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“The unbound prometheus”: A review
A Review RONDO
CAMERON Emory
Uhxrsity
Professor Landes’s book-length chapter in volume VI of the Cumbridge Economic History of Europe, “Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe, 17.50-1914,” constitutes the core of this new publication. The four major subdivisions of that chapter, “The Industrial Revolution in Britain,” “Continental Emulation,” “ Closing the Gap,” and “Short Breath and Second Wind,” appear as chapters 2-5 of The Unbound Prometheus,* the first with minor revisions, the others with none at all.’ These are supplemented by an introductory chapter that surveys European economic development from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century and offers some philosophical reflections on Europe’s role as pioneer in industrialism, and two chapters on “The Interwar Years” and “Reconstruction and Growth Since 1945.” The relatively brief “conclusion” from the original chapter is reproduced virtually unchanged as chapter 8-unchanged, that is, except for the addition of a couple of paragraphs on the last page in which, for the first and only time, brief reference is made to the myth of Prometheus. The resulting package is, in effect, a trio of separate studies within a single set of covers, but lacking the necessary unity and cohesion to constitute an effective book. *David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 566 pp., $8.50 cloth, $2.95 paper. ‘For example, on p. 355 a footnote refers to H. J. Habakkuk’s American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century, published’in 1962, and continues: “It would have been desirable to consider this work at a number of other points. Unfortunately, the original manuscript was in the hands of the printer at the time Professor Habakkuk’s volume appeared. The present discussion has been added in galley because of the fundamental importance of the general issue.” Other examples of the careless manner in which the book was put together are the obvious typographical errors reprinted unchanged from the CEHE, for example in tables 7 and 8.
230
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History
The first of the three, Landes’s original assignment for the CamHistory, is an account of the major technological changes in European industry since the mid-eighteenth century. Another, the one that seemed to justify separate publication, purports to be “a general, truly comparative survey of the course of the European industrial revolution” intended to replace the more conventional “textbooks in economic history currently used in American colleges and universities” (p. vii). Finally, we are also treated to an “interpretive essay” on the origins, nature and significance of industrialism as a way of life. (Landes apparently sees no difference between a “comparative survey” and an “interpretive essay”; the confusion is unfortunate.) Each of the three contains much of value, but their intermixture and superimposition greatly complicate the task of a reviewer, as they will that of the ordinary reader, whether student, teacher or researcher. The most satisfactory aspect of the volume, but probably the one of least general interest, is its authoritative account of technological change. Landes has read widely in both the contemporary technical literature and more recent historical accounts of the development of technology. His knowledge of technical processes is impressive, and nowhere else is his enormous erudition exhibited with such effect. (The lengthy bibliography that was such a noteworthy feature of the CEHE volume has been omitted from this one.) The long, detailed discussions of the transformations of the textile, metallurgical and chemical industries, the origins and growth of electric power and the inauguration of the radio industry, among others, have their analogues elsewhere; but Landes’s treatment is distinguished by his consideration of both the economic and non-economic incentives for, and obstacles to, the utilization of new techniques-with possibly an overemphasis on non-economic factors. Occasionally, it is true, as in his discussion of the technology of the cotton and iron industries in the interwar period (pp. 451-480), he gets bogged down in technicalities to such an extent that he will lose his readers in spite of his vivid language. For the most part, however, his descriptions of processes and explanations of changes are about as clear and understandable as could be hoped for. Throughout, as well, he emphasizes, without specifying, the many “small anonymous gains” that were “probably more important in the long run than the major inventions that have been remembered in the history books” (p. 92). While “importance” in this context is difficult to measure-without the major bridge Economic
“The Unbound Prometheus”:
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inventions there would have been no occasion for the minor improvements-the point is worth making. A. P. Usher pointed out many years ago in his classic History of Mechanical Inventions the significance of the period of “critical revision” for refining and improving major innovations. As “a general, truly comparative survey of the course of the European industrial revolution” the volume is much less satisfactory, and the author is well aware of at least some of its limitations in that respect. There are, in my opinion, at least four reasons why the volume is deficient for textbook purposes: (1) sectoral imbalance; (2) unbalanced geographical coverage; (3) inadequate use of economic analysis; and (4) organization and stylistic problems. Landes notes in his preface that, because of his focus on industrial technology and industrial development, he has slighted other sectors of the economy, such as agriculture and transportation. For his chapter in the CEHE this was an entirely reasonable procedure, since other chapters covered those subjects. But in “a general, truly comparative survey,” especially one purporting to deal with the transition from traditional, agrarian-based societies to industrial societies, it is much less so, and leads him to conclusions that will not withstand critical scrutiny. For example, the relatively leisurely pace of French industrial development, which Landes attributes largely to a value system that gave low status to menial labor and productive enterprise, cannot be properly understood without reference to the structure of French agriculture and the follies of agrarian policy, which kept a large proportion of the labor force in menial, low productivity accupations. His treatment of banking is both more complete and more satisfactory, but I believe he errs, especially in the case of French banking, in attaching more importance to an assumed lack of demand for credit by industrial enterprises, rather than to restrictions on its supply. French firms may have been wary of long term credits, which might possibly have resulted in the loss of some independence (Landes presents no evidence, only assertions that they were), but they were clearly starved for short term credit for working capital (which does not involve loss of control) as a result of the structure and behavior of the French banking system.2 In this and other respects the volume would have benefitted from a more thorough re‘See R. Cameron chap. 4.
et al., Banking in the Early Stagesof’industrialization.
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vision and updating to take account of findings published since the original manuscript was completed almost a decade ago. The geographical scope of the volume is donsiderably narrower than the subtitle suggests; in effect, it is limited to Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, with greatest attention given to Britain and Germany. Both Russia and the United States, although not parts of Western Europe, receive more attention than the Scandinavian countries, the Iberian peninsula and Italy, which are almost totally ignored except for passing references, chiefly in the new chapters dealing with the twentieth century. Landes indicates at the outset that his “central concern” is “why some countries in Europe accomplished this transformation [industrialization] earlier than others; also how the pattern of development differed from one nation to another and why” (p. 39). This is surely one of the most important intellectual problems in recent economic history, and a genuine attempt to deal with it by someone of Landes’s intelligence and knowledge, even if not totally successful, would have been both interesting and instructive. In fact, however, Landes has not attacked the problem in a way that could possibly yield satisfactory answers to the questions he has raised. In effect, he has concentrated only on the “success stories”and not all of those, at that. (Landes might argue that France was not successful in industrialization, but the fact that French per capita income today is as high as or higher than German and British is a powerful counter-argument.) But what of those countries in Europein Western Europe even-that notably failed to industrialize, or did so only imperfectly and with great difficulty? Why did Scotland industrialize, but not Ireland? Why France, but not Spain? Why Sweden, but not Italy? Why Germany, but not Austria? Furthermore, why was Belgium one of the Continental pioneers of industrialization, whereas the neighboring Netherlands, possessing many similarities, was one of the late comers? Up to a point the answers to these questions are very easy (but thereafter very difficult), but Landes has not even raised them; hence he cannot hope to answer the larger questions that depend upon them. Landes is no “new” economic historian, nor does he claim to be one. His use of quantitative data is limited to descriptive and illustrative statistics. (Even for this purpose, however, his extensive and uncritical reliance on Michael G. Mulhall’s Dictionary of Statistics as a source raises one’s eyebrows.) He has sprinkled his text with the jargon of economic theory, but his mastery of economic analysis is considerably less thorough than his knowledge of technical pro-
“The Unbound Prometheus”:
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cesses.3 “In the last analysis the decisive consideration was one of attitudes and values” (p. 543) typifies his reaction to problems requiring economic analysis for their solution. For example, he insists that there was something “irrational” in the delay of Continental industrialists (especially French ones, although the Germans and others were even slower) in replacing wood and charcoal fuel with coal. He writes of the “deeper rationality” of the British, whereas “such nations as France, confronted with the same choice, obdurately rejected coal-even where there were strong pecuniary incentives to switch over to the cheaper fuel” (p. 54n.). The facts of the matter are that, in the relevant period, coal was not the “cheaper fuel” in France for most uses, that French industrialists were not “confronted with the same choice” (i.e., the same relative costs for alternative types of fuel), and that they did not “obdurately” reject coal when relative costs shifted with the opening of new mines and the depletion of forests. As for the “deeper rationality” of the British, it consisted in perceiving that, given the relative costs of coal and wood or charcoal in Britain, coal was cheaper in most locations and for most uses. I confess that I do not understand the reference to “new methods of production that save costs at the expense of solidity or appearance: the use of coal in place of wood in glass-making or brewing is the best example” (pp. 53-54). Is beer (or, for that matter, glass) less solid or attractive for having been made with coal? Landes applies the same type of reasoning to explain the passing of industrial leadership (the phrase is his) from Britain to Germany in the late nineteenth century. According to him, German entrepreneurs were also motivated by “non-rational” factors, but in their case it paid, whereas the British seem to have lost their “deeper rationality”: The significance of this pecuniary approach [of the British1 is best appreciated when it is contrasted with the technological rationality of the Germans. This was a different kind of arithmetic, which maximized, not returns, but technical efficiency. For the German engineer, and the manufacturer and banker who stood behind him, the new was desirable, not so much because it paid, but because it worked better. There were right and wrong ways of doing things, and the right was the %udents of monetary history will be interested to learn that “the nineteenth century was marked by a protracted and sharp deflation, stretching from 1817 to 1896 with only one short interruption of some six or seven years.” Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, p. 233.
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scientific, mechanized, capital-intensive way. The means had become the end.4 That may be a correct description of German motivation, but I doubt it-especially as it concerns the bankers. In any case, it is pure assertion. Landes presents no evidence, not even a footnote reference to a German dissertation, much less the memoirs of engineers, manufacturers or bankers-not that they would prove the case. Further on he admits that he has “rested much of this discussion . . . on what sociologists call the analysis of ideal types”-i.e. stereotypes. Landes’s preference for sociological theories of economic development is not wrong, merely misplaced. Few economists with experience in Latin America, Africa or Asia would dispute the statement that the economic development of those areas is not primarily an economic problem; it is, instead, a problem of values, attitudes, institutions and social structure-in short, a social and cultural problem. Had Landes applied his sociological theories to a comparison of, say, France and Spain, or Sweden and Italy, and tested them with empirical evidence, the result might well have been a substantial advance in our understanding of the dynamics of economic and social change. But the attempt to explain miniscule differences in the per capita growth rates of the economies of Britain, France and Germany by reference to stereotypes of national character without consideration of resource endowment, population density and growth rates, and other economic factors is equivalent to measuring the length of bacteria with a tailor’s tape measure. Even if we could define in mensurable terms a “propensity to apply science to economic ends” or a “propensity to seek material advance” (Rostow’s phrases, not Landes’s), and assign a probability distribution to each nation, the quartile-even decile-intervals would be so great as to drown completely the differences in the modal values between cultures so similar as the English and the German. In dealing with economic problems the most suitable procedure is to exhaust the economic explanations before turning to broader social or cultural ones which, given the state of our knowledge, are much less precise and testable. In the cases dealt with by Landes, economic considerations by themselves are a sufficient explanation. As a textbook the volume has some purely organizational disadvantages. For example, the average length of the chapter is almost Vbid., p. 354.
