French industrialization: The roehl thesis reconsidered

EXPLORATIONS

IN ECONOMIC

HISTORY

18, 415-433 (1981)

French Industrialization: The Roehl Thesis Reconsidered ROBERT

R. LOCKE

University of Hawaii

French industrialization is one of the most controversial subjects in economic history. Until recently most scholars agreed at least that it had been retarded and at times had stagnated; the principal controversies were about the causes of “retardation” and “stagnation.” Now, however, scholars have come to question the thesis of backwardness itself. Richard Roehl’s long article in Explorations in Economic History (1976a) presents one of the latest views of this revisionist school, one that threatens to become very influential.’ Its message was deemed important enough to justify the article’s translation and publication in a major French journal.* Already Donald N. McCloskey, reviewing the triumphs of cliometrics, uses Roehl’s work to question the standard retardation-stagnation interpretation of French industrialization.3 My examination of Roehl’s essay concludes differently. Roehl begins with the supposed paradox of French industrialization. Table 1, which he cites, clarifies the nature of the paradox.4 It shows that 19th~century rates of growth in national product were similar in Britain and France, especially when measured on a per capita basis. Moreover, when British and French growth rates are projected back into the 18th century the results are the same: 18th~century output of French industries grew on the average 1.91% per annum, a rate that was higher than that of the British.’ Accordingly the French per capita increase in national product matched the British over these two centuries. But about 75 years into this 200-year period Britain, as everybody knows, began an industrial revolution. Since the traditional view has been that French * The author read this paper, in a somewhat different form, before a student-faculty group in the Department of History, University of Manchester (March 10th) and a gathering in the Max-Planck-Institut, Giittingen (June 2nd), 1978. ’ Roehl (1976a). ’ RoehI (1976b). ’ McCloskey (1978), p. 23. ’ Roehl (1976a), p. 237. ’ Roehl, (1976a), p. 243. Also see Marczewski (l%l), p. 375, Marezewski (1%3), and Crouzet (1966), p. 266. 415 0014-4983/81/040415-19$02.00/O CopyhSht 0 lwll by Academic Press, Inc. All &hts of reproduction in any form mservui.

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industrialization was retarded and stagnant how was it possible for French national production to keep pace with British after as well as before the onset of the industrial revolution? Roehl’s statistics, then, evoke this paradox: one country, France, that did not revolutionize its industries, kept pace with another country, Britain, that did. Roehl resolves the paradox with this statement: The conventional picture is roughly as follows. The French economy in the early modem period, until, say, the late 17th century, is relatively strong and healthy; by the 19th it is troubled and stagnant. Though the chronology of the transition, from 17th century wealth and power to 19th-century retarded industrialization, is rather imprecise, nevertheless the 18th century usually appears as the period during which those roots of subsequent problems are implanted. I wish instead to maintain here the proposition that something different is occurring in 18th century France-specifically, that modem economic growth has its beginnings there. The 19th century then ceases to be paradoxical and becomes fully explicable: it represents the continuation of a long-term trend of economic growth.6

The idea is not original. It only echoes conclusions voiced somewhat earlier by French and American scholars, conclusions based primarily on econometric studies done in the French Institute of Applied Economics. These studies prove that France was, as one of the leading revisionist, T. J. Markovitch, asserted,” . . . the first industrial power in the world, not only in the eighteenth but even in the beginning of the nineteenth century,” that is, well after the British industrial revolution had begun.’ The statistics upon which Roehl’s case rests are not the first on French industry. But they are the first to produce such a radical reinterpretation. Since nothing seems to be seriously wrong with previous statistics, how has the statistical basis for such revisionism been achieved? The answer: by changing the definition of industrialization to include proto-industrialization. The latter refers to the extensive industrialization that occurred in rural Europe in the handicraft or domestic manufacturers from the 16th to the 19th century. This industrialization, which fed products into an expanding stream of national and international trade, became the productive base of a comparatively rich and powerful, Western European centered, world economy. The statistical surveys of French industry prepared in the 1840s and 186Os, on which the standard “retardationview depends, had ignored proto-industrialization. Consestagnation” quently, they, Roehl and others feel, greatly underestimated the growth of total product and hence overall French industrial development. This “error” has been corrected in recent works of quantification. And the combination of handicraft production with modern factory pro6 Roehl (1976a), p. 238. ’ Markovitch (1966), p. 317. Also see Markovitch

(1968) pp. 578479.

