------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------  
Published by EH.NET (October 2005)  
  
Leandro Prados de la Escosura, editor, _Exceptionalism and   
Industrialisation: Britain and Its European Rivals, 1688-1815_.   
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.  xv + 335 pp., $90   
(hardcover), ISBN: 0-521-79304-1.  
  
Reviewed for EH.NET by Gregory Clark, Department of Economics,   
University of California, Davis and Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg zu   
Berlin.  
  
  
This book, edited by Leandro Prados of Carlos III, Madrid, is a   
Festschrift for the well-known English economic historian Patrick   
O'Brien, the papers for which originated in a conference held in his   
honor in Madrid in 2001.  The contributors include Robert Allen,   
Daniel Baugh, Richard Bonney, Forrest Capie, Nick Crafts, Stanley   
Engerman, Javier Cuenca Esteban, Rainer Fremdling, Knick Harley,   
Christine MacLeod, Larry Neal, James Simpson, James Thompson, and   
Gianni Toniolo.  
  
"When traveling should you eat the local specialties?"  A widely   
circulated economic theorem in the U.S. asserts "No."  If the local   
specialty was any good, it would be available everywhere.  (This   
perhaps explains why American economists have an international, and   
not just a national, reputation for dullness.)  There is a lesser   
known corollary amongst academics which similarly answers "Should you   
read Festschrifts?" with "No, anything good in them is available   
elsewhere."  Given the incentives of academic life, contributors to   
Festschrifts have an unfortunate motive to deliver what is on the   
menu else where, or to offer from the larder something that for good   
reason has been long lying on the bottom shelf untouched.  
  
It is thus a mark of the esteem with which Patrick O'Brien is held by   
his students and colleagues that this volume, though of variable   
quality, contains interesting pieces of original research that are   
unique to this outlet.  The thirteen contributions each give at least   
lip service to detailing what allowed Britain to achieve the great   
lead in industrialization by 1815.  But the diversity of answers   
reveals once again just how mysterious the Industrial Revolution is,   
and how little hope there seems at present of a convincing answer to   
the questions "Why Britain?  Why 1770?"  They are loosely organized   
into six sections labeled respectively: the origins of British   
primacy, agriculture and industrialization, technological change,   
institutions and growth, war and hegemony, and conclusions.  
  
This reviewer found the pieces on agriculture and technology the most   
informative and thought provoking.  Nick Crafts and Knick Harley, for   
example, employ their computable general equilibrium (CGE) model of   
the English Industrial Revolution to ask what explains England's   
unusually low share of employment in agriculture by 1841?  Was it   
population growth, agricultural productivity gains, or the peculiar   
institutional structures of English agriculture?  Their conclusion   
vindicates a long held position of Patrick O'Brien and Caglar Kaydar   
in their 1978 book that England's advantage lay more in very high   
labor productivity in agriculture in the nineteenth century than in   
high industrial labor productivity.  Using the CGE model Crafts and   
Harley argue that had two thirds of English land remained farmed by   
peasant farmers, as they assume for 1770, then the share of labor in   
agriculture in 1841 would have been 47% instead of 22%.  The reason   
this assumption has such a large effect on employment in agriculture   
is that it would imply that two thirds of all land rents in 1841 were   
allocated to subsidizing workers to stay in agriculture.  
  
This conclusion seems, to say the least, a little suspect.  Already   
by 1770 English farmland was mainly owned by large owners and rented   
out for cash rents at market rates to cultivators, who paid the rents   
to the landlords, not to surplus relatives with low value to their   
labor time on the farm.  And there are strong indications that labor   
productivity in English agriculture was already high by 1770 by   
European standards before the Industrial Revolution was under way.   
But agree or disagree, anyone interested in these issues will want to   
read this piece.  
  
James Simpson, in another piece that is original to this volume, also   
supports the O'Brien/Kaydar hypothesis through a consideration of the   
details of English agriculture versus that of its continental   
competitors.  This piece again is a fresh perspective on these issues.  
  
There are three essays on the role of technological change.  The   
first of these, by Christine MacLeod, though just a survey of   
technological developments and their institutional structures in   
Britain and its competitors is well executed, and is an excellent   
introduction to the subject.  The main conclusion is that, if   
anything, institutions in France provided more incentives for   
innovation than those in England in the eighteenth century.  The   
other articles in this section by James Thompson and Rainer   
Fremdling, while not uninteresting, seemed to get lost in the details   
of the innovations discussed and forget the larger question "Why was   
Britain different?"  
  
The sections on institutions and war were less rewarding.  Another   
version of the "restaurant theorem" above is the following.  "Can   
local institutions explain the success of particular economies?  No,   
because if any local institution was particularly valuable it would   
have been copied everywhere."  The authors of these sections seem not   
to have taken on board this maxim, and attribute wonderful powers to   
the most mundane institutional differences.  
  
Every institutional difference between England and less successful   
economies is taken as evidence of the true power and wonder of   
institutions.  No matter how trivial these differences might appear,   
or how little theory there is in advance of what Industrial   
Revolution producing institutions look like, the writers have faith   
they matter. Money, banks, government bonds, taxes, naval   
organization - did any of these make the British Industrial   
Revolution?  To a skeptic it all seems on a par with those fervent   
believers who see Weeping Madonnas in tree stumps.  But with belief   
every institution becomes wondrous, and the power of institutions is   
manifest in every detail of ordinary life.  
  
  
Gregory Clark is author of "Human Capital, Fertility, and the   
Industrial Revolution," _Journal of the European Economic   
Association_ 3 (2005), and "The Condition of the Working-Class in   
England, 1209-2004," _Journal of Political Economy_ (forthcoming,   
December, 2005).  
  
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