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70 pages (two of them are in excess of 100 pages), with very few subheadings. The chapters are broadly chronological in scope (chapter 3 is concerned chiefly with the period 1815-1850, chapter 4 with the 1850s and 1860s; and chapter 5 with the period from the depression of 1873 to the outbreak of World War I). Organization within the chapters varies somewhat, but the general procedure is to deal with one industry or group of industries in one country, pass on to the same industry or group in other countries and return to the first country for another industry. The result is a certain amount of repetition, loss of continuity, and above all a blurring of general trends. Substantive content ranges from the most elementary textbook statements (“The product of the blast furnace is pig iron, a hard meta too brittle to work” [p. 91 J; “Steel is a superior variety of iron” [p. 2511) to involved technical discussions of the properties of certain chemical compounds and the organizational details of various business mergers. It is a virtuoso demonstration of the author’s extraordinary grasp of material from a variety of technical fields, but, for a textbook, it tells both too much and too little: too much on matters of little direct relevance to the main story, too little general coverage of the broad outlines. Graduate students, if they are persevering, can learn much from it (as mine have), but the typical undergraduate will be left thoroughly confused. Landes, unlike many economic historians, has a keen sense of literary style. He makes a conscious attempt to write well, even poetically. This can make an otherwise dull story interesting, but at times he gets carried away by his metaphors and figures of speech. Usually the results are merely ludicrous or annoying, as in his discussion of German reparations after World War I, where he writes that the treaty provided “abundant food for mutual recrimination” (p. 363). And the mental image conjured by “this affluence . . . [coming] home to roost” (ibid.) is startling. Sometimes, however, his exaggerated language causes him to make misleading, even fallacious statements. To call the fall in prices between 1873 and 1896 ‘“the most drastic deflation in the memory of man” (p. 230) is misleading at best; the post-Napoleonic deflation was at least as severe. And the statement that prices fell “inexorably through crisis and boom” (ibid.) is demonstrably false. Evaluation of literary style is, to some extent, at least, a subjective matter; and adverse comments on it in a scholarly journal may be out of place. Nevertheless, I believe that a more restrained use of superlatives and vivid figures of speech would have resulted in both a more readable and more accurate book.
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I confess to certain personal prejudices regarding the use of language. Use of the feminine gender in referring to nations, states, governments and other such abstractions is one of them, and calling the United States a “she” and writing about “her behavior” (p. 493) grates upon my sensibilities. That is not the whole of the matter, however. Landes’s tendency to reify and personalize nations, in combination with his metaphoric language, results in some basic distortions of history. Whatever its literary merit, the phrase (referring to France) “the development within her body social of psychological and institutional antibodies to the virus of modernization” (p. 236), can create a seriously misleading impression in the minds of the readers. The frequent references to the international process of industrialization as a “race” and a “struggle,” with accompanying metaphors (“short breath” and “second wind”), obscures the very nature of that process, and the motivations of those who brought it about. Undoubtedly, considerations of political power and prestige influenced national economic policies on many occasions (usually with adverse effects on economic welfare), but politicians and statesmen were not the agents of industrialization; and it may be doubted that patriotic or nationalistic motives were of major importance for the millions of entrepreneurs, inventors and engineers who were. (Does Landes really believe that Americans regard it as unpatriotic to own a three-year old automobile? [p. 1321) What meaning should one attach to the sentence, “Industrialization was, from the start, a political imperative” (p. 139)? That without industrialization the nation would cease to exist? But Spain and Portugal survived, and Greece and Italy came into existence, all without significant industrialization. That the state should sponsor and carry through programs of industrialization on its own initiative? But Landes himself has shown (pp. 136-37, inter alia) that private enterprise was far more effective in promoting industrialization than the few holdover state enterprises from the eighteenth century. In short, by reifying nations and governments and then writing about them in metaphorical terms, Landes creates impressions in the minds of readers which he himself, no doubt, would deny that he intended. In contrast to his strong, certain opinions on some subjects for which there are no empirical data, such as the supposedly conservative character of the French family firm in comparison with the “progressive” British, he equivocates on others that are apparently more amenable to measurement. What conclusion should one draw from the following passage? “The 1850’s and 1860’s then were the years