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duction has generated dramatic revisionist statistics. Markovitch has, Roehl observes, been able to push the date when French industrial production surpassed agricultural from 1885 back to 1790, a year that compares very favorably with the British (1810).* Such evidence convinces Roehl that France went into sustained industrialization in the 18th century and continued to industrialize at a quite respectable rate thereafter. The country never had a “retarded” economy, nor, except for very brief periods, did its economy stagnate. My objections to Roehl’s resolution of the paradox can be clarified by looking briefly at two terms frequently employed in economic history: growth and industrialization. In a well-known study D. C. North and R. P. Thomas define growth as follows: “In speaking of economic growth we refer to a per capita long-run rise in income. True economic growth thus implies that the total income of society must increase more rapidly than population.“’ Industrialization, on the other hand, is defined by W. W. Rostow in How It All Began. “What distinguishes the world since the industrial revolution from the world before,” he wrote, “is the systematic, regular and progressive application of science and technology to the production of goods and services. “lo Growth and industrialization, as defined, are not, then, the same thing. Growth, that is, a per capita rise in income, can occur because of industrialization, but it can also occur without “the systematic, regular and progressive application of science and technology to the production of goods and service.” Although Roehl employs the two terms interchangeably, data on growth are used almost exclusively to buttress his revisionist claim. One of his prime sources, Markovitch, for example, ignores the technological distinctions basic to Rostow’s definition of industrialization. Markovitch in fact reduces technologically oriented 19th~century industries (mining, chemicals, iron, etc.) to positions of minor importance within the total, proto-industrial-dominated, French productive framework.” Whereas, his figures show that, as late as the Second Empire, the metal industries (extraction and fabrication) only produced 6% of total national product, the technologically slow-moving building trades and public works accounted for more than 50% and food processing for 16% of industrial production. True the figure for textiles, a technologically progressive industry, was also high (33%) on Markovitch’s index but textiles was also a very large, technologically backward, proto-industry. There is, however, no reason to belabor the point. Proto-industrialization oc* If home manufacture for home consumption is eliminated the date for France is, according to Jean Marczewski, about 1840, that is, not so favorable to France. See remarks on the debate in Mendels (1972), pp. 258-259; and Marczewski (1%5). 9 North and Thomas (1973), p. 1. ” Rostow (1975), p. 2. ” Markovitch in Cameron et al. (1970), p. 234,

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cut-red, by common acknowledgement, during a period of relative technological stagnation. By stressing it, Roehl automatically downplays science and technology. Nobody really denied the excellent per capita growth rates in 18thcentury France. Nobody, moreover, denies that proto-industrialization contributed significantly (more significantly than the newer technologically oriented industries of the industrial revolution) to early 19th~century per capita growth. Nobody, in addition, should deny Roehl’s point that French rates of economic growth were respectable throughout the 19th century. The question is, do these data on growth refute a retardation-stagnation thesis? Obviously the proto-industrial emphasis cannot refute the thesis if retardation-stagnation is defined in scientifictechnological terms. If Roehl uses the proto-industrial argument, therefore, he cannot accept the Rostowian definition of industrialization. Unfortunately Roehl has really not quite understood this fact. He, who emphasizes the nontechnological proto-industrial nature of the l&h- and 19th~century French economy, devotes considerable space in his article to proving French technological prowess in both these centuries. He states, for example, that “Possibly the safest thing to say of French technological borrowing in the 18th century is that it was internationally eclectic, and reveals no crucial dependence of French economic development upon the technology afforded by any single nation.“‘* Correct, but why defend French technology since economic development was not, in the 18th century, its attribute.13 He admits that the French borrowed from the British in the 19th century but only in certain industries, e.g., textiles, iron, and railroads. Then he adds: “To concede that the French were indeed borrowing technology from Britain in some of the lines in which the British were making real technological advances in the late 18th and first half of the 19th century, however, is not equivalent to establishing total French dependence upon Britain, across the board of industrial technologies.“‘4 But why should there be “total dependence?” The French borrowed from British industries that were technologically progressive. The industries that were technologically stagnant would not be a source of transfer. French dependence industrially, then, would be only partial even if that dependence were complete. The general thesis, in fact, suffers from the confusion of growth with industrialization. A. S. Milward and S. B. Saul point out that judgments about French performance vary according to whether the topic is growth ‘* Roehl (1976a). p. 251. I3 Technology did, of course, improve during the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries. Most authorities agree, however, that the improvements were not decisive contributions to increased productivity. See Kellenbenz in Lton, (1972), Singer (1947), and Landes (1970). ” Roehl (1976a), p. 252.

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or development. Although French growth rates can be considered to have been quite respectable, they wrote, “Once the problem is seen as one of relative economic development the conclusion to be drawn must be a different one. The gap in the volume of industrial output and in the level of technological development between France and her major competitor, Britain, which seems to have been closing in the eighteenth century, widened [in the nineteenth].“” The historians Roehl identifies with the retardation-stagnation thesis-from J. D. Clapham, whose book, The Economic Development of France and Germany, 1815-1914, Roehl tells us, is “the founding account” of the retardation idea, to Claude Fohlen-present the thesis primarily in terms of industrialization not growth.16 Industrialization, moreover, is the theme of other books, I5 Milward and Saul (1973), p. 270. J. D. Gould also makes this distinction between development and growth. He writes While ‘sustained increase in real per capita incomes,’ or something like it, is the most widely accepted definition of economic growth, there are those who would prefer to envisage this, alternatively or in a complementary sense, in terms of structural changes such as a persistent decline in the proportion of the labor force employed, or national product generated, by the agricultural sector, and corresonding increases in manufacturing. This view of growth is one which appeals particularly to some economists in low-income countries. . . . There is a temptation to view true economic development in such societies as involving not merely rising per capita incomes but also diversification of economic structure from primary activity, towards the industrial and services sector. . . . (Gould, 1972, P. 2) Gould’s juxtaposition of growtb and development is similar to the juxtaposition, made here, of growth and industrialization. Gould, however, when discussing structural transformations, does not specifically mention the switch from labor-intensive, technologically stagnant, to capital-intensive, technologically progressive, industry. His definition of development, therefore, is somewhat different from Rostow’s definition of indnstrial%xation. Milward and Saul, however, appear to use devebpment in Rostow’s sense of m. I6 Clapham (1921), Fohlen in Cipolla (1973). Fohlen like Clapham examines the familiar 19th century technologically oriented industries (textiles, iron, steel, railroads, engineering, electricals and chemicals). He states quite clearly that he is writing about industrialization not growth: The industrial revolution is basically a revolution of coal, steel, and cotton. But it is also the revolution of electricity and of the internal combustion engine, of the atomic reactor and of the interplanetary rockets. . . . If there is a certain ambiguity about the phrase ‘Industrial Revolution,’ it is particularly true of France. First of all because this revolution was not original, being in part imported from England and imitated from there, in accordance with a process general to western Europe. This is not to underestimate the originality of French inventions. . . But it must be admitted that the basic technique is of English inspiration, for example, Watt’s steam-engine, spindles, the iron forges exactly described as ‘in the English style,’ puddling. The spontaneity associated with a revolution cannot be found in France because the prototype was derived from abroad. Fohlen, 1970, p. 8.

