Jones on Dudley, _Information Revolutions in the History of the West_

[Book Reviews in Economic and Business History]

Published by EH.NET (December 2008)

Leonard Dudley, _Information Revolutions in the History of the West_. 
Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2008.  xi + 347 pp. $150 (cloth), ISBN: 
978-1-84720-790-6.

Reviewed for EH.NET by Eric Jones, Melbourne Business School.


Leonard Dudley, a Canadian now at the University of Montreal, once 
formalized part of Harold Innis’s work on the role of communications in 
the history of empire.  In his current book, Dudley (in part with 
co-authors) tries to isolate the effects of information revolutions in 
the whole grand sweep of the history of the Western World.  This project 
is worthy of Innis and is a logical one for our time, when changes in IT 
and their societal impacts are so visible.  Others have been nibbling at 
the cherry but Dudley has been left plenty to investigate.

A full 85 percent of _Information Revolutions_ is devoted to nine 
episodes where the proposition is that new technologies, including 
developments like the standardization of languages and scripts, were 
followed by rapid changes in society, politics and economics.  The 
author does not assert outright that the inventions and their diffusion 
caused the wide changes that followed but he obviously thinks this was 
the case.  The nine episodes center on the following phenomena: the 
consolidation of the Carolingian empire, the Norman Conquest, the impact 
of Lutheranism, the fall of Charles I, the Reform Bill of 1832, the 
American Civil War, the Spanish-American War, the entry of the United 
Kingdom into the First World War, and a supposed link between the 
dissolution of the USSR and the fall of the Twin Towers.  Each of these 
events is recounted in well-informed, well-documented and well-presented 
detail.  Their precursors and the historical context tend to get more 
space than the consequences.

Most readers will learn a great deal from these sections, since few will 
be familiar with every episode.  The accounts of the Spanish-American 
War, of Alfred Harmsworth and his mass production of debased newspapers, 
and of the Cold War seem the most compelling, despite the fact that the 
last two are much the most familiar among the cases.  Yellow journalism 
is always fun to read about, though it is unclear just how much we 
should glory in the spread of literacy (exaggerated, by the way, in the 
figures Dudley cites) if its crowning achievement is an ability to read 
the tabloids.  Education, judgment and literacy are different things. 
Any hesitation with which the reader may be left will not, however, 
concern the narratives but be a faint uncertainty as to why this, rather 
than some other set of cases, has been selected.  Dudley’s answer will 
be plain: the examples serve as well as any to demonstrate the recurrent 
force of richer mixes of information.

A slightly greater hesitation may attach to the dramatizing nature of 
the expositions.  Each invention, and its dissemination, is portrayed as 
rupturing the historical continuum.  The thought may arise in the 
skeptical mind that the economy was often reshaped by less discontinuous 
change.  For example, Yrjo Kaukaninen has shown (_European Review of 
Economic History_, 2001) how the transmission of information was being 
speeded up in the early nineteenth century, before the introduction of 
the electric telegraph.  Dudley gives a lot of space, more 
conventionally, to Morse and pays special attention to the fact that 
Grant used the telegraph for coordinating simultaneous attacks on the 
Confederacy.  Kaukianinen presents the argument for less punctuated 
change, involving broad front improvement via mail coach connections 
followed by railways, and sailing packets followed by steamships, with 
the result that more days were saved on most routes between 1820 and 
1860 than after the adoption of the telegraph.  Although the subject has 
not hitherto received proportionate scrutiny no one doubts that IT has 
repeatedly made a big difference to the world, but it remains a tad moot 
whether Dudley’s emphasis on revolutions is always warranted.

One difficulty with jump-starting history by means of new technologies 
is that on their own the devices remain inert.  Something, or rather 
somebody, has to put them into the productive system: innovation trumps 
invention.  Hence if we consider the example of Gutenberg’s printing 
press, we find Dudley makes the large claim that it began to generate a 
new type of society in early seventeenth-century Britain.  This 
proposition follows the line to which he hews throughout -- that new 
information technologies spark off great social, political and economic 
changes.  Yet if the printing press were so potent why had it not 
already succeeded in remolding the societies of China, Japan and Korea? 
  Special interests and the political order muzzled the effects there. 
New technologies may be necessary conditions for certain types of change 
but they are not sufficient ones.  Dudley is well aware of the 
significance of processes of diffusion and devotes half his space to 
them but does not pay much attention to contrary cases.

He frames the consequences of novel technologies in terms of network 
effects and economies of scale in information storage.  The insistence 
that each episode supports his contention that IT necessarily has a 
revolutionary impact, as opposed to playing one important role among 
many in complex processes, is less easy to concede.  When he introduces 
reports of two cruel psychological experiments which, he asserts, 
altered group behavior in ways analogous to the effects of IT, I am 
unpersuaded.  The analogies are strained and seem mainly to demonstrate 
the fact that team sports inculcate violence.  The historical narratives 
in this book, on the other hand, are exceptionally worth reading for 
their own sake.


Eric Jones is Professorial Fellow, Melbourne Business School, and 
Visiting Professor, University of Exeter. He is the author of _The 
European Miracle_ (Cambridge University Press, third edition, 2003) and 
_Cultures Merging: A Historical and Economic Critique of Culture_ 
(Princeton University Press, 2006).

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