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when western Europe caught up with Britain Not in a quantitative sense; that was to come later, and then only in certain areas. Nor even qualitatively, whether in scale and efficiency of production of given industries, or in degree of industrialization of the economy as a whole” (p. 229). Such equivocations occur frequently. Landes himself takes note of this indecision in his conclusion, but seeks refuge in “the complexity of economic development.” True, economic development is a complex process, but it is incumbent upon an author of a book such as this to clarify complex processes as much as possible. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Landes has done the contrary,
CAMERON Emory
Uhxrsity
Professor Landes’s book-length chapter in volume VI of the Cumbridge Economic History of Europe, “Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe, 17.50-1914,” constitutes the core of this new publication. The four major subdivisions of that chapter, “The Industrial Revolution in Britain,” “Continental Emulation,” “ Closing the Gap,” and “Short Breath and Second Wind,” appear as chapters 2-5 of The Unbound Prometheus,* the first with minor revisions, the others with none at all.’ These are supplemented by an introductory chapter that surveys European economic development from the Middle Ages to the eighteenth century and offers some philosophical reflections on Europe’s role as pioneer in industrialism, and two chapters on “The Interwar Years” and “Reconstruction and Growth Since 1945.” The relatively brief “conclusion” from the original chapter is reproduced virtually unchanged as chapter 8-unchanged, that is, except for the addition of a couple of paragraphs on the last page in which, for the first and only time, brief reference is made to the myth of Prometheus. The resulting package is, in effect, a trio of separate studies within a single set of covers, but lacking the necessary unity and cohesion to constitute an effective book. *David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 566 pp., $8.50 cloth, $2.95 paper. ‘For example, on p. 355 a footnote refers to H. J. Habakkuk’s American and British Technology in the Nineteenth Century, published’in 1962, and continues: “It would have been desirable to consider this work at a number of other points. Unfortunately, the original manuscript was in the hands of the printer at the time Professor Habakkuk’s volume appeared. The present discussion has been added in galley because of the fundamental importance of the general issue.” Other examples of the careless manner in which the book was put together are the obvious typographical errors reprinted unchanged from the CEHE, for example in tables 7 and 8.
230
Explorations
in Economic
History
The first of the three, Landes’s original assignment for the CamHistory, is an account of the major technological changes in European industry since the mid-eighteenth century. Another, the one that seemed to justify separate publication, purports to be “a general, truly comparative survey of the course of the European industrial revolution” intended to replace the more conventional “textbooks in economic history currently used in American colleges and universities” (p. vii). Finally, we are also treated to an “interpretive essay” on the origins, nature and significance of industrialism as a way of life. (Landes apparently sees no difference between a “comparative survey” and an “interpretive essay”; the confusion is unfortunate.) Each of the three contains much of value, but their intermixture and superimposition greatly complicate the task of a reviewer, as they will that of the ordinary reader, whether student, teacher or researcher. The most satisfactory aspect of the volume, but probably the one of least general interest, is its authoritative account of technological change. Landes has read widely in both the contemporary technical literature and more recent historical accounts of the development of technology. His knowledge of technical processes is impressive, and nowhere else is his enormous erudition exhibited with such effect. (The lengthy bibliography that was such a noteworthy feature of the CEHE volume has been omitted from this one.) The long, detailed discussions of the transformations of the textile, metallurgical and chemical industries, the origins and growth of electric power and the inauguration of the radio industry, among others, have their analogues elsewhere; but Landes’s treatment is distinguished by his consideration of both the economic and non-economic incentives for, and obstacles to, the utilization of new techniques-with possibly an overemphasis on non-economic factors. Occasionally, it is true, as in his discussion of the technology of the cotton and iron industries in the interwar period (pp. 451-480), he gets bogged down in technicalities to such an extent that he will lose his readers in spite of his vivid language. For the most part, however, his descriptions of processes and explanations of changes are about as clear and understandable as could be hoped for. Throughout, as well, he emphasizes, without specifying, the many “small anonymous gains” that were “probably more important in the long run than the major inventions that have been remembered in the history books” (p. 92). While “importance” in this context is difficult to measure-without the major bridge Economic