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not mentioned by Roehl in this specific context but of which he is certainly aware. One has to think only of Arthur Dunham’s La revolution industrielle en France, 2815-2848, or Charles Ballot’s influential posthumous l’lntroduction du machinisme duns l’industrie fran~aise for works which stress, at least in part, French retardation and stagnation.” Another point should be made about the correlation of the retardation-stagnation thesis with industrialization. Roehl is very hard on the retardation historians. He notes, quoting Professors R. E. Cameron and M. M. Knight, that “the retardative perspective among the senior generation of economic historians, at least in this country (U.S.A.), originates from personal impression of the French economy in the immediate post-World War II period.“‘* He thus implies that the retardation-stagnation thesis is the concoction of a few misguided Americans who, descending on a war-devastated France in affluent triumph in 1945, mistook a temporary war-induced industrial condition for a permanent historical one. Undoubtedly, since growth analysis is a post-1945 phenomenon in economics, study of French economic growth has really been done by historians after the war. Industrialization, however, is another matter. The idea that France was retarded and stagnated industrially did not pop into people’s minds in the post-World War II era. The work done by Clapham and Ballot is a good example of an early awareness of retardation among historians on both sides of the channel, if not the Atlantic. Historians, moreover, operated in a critical tradition that was almost as old as the industrial revolution itself. Industrialists, engineers, economists, and journalists, living inside and outside of France, were concerned with the retardative nature of French industrialization long before historians turned to the subject. References to this backwardness fill the memoirs, letters, books, brochures, parliamentary minutes, and governmental reports produced by contemporaries throughout the eventful 19th century.” Obviously, therefore, Roehl has flogged historians of industrialization with an inappropriate club. But more is at stake than a simple confusion ” Dunham (1953). Ballot (1923). Although Ballot’s book was published in 1923 it was written before 1917 when he was killed. ” Roehl (1976a), p. 233, fn. 1. I9 The sources are legion. For the earlier part of the century see, for example, the remarks of Emile Martin, a talented construction engineer, on British superiority; Itrs. No. 16, 18, 19, 22, and 23 to the French industrialist Denys Benoist d’Azy, in Locke, 1978. Martin noted in 1837 during a visit to Britain, “One must not stay away from this country too long or he will find all things too far advanced since last he saw them.” Locke, 1978, p. 108) Further examples: on the backwardness of the French ceramic industry compared to the German, see Granger (1900, 1903). Granger was a French professor and engineer who systematically studied the German glass and ceramic industry. On the comparatively rapid and superior development of industry in Germany see Cambon (1908) and Cambon (1909). Cambon noted that “the industrial transformation of Germany was happening with such speed that a just published book is a step behind today’s reality. . . .” Cambon (1908), p. 534. French industry comes off badly in these comparisons.

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of analytical categories. Many historians have distinguished between growth and industrialization. They are, as Simon Kuznets remarked at the conference in Constance on the Rostow Take-Off thesis, “two different things which we must keep separate.“” But, if two things to be kept separate they have not been considered to be things of equal value. Professor North at that Constance conference found, for instance, the emphasis of Professors Rostow and Landes on industrialization a false emphasis, because he agreed with Professor Kuznets that accelerated growth need not be the same thing. It was all to easy to pick out the technical innovations as the dramatic aspects of what happened, but we needed a much broader approach which would enable us to look at all aspects of change.*’

Clearly, for North, industrialization, as defined by Rostow, can be a matter quite secondary to growth. Of course proponents of a Rostowian view of industrialization do not accept such a contention. Professor Landes, whose The Unbound Prometheus is a veritable hymn to technological change, maintained in Constance: In the eighteenth century . . . something unique happened in that industry responded to a challenge and made an apparently irreversible technical breakthrough. . . . There was a discontinuity here in a qualitative sense, and . . . the whole complex of innovations, with the rise in productivity they caused, produced a much bigger change than man had ever seen before. Eventually the alliance of science and technique made possible systematic innovation and a continued flow of productivity increases. . . . This qualitative change was a great event in human history?’

