------------ EH.NET BOOK REVIEW --------------
Published by EH.NET (August 2007)

Ronald Findlay, Rolf G.H. Henriksson, Hakan Lindgren and Mats 
Lundahl, editors, _Eli Heckscher, International Trade, and Economic 
History_. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. xi + 560 pp. $50 (cloth), 
ISBN" 0-262-06251-8.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Nick Crafts, Department of Economics, 
University of Warwick.


This edited volume contains the proceedings of a 2002 conference 
which marked the fifth anniversary of Eli Heckscher's death. The aim 
of the symposium was "to create a forum where economists and economic 
historians could meet to develop a picture of how relevant 
Heckscher's research program and results are perceived to be by 
current practitioners" (p. x). Each area of Heckscher's scholarship 
gets a separate section (parts II to VI) and there are also sections 
devoted to material of a more biographical nature relevant to the 
development of Heckscher's views on methodology and politics (parts I 
and VII). This review focuses on parts II to VI which are the most 
interesting for the vast majority of the EH.Net audience.

Part II deals with Heckscher-Ohlin Trade Theory and contains chapters 
by Ronald W. Jones and Kevin O'Rourke. The former re-evaluates 
Heckscher's 1919 paper and concludes that its contribution is truly 
seminal. The latter is an interesting econometric analysis of 
attitudes to globalization which concludes that high-skilled workers 
in OECD countries are relatively pro-globalization, as might be 
supposed on a Stolper-Samuelson view of the world. Strikingly, 
however, there is no paper that assesses how much Heckscher-Ohlin 
trade theory still has to contribute to the understanding of trade 
and industrial location in the era of the new international economics 
and the new economic geography.

Part III considers Historical Applications of Heckscher-Ohlin Theory 
and contains papers by Peter Temin, Ronald Findlay and Mats Lundahl, 
and Jeffrey Williamson. The first two are papers that seek to make 
bricks without (much) straw. Temin analyzes trade across the 
Mediterranean Sea in biblical times, while Findlay and Lundahl 
develop a Malthusian model with an endogenous frontier to look at 
demographic shocks in the 800 years ending with the Black Death. This 
is a nice model but seems to owe more to Malthus than to Heckscher. 
Williamson's paper is an excellent econometric analysis of the 
pattern of tariffs during 1870 to 1938 which concludes that this was 
the era when Stolper-Samuelson (factor endowment) arguments mattered 
a lot. The standard of the papers in this section is notably high but 
unfortunately the breadth of the historical coverage is not really 
adequate to fulfil the aspirations of the conference organizers.

Part IV turns to Mercantilism and offers four quite varied papers. 
Lars Magnusson directly addresses the issue of how valuable 
Heckscher's work is nowadays. He argues that although its analysis is 
seriously dated, nevertheless there is still value in the impressive 
command of historical detail. Deepak Lal explains how _Mercantilism_ 
helped him to make sense of cycles of economic repression and reform 
in developing countries. Douglas Irwin summarizes his well-known 
game-theoretic analysis of mercantilist rivalry between the British 
and Dutch East India Companies. Finally, Joel Mokyr uses Heckscher as 
an excuse to develop some interesting points about the role of 
Enlightenment economic thinking -- especially the increasing 
realization that trade was not a zero-sum game -- in stimulating the 
Industrial Revolution. The sub-text of this section seems to be that, 
actually, the current relevance of Heckscher's great work is quite 
limited.

Part V deals with The Continental Blockade, with weighty 
contributions from Francois Crouzet, Lance Davis and Stanley 
Engerman, and Patrick O'Brien. These authors offer differing views as 
to the current value of Heckscher's work. Davis and Engerman conclude 
that, on the whole, it remains an essential work whose 
interpretations are still acceptable, while O'Brien is much more 
critical. He argues that to a modern audience the work seems 
Anglocentric and fails properly to understand how and why the British 
state defeated Napoleon's attempt to close continental markets to 
British trade. Crouzet's position is intermediate in that he sees the 
book as still deserving to be described as a masterpiece but 
nevertheless a rather partisan account.

Part VI is about Swedish Economic History. The most interesting of 
these papers to the general audience of economic historians is 
Lennart Schon's essay on the 1870-1930 period of Swedish 
industrialization. He argues that prior to 1890 this followed a 
Heckscher-Ohlin trajectory based on exports of industrial products 
based on Swedish natural resources but subsequently technological 
progress was more central and a major structural transformation 
ensued. The other two papers in this section are probably for a more 
specialist readership. Johan Soderberg discusses Heckscher's vision 
of economic development and suggests that his thesis that the Western 
world reached its apogee around 1900 is unpersuasive. Mats Morell 
looks at Heckscher's analyses of food consumption in early-modern 
Sweden and suggests that although the conclusions may be more or less 
valid everything else was seriously flawed. Here, too, it seems that 
Heckscher no longer has a great deal to offer.

Overall, this is a collection in which many economic historians will 
find something of interest and the quality of most of the 
contributions is very high. On the other hand, few economic 
historians will want to read the whole set of papers. Those who do 
will quite possibly come to the view that, while Heckscher was indeed 
a major figure in the development both of economics and of economic 
history, his time has gone.


Nick Crafts is Professor of Economic History at the University of 
Warwick. His most recent publication is a volume edited with Ian 
Gazeley and Andrew Newell, _Work and Pay in Twentieth-Century 
Britain_, Oxford University Press, 2007.

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Published by EH.Net (August 2007). All EH.Net reviews are archived at 
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