“The Unbound Prometheus”:
A Review
231
inventions there would have been no occasion for the minor improvements-the point is worth making. A. P. Usher pointed out many years ago in his classic History of Mechanical Inventions the significance of the period of “critical revision” for refining and improving major innovations. As “a general, truly comparative survey of the course of the European industrial revolution” the volume is much less satisfactory, and the author is well aware of at least some of its limitations in that respect. There are, in my opinion, at least four reasons why the volume is deficient for textbook purposes: (1) sectoral imbalance; (2) unbalanced geographical coverage; (3) inadequate use of economic analysis; and (4) organization and stylistic problems. Landes notes in his preface that, because of his focus on industrial technology and industrial development, he has slighted other sectors of the economy, such as agriculture and transportation. For his chapter in the CEHE this was an entirely reasonable procedure, since other chapters covered those subjects. But in “a general, truly comparative survey,” especially one purporting to deal with the transition from traditional, agrarian-based societies to industrial societies, it is much less so, and leads him to conclusions that will not withstand critical scrutiny. For example, the relatively leisurely pace of French industrial development, which Landes attributes largely to a value system that gave low status to menial labor and productive enterprise, cannot be properly understood without reference to the structure of French agriculture and the follies of agrarian policy, which kept a large proportion of the labor force in menial, low productivity accupations. His treatment of banking is both more complete and more satisfactory, but I believe he errs, especially in the case of French banking, in attaching more importance to an assumed lack of demand for credit by industrial enterprises, rather than to restrictions on its supply. French firms may have been wary of long term credits, which might possibly have resulted in the loss of some independence (Landes presents no evidence, only assertions that they were), but they were clearly starved for short term credit for working capital (which does not involve loss of control) as a result of the structure and behavior of the French banking system.2 In this and other respects the volume would have benefitted from a more thorough re‘See R. Cameron chap. 4.
et al., Banking in the Early Stagesof’industrialization.
232
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in Economic History
vision and updating to take account of findings published since the original manuscript was completed almost a decade ago. The geographical scope of the volume is donsiderably narrower than the subtitle suggests; in effect, it is limited to Britain, France, Belgium and Germany, with greatest attention given to Britain and Germany. Both Russia and the United States, although not parts of Western Europe, receive more attention than the Scandinavian countries, the Iberian peninsula and Italy, which are almost totally ignored except for passing references, chiefly in the new chapters dealing with the twentieth century. Landes indicates at the outset that his “central concern” is “why some countries in Europe accomplished this transformation [industrialization] earlier than others; also how the pattern of development differed from one nation to another and why” (p. 39). This is surely one of the most important intellectual problems in recent economic history, and a genuine attempt to deal with it by someone of Landes’s intelligence and knowledge, even if not totally successful, would have been both interesting and instructive. In fact, however, Landes has not attacked the problem in a way that could possibly yield satisfactory answers to the questions he has raised. In effect, he has concentrated only on the “success stories”and not all of those, at that. (Landes might argue that France was not successful in industrialization, but the fact that French per capita income today is as high as or higher than German and British is a powerful counter-argument.) But what of those countries in Europein Western Europe even-that notably failed to industrialize, or did so only imperfectly and with great difficulty? Why did Scotland industrialize, but not Ireland? Why France, but not Spain? Why Sweden, but not Italy? Why Germany, but not Austria? Furthermore, why was Belgium one of the Continental pioneers of industrialization, whereas the neighboring Netherlands, possessing many similarities, was one of the late comers? Up to a point the answers to these questions are very easy (but thereafter very difficult), but Landes has not even raised them; hence he cannot hope to answer the larger questions that depend upon them. Landes is no “new” economic historian, nor does he claim to be one. His use of quantitative data is limited to descriptive and illustrative statistics. (Even for this purpose, however, his extensive and uncritical reliance on Michael G. Mulhall’s Dictionary of Statistics as a source raises one’s eyebrows.) He has sprinkled his text with the jargon of economic theory, but his mastery of economic analysis is considerably less thorough than his knowledge of technical pro-