Apparently somebody is wrong. Industrialization cannot be both the most significant event of modem economic history and of secondary importance. The question, moreover, is crucial here because Roehl not only stresses proto-industrialization but expressly belittles the technological factor.23 There are often good reasons in economic history for so doing, even when industrial productivity is under consideration. Professors North and Thomas have actualIy listed four ways to increase productivity, (1) through economies of scale, (2) through improvements in the quality of the factors of production (such as better educated labor and capital embodying new technology), (3) through reduction in those market imperfections that result from uncertainty and information costs, and (4) through organization changes that remove market imperfections.24 Among M Rostow (1%3), p. 337. *’ Rostow (1%3), p. 337. 22 Rostow (1973), pp. 342, 343. Landes (1970). ” Roehl (1976b), p. 422. *’ North and Thomas (1973), p. 2.

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them only the second-improvements in the quality of the factors of production embodying new technology-specifically acknowledges the technological contribution to productivity and here it is just one of the factors mentioned, the other being “better educated labor.” Since these scholars sought to explain economic growth during a period of relative technological stagnation, they, of necessity, had to emphasize the nontechnological basis of growth, otherwise it could not be explained. That growth is attributed, therefore, to innovative organizations (private property in the form of individual and joint stock ownership, for instance), creative marketing methods, and new financial and business techniques (double-entry bookkeeping, bills of exchange, insurance, banking practices, etc.). That historians should, however, adopt such an attitude toward technology in the period of its unprecedented and unparalled transformation shows an astonishing poverty of imagination on the subject. Roehl’s view like North’s that 19th~century technology is a matter of a few spectacular mechanical inventions in some industries is simply not true. Modern technology, industrialization in Rostow’s sense, introduced a range of products that was unheard of in the mid-18th century. Iron plates for boilers, rails, steam engines, gaslights, coal tar dyes, pharmaceuticals, alloy steels, steam-driven turbines, motor cars, airplanes-the list is endless and unending. Nor did this explosion of products come late, i.e., just during the second industrial revolution. Product spin-off, indeed industrial spin-off, was typical from the beginning. One has to consider only gaslights, coal tar, asphalt paving and roofing, and mackintosh rainware for examples of this proliferation. Product availability, moreover, was as significant for the industrial producer as the individual consumer. The proto-industrial iron industry could never, for example, have made the cast-iron sections needed for bridge construction: the rails, the sheet metal necessary for the construction and operation of railroads, the pipes needed for water, sewage, and gas lighting systems in the sprawling urban centers as well as in individual dwellings. They depended on the coke blast furnaces, the puddling furnace, the English type forges and foundries. The economic structure of the industrial revolution grew out of an interrelated technology which has continued to evolve and change. This is what Professor Landes meant when he stressed that “a whole new system of production based on the use of machines and mechanical power was being introduced.” This is what he meant when he said that the industrial revolution was “a great event in human history.” Technology, moreover, transformed the service as much as the manufacturing sector. Modem industry, as opposed to proto-industry, is capital-intensive. Indeed the productivity of technologically oriented industries is so great that relatively few people have had to be employed in them to meet public manufacturinq needs. Professor Lebrun has noted,

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for instance, that “between 1840 and 1850, the six key sectors upon which the growth of the Belgian economy depended only employed 100,000 workers, that is about 2.5% of the total population, 5% of the active population, and 14% of the industrial population.“” Capital-intensive industry could not employ all the labor being used in heavily proto-industrialized countries. Much labor did, of course, remain in agriculture, until mechanization reduced manpower needs, but the tendency has been, with increased productivity in agriculture and manufacturing, for the service sector’s proportion of employment to grow. Economists have long recognized, therefore, that the more advanced a country technologically, in terms of capital-intensive technologically progressive industrialization, the more its labor force is engaged in service instead of manufacturing and agricultural activities.26 Technology has also changed the nature as well as the size of the service sector. Medicine and law underwent basic transformations as professions when technology converted medicine from an art into a science and civil law from a jurisprudence about real property into one about liquid securities and industrial corporations. Urban growth brought the increased need for municipal public services which took their place along side and began to compete with traditional domestic servant occupations. The unprecedented production of printed matter-made possible technically by inventions like Koenig’s SchnelEpresse-led to a corresponding increase in the number of publisher, book, and newspaper trades. More free time and the great mobility brought by the revolution in transportation augmented, first for the middle and then in the next century for the working classes, recreational service and expanded the restaurant and hotel industry. And this happened in the 19th century. That is when the Cook’s tour began. I am suggesting, then, that technology is not just another growth factor, not modern technology. The tendency to deemphasize it, to reduce it to the “dramatic” invention, results from a failure to understand how technology became an all-pervasive factor which not only promoted growth per capita in its own right, in the quantitative sense, but radically altered the condition of life from that of men living before the industrial revolution.27 This hardly means that people in a nontechnological society, 2( Lebrun in Leon et al. (1972), pp. 141-186. 26 See Kuznets (1966); Clark (1940). Also consult Gould (1972), Chapter 1, “Growth and Development in History,” and, therein, “Structural change and sectoral productivity,” pp. 51-66. ” The failure to recognize the radical nature of this transformation (think only of a visit to the doctor or dentist; look out the window at the street Lighting, surface, and traffic; enter the kitchen and look at the sink, the refrigerator and the stove, and consider what the similar experience of the l&h-century rich, not to mention poor, would have been)

