------------ 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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Published by EH.Net (October 2005). All EH.Net reviews are archived
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