capita
growth or the welfare state. The cheapest shot one can take at a book like
this is to complain that the author did not write the kind of book that
the reviewer would have written. It is not possible or even desirable to
write a "balanced" or "fair" account of Europe in the twentieth century:
this is a personal account, a century as seen by one historian, and one
who was visibly having fun while writing it. Read the book, and share
Harold James's fun.
Joel Mokyr is the Robert H. Strotz Professor of Arts and Sciences and
Professor of Economics and History at Northwestern University. His _The
Gifts of Athena: Historical Origins of the Knowledge Economy_ was published
in 2002 by Princeton University Press. He is the editor of the _Oxford
Encyclopedia of Economic History_ (2003).
Copyright (c) 2004 by EH.Net. All rights reserved. This work may be copied
for non-profit educational uses if proper credit is given to the author and
the list. For other permission, please contact the EH.Net Administrator
([log in to unmask]; Telephone: 513-529-2229). Published by EH.Net (April
2004). All EH.Net reviews are archived at http://www.eh.net/BookReview.
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