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like the proto-industrial society, could not have seen their lives, for nontechnological reasons, significantly changed from that of previous societies. Professor Roehl can be absolutely right when he stresses the nontechnological basis of growth. That growth occurred and greatly modified, with proto-industry, the previous society of agricultural configurations. But the importance of subsequent technological developments is not thereby reduced. Each source of productivity Professor North used to explain the nontechnological basis of pre-19th century growth was decisively influenced by technology during the industrial revolution. Market imperfections, resulting from uncertainty and information costs, were eliminated by the telegraph, the telephone, the typewriter, and the mechanical calculator. Market imperfections arising from organization deficiencies were erased by the railroads and steamships, which permitted regular, scheduled handling of passengers and freight, and by the adoption of new power sources which vastly improved factory layout and production processes. The development of a science of modern management, with its attention to marketing analysis and production control, depended on technological innovations of the industrial revolution for its very being. Even property conceptions, upon which North and Thomas have placed such heavy emphasis, have been significantly changed; for, if, as they say, private property was a crucial nontechnological growth factor (developing out of sociopolitical conditions), it had to be altered in form during the industrial revolution. Bankruptcy laws, limited financial and social liability laws, carefully controlled auditing procedures for large joint-stock industrial corporations-all are examples of the legal metamorphosis induced by technology’s impact on the form and content of property. Indeed the requirements of industrial capitalism often made a metahas fed the argument again the retardation-stagnation states:

thesis. Professor Levy-Leboyer

In international comparisons of growth rates, the problem is compounded by the fact that some countries continued in the nineteenth century to operate according to the old industrial structure much longer than others; France for instance much longer than England. It has been argued that this was not necessarily a manifestation of underdevelopment; on the contrary, it was the relative supplies of labor and capital which created a comparative advantage in this type of industry and dictated the persistence of crafts. There would have been no ‘underdevelopment’ here but a basically correct allocation of resources. Quoted in Mendels, 1972, p. 260. Also see Levy-Leboyer, 1968b. As long as crafts can produce the same products as machines, this argument about the relativity of factor input makes sense. But when the machines change the product world it does not. One could not, after all, manufacture such a basic commodity as iron bars until Cort developed the puddling furnace. The argument is, therefore, an economic explanation of how and why France remained backward, not a refutation of backwardness.

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morphosis in the property conceptions and business techniques of commercial, proto-industrial capitalism imperative. This happened, for example, to the accounting procedures developed to protect the interests of private property owners. “The trouble was,” one expert has written, that the watchdog of the shareholders became . . . an unintentional guardian of mercantile precedent. . . . The double-entry system, together with the gold standard and the mechanism of the bank rate, may be said to represent outstanding instances of accounting and monetary ingenuity, geared to the mercantile aim of a mercantile age. These skillful accounting and monetary practices, and the tinancial organization that was developed in order to service world-wide commerce, are in their greater part unsuitable for the accounting and monetary servicing of nation-wide industry. So we had to develop performance accountancy to take its place alongside investor accountancy.”

Industrial management in capital-intensive, technologically oriented industry could not operate with financial accounting tools intended to provide shareholders with statements about profits and losses, assets and liabilities-about proprietorship. Needing information about production processes, the modem plant manager invented cost accounting. But reverence for investor accounting practice was so great that cost accounting used its obsolescent methods (double-entry, historical costing) for a very long time. Only with the creation, after 1900, of standard costing and budgeting did cost accounting escape the mercantile straitjacket to become the useful management technology it is today.29 The point is that changes in business and industrial methods in the office were as much technologically determined as those in the factory. In fact changes in the factory brought them about. Roehl, insisting that intensive proto-industrialization made France the first modem industrial country, does not seem, therefore, to appreciate the enormity of the difference between a technological 19th and a proto-industrial 18th-century economy. Nonetheless Roehl could recognize the vast difference between the two without necessarily conceding his argument. That argument is based on a teleological conception of economic history which considers protoindustrialization, although labor-intensive and nontechnological, both as a component in and an agent conditioning the development of a capitalintensive technological economy. Since it is hard to conceive of an economy (before the 20th century) jumping straight from agriculture into sustained industrialization, without having gone through some intermediate proto-industrial state, the idea appears plausible. The necessity of p Kissack (1971). p. 474. n Management accounting still awaits its historian. Some useful works on the subject are Batty (1968), Bray (1946), Garner (1954), Johnson (197Sa), Littleton 1933), McKendrick (1970), Perren (1944), Schoenfeld (1974), Solomons (1%8), and Weber (l%O).