“The Unbound Prometheus”:
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cesses.3 “In the last analysis the decisive consideration was one of attitudes and values” (p. 543) typifies his reaction to problems requiring economic analysis for their solution. For example, he insists that there was something “irrational” in the delay of Continental industrialists (especially French ones, although the Germans and others were even slower) in replacing wood and charcoal fuel with coal. He writes of the “deeper rationality” of the British, whereas “such nations as France, confronted with the same choice, obdurately rejected coal-even where there were strong pecuniary incentives to switch over to the cheaper fuel” (p. 54n.). The facts of the matter are that, in the relevant period, coal was not the “cheaper fuel” in France for most uses, that French industrialists were not “confronted with the same choice” (i.e., the same relative costs for alternative types of fuel), and that they did not “obdurately” reject coal when relative costs shifted with the opening of new mines and the depletion of forests. As for the “deeper rationality” of the British, it consisted in perceiving that, given the relative costs of coal and wood or charcoal in Britain, coal was cheaper in most locations and for most uses. I confess that I do not understand the reference to “new methods of production that save costs at the expense of solidity or appearance: the use of coal in place of wood in glass-making or brewing is the best example” (pp. 53-54). Is beer (or, for that matter, glass) less solid or attractive for having been made with coal? Landes applies the same type of reasoning to explain the passing of industrial leadership (the phrase is his) from Britain to Germany in the late nineteenth century. According to him, German entrepreneurs were also motivated by “non-rational” factors, but in their case it paid, whereas the British seem to have lost their “deeper rationality”: The significance of this pecuniary approach [of the British1 is best appreciated when it is contrasted with the technological rationality of the Germans. This was a different kind of arithmetic, which maximized, not returns, but technical efficiency. For the German engineer, and the manufacturer and banker who stood behind him, the new was desirable, not so much because it paid, but because it worked better. There were right and wrong ways of doing things, and the right was the %udents of monetary history will be interested to learn that “the nineteenth century was marked by a protracted and sharp deflation, stretching from 1817 to 1896 with only one short interruption of some six or seven years.” Landes, The Unbound Prometheus, p. 233.
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scientific, mechanized, capital-intensive way. The means had become the end.4 That may be a correct description of German motivation, but I doubt it-especially as it concerns the bankers. In any case, it is pure assertion. Landes presents no evidence, not even a footnote reference to a German dissertation, much less the memoirs of engineers, manufacturers or bankers-not that they would prove the case. Further on he admits that he has “rested much of this discussion . . . on what sociologists call the analysis of ideal types”-i.e. stereotypes. Landes’s preference for sociological theories of economic development is not wrong, merely misplaced. Few economists with experience in Latin America, Africa or Asia would dispute the statement that the economic development of those areas is not primarily an economic problem; it is, instead, a problem of values, attitudes, institutions and social structure-in short, a social and cultural problem. Had Landes applied his sociological theories to a comparison of, say, France and Spain, or Sweden and Italy, and tested them with empirical evidence, the result might well have been a substantial advance in our understanding of the dynamics of economic and social change. But the attempt to explain miniscule differences in the per capita growth rates of the economies of Britain, France and Germany by reference to stereotypes of national character without consideration of resource endowment, population density and growth rates, and other economic factors is equivalent to measuring the length of bacteria with a tailor’s tape measure. Even if we could define in mensurable terms a “propensity to apply science to economic ends” or a “propensity to seek material advance” (Rostow’s phrases, not Landes’s), and assign a probability distribution to each nation, the quartile-even decile-intervals would be so great as to drown completely the differences in the modal values between cultures so similar as the English and the German. In dealing with economic problems the most suitable procedure is to exhaust the economic explanations before turning to broader social or cultural ones which, given the state of our knowledge, are much less precise and testable. In the cases dealt with by Landes, economic considerations by themselves are a sufficient explanation. As a textbook the volume has some purely organizational disadvantages. For example, the average length of the chapter is almost Vbid., p. 354.