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showing the process of economic transformation, however, poses problems. Roehl explains that transition with the Gerschenkron hypothesis. Professor Gerschenkron posited that industrialization, once it begins in a backward economy, is rapid, involves a sharp break from the past economically, and is capital-intensive, e.g., characterized by large-size factories and firms. Roehl reverses the argument. He generalizes that heavily proto-industrialized countries rely on proto-industry much longer, i.e., are more slowly transformed into capital-intensive, technologically progressive economies. To him therefore, proto-industrialization in France slowed rather than advanced the speed of subsequent technological transformation. What appears to be “retardation” and “stagnation,” then, is only the developmental characteristics of a country that had entered the path of modem industrialization earlier. This idea is Roehl’s specific claim to originality in his essay. He takes up each of the points Gerschenkron made about late industrialization and “proves” that, if inverted, they explain the industrial evolution of an earlier starter like France. But no guarantee exists that the opposite of a hypothesis is true, especially when the hypothesis itself may not be valid.M The thorny problem of Britain’s comparative development must also be explained. Roehl does not suggest that Britain was less proto-industrialized than France. If his version of the Gerschenkron hypothesis is true, Britain should not have had the “industrial revolution” before France. But Britain did begin that historic transformation. Why? Peter Kriedte, in the most recent extended discussion of the U&Ygang from Proto-Zndustrialisierung to kapitalistischen Zndustrialisierung explains the British and the continental development quite differently from Roehl. He is well aware of the persistent proto-industrial sector in the French economy but he considers it to be proof of retarded rather than early industrialization. Not only did France fail to undergo rapid industrialization, in Rostow’s sense, but France did not proto-industrialize as extensively as Britain. Indeed he sees a connection between the two. Whereas, Kriedte contends, the development of productive forces reached a limit in 18th-century Britain that was only overcome by the installation of “a new production system,” the continental states (including France) did not, of necessity, develop similar new production forces at the same time [as Britain] because they, “at the end of the 18th century, had not yet reached the point where it had become necessary to abandon the traditional paths of economic growth.“3L In other words Kriedte contends that the more highly developed a nation’s protoindustries, the sooner it will have to adopt modem technology in order M For a critique of the Gerschenkron ‘I Kriedte (1977), p. 278.

hypothesis see Gould (1972), pp. 431-434.

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to get out of the proto-industrial constriction. Britain was the first to do this because Britain was the most proto-industrialized. Apparently, then, Kriedte would reject Roehl’s view about proto-industrialization retarding development.32 The question is, however, not just whose stage theory is correct but whether anybody’s is correct, whether, that is, modern industrialization was, as Landes suggests, an economic “discontinuity.” Proto-industrial economies of considerable sophistication have existed historically, in China, in India, but they never went into sustained technological development.33 This fact alone suggests that, if proto-industrialization was a stage in a great process of modem economic growth, it was not a causal one. Scholars have, consequently, found themselves looking at noneconomic factors to explain the Western technological breakthrough in the late 18th and 19th centuries. Rostow has observed, for example, that, if proto-industrial economies have existed outside the West, one Western characteristic has been unique, the scientific revolution of the 17th century. He concludes that this intellectual revolution is the real “cause” of the West’s subsequent technological great leap forward.34 There are problems which such an argument, especially when applied to France. France could be considered the important scientific community of the 18th century; yet technological breakthrough occurred in Britain. These difficulties cannot be examined here. Suffice it to say only that so many, conflicting, theories raise serious questions about our ability to use economic causes to explain economic events. Specifically they ask how, economically, a nontechnological society, the proto-industrial society, might produce a technological one. Nobody, including Professor Roehl, seems to have 32 Macrohistorical explanations usually run into difficulties when they face facts. Kriedte, quoting E. J. Hobsbawn cites the role of cotton textiles as the “Schrittmacher” in finding the way “aus der Krise der proto-industriellen Produktionsweise. . . .” (Kriedte, 1977, p. 286) The role of cotton textiles as a “leading sector” has, however, been examined and denied. See, Rostow (1%3), passim. 33 On India see Mukejee (1967). On China see Perkins (1967) and Elvins (1973). Perkins writes: “There is no natural or irrestible movement from commercial development to industrialization. The experience of China alone is testimony to this.” (p. 485) Rostow has added: “There was nothing historically unique about [the Western] expansion in trade, increase in urbanization, stimulus to commercial-related institutions, and growth in handicraft processing and manufacturing. , . . [None of this] . . set in motion a regular Row of new technology that was actually absorbed into the economic process. Without such a flow, the expansion of income and population could have gone on for some time, as new and old regions within the world trading system were further developed within the framework of then existing technology, but, sooner or later, Malthusian limits were bound to be reached. . . .” Rostow (1975), pp. 128-129. y In Rostow’s words: “. . . the scientific revolution, in all its consequences, is the element in the equation of history that distinguishes early modem Europe from all previous periods of economic expansion.” Rostow (1975), p. 132.

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been able to answer this question very satisfactorily-Professor Gerschenkron’s hypothesis notwithstanding.” If Roehl cannot show a precise connection between proto-industrialization and industrialization or whether any connection in fact existed, then, there is not much point in telling us about the extent to which France was proto-industrialized, unless, of course, he is interested just in studying proto-industrialization per se. The significance of the modem economy, after all, is that it is scientifically and technologically dynamic. If proto-industrialization is not part of some process that causes industrialization and if it is so different from subsequent technologically progressive industry how can proof of its early and extensive existence in France be used to argue against a retardation-stagnation thesis? That thesis is not that France was without proto-industries. Everybody recognizes that the proto-industrial French economy had been healthy and thriving. The difficulty came with the transition to the new economy in the 19th century. This point can be obscured if the reasons given for France’s retardation are not kept separate from the nature of the retardation itself. The “causes” which historians cite run from psychological reasoning about businessmen’s values to sociological extrapolations about the presence of the family firm, to demographic considerations about population stagnation, to purely economic arguments about technological stagnation occurring because of insufficient demand. But the thing being explained is industrialization in Rostow’s terms. This critique has been concerned with the tendency to revise French industrial history either by confusing the categories of analysis, growth, and industrialization, or by claiming that the first category is more important than the second. It has, therefore, not been about method, for, theoretically, the factors pertaining to each analytical category could be examined in a variety of descriptive and statistical ways. Method is, nonetheless, important because it must fit the analytical category to which applied. Since Roehl’s revisionism rests principally on macroeconomic data, it must clarify industrialization not growth in order to be useful. This is true because Roehl’s revisionism does not rely solely on proto-industrial statistics. If he stresses proto-industrialization he is also aware of the macroeconomic data which show respectable rates of growth in 19th-century French capital intensive industries (iron and steel, chemicals, mechanical engineering, etc.).36The question is, then, is the ” Even an econometrician of Phylis Deane’s stature, perplexed by an inability to cite economic reasons for the rapid growth of British technology, has mentioned a noneconomic cause. She attributed it to emulation, inspired in contemporaries by the startling and obviously sometimes very lucrative examples of the triumphant technical imagination. Rostow (1%3), p. 72. 36 He cites a number of studies that register impressive 19th century French growth in these modem industries, including, Crouzet (1970), Crouzet (1972), Crouzet (1974), L&yLeboyer (1%8a), L&y-Leboyer (1%8b), and, L&y-Leboyer (1971).

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method appropriate to the task of measuring modern industrialization as well as proto-industrialization? Had France been an underdeveloped country, had there been no steel, textile, railroad, mechanical construction, chemical or electrical industries, then it would have been easy to prove by macroeconometrics that the country lagged behind industrially. But that is and has not been the problem. France was a recognized great industrial power during the 19th century and the retardation-stagnation thesis has never claimed the contrary. French industrial performance has been judged marginally, against that of the most advanced industrial countries, and has been found wanting.37 So the question becomes: Do the macroeconomic indices charting the growth of technologically oriented industries permit us to draw firm conclusion about the marginal performance technologically of these industries, conclusion useable for a refutation of the retardation-stagnation thesis? I think not. Consider, by way of illustration, the state of the French steel industry before World War I. The achievements of this industry have been praised rather abundantly by revisionists like Roehl. It is surprising, then, to discover Germans concluding in 1916 that “aside from certain exceptions, this [French] industry is inefficient.“38 The German conclusion was not capricious. It was based on a study of French industry located in the occupied areas, done by “about 200” German engineers and technicians. The study covered 86.1% of the French steel industry, including the country’s most modem plants. Although the report is presented dispassionately with an impressive array of statistics, it could, of course, be distorted because of anti-French prejudices. But the form not the content of the critique is really of interest. That critique emphasized the obsolescence of equipment and the failure to integrate production processes. Its authors noted that German equipment had been installed in great quantities (and the more sophisticated the equipment the greater the quantity) in the modem plants. In some, the entire production process had been brought over before the war and installed in tofo in the French factories. Even the French improvements, therefore, amounted, in this account, to a triumph of German rather than French technology. ” A marginal difference in performance is not insignificant. A manufacturing industry, like British motorcycles, for example, which is far beyond the capabilities of a backward country, has faced extinction simply because Japanese costs and prices were marginally lower. Moreover the importance is not just economic. France’s ability to keep up with Britain and Germany was much more important in the world of great power anarchy than her obvious superiority over the great majority of economically weak nations. On it depended not just a capacity to exert political and cultural influence in the world but, ultimately, national survival. Proponents of the retardation-stagnation thesis believe that French industrialization in the 19th century helps explain, at least in part, France’s relative decline as a great European power between 1800 and 1914. ‘a Die Inu’ustrie . . . (1916), p. 67.

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The indices upon which revisionist rely to extol pre-World War I progress in this industry do not confront the issues raised in the German report. It concentrated on plant and equipment, the revisionist indices deal with output by tons of iron and steel. A close connection exists, of course, between equipment and production, for the excellence of the one depends a lot on the other. But the revisionist indices, because of source limitations, only give production by weight for blast furnaces, forges, and foundries. Nothing is wrong with that. But indices which register solid growth in tons of basic production say nothing about the extent to which this tonnage might be restricted to the least technologically advanced products, a limited product line, or accomplished, in the newer plants, with equipment imported from abroad. They give us, in short, insufficient evidence to judge the industry’s technology marginally.3g But one need not follow Roehl down the road of macroeconomics. There is another road. I am referring to the analytical methods used in modem industrial engineering and business administration. A lot has been written by Professor Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. and others about the importance of their institutionalization in American business during the past 100 years, but the methods themselves have rarely been assimilated and used by historiansm These methods (i.e., cost accounting, managerial economics, decision theory, etc.) were developed precisely to enable business and industry to evaluate accurately marginal performance. Whether they can fully clarify the retardation-stagnation issue is not yet known because so few have utilized them properly. But they promise to answer the historical question raised by Roehl much more fruitfully than the macroeconomic techniquesfrom which he has borrowed.41 REFERENCES Ballot, C. (1923), L’lntroduction du machinisme darts l’industrie franGuise, Paris. Batty, J. (Ed.) (1968), Developments in Management Accountancy, London. Bray, F. S. (1946), “Recent British Accounting Developments.” The Accounting Review 21, W-204. Cambon, V. (1908), “Les procedes de l’industrie allemande.” In Memoires-ingenieurs civils de France, pp. 534-512. Cambon, V. (1909), L’Affemagne au travail, Paris. Cameron, Rondo, et al. (1970), Essays in French Economic Histoty. Homewood, III. Chandler, A. D., Jr., and Redlich, F. (l%l), “Recent Developments in American Business Administration and their Conceptualization.” Business History Review 35, l-27. Cipolla, C. M. (Ed.) (1973), Fontana Economic History of Europe. Vol. IV, The Emergence of Industrial Societies, London. 2 parts. r, Similar arguments can be made about macroeconomic data on other French inudstries (e.g., chemicals, electricals, engineering, and especially, machine tools). W See, for example, Chandler and Redlich (1961). ” For further clarification on this point see Johnson (1%5b), and my two articles in The Accounting Historians Journal, 1979.

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Clapham, H. H. (1921), Economic Development of France and Germany, 1818-1914. Cambridge. Clark, C. (1940), The Conditions of Economic Progress. London. Crouzet, F. (1966), “Angleterre et France au XVIIIe sitcle. Essai d’analyse comparee de deux croissances bconomiques.” Annales: economies, societes, civilisations 21, pp. 254-291. Translated in R. M. Hartwell (Ed.) (1%7), The Causes of the Industrial Revolution. London. Crouzet, F. (1970), Essai de construction d’un indice annuel de la production industrielle francaise au XIXe siecle.” Annales: economies, societe’s, civilisations 25, 56-W. Crouzet, F. (1972), “Western Europe and Great Britain: ‘Catching Up’ in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century.” In A. J. Youngson (Ed.), Economic Development in the Long Run, London. Crouzet, F. (1974), “French Economic Growth in the Nineteenth Century Reconsidered.” History 59, 167-179. Dunham, A. L. (1953), La revolution industrielle en France, 1815-1848, Paris. Translated as The Industrial Revolution in France, 1815-1848. New York, 1955. Elvins, M. (1973), “Quantitative Growth, Qualitative Standstill.” In Elvins, M. (1973), The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press. Pp. 285-316. Fohlen, C. B. (1970), “France, 1700-1914.” In Cipolla (1973), Part 1, Chap. 1, pp. 7-75. Garner, S. P. (1954), Evolution of Cost Accounting to 1925, University, Alabama. Gould, J. D. (1972), Economic Growth in History, London. Granger, A. (1900), La ceramique en Allemagne et l’enseignement technique relattfd cette industrie, Paris. Granger, A. (1903), Progres recent dans l’industrie du verre, Paris. Granger, A. (1916), Die Industrie im besetzten Frankreich, Munich. Johnson, H. T. (1975a), “Management Accounting in an Early Integrated Industry: E. I. Dupont de Nemours Powder Co., 1903-1912.” Business History Review 44, 184-204. Johnson, H. T. (1975b), “The Role of Accounting History in the Study of Modem Business Enterprise.” The Accounting Review 50, 444-450. Kellenbenz, H. (1972), “Les industries dans 1’Europe modeme (1500-1750)” In Leon, P., Crouzet, F., and Gascon, R. (Eds.) (1972). Kissack, W. F. (1971), “Accountancy in an Industrial Society.” Accountant, 474-476. Kriedte, P. (1977), “Die Proto-Industrialisierung zwischen Industrialisierung und De-lndustrialisienutg.” In Kriedte, P., Medich, H., and Schlumbohm, J. (1977). Kriedte, P., Medick, H., and Schlumbohm, J. (1977), Industrialisierung vor der Industrialisierung, Goettingen. Kuznets, S. (1966), Modern Economic Growth. Rate, Structure, and Spread. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press. Landes, D. S. (1%9), The Unbound Prometheus, Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Lebrun, P. (1972), “L’lndustrialisation en Belgique au XIXe sitcle.” In Leon, et al. (1972). Pp. 141-186. Leon, P., Crouzet, F., and Gascon, R. (Eds.) (19721, L’lndustrialisation en Europe au XIXe sidcle, Collogues Internationaux du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Lyon 7-10 octobre 1970, Paris. Levy-Leboyer, M. (1968a), “La croissance economique en France au XIXe sitcle.” Annales: economies, societds, civilisations 23, 788-807. Levy-Leboyer, M. (1968b), “Les processus d’industrialisation: Le cas de 1’Angleterre et de la France.” Revue historique 239, 281-298. L&y-Leboyer, M. (1971), La deceleration de l’tconomie francaise dans la seconde moi it du XlXe siecle.” Revue d’histoire tconomique et sociale 49, 485-507. Littleton, A. C. (1933), Accounting Evolution to 1900. New York: Russell. Locke, Robert R. (1978), Les fonderies et forges d’dlais, 1829 a 1874. Paris.

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