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70 pages (two of them are in excess of 100 pages), with very few subheadings. The chapters are broadly chronological in scope (chapter 3 is concerned chiefly with the period 1815-1850, chapter 4 with the 1850s and 1860s; and chapter 5 with the period from the depression of 1873 to the outbreak of World War I). Organization within the chapters varies somewhat, but the general procedure is to deal with one industry or group of industries in one country, pass on to the same industry or group in other countries and return to the first country for another industry. The result is a certain amount of repetition, loss of continuity, and above all a blurring of general trends. Substantive content ranges from the most elementary textbook statements (“The product of the blast furnace is pig iron, a hard meta too brittle to work” [p. 91 J; “Steel is a superior variety of iron” [p. 2511) to involved technical discussions of the properties of certain chemical compounds and the organizational details of various business mergers. It is a virtuoso demonstration of the author’s extraordinary grasp of material from a variety of technical fields, but, for a textbook, it tells both too much and too little: too much on matters of little direct relevance to the main story, too little general coverage of the broad outlines. Graduate students, if they are persevering, can learn much from it (as mine have), but the typical undergraduate will be left thoroughly confused. Landes, unlike many economic historians, has a keen sense of literary style. He makes a conscious attempt to write well, even poetically. This can make an otherwise dull story interesting, but at times he gets carried away by his metaphors and figures of speech. Usually the results are merely ludicrous or annoying, as in his discussion of German reparations after World War I, where he writes that the treaty provided “abundant food for mutual recrimination” (p. 363). And the mental image conjured by “this affluence . . . [coming] home to roost” (ibid.) is startling. Sometimes, however, his exaggerated language causes him to make misleading, even fallacious statements. To call the fall in prices between 1873 and 1896 ‘“the most drastic deflation in the memory of man” (p. 230) is misleading at best; the post-Napoleonic deflation was at least as severe. And the statement that prices fell “inexorably through crisis and boom” (ibid.) is demonstrably false. Evaluation of literary style is, to some extent, at least, a subjective matter; and adverse comments on it in a scholarly journal may be out of place. Nevertheless, I believe that a more restrained use of superlatives and vivid figures of speech would have resulted in both a more readable and more accurate book.
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I confess to certain personal prejudices regarding the use of language. Use of the feminine gender in referring to nations, states, governments and other such abstractions is one of them, and calling the United States a “she” and writing about “her behavior” (p. 493) grates upon my sensibilities. That is not the whole of the matter, however. Landes’s tendency to reify and personalize nations, in combination with his metaphoric language, results in some basic distortions of history. Whatever its literary merit, the phrase (referring to France) “the development within her body social of psychological and institutional antibodies to the virus of modernization” (p. 236), can create a seriously misleading impression in the minds of the readers. The frequent references to the international process of industrialization as a “race” and a “struggle,” with accompanying metaphors (“short breath” and “second wind”), obscures the very nature of that process, and the motivations of those who brought it about. Undoubtedly, considerations of political power and prestige influenced national economic policies on many occasions (usually with adverse effects on economic welfare), but politicians and statesmen were not the agents of industrialization; and it may be doubted that patriotic or nationalistic motives were of major importance for the millions of entrepreneurs, inventors and engineers who were. (Does Landes really believe that Americans regard it as unpatriotic to own a three-year old automobile? [p. 1321) What meaning should one attach to the sentence, “Industrialization was, from the start, a political imperative” (p. 139)? That without industrialization the nation would cease to exist? But Spain and Portugal survived, and Greece and Italy came into existence, all without significant industrialization. That the state should sponsor and carry through programs of industrialization on its own initiative? But Landes himself has shown (pp. 136-37, inter alia) that private enterprise was far more effective in promoting industrialization than the few holdover state enterprises from the eighteenth century. In short, by reifying nations and governments and then writing about them in metaphorical terms, Landes creates impressions in the minds of readers which he himself, no doubt, would deny that he intended. In contrast to his strong, certain opinions on some subjects for which there are no empirical data, such as the supposedly conservative character of the French family firm in comparison with the “progressive” British, he equivocates on others that are apparently more amenable to measurement. What conclusion should one draw from the following passage? “The 1850’s and 1860’s then were the years
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when western Europe caught up with Britain Not in a quantitative sense; that was to come later, and then only in certain areas. Nor even qualitatively, whether in scale and efficiency of production of given industries, or in degree of industrialization of the economy as a whole” (p. 229). Such equivocations occur frequently. Landes himself takes note of this indecision in his conclusion, but seeks refuge in “the complexity of economic development.” True, economic development is a complex process, but it is incumbent upon an author of a book such as this to clarify complex processes as much as possible. Unfortunately, in my opinion, Landes has done